Chapter 65: The Pact of Enemies, Part Eight: Calligraphy

There's something I haven't told you about Trazadora Garialys: I owe her one.

When the Empero Council sat me in a backless chair to decide whether I was a danger, she was the only one at that table who defended me without anyone asking her to. She raised her hand like a student, said *excuse me, may I say something*, and dismantled Wilda and Duralianne with three sentences.

She's the youngest of all Mayorka's professors, by a margin that's uncomfortable: from behind, in a hallway, she passes for a final-year student.

And she has clean hands.

That's noticeable if you know where to look. Professor Vauxol, who is a vassal of her house, walks around with rainbow ink up to his wrists and nobody asks him anything. The lady of the house doesn't stain herself. The vassal does.

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"Silence," she said, and the Artistic branch classroom fell quiet. "Today we're not going to paint anything. Today we're going to write a single letter until you stop hating me."

Someone protested under their breath: half the class had chosen that branch for the teacher's surname, expecting large canvases.

"I know what you're thinking. That calligraphy is what you do when you don't know how to paint." She leaned on the desk with both hands. "A painting can lie to whoever looks at it. A letter is a single gesture, made a single time, and there's no way to fix it afterward. We start here because it's the only thing in this class that allows no trick."

She handed out rice paper and black ink, and wrote a character from the ancient alphabet on the blackboard.

"What does it mean, Professor?"

"Nothing, the way you're doing it."

She waited for the laughter to die down.

"It's called *vah*. It heads treaties, vows, and seals: it means *attested*." She knocked the blackboard with her knuckle. "Everything this continent has sworn in four hundred years begins with this letter. You're going to write it forty times this afternoon and tomorrow none of you will remember it."

I remembered.

I remembered much later, in a very large place full of people, and by then it wasn't funny anymore.

"You don't copy a letter with your hand," she said, pacing between the desks. "The hand is the end. The letter starts in the shoulder, runs down through the elbow, and exits through the wrist. If your shoulder doesn't know what it's going to say, your wrist will lie."

Studying literature for three years in a world where it served no purpose, and nobody ever explained to me what that woman, who barely has ten years on me, explained in a single sentence.

Dipping the brush. Placing the tip on the paper.

And the letter came out crooked.

"Again."

Crooked.

"Again."

Crooked, and with a blot, because by the fourth try I was gripping the brush the way you grip a rope.

She passed behind me and said nothing, which was worse.

On the ninth try I did something I had never done before: I stopped looking at the paper. I saw the stroke whole before it existed — the entry of the brush, the weight in the middle, the exit — and I let my arm reach for it.

It came out.

And in the exact instant it came out, my Empero moved on its own.

I didn't call it or give it any order. It rose from wherever it was, salty and black, climbed up my arm, and settled on my wrist for the entire stroke, still, the size of a coin.

The brush fell from my hand.

"Elcronne." She was behind me. I hadn't heard her arrive. "You're pale."

"I just understood something."

"Good afternoon for that." She tapped the paper. "Twenty more. You'll understand much better by number twenty."

Twenty more written. In every single one it moved. In none did I ask it to.

And there, with my wrist stained in ink, I got the joke.

Since the day it awakened, I had been shouting orders at my Empero, the way you speak to a servant with a bad attitude. All that time I had been holding my right hand with my left to explain, out loud and slowly, how to hold a pencil.

My Empero is the hand I write with.

You don't give orders to the hand. You have to know what you're going to write.

And there was something else, smaller, that took me a while to put into words.

It cost me nothing. When I write an order on a word I feel it: something leaves from inside, the same way you feel it when you pay and know exactly how much. That afternoon my Empero climbed to the edge of my wrist twenty times and nothing left, because it was doing nothing. It was *being*.

I had been paying twice for each word since the beginning: for what it did, and for the effort of forcing my own Empero to make it. The second half of that bill was unnecessary.

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Layda was to my left, with her notebook open to an impeccable page and her diary underneath, in her lap, writing something else with her other hand. She's been doing that since the first day and nobody has noticed.

"Stop looking at me," she said, without looking up.

"What are you writing?"

"What you did three minutes ago." She turned a page. "You wrote a letter and your Empero climbed to your wrist on its own. And don't ever do it again in front of a Garialys."

"She already knows."

That made her lift her head.

"What do you mean she already knows?"

"She said it in front of the Empero Council, with those exact words: *Elcronne's Empero is conceptual, it's related to art*. Twelve people heard her. Nobody blinked."

Layda went very still.

"That's worse."

"Why would it be worse? She was defending me."

"Because you've been marked for weeks and on top of that you thanked her." She lowered the brush. "Do you know what Duralldan was?"

"A dragon."

"A conceptual. One of the greatest. And Aeloran Garialys didn't kill it: she painted a prison inside it and left it there." She traced an impeccable line. "The Garialys don't imprison dragons, Elcronne. They imprison concepts they find unique. A dragon crossed their path once and they've been celebrating it for six hundred years."

"She defended me."

"Right." She dipped her brush. "Nobody imprisons a painting they don't care about. Now write pretty."

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And now the other half of that afternoon, which happened at the same time and in the same room. Mayorka's Arts share the old wing: an enormous hall split by a row of columns, the Artistic branch on one side and the Scenic on the other.

On the other side there was music.

Professor Dorian Valente was teaching dance, and no ordinary dance: the one performed after the sealing, the one that opens every state wedding for the last four hundred years. Three beats and a long turn.

Everything could be heard, because a row of columns stops nothing. The lute. Valente counting — *one, two, three, and turn*. And thirty pairs of feet learning the same wrong step at the same time.

I was writing a letter in black ink on rice paper, tongue between my teeth.

And between the columns, thirty steps away, Lianza D'Tariel was learning to dance with Ardwyn V of Jahke.

She did it perfectly, of course. She does everything perfectly. Back straight, left hand at the exact height, gaze over his shoulder, looking at nothing.

Ardwyn laughed. He got the long turn wrong twice and both times he laughed at himself, with that ease of people who have never paid for anything, and one of those times she smiled a little too.

What cost me was the small smile. The hand on the waist I'd been practicing all week.

And here I have to be honest with you, because I've spent half the chapter telling you about that afternoon as if it had been a discovery about my Empero.

I was writing the same letter forty times thirty steps away from the woman I love, while she learned to dance with the man they were going to marry her to. Both things happened in the same room and at the same hour.

It felt like the cruelest joke this world had played on me since I arrived in it. And this world has played quite a few.

"Elcronne." Behind me again, again without me hearing her arrive. "Stroke twenty-one came out worse than number two."

"I'm sorry, Professor."

"Don't apologize to me, apologize to the paper." She flipped the sheet over. "Do you know what happened?"

"I got distracted."

"You lied." She knocked the paper with her knuckle. "You wrote with your shoulder pointing one way and your head pointing another, and the paper found out. The paper always finds out."

She stayed there a moment longer than necessary.

"The deputy headmaster spoke to me about you before the term started," she said, quieter, still looking at the sheet. "He asked me to keep an eye on you. I told him my students don't start interesting me until their third year."

"And what did he say?"

"That with you there wouldn't be a third year."

My head came up. Hers didn't.

"Professor..."

"Don't ask me." She picked up my sheet, held it against the light for a second, and set it back on the desk, upside down. "Write better, Elcronne. If you're going to do whatever it is Theren thinks you're going to do, you'd better not have a trembling hand."

She moved on to correct the next desk.

Twenty more letters written. I counted them all.

I also counted the turns.