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On Emily’s ninth birthday there is a ball.
There is always a ball on her birthday, no matter how she feels about it. Corvo dislikes them almost as much as she does, but he can see the political necessity even if he complains to her mother about the risks, so she gets no quarter there. And her mother will not be moved at all. She has the same hard set to her mouth that Emily has lately started thinking of as her Parliament Meeting Face, and all of Emily’s protests die unspoken. She resigns herself to a birthday afternoon spent standing very still while her maids fuss over her hair and her dress, and an evening spent remembering her very best table manners in front of the delegate from Tyvia.
Last year’s ball was bigger. But then, last year there wasn’t a plague in the city. Her mother tries not to speak of it in front of her, but Emily has gotten very good at hiding, and sometimes when she’s hiding she hears things she wasn’t meant to. So she knows that the Tyvian delegate has been sending daily letters begging to be recalled to Dabokva, and that Morley, to the Navy’s worry, has only sent a gift. The nobles wear the same bright, false smiles they always do when they dance, and trade whispers over their drinks about leaving the city. No one wants to be the first to break, but someone will.
During the dancing, she tries twice to sneak off, but Corvo knows her too well to take his eye off her. After the second attempt he steps forward to hover protectively and unsubtly at her side.
“Mind your mother, Lady Emily,” he mutters under his breath, and places a hand briefly on her shoulder before he returns it to the hilt of his sword.
She watches him study the room, and tries to see it as he would. Was Lord Pearson trying to edge closer to the dais where the Empress sat, or merely closer to Lady Russell? If the party were stormed by a band of rebellious pirates, how many ways out of the room would she have?
Plotting her path up the velvet bunting to the balcony, where she would steal a pirate’s sword and fight her way through to the chandelier, is diverting enough to keep her in her seat until the last of the minor nobles and tradesmen have paid their respects to the occasion. After that, the evening is all about politics and grown-up maneuvering, not about her, and when she starts yawning too wide to keep her eyes open her mother excuses her young heir to the guests and sends Corvo to put her to bed.
He hates to be away from her mother’s side for long, hates more to leave her surrounded by strangers. Still, he stays long enough for a maid to help her out of her dress and into her nightgown, long enough to tuck her in - a treat rare enough that she knows he is doing it only because of her birthday.
She is asleep before she has a chance to say goodnight.
Emily does not like her birthday. But the next day, her mother comes in just before lunch and tells her tutors they are dismissed for the afternoon. Her tutors look almost as surprised as she is. Her mother used to take lunch with her in the playroom, sometimes, on days when there were no court functions or meetings with her advisors demanding her time. But those days have dwindled, and then disappeared altogether, in the last year.
Emily wonders if the Spymaster will be mad at her again, but her mother doesn’t seem concerned. When Emily asks where they’re going, she just laughs and says it’s a surprise.
A hundred years of war and rebuilding have left Dunwall Tower a honeycomb of secret passages, hidden doors, and dead-ends. Some of them Corvo and her mother showed her, places to hide and escape if the city ever fell. Some of them she found on her own. The stairway they take now is not really a secret - everyone in the Tower knows about it, and the guards use it all the time, because it opens so much closer to their quarters. But you still have to press the right carving on the wall to swing the bookcase aside, and that is enough to make even a well-trod servants’ entrance feel like an adventure. Especially when Emily realizes they must be going to the roof.
Emily is not allowed on the Tower roof, not since last year when she fell trying to climb a parapet. Despite her protests that it had only been a few feet and a twisted ankle, and anyway now she knew where the good handholds were, all of the guards are under strictest orders to send her straight back to her governess if they catch her up there. When they come around the stone outcropping that hides the doorway from view, the guard on that side nods at her mother, and Emily makes a face back at him. He stays as stern-looking as ever but Emily is pretty sure he’s trying not to smile.
“All the other guards have cleared out, Your Highness,” he says. “Just as he requested.”
“Tell the captain I thank him for his indulgence,” her mother replies. “We’ll only be a few hours, I’m sure the Royal Protector can keep us safe for that long.”
“Of course, Your Highness,” he says, and after a final watchful glance around he heads to the stairs, leaving them alone on the roof.
Well, alone except for Corvo. They step around a row of columns and she sees him waiting for them, sitting on a blanket spread out on the balcony.
“Your royal feast, my lady,” he says to her, and she drops her mother’s hand and scrambles over to him.
The kitchen maids must have loaded him down with everything he could carry, because it really is a feast. Sausages and fish pie and crisp onion tarts, more than the three of them can eat, and for once her mother doesn’t remind her of her manners. When Emily gets too daring with her knife, and sends a sausage off the edge of the balcony into the garden, her mother only raises an eyebrow.
“Admiral Kozlov said you were an exceptionally charming young lady,” her mother says. She tries to look stern, but her eyes are dancing, and Emily can see the ruby-red smear on the blanket where she was incautious herself with a jam cake. “And I thought Lady Penderghast was going to try to take you home with her. If they could see you now!”
