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She’d thought sparing Ramsey would leave a bitter taste in her mouth, but all Emily feels is satisfaction, ugly and sour. Enjoy rationing what’s left, she thinks, cramming a fistful of grapes in her mouth and stuffing every last morsel of fresh food in her coat. It’ll probably all fall out of her pockets later anyway, but she’ll be damned if she leaves any for him.
Her heart turns at a platter of figs—poor Alexi, dead barely ten feet away. Bastillian figs had been her favorite. Emily bites one into savage halves and barely tastes it on the way down.
She takes whatever loose coin she can find and locks all her old drawings and letters in one of the Imperial safes. No need for Ramsey to have entertainment during his little stay. She locks away Jessamine’s audiolog too, hiding it under drafts of treaties and trade agreements, and dumps Ramsey’s sword outside the safe room’s back door along with all the cutlery and sharp objects she can find.
When she’s done, the only weapon left in the room is a pistol. Emily takes it with a hard thin smile. If Ramsey wants to leave his dream home so badly, well. He won’t get the easy way out. It’s a petty thought and a petty act, unbecoming of an empress, but with the way things are now she might as well—
that’s my girl
—she must not.
Emily stabs the pistol in her belt, throat tight, jaw tight. Throne or no throne, she is still the Empress. She must not, will not throw away something Corvo gave up so much for her to deserve.
The safe room held little by way of coin, but there are some objects of value she could take to sell later. Emily sweeps through it one more time, stowing away what she can, and pauses before the little shelf by her bed. There’s Mrs. Pilsen, more stitch now than cloth, and a little boat Samuel carved for her back in the Hound Pits days. Emily’s come to think of the two as a pair; he’d made it so Mrs. Pilsen could go on grand voyages in her bathwater.
She could take both, if she was willing to give up precious pocket space. It would be wiser to bring only one.
Emily wavers.
Then she takes Mrs. Pilsen, locks her in a safe, and tucks Samuel’s ship in her coat.
-
She doesn’t realize how badly Foster’s short on coin until they’re well underway.
“You need how much to bribe the guards?” says Emily, aghast—not because of the amount, she’s eaten off plates worth more, but because of the stark reality of twenty-five coins out in Foster’s ledger.
“Two hundred and fifty coin in gold,” Foster repeats. There’s a grim humor in her eyes. “Welcome to the other side of the gate, Majesty.”
Her old life seems so frivolous now; her own clothes, with their bespoke fabric and cut, feel like an accusation. Emily hands over everything she took from the Tower on the spot: two of Sokolov’s old paintings, statuettes in rare woods, coins in bright metals stamped with her face.
If only she could go back to hating something as simple as posing for coins. How Corvo had smiled then. Like she was the only good thing left in his life. Like she was all the good he would leave in the world.
Foster looks down at Emily’s offerings lined up on her charts and sucks her teeth in flat-eyed appraisal. “Some of these’ll be hard to fence. What’s left might be enough for the port guard.”
She taps a finger against the stump of her arm, eyes darting from item to item in calculation, and then, to Emily’s surprise, pushes exactly half the coins back to her. “Anything else?”
Old Samuel’s boat carving is light as knucklebones in her coat. “No,” says Emily. “That’s all I could carry.”
Foster grunts and begins sorting the statuettes for sale. It takes Emily a moment to understand she’s been dismissed. She takes her half of the coins—why did that simple generosity throw her so?—and goes back to her quarters, and once she is there she lets herself fall in bed and tugs Samuel’s carving from her pocket.
It had felt too big for her bathtub once. It seems so small in her hands now.
Foster’s eye would be better at judging its value, but Emily doubts it’d be worth much. Samuel had carved it from a twist of driftwood washed up near the Hound Pits, and let her watch with Mrs. Pilsen as he whittled out the hull. He’d even blessed the wood with a drop of whiskey, because it was frightful bad luck, he said, to sail in an unblessed ship.
Emily wonders if Foster blessed the Dreadful Wale, and if she did, what she had said. Samuel had blessed Amaranth, he’d told her so, he’d told her it was the blessing that let her outlive every other boat of her make—
If only it was Samuel steering the Wale. If only it was Amaranth taking her to Karnaca. Amaranth, weathered and puttering, the riverboat that outlived her captain.
Emily grips the little carving until her knuckles ache white. It does not distract from the lump in her throat.
Old Samuel, who brought Corvo wherever he needed to go, who never failed to bring Corvo back to her, who never failed to take her out to sea whenever she grew sick of the Tower and bleak stone. Emily squeezes her eyes shut just like she did at the Hound Pits, until she doesn’t see darkness but stars.
The Abbey teaches it is dangerous to pray, for the world is vast and anything can hear, but if anything can hear then perhaps Samuel might. And if Samuel might, then it is worth trying.
He still thinks he failed my mother, Samuel, is the first thought out of her head. Empresses do not cry. Empresses do not ever cry. He’s going to think he failed me. Don’t let me do something to prove it.
Don’t let me make him regret waking up.