Chapter 6: The Exhausted Empress
The morning light crept through the silk curtains like an intruder, pale and tentative, as if it too knew better than to disturb the fragile peace of the Empress's chambers. Lalisa lay motionless beneath the mountain of covers, her black hair fanned across the pillow like spilled ink, her breathing shallow and uneven.
She had not slept.
The letters had come at three in the morning. Then again at four. A third rider had arrived just as the sky began to lighten, his horse lathered and staggering, the letter in his hand damp with condensation from the long ride through the night.
She had stopped reading them by the fifth hour. Had stopped even breaking the seals. She simply watched them accumulate on the bedside table, a growing fortress of his desperation, until Claire had finally swept them all onto a silver tray and carried them away with a pointed look.
"The Emperor's correspondence, Your Majesty," Claire had said, her voice carefully neutral. "Shall I have them placed in your study?"
"No." Lalisa's voice had come out raw, scraped thin by hours of wakefulness. "Bring them to breakfast. I will deal with them there."
Now she sat in the Private Breakfast Room, the gilded mirrors reflecting her hollow-eyed expression back at her from every angle, and stared at the tray that Claire had arranged with meticulous care. Twenty-three letters, each sealed with the imperial sigil, each bearing the familiar scrawl of her husband's increasingly unhinged handwriting.
Twenty-three.
The number sat in her stomach like a stone.
She reached for her coffee first, letting the bitter heat scald her throat before she touched a single envelope. The croissants sat untouched on their silver platter, their golden surfaces gleaming with butter she knew she could not stomach. The honeyed pastries Claire had ordered specially — her usual favorite — remained pristine, their glaze catching the candlelight like trapped amber.
"You need to eat, Your Majesty." Claire hovered at the edge of her vision, a specter of concern in a grey morning dress.
"I need my husband to develop a hobby other than writing me love letters." Lalisa set down the coffee cup with a clink that echoed too loudly in the silent room. "Perhaps embroidery. Or chess. Something that does not require paper."
Claire's lips twitched, but she said nothing. She knew better than to laugh at the Empress's frustration, even when the Empress invited it.
Lalisa reached for the first letter, breaking the seal with practiced efficiency. She skimmed the contents — another accusation about Ney, another demand for her scent, another plea for her to write — and set it aside without a word.
The second was worse. The third, worse still.
By the fourth, she had stopped reading them in full, letting her eyes catch only fragments as she tore through the envelopes in quick succession. You have not written. You do not love me. I saw a woman today who resembled you and I nearly wept in front of my entire command staff. Write to me. Write to me. Write to me.
The words blurred together, a river of desperation that threatened to drown her.
She reached for her coffee again, but her hand paused mid-motion as her gaze caught on the final envelope in the pile. It was smaller than the others, folded with more care, the seal pressed with an unusual precision that suggested he had taken his time with this one. That he had wanted it to be perfect.
Lalisa hesitated. Something about this letter felt different. The weight of it, perhaps. The way the paper seemed to hold its breath.
She broke the seal and unfolded the page.
Her eyes moved across the words, once, twice, three times, before the meaning truly registered.
You write more fondly of your dogs than you do of me. Should I bark to gain your affection?
The words hung in the air, suspended between the gilded mirrors and the flickering candles. There was no accusation in them, no demand, no plea. Just a quiet, devastating observation delivered with such raw vulnerability that Lalisa felt something crack open in her chest.
She stared at the words. Read them again.
You write more fondly of your dogs than you do of me.
It was true. God help her, it was true. She had written to him about Fortuné's new tricks, about the little spaniel's antics in the garden, about the way the creature had curled up in her lap during the cold snap, in more detail than she had written about her own missing of him. She had filled her letters — the few she had managed to send before the avalanche began — with observations about the palace, the weather, the gossip of the court. Anything that was not the terrifying vulnerability of admitting that she loved him so fiercely it sometimes felt like she was being torn apart from the inside.
She had used her dogs as a shield. He had noticed.
Should I bark to gain your affection?
Lalisa set the letter down with hands that were not quite steady. The coffee had gone cold. The pastries had turned to lead. The room pressed in around her, close and suffocating, the mirrors reflecting her pale face back at her from a dozen angles.
"Your Majesty?" Claire's voice came from somewhere far away. "Are you well?"
Lalisa did not answer. She rose from the table, her legs carrying her to the window on autopilot, her fingers finding the cold glass and pressing against it as if she could reach through the distance and touch him. The gardens stretched out below, green and orderly and indifferent to her turmoil.
Twenty-three letters.
Twenty-three letters of desperation and love and fear, clawing at her attention, demanding a response that she could not seem to form. And now this final letter had landed like a knife between her ribs, opening a wound she had not known was there.
She had been cruel. Not intentionally — never intentionally — but carelessly. She had been so busy protecting herself from the intensity of his emotions that she had forgotten to protect him from the distance she created. He had felt it. Of course he had felt it. He was the most perceptive man she had ever known, attuned to her every mood and shift, reading her silences with a fluency that sometimes terrified her.
