Chapter 21: Ansel Pays

Ansel's POV

I had told my wife to stay at home, and she had walked into the Imperial palace in a ball gown and taken apart a lie.

I stood in the doorway with snow melting down my collar and watched the Emperor's marshals take the Empress by the elbows.

She looked at me then.

"Ansel," said Odile.

It was the same soft voice. It was the one I had heard in my head every night for six years.

"Tell them," she said. "Tell them what you remember."

I walked down the length of the hall. Nobody spoke.

I stopped in front of her.

"Show me your left hand," I said.

"Ansel, please."

"Your left hand."

She held it out.

It was smooth and white and unmarked, with a ring on it.

I looked at it for a long time.

I thought about a girl in a grey dress, and a curtain smoking on her fingers.

I thought about a glove I had taken out of a drawer every year, to look at it.

"Thank you for the cake," I said. "For six years of it."

I turned my back on her.

The marshals took her out. The great doors shut, and six hundred people looked at me.

My wife stood at the table in the candlelight with a scorched grey glove on her hand, and she did not look as though she wanted anything.

She looked tired.

I crossed the floor to her. I knelt.

I had knelt to an Emperor and at my brother's grave, and neither had been this hard.

"I said you were clever and frightened," I said. "I said you had found the only lock you could pick."

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