“Admiral Kozlov wouldn’t mind,” Emily retorts. “He told me last night that when they were shipwrecked in Pandyssia, they didn’t even cook the giant snakes before they ate them. They didn’t care about using the right fork.”
The wind blows cold and damp from the east off the river, carrying salt-scent and the shouts of dock workers readying ships to head out to sea. The admiral had had many stories about his adventures in Pandyssia, the ruined temples, the whale-song at night on the water. Emily has never been to sea; she has never left the safety of Dunwall.
“When I’m Empress,” she asks, “will I still have to have a ball on my birthday?”
Her mother laughs, gentle and quiet. “If you can get out of it,” she says, “it’s more than I ever could.”
“What?” Corvo drawls, from his spot leaning against the railing of the balcony. “You don’t like spending your birthday dancing with jumped-up noblemen and getting cornered by Lady Travisham talking about trade deals?”
“As much as you like spending it jumping at every shadow in the ballroom,” her mother replies. “But we all make sacrifices, don’t we?” She is still smiling, but there is something very tired in her face behind it.
“I’m sorry, Emily,” she says. “I wish -”
And then she seems to think better of it, because she stops, and looks over at Corvo again. “I think we’re missing something, Corvo,” she says. “We’ve had lunch, and cake, but I’m certain there was something else in that basket.”
“I think you’re right, Your Highness,” he says. “I swear I just saw it -”
He checks the blanket, under the plates, even though there’s clearly nothing there - and then he reaches behind his back and pulls out a small flat package wrapped in silver paper.
She got presents last night, of course, from the ambassadors and noble families trying to outdo each other with lavish, pointless gifts; the only thing worse than getting them was knowing that her etiquette tutor was going to make her sit down and go through every one to decide the appropriate amount of formal gratitude to express. And from her mother, who gave her a replica of one of the Imperial Navy’s flagships, with its own tiny wooden crew, which has already been christened and had its maiden voyage on her bedsheets. But she didn’t get anything from Corvo, and she had bit her tongue trying not to ask, because he had always had a present for her before.
It’s lighter than it looks when she takes it, and for a moment she swallows her disappointment. She’s been begging Corvo for months to teach her how to sword-fight and shoot, to let her have a knife like his, and while he was happy enough to teach her a few small tricks her mother has put her foot down on anything more. But then she gets the paper and - it isn’t a knife, as she knew it wouldn’t be, but it’s almost as good: a set of colored pencils, good ones, much better than what she has in the schoolroom, and their own case just the right size to hide in her pocket.
“I asked Sokolov’s assistants what he uses,” Corvo says. “He does studies in pencil before he paints.”
Emily throws herself at him in a hug. “I’m going to draw a picture of you, Corvo,” she tells him. “Can I draw a picture of you now? I want to draw all three of us together!”
Her mother reaches around him and pulls out the other thing hidden in the basket - several sheets of drawing paper.
“I think we have time to sit for a royal portrait,” she says.
But Emily is only halfway through her drawing, tongue poked out stubbornly as she tries to get the right color of her mother’s dress, when they are interrupted by the discreet cough of a guard.
“My apologies, Your Highness,” he says, when he has their attention. “But the Spymaster said it was too urgent to keep waiting.”
“Oh, what now?” her mother sighs wearily as she gets to her feet. She kisses the top of Emily’s head, but she isn’t staying.
Most of Emily’s drawings she puts up in her room, or in the schoolroom, as much as her tutors complain about it. But that one she folds up and keeps in her pocket, the same place she keeps the pencils Corvo gave her, and so that one is the only one she saves: the three of them, together, unfinished.
On Emily’s tenth birthday she is in a whorehouse.
She tells herself all day that Corvo is coming. When they brought her here, the Pendletons told her that Corvo was arrested at the Tower, that soon she’d be safe from him for good, but she knows they lied. Corvo is smarter than they are. He’s going to escape, and he’s going to find her. Madame Prudence doesn’t care that it’s her birthday, but Corvo will remember.
That night she doesn’t cry. She is the Empress now, and Empresses do not cry, not even when they’re locked in the dark, not even when they realize no one is coming to save them.
She bites her lips bloody against the sobs, swallows her tears until there is nothing left but cold. And the next morning when one of the girls takes her downstairs to the washroom she memorizes every locked door they pass, because if Corvo isn’t coming then she’s going to have to do it herself.
On Emily’s tenth-and-a-half-birthday she has a nightmare.
She doesn’t remember most of it - Morgan and Custis dragging her by the arm, her mother’s dark hair against the pale marble, a cage like the empty ribs of a whale. She never knows where they’re taking her in her nightmares, but she always knows she’ll never come back.
She wakes up crying for her mother, but her mother isn’t there.
Once she can breathe again, once she no longer feels the ghostly sting of Custis’s fingers digging into her wrist, she realizes no one is there at all. Callista’s bed beside hers is empty, the sheets still rumpled, and her nightgown is folded neatly over the back of her chair. She must have woken early, and Emily is glad for that - she likes Callista, but she fusses.
