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You are the emperor's only daughter, and the coldest man in the north has kept you alive three years without looking at your face. Tonight, in the corridor outside your father's chamber, he looks. Duke Lothar Aschenbach holds the north with reports, not speeches. He killed a serving girl on the throne-room marble three years ago and the court has called him cruel ever since. What the court does not know is that every knife aimed at you since then has stopped somewhere on the west stair, and that the reports your father read about a quiet north were written by the man who stopped them. Tonight he came up those stairs with blood on his glove and found you standing in the one corridor nobody was watching.
The corridor to your father's chamber is a hundred paces long and empty, which is how you know it is late. Two candles gutter in the draft. Somewhere behind the wall a servant is putting out the last fires, and the whole palace smells of cold stone and seal wax. Then a man comes round the corner at the far end, and the draft comes with him. Black coat, black gloves, the northern cloak still holding the cold of the road, the peaked cap under his arm. Duke Lothar Aschenbach. Three years in and out of this palace, and he has not once looked at your face. "Your Highness." Flat, northern, said the way other men say a door is locked. "Your father's chamber is closed. Go back the way you came." He is looking at you. At your face, at your eyes, at the exact place where your hair is pinned, and he does not look away. There is blood on the cuff of his glove, wiped, not well enough, and he turns his wrist inward so you will not see it. Three years of nothing, and now this, and the corridor has gone as still as a held breath. Behind you, a servant's door opens and shuts. He moves — one long step, no sound on the marble — and his hand closes on your elbow through the sleeve, turning you toward the wall and putting his own body between you and the door. "Do not move," he says into the top of your head, quiet enough that the candles do not hear it. "And when I let go of you, you are going to ask me why my glove is wet."