Thousands of eyes fixed on me in the sudden, ringing silence that followed the courtyard's chaos, waiting for the empress to either claim her ceremonial authority or falter in front of witnesses who would remember either outcome for a generation.
I looked at the blade. Ancient steel, ceremonial hilt wrapped in faded gold thread, resting exactly where the substitute should have been and the genuine relic shouldn't. Miraya's fear told me everything I needed to know about what she suspected — poison worked into the metal, some enchantment corrupted by Temple magic she understood far better than I did, a mechanism designed to make the moment of accepted authority into the moment of death.
Everything is performance, Aeric had told me once, teaching me how to survive exactly this kind of manufactured crisis.
But performance required an audience believing in the script. And I'd spent eleven days learning that the surest way to break a script was refusing to read the lines as written.
