The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Chapter 183: Aurelia's Undignified End

Five hundred years ago, in the palace in Dawn Song:

After my performance on her birthday, Aurelia knew what was coming. I'd already removed all the ministers who dared question Cassius and all the friends who dared confront him. Her greatest ally, Marcius, was dead and (partially) eaten. Her ladies-in-waiting had all been replaced with women who worshipped me.

One of them, the gingko tree spirit whose gown had so impressed me the first time I entered the palace, now sent me a warning note: The empress is conspiring with her father.

Ah, Imperial in-laws and their opinions: the bane of any emperor.

Unfortunately, since a lady needed massive amounts of political backing to be selected empress in the first place, her family tended to be influential. In Aurelia's case, I'd whittled away her relatives at court – her sister had been imprisoned for negligence as Minister of Transportation, her brothers had been executed for an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister (they hadn't come close to poisoning me, but the effort was entertaining), and her excessive number of cousins had been exiled or tortured to death.

Now only her elderly father was left on the family estate outside the capital. He'd long since retired from politics into one of those hermit-like existences wherein non-awakened humans pondered their mortality while painting terrible landscapes and composing worse poetry. Still, he had enough doddering old-people friends and, more specifically, doddering old-people friends with children at court, to present a threat to me.

Clearly, he and his daughter had to go.

My order to the guards went out: Stop any messenger sent by the empress and notify me at once, and soon enough, a blushing young guard won the honor of bringing me word that they had captured an underservant.

I had the spy brought before me. He was a gardener's apprentice, no older than Cassia Prima, and he was shaking like a maple leaf. Still, he denied conspiring with Aurelia, even after they tore open his collar and retrieved a message written in her own hand, in her own blood, on a strip of cotton torn from her own underskirt.

"It's not conspiracy to defend the Rightful Empress!" he shouted, and such was his fanaticism that I could hear the capitals. "You're all traitors! You've all betrayed her! Yes, all of you! Even if you put me to death, I will die without regret!"

I was happy to oblige.

That taken care of, I found Cassius in the garden, where he was playing elephant chess against a skillful courtier who was losing just the right amount. With every fur on my nine tails aflutter, I flung myself to my knees before the emperor. "Your Imperial Majesty, I have failed you! Exile me, banish me, send me away from your gracious presence forever!"

Cassius' hand jerked and knocked chess pieces off the board. They clinked on the stone table. "What brings you to make such an unexpected request of us, Piri?"

In both hands, I proffered the strip of cotton. "See what the empress has written! See what she intends! She pleads for her father to raise an army against you! If your own empress is conspiring against you, then clearly I have failed you as Prime Minister! Put me to death for my failure!"

Cassius snatched the message and scanned the rust-red words.

"She wrote it in her own blood!" I cried. "I can smell it! The gravest message anyone can write! I have failed you, my emperor!"

Through my lashes, I monitored Cassius' expression. His eyebrows pinched together, and his lips contorted into a ferocious scowl. "Go," he commanded his chess partner in a quiet, deadly tone, and the courtier leaped up. "Go," he commanded the rest of his retainers, and they all fled. "Go! Arrest the Empress!" he commanded his guards, and they clanked off with much rattling of their swords.