Night Shine

by Tessa Gratton

  He turned his back to the empress and scoured the room with his hard demon-kissed gaze.

  Sky put the knife blade to the copper skin at the back of his wrist and sliced deep enough for bright-purple blood to spill immediately over, splatting vividly against the polished red-and-black floor.

  A wave of shocked cries rippled through the court at the offense of bleeding before the empress, but they swiftly transformed into sighs of relief, and the First Consort called majestically, “Bring them to our rooms.”

  Nothing chose to misinterpret, as was her frequent habit, and pretended “them” could not include “Nothing.” As the palace guard herded Sky, avoiding the drops of his blood, she slipped between a lady in harsh pink and two painted servants, into the corridor, and scrambled up a lattice into the ceiling. Between the ceiling plaster and the steep slant of the roof were tiny pocket-rooms all over the palace compound. Fans run by water wheels circulated the air, sucking smoke away from the lacquered walls and decorative ceilings of the palace through many small shafts and peepholes.

  Once perched on a crossbeam in the dark palace cavity, Nothing closed her eyes and felt the panic and terror she’d not allowed herself before plunging the dagger into the imposter.

  With trembling hands she unwound the volume of her hair until it hung around her shoulders in ragged layers. Only Kirin had touched her hair in four years, since she’d sliced it all off. She grabbed fistfuls of it, pressing it into her eyelids, against her mouth, while her very bones shook. Kirin was gone, but where? He lived. He had to live—she felt it in her heart and stomach just as she’d felt the imposter—but what could be done? What could she do? Her breath stuttered in tiny little gasps. For her entire life she’d truly cared about only one thing, and she’d lost him.

  Smoke tinged with spicy perfume swirled around her, soaking into her hair and the robe she wore. To calm down, she tried to think of regular things: that she needed a bath, but would wait until late in the night to slide into the Second Consort’s bathhouse and avail herself of the cold water. If she traded a chit of information about one lady’s new lover to the imperial steward of the second circle, she might win an hour in the steam room, too. The heat would relax her, and she could interrogate the little flashy fire spirits about what might have done this to Kirin. Once she was composed, she could ask the great demon of the palace, too. It was supposed to protect the scions of the empire but had not noticed a simulacrum within its own walls!

  Nothing reminded herself to be fierce. She stood and balanced along the rafter to the corner of the cavity and tucked her slippered feet down into the wall. She lowered herself smoothly and walked sideways along the narrow corridor, making little enough noise anyone passing would say, “It’s only a mouse in the wall; nothing to be worried about.”

  Nothing at all.

  Sometimes she played a game with herself guessing which of the palace residents knew the truth of what they said. “Remember that you may be nothing to them but are everything to me,” Kirin had whispered to her when she was twelve and he fourteen.

  This afternoon there was little chance of her whispered footsteps being detected, for the corridor on the other side of the thin wall rushed with servants. Once she heard the telltale clatter of armor moving opposite her, and she was glad not to be heading in that direction.

  Nothing slipped out of the wall behind a narrow banner painted with rainy skies, just outside the gate to the Lily Garden.

  A croaking cry erupted beside her, and Nothing squeaked, darting back. Straight into the hands of Aya the witch.

  “Hello, little Nothing,” the witch said as Nothing twisted free.

  Aya’s sister-witch, Leaf, boxed Nothing in.

  It had been years since she’d had to worry about being ambushed by witches.

  They were twice her age, with tan skin and shaved heads, their scalps marked with aether-sigils. Gray robes hung from their bony shoulders and each carried a staff of King-Tree wood hooked at the top into a perch for their raven spirit familiars. The ravens stared at Nothing just as their mistresses did: both birds had one black eye and one eye of glowing aether-blue. A sacrifice from their binding, when they’d agreed to become familiars.

  Nothing avoided them harder than she avoided witches.

  Aya spoke again. “We traced you through the aether, little Nothing. You cannot hide from us.”

  “Not unless we allow it,” Leaf added.