He had felt her pulling away. And he had responded the only way he knew how — by pulling harder. By writing more. By drowning her in his words because he feared that her silence meant she was slipping out of his grasp forever.
And she had repaid his desperation with a single flippant line about stopping his letters, and then with a wall of silence.
"You look pale, Your Majesty." Claire had moved closer, her voice soft with concern. "Shall I send for a physician?"
"No." Lalisa's voice came out as barely a whisper. "No, I need to think."
"About the Emperor's letters?"
"About how I have been a fool."
Claire did not argue. She had served the Empress long enough to know when silence was the wiser course.
Lalisa turned from the window, her gaze falling on the scattered letters across the breakfast table. They lay like fallen soldiers, his words bleeding across the pages in desperate armies. She had read them with growing numbness, she realized. Had let the sheer volume of his intensity wash over her like a tide, leaving her hollow and depleted instead of moved.
She had stopped feeling. That was the cruelest part.
Somewhere between the fifteenth letter and the twentieth, she had stopped feeling the love that pulsed beneath every desperate word he wrote. She had started seeing only the demand, the need, the desperate grasping for something she was not sure she could give. She had forgotten to see the man behind the words — the man who was terrified of losing her, who was fighting a war on foreign soil while his mind was consumed by a love so fierce it threatened to consume him entirely.
She had forgotten to see Jensen.
"You write more fondly of your dogs than you do of me." She murmured the words aloud, testing their weight on her tongue. "Should I bark to gain your affection?"
Claire's expression flickered with confusion, but she said nothing.
Lalisa moved back to the table, her hands sweeping the letters into a neat pile with a decisiveness that surprised even her. She did not re-read them. Did not allow herself to be pulled back into the undertow of his desperation. Instead, she carried the stack to the fireplace and dropped them onto the embers.
The paper caught quickly, the flames licking at Jensen's words, consuming his fears and accusations in a rush of orange and gold. Lalisa watched them burn, her expression unreadable, her heart a steady drum in her chest.
"What are you doing, Your Majesty?" Claire's voice was barely audible over the crackle of the flames.
"Making a decision." Lalisa's voice was calm, certain in a way it had not been all morning. "I cannot answer twenty-three letters. I cannot address the fears of a man who sees enemies in every shadow and rivals in every conversation I have. I cannot spend my days convincing him that I love him."
She watched the last page curl and blacken, Jensen's final plea turning to ash.
"But I can do something else."
She swept from the room, her robes billowing behind her, her bare feet cold against the marble floor. Claire hurried after her, confusion and concern warring in her expression.
"Your Majesty? What are you planning?"
"The only thing that will actually work." Lalisa reached her private salon and began pulling dresses from the wardrobe with aggressive efficiency. "I am going to the Netherlands."
"The — Your Majesty, you cannot! The Emperor is at war! The roads are dangerous, the front is unstable, and he would be furious if he knew you were —"
"Furious?" Lalisa paused, a silk gown clutched in her hands, a wild smile curving her lips for the first time that morning. "He has been furious for a week, Claire. He has written me twenty-three letters demanding my presence, my attention, my very soul. Let him be furious when I appear before him in the flesh, unannounced and undeniably real."
Claire's mouth opened and closed like a fish. "But the journey — "
"Will take three days if we push the horses." Lalisa tossed the gown onto the bed and reached for another. "Pack my blue traveling dress. The one with the fur trim. And my warmest cloak. I want to be ready within the hour."
"Your Majesty, this is madness."
"Yes." Lalisa's smile softened, her eyes growing distant with a tenderness that transformed her features. "But it is the kind of madness he will understand. He has been writing to a ghost, Claire. An idea of me that his own fears have conjured. I need to remind him that I am real. That I am here. That I am not slipping away from him."
She pressed a hand to her chest, feeling the rapid beat of her own heart. "He needs to see me. To touch me. To know that I am not just words on a page that he can lose."
Claire stood frozen for a long moment. Then, slowly, a smile broke across her face — the smile of a woman who had served the Empress for years and had learned to recognize when a course of action was both insane and absolutely necessary.
"I will prepare the carriage, Your Majesty. Discreetly, of course. The court need not know of your departure."
"Good." Lalisa turned back to the wardrobe, her hands moving with renewed purpose. "And Claire?"
"Your Majesty?"
"Send word to the stables. We will need fresh horses at every post station along the route. I intend to make this journey in two days, not three."
Claire bowed, her smile widening. "As you wish, Your Majesty."
The door clicked shut behind her, and Lalisa was alone with the rustle of silk and the distant crackle of the dying fire in the breakfast room. Twenty-three letters had turned to ash. The weight of them had lifted from her chest, replaced by something lighter, sharper, more urgent.
She was going to see her husband.
She was going to walk into his camp, in front of his entire command staff, and remind him — and every man there — exactly who she was.
And then she was going to take him apart with her bare hands.