The Empress Does Not Look

They called it blindness because the court preferred a medical word to a political one. Aya’s eyes worked. She kept them closed. Open, they had once seen a verdict too early, and the man it concerned had died trying to outrun a future that had only been a glance.

So she sewed. Decrees arrived as plain thread. She stitched them into a long cloth that ran from her hands to a chest no minister was allowed to open. If the stitch held, the law held. If the thread slipped, the clerks rewrote the sentence and pretended the first draft had been a smudge.

“The southern tax,” said the chancellor, placing a skein the color of old money.

Aya’s needle took it, hesitated at the third character, and pulled free. The thread lay on the cloth like a vein that had thought better of it.

“Again,” she said. “And do not tell me the province can bear it. The thread has already been there.”