  That was not true: the great demon of the palace sometimes hid Nothing from their aether-eyes. But Nothing pressed her lips tightly closed.

  “How did you know?” Leaf asked. Her raven croaked again, a low, bizarre sound like a summons.

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” Nothing said.

  Both witches pressed nearer. “The prince—as you so ferociously proved—is not here to command us away from you.”

  “But you are not released from his previous commands,” Nothing said, desperate to remain calm. Her voice was too tight; they had to know she was afraid.

  “No,” Aya said conversationally. “We cannot compel you, but what harm is there in telling us what you know? In helping us?”

  Nothing stared between them. The hairs on her neck tingled, and she shivered down her spine. Witches made her nervous because their sigils and familiars connected them to the aether, the windy layers of magic surrounding the world. They could hear the warnings of spirits and the laughter of demons—and Nothing could too. She’d worked to hide her sensitivities because Kirin had told her she must if she did not wish to be forced into a witch’s life. The priests of the palace left her alone, being concerned with philosophy, gods, and the occasional ghost, but the witches: they suspected she was more than she seemed.

  “I have not a single thing to say,” Nothing said. She tilted her chin up, imagining Kirin’s easy arrogance. “It is not my fault you did not see what was obvious to me.”

  Aya narrowed her eyes; Leaf laughed.

  “We see you,” Leaf said, “even when the rest of the court has forgotten you are anything but a slip of a girl the prince has taken for a pet.”

  “Nobody will forget you after today,” Aya said softly, relishing the words.

  Nothing pushed past them. She hated that they were right.

  The aether-eyes of the raven familiars remained on her back as she walked silently away. Nothing felt their cold gazes tickling at the base of her skull.

  The Lily Garden bubbled off the inner wall of the fifth circle of the palace. This was a small garden, as palace gardens went, shaped like an eye: it curved in a teardrop against the wall, the round head home to an equally round pond, the tail narrowing gently in a path trellised by hanging sunset lilies. Concentric beds of various types of lily circled the pond, creamy and white and the fairest blushing pink. Climbing star lilies graced the red-washed walls. Though the garden was rarely empty at this time of day, the uproar in the palace had cleared it for her now. Nothing headed straight to the pond, tucking herself against the short lip between two red-glazed pots of cluster lilies. She sighed and closed her eyes, breathing deep of the comforting air this near to the ground. Still water, moss, cloying floral perfume, and the sweet, persistent smell of rot.

  It was into this garden that Nothing had been born.

  Oh, not literally, but here she’d been discovered as a baby, the week of the spring turn, swaddled in light-green silk embroidered with a flower none could name. The same flower shape was burned into her tiny sand-white chest like a brand.

  Sometimes the scar ached, and she put cold water against it; other times it throbbed and the only relief to be found was bringing it nearer to heat.

  That was a detail she’d never told anyone but Kirin. He said she was a Queen of Heaven reborn, with a fire spirit for a heart, though such things were impossible. Spirits had no flesh—they were shards of aether. Demons were dead spirits and could only possess and steal energy from their houses.

  Though no woman claimed to have borne her, and none
could be discovered, Nothing had been raised with the babes of the court until she was old enough to slip into the walls and smoke ways. Then she’d met Kirin, and being his friend was enough to ground her here, despite uncertainty, despite having an impossible name and no other place.

  The great demon of the palace, that one time Nothing had asked who she was, shrugged deeply enough to crack plaster off the walls in the empress’s bathhouse and said, I don’t mind you are here.

  Which was hardly an answer, but the best it would give.

  “Where are you, Kirin?” she whispered.

  A splash in the pond answered her. Nothing blinked and did not move. The splash was followed by the swish of water as a small tail waved across its surface and a dragon-lily spirit drifted toward her side of the pond.

