The Tyrant's Pet novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: The River Stones

He drank it to the last drop.

Then he set the basin back on its stand, empty, and wiped his mouth with his black thumb.

He didn't fall. He didn't even cough.

"Clean," he said. "Somebody write that down."

A clerk in the corner scribbled so fast his pen squeaked.

The Emperor pulled his glove back on and looked at the chancellor.

"Next time you call her a trick," he said, "you'll drink first."

The chancellor bowed very low.

When he came up, he was smiling.

He looked at the Emperor's gloved hand for a long moment.

Then court was over.

For ten days after that, nobody let me do anything.

They gave me dresses. They gave me a room with a window over the river.

They gave me books, and a cat that wasn't mine, and three meals a day.

Pets, it turned out, weren't supposed to work.

The Emperor I hardly saw.

"Where does he go?" I asked Agatha on the tenth evening.

She was cutting bread and didn't look up.

"New moon tonight," she said. "He goes to the river stones."

"What's at the river stones?"

She put the knife down.

"Saltgate," she said. "Ask him yourself. You're the only one in this house who isn't scared to."

So I hid in his carriage.

He found me two miles out of the city.

He looked at me curled on the floor between the seats for a long moment.

"Get up," he said. "You'll ruin another dress."

"You're not sending me back?"

"Would you go?"

"No."

"Then sit down and be quiet."

We reached Saltgate after midnight.

It was a gray stone town on a bend of the river, half its windows dark.

The smell came in through the carriage walls.

Past the last houses, the river ran over a long bar of flat stones, shallow and wide.

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