Their eyes unfocused a little. They looked at someone beyond the camera, not at the gathered crowd. Whatever was being said, or gestured, it caused the speaker to quirk their perfect dark eyebrows in a kind of oh, for goodness’ sake moment of impatience.
“For those of you not privy to the beginning of the broadcast,” it drawled, “I will inform you, again, that the Emperor cares deeply for New Rho—that he has no desire to see the end that, I can assure you firsthand, has come for the rebels of Ur. He wants to see resettlement and supply begin afresh … and believe me, the current—disturbance—in the planet’s atmosphere is no barrier to the graces or the punishments that the Nine Houses can distribute. I say this with all the authority invested in me as Prince Ianthe Naberius the First, the Lyctor Prince, the Saint of Awe.”
For a moment the crowd was silent. The speech had to be translated for some people, anyone who didn’t have really good House. But then the word spread through the crowd—Lyctor—Lyctor—Lyctor.
Prince Ianthe Naberius said, “I hope you find that … comforting.”
Nobody found it comforting. The word was picking up—Lyctor—Lyctor—Lyctor, like a wind.
The person—Prince Ianthe Naberius—drawled, “Yet that’s not all,” and made a brief and strange expression. It was one Nona had never seen, one Nona couldn’t parse. The Prince crooked their finger at someone Nona couldn’t see, and the camera wobbled and pulled back to reveal that someone else was sitting right there, at the same desk.
The first person sat beautifully, while this second person sat with ramrod posture. They were dressed in the same bright white jacket as their counterpart, with the same tie. Their skin was rendered pallid in those hot lights, with the same weird, waxy quality: warm-coloured skin that should have been a similar brown hue to Nona’s, except that there was something wrong with it. Their crooked mouth was set in a serious, bloodless line, and their face held no expression at all. It was a grim mask on a forbidding face, with about as much animation as the portrait in We Suffer’s office. The only alive thing about this second person was their hair, neatly arrayed with a wreath of fingerbones and white, springlike blossoms: wildly red hair, red enough to make the electric hexagons struggle with it. It was the face of the girl in her dream.
And their eyes—
After that first, astonishing moment, Nona stared without seeing in a wild paralysis of recognition. She was trembling. The face on the screen was the face of the girl in her dream; it was the picture of the face that Camilla and Palamedes had drawn for her; but so much more serious, so lifeless, so slack, like the girl was sleeping with her eyes open, that for a moment she thought she must be mistaken. Yet there she was—it was her, the girl in her dream. For a moment Nona panicked, convinced that somehow the broadcast could see her too, that the girl was looking at her. But she had imagined it. Broadcasts didn’t work that way.
“The Emperor has sent no intermediary to vouchsafe you,” the first person said. Nona could barely hear for looking. “All these promises are made by no lowlier personages than myself and Her Most Serene Highness, Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia, heir to the First House, the Emperor’s only daughter.”
Nobody said anything. Prince Ianthe Naberius continued, “The Emperor Undying has sent nothing less than his own Tower Princes, as gracious tokens of his extreme love and concern … his unimpeachable authority.”
There was something irrepressible hovering at the edges of the person called Prince Ianthe Naberius’s mouth at love and at concern—like a struggle not to smile, or not to explode in a fit of temper. Nona had rarely seen those two feelings go to war before. But it only lasted a second. The camera waited on the other person—the other prince—as though waiting for them, for her, to say anything. She didn’t. She was as stony and as cool and as uninterested as she had been before. Curiously, Nona noticed, she didn’t even seem to be breathing.
“Anyway! Back to me, Prince Ianthe Naberius,” said Prince Ianthe Naberius.
The screen nauseously wobbled back and closed in. The Crown Prince, the dream girl, disappeared from view.
They said, “I will broadcast again, exactly twenty-four hours from now, with new instructions. What those instructions are will depend very much on you.
“Hail to the Emperor Undying, to his Nine Houses, and also to you, his respected pactmates, beneficiaries, and allies.”
There was a pause.
In quite a different voice the person said, “That’ll fix their little red wagons. Is this still on…？”