The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison Page A

it would be as well to take care of the matter promptly.
    She did not like him, but it was clear she was not going to let her personal feelings interfere with her efficiency. Possibly she was more keenly aware than Chavar of the emperor’s power to remove her from her position if she gave him reason. But her efficiency felt like ruthlessness, and he was so weary already, a headache ticking in his temples, that he said simply, “We are confident that any persons you recommend will be entirely adequate to our needs.”
    She nodded, despising him for weakness, and whisked herself away. Atterezh came in on a wave of cheerful burbling about cloth and color and pattern of which Maia understood maybe two words in seven. Beshelar and Cala, as befitted the emperor’s nohecharei, sat one to either side of the door watching alertly. Maia suspected that this would not be the last time in his life he wished to be able to tell them simply to go away.
    And before Atterezh was done, Csevet had appeared, with a list even worse than Esaran’s. Word of the new emperor’s arrival had spread, and courtiers, the Witnesses of the Corazhas especially, were beginning to gather. Csevet had a towering stack of letters—some delivered through the pneumatic system, others left by various persons with the guards at the grilles when they were not permitted entrance—and he insisted inexorably that every one of them had to be at least noticed that evening. He and Maia sat, one on either side of the enormous desk that lurked like a winter-fuddled bear in the back corner of the Rose Room, and went through the letters one by one.
    Maia had known that he had been plunged into deep water by his accession to his father’s throne, but it was that stack of letters that showed him just how deep and cold the water was. He recognized some of the names, from gossip Setheris has shared, and knew generally what the Corazhas, the Judiciate, the Parliament were, but the inadequacy of his knowledge became more and more cruelly apparent with each letter, as Csevet read it aloud and paused with his eyebrows raised, and Maia had to ask who the writer was, or what exactly it was that he was writing about. Beshelar and even Cala got dragged into the process of educating the emperor, and Maia sat and listened and hated it.
    He had known of the concordat—half cease-fire, half alliance—maintained between Parliament, Corazhas, and Judiciate, supporting the emperor between them like the legs of a fragile and argumentative tripod, but he had never had more than the narrowest crack of a view of them. Now, suddenly, he was surrounded by—almost drowning in—a brilliantly colored panorama: the clamoring House of Commons, the disdainful House of Blood, still resentful all these centuries later that they had to negotiate with men who were merely elected; the delicate internecine feuds of the judiciars, no fewer than eleven of whom had sent letters by the pneumatic, each with language more impenetrable than the last; the seven Witnesses of the Corazhas, the advisers of the emperor, none of whom had sent anything in his own person except the most correct and restrained of condolences and good wishes, but whose secretaries had created a deluge of vellum and paper. Then there were the lesser lords and courtiers and merchants and civil servants.… And on top of this madness, the emperor was supposed to keep his balance?
    The worst was a letter from someone named Eshevis Tethimar, a letter so dense with hints, obscurities, and circumlocutions that Maia could make no sense of it at all, even after Csevet had explained that Eshevis Tethimar was the heir of the Duke Tethimel, one of the wealthiest landowners in southern Thu-Athamar.
    “But what does he want?”
    “Although we cannot say for certain…”
    “Please. We beg of you. Guess.”
    Csevet flicked his ears. “We would guess that Dach’osmer Tethimar is a suitor for the hand of the Archduchess Vedero.”
    Maia looked