After the initial shock of being grabbed by the guards, Viscountess Lintone didn’t cry out or struggle. When the young Corvina met her eyes, she could see nothing but a terrible resignation in them.

With the Emperor’s reputation for violence, perhaps this outcome was something the Viscountess had been quietly preparing for ever since she had entered the palace.

After that day, Corvina had often wondered why the Viscountess had accepted the job in the first place. Eventually, Corvina had come to understand that there weren’t that many ways for a respectable noblewoman with few assets and fewer friends to make a living. Becoming the royal tutor may have been her best option from a slew of unpleasant options.

On that day, Robert Marshal had been the first to move. Decisively, he unsheathed the dagger, letting the sheathe fall to the ground. With his other hand, he opened the door of the cage and reached in to grasp the bird firmly around its body. His bird was a bright emerald blue.

Robert knelt and held the bird against the ground. It was writhing and chirping furiously, trying to escape. Then Robert raised his dagger and brought it down, stabbing straight through the bird’s neck, severing its head completely.

Robert stood up, watching as the headless body of the bird continued to spasm for a few moments after death. His expression was one of vague interest, and nothing more. The same expression he wore during all their lessons.

“Very well done,” said the Emperor.

Robert looked up at the Emperor with a flash of pride in his eyes. No one moved to clean up the bird’s corpse. It was left there on the lawn. Corvina couldn’t look away from it.

“Well?” said the Emperor to Corvina and Sebastian. “Are the two of you going to take action, or will your tutor’s blood be the next to be spilled?”

Corvina finally tore her gaze away from the dead bird and back to the Viscountess. The Viscountess was looking down at the ground now, seemingly unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes.

Corvina turned back to the bird cage in front of her.

The purple bird was still flapping its wings, fluttering around the cage. Corvina reached up and opened the cage door, but then remembered she should have unsheathed the dagger first. She hurried to unsheathe it, but in her unsteady haste she dropped the weapon altogether. But the door was open and the bird was flying around the cage. There was a danger it could get away and then the Viscountess would die. So Corvina reached into the cage with both hands and grasped the bird.

Corvina could feel the bird struggling to escape. She held it tightly so it wouldn’t get away as she withdrew it from the cage. There was no time to search for the dagger and if she let go with even one hand then maybe the bird would get away.

In her panic and determination, Corvina shifted her grasp so that one hand was around the bird’s neck.

And she twisted with all her strength.

Corvina didn’t loosen her grasp until she was certain the bird had stopped moving. Then she dropped it, taking two steps back, desperate to get away from the terrible crunch she had felt. The living flesh turning to dead meat in her grasp.

Corvina looked up at the Emperor. He nodded at her, approvingly.

Then the Emperor turned his gaze to Sebastian.

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Sebastian flinched when the Emperor looked at him. He was visibly shaking. The bird in his cage was smaller than the one in Corvina’s had been, and its feathers were a bright gold in color.

Sebastian, being the Crown Prince, was the most pampered of the three children. Even the Viscountess rarely really pushed him to do anything he didn’t want to do, preferring to use gentle persuasion in cases where she might have used a mild punishment for Corvina or Robert.

Sebastian reached towards the cage with a trembling hand, and then paused. He didn’t seem to be able to bring himself to move past a certain point.

“I can’t… I can’t do it…” he said, in a small voice.

“You can’t do it. Are you certain, son?” said the Emperor. He pointed towards the Viscountess, held down by the guards. “Consider the consequences if you don’t act. You’ll have to make much more difficult decisions than this when you’re Emperor. You’ll have to dirty your hands with far worse than the blood of a songbird.”

“I can’t!” shouted Sebastian. He glared at his father, although tears were forming at the corner of his eyes. His small hands were balled into fists.

The Emperor sighed and folded his arms. “That’s very disappointing.” He looked at Corvina and Robert and their obediently dead birds. Then he looked at the Viscountess. “I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to punish all of you for the failure of just one of you. Corvina, Robert, you have proven yourselves worthy of your high status, capable of making the necessary decisions. For that, I will spare your tutor.”

The Emperor nodded, and the guards let Viscountess Lintone go. “Escort her home, would you?” said the Emperor. “Oh, and would you—” he delivered further instructions to the guards in a hushed tone Corvina couldn’t make out.

Then the guards led the Viscountess away. The Emperor dismissed the maids as well, and so the children were left alone with the Emperor and the birds—only the small gold one still singing.

“Perhaps you just didn’t have the right motivation,” the Emperor said to Sebastian.

After what felt like an eternity but must’ve been more like twenty minutes, a couple of the guards returned, accompanied by Empress Zephrine, Sebastian’s mother.

The Empress was a slight woman with wispy blonde hair and the general air of a rabbit caught in a trap. Corvina had rarely seen her in person as a child. Since Corvina was the daughter of the Emperor and another woman, there was no particular reason that the Empress should acknowledge her.

As a child, Corvina had seen the Empress as a distant, fragile figure. Like a porcelain doll in a glass case behind velvet ropes. As an adult, Corvina sometimes thought about just how hard life in the palace must have been for the Empress. Like Viscountess Lintone, Empress Zephrine hadn’t had much choice in entering the palace.

Zephrine had been a princess from the Kingdom of Ladore, a small country bordering the Wyernwolf Empire to the North. She was sent by her father to a marriage she likely hadn’t wanted in order to prevent a war she likely wouldn’t have survived. It couldn’t have been easy, being married to such a man, a stranger, in a foreign land, away from everyone and everything she’d known.

But much of that was speculation. Corvina had never had the chance to get to know the woman well enough to truly understand what her feelings might have been.

When Sebastian saw his mother he cried “Mom!” and ran over to her. She bent down to hug her son, seemingly uncomfortable with the gesture. The royals of Wyernwolf rarely took a very hands-on approach to parenting.

“There, there,” she said, patting Sebastian on the head. “Richard,” she said to the Emperor. “What’s going on?”

“I’m teaching our son an important lesson,” said the Emperor. “Now, Sebastian, I think you know what you have to do. And what will happen if you don’t.”

Sebastian looked at his father, his eyes full of terror. He swallowed his tears and broke away from his mother’s embrace, walking back towards the bird cage.

The Empress looked confused and concerned by the whole scene, her eyes darting from the Emperor, to the children, to the bird cages, to the dead birds.

Sebastian approached the final bird cage. With still-trembling hands, he picked up his dagger and drew it from its sheathe. Then he opened the door of the bird cage, reached in with one hand to grasp the small golden bird. He pulled it out of the cage.

Tears were streaming down his face as he grasped the bird in one hand and the dagger in the other.

There was a long, terrible moment when everything held still and the only sound that could be heard was the bird screaming its frightened song.

Then Sebastian let go.

The dagger fell to the ground with a thunk and the bird flew away, darting quickly up and out of sight. Sebastian was still crying as he watched the bird fly away.

The Emperor scoffed. “Useless,” he said. Then he took his own sword that he always wore at his side and he ran the Empress through.