She can’t go back to sleep now, so she quickly dresses, and goes out on the walkway to watch for Corvo coming back with Samuel. She’s just starting to shiver in the grey chill of early dawn when she hears the quiet sputtering of Samuel’s engine pulling up to the dock.
The whole city is in chaos, and it’s all Corvo’s fault. Two weeks ago he brought back Sokolov over his shoulder, and the grown-ups have been buzzing about it ever since, making plans that drop down to whispers when they notice her there. They won’t tell her what they’re doing, just that it’s all to put her on the throne.
This time, though, he just comes back looking tired. She hugs the railing and watches him climb slowly out of the boat, favoring his arm like it hurts him to use. He stumbles across the yard toward the pub, and when he disappears under the ledge of Piero’s workshop, she’s trying so hard to see where he went that she doesn’t notice him until he clears his throat behind her.
“You should be in bed,” he says. He’s standing just off the edge of the roof, on one of the vents. He’s still wearing his mask, and if she didn’t know he was Corvo underneath she would probably be frightened of him. Everyone else is.
“It’s almost morning,” she tells him. “And I couldn’t sleep. Did you fight with the City Watch this time?”
“I try not to,” he says. She expects him to argue more about sending her back to bed, but he just takes off his mask and shrugs off his coat. He wraps it around her shoulders before he sits down heavily on the bridge beside her.
“You’re cold,” he says simply, when she looks at him.
With his coat off, she can see the bloom of blood soaking through the shoulder of his shirt, and her eyes grow wide. “Corvo! Are you hurt? Did you get shot? Are -”
“I’m fine. I just - wasn’t paying attention. Stupid. But the bleeding’s already stopped.”
He’s trying to be reassuring, but she can feel the tears threatening to spill over. She won’t, she won’t, she won’t, but she can still remember her mother in her dream, so still and pale, just like she was when - and now Corvo is hurt -
“Emily.” He takes her hand. She lets him touch her fingers gently to his shoulder, where the blood is stiff and tacky, already almost dry. And to his chest, where his heart beats steady and strong. “I’m fine.”
She believes him. She has to. But she still can’t speak around the lump in her throat. She closes her eyes tight and buries her face in his shoulder, lets him hold her like he did when she was small. Even under the stink of river mud and whale oil and blood he still smells familiar.
“I dream about her too,” he says quietly.
The sun is almost risen. From here, Emily can just see the top of Dunwall Tower, the sun glinting off the metal battlements and the watchtower.
“Callista said - Callista said the Regent wouldn’t let people come to the funeral, but they still threw flowers over the walls. All the servants had to help clean up the grounds for days.”
Campbell has visited the Golden Cat that night to check on her. He had been angry, shouted at Madame Prudence, threatened the girls, and she had never known why.
“I wish -” It hurts to say it, but she swallows and tries again. “I wish I could have -”
“I know. So do I.”
Sometimes, when no one is looking at him, Corvo stands very still, like he’s listening to a conversation no one else can hear. She heard Lydia call it creepy once, while she was making the beds. He does it now, staring down and studying the back of his hand.
“Your mother - if she were here, your mother - she never wanted this for you. But she would say you’re very brave.” He stumbles over the words, voice rough. And then he reaches into one of the pockets of his coat and pulls out a small package wrapped in brown paper.
“This is for you,” he says. “I asked Piero if he could…”
She knows what it is before she opens it, just from the weight of it, and her hands shake a little.
It would be a twin to Corvo’s sword, if it weren’t for its size. This is just a knife, and a small one at that, the hilt fitting easily even in her hand.
“Give it to me,” Corvo says. “Hilt first, now. And give me your hand. This will hurt a little.”
With the tip of the knife, he makes a prick in her finger, just enough to well up a few drops of blood. She bites back a yelp and watches as he smears her blood on the blade of the knife, a bright streak of red on the black metal. He hands it back to her, along with a rag to wipe it clean again.
“Now it’s yours for good,” he says. “I don’t want you to use it if you don’t have to. Run. Hide. But I want you to keep it.”
She doesn’t use it. Havelock and Martin are too big, and she doesn’t know where Corvo is, and she has nowhere to go. She struggles and cries out as they force her into the boat, and the knife stays hidden. But as she sits in her cell in the lighthouse, hoping against hope that Corvo’s death is a lie for the second time, she holds it, and reminds herself that Corvo told her she was brave.
On Emily’s eleventh birthday she is an empress.
There is a ball, with Corvo’s reluctant consent, because the city and her alliances alike must be rebuilt from the last year. He spends the whole night standing watchfully at her shoulder, and no one comes close enough to pose any kind of danger to her.
The next day, he is waiting for her when she comes out of her room. He has his sword on his belt, and he’s carrying one of the light practice blades the guard trainees use.
“We have work to do,” he says, and he takes her hand.