  Dragon lilies were elegant and occasionally grotesque if not sculpted by a master gardener. From their heart-shaped leaf pads, their stalks rose in a curve like the sinuous shape of a dragon, and their white flower faces spread like whiskers, with one heavy petal dropped open like a gaping dragon’s maw to reveal blister-pink stamen. This dragon-lily spirit’s head mirrored the shape of its flower, with eyes just as blister-pink as the stamen that flickered with simple thought, and of course it was a flower spirit, not a dragon, but every time a gardener mentioned its name, the spirit latched on to the power in the word for dragon and puffed a slight bit larger, a slight bit brighter, until it had chased the other species of lily spirits from the garden. It did not mind Nothing hiding here, naturally, because Nothing was no competition.

  “You smell like tears,” it said.

  Nothing tilted her face to show the round curve of her cheek, and the spirit licked her tearstains with a tongue softer than petals.

  This spirit was one of Nothing’s only friends. She had a few because once Kirin had told her it was safe to make them, so long as she never loved any more than she loved him. So she didn’t.

  The Day the Sky Opened was not Nothing’s friend, though they knew each other better than most.

  Her nonhuman friends included this dragon-lily spirit, the great demon of the palace who liked the tickle of Nothing’s fingers and toes as she climbed and slipped through the smoke ways, and three dawn sprites who hovered in the window of the Second Consort’s changing room. Nothing fed them tiny crystals of honey the color of Kirin’s eyes on every Peaceday.

  Beyond that, Nothing considered only Whisper, the youngest tailor in the palace, to be her friend. A small list, but a dear one.

  So small that it might never recover should she lose Kirin forever.

  Another tear slid down her cheek as Nothing contemplated a life without him. It made her feel empty. As if she did not know what to be without Kirin telling her. She’d only managed this summer by knowing he would return. Without that certainty, she worried she’d fade away. A bad state of affairs, she knew, but it was simply the way of her heart.

  “Other side?” asked the dragon-lily spirit, and Nothing lifted her chin so it could slither across her collar to her other shoulder and lick her left cheek. It curled there, a skinny white-and-green wisp of light, nuzzling her, quite hidden by the fall of her loose hair.

  Nothing was a pretty girl, neither beautiful nor remarkably otherwise, with cool sand-white skin too dull in tone to be considered a bold contrast to anything, half-moon brown eyes with short lashes, round cheeks, and a mouth that might’ve been charming if it did not rest in a flat line most of the time. Her hair was thick, unevenly black-brown, and haphazardly wavy—she could have straightened it with little effort and dyed it for vivid contrast, but she preferred to remain unremarkable. She cut it herself, and the ends were ragged as a result. She did not maintain proper bangs as had been in fashion for girls this past year. Nothing was considered helplessly unfashionable by the consorts, when they considered her at all, but Kirin had always defended her fundamentally blurry nature by telling his father that a perfect prince such as himself could only truly find contrast with an accessory like Nothing. The First Consort had replied that Kirin was appallingly rude sometimes, even for a prince, and Nothing only sank lower in her bow. Kirin had saved her from explaining to his father the truth about why she’d ruined her hair: Someone told her when she was very small that her mother must have touched the black fringe around her baby face, and so Nothing believed the ends of her hair were all of her mother that remained. She’d refused to cut it and worn it in plain looping braids with the ends trailing against her jaw so when she moved, they brushed her in a soft maternal caress. At thirteen, in fury at some fault she could not remember, though likely Kirin did, Nothing braided it all into a thick rope and hacked it off. A weight had lifted from her. With the ends, she’d made two bracelets: one for herself and one for Kirin Dark-Smile. The imposter had not been wearing it.

  She stretched her hand farther out of the torn sleeve of her robe to study the old thing. Its weave had loosened over time, some hairs snapping so they stuck out of the bracelet messily. “Do you think you could become my familiar and lend me power to find him?” she murmured to the dragon-lily spirit.

  But the dragon-lily spirit hissed and huddled against her neck. It pinched her earlobe for balance as she turned toward the tail of the garden, having heard the sound of careful, deliberate footsteps.

  “Nothing?”

  It was Sky.

  Nothing hugged her knees to her chest and waited.

  “I know this is your place of refuge, Nothing, but I must speak with you.”

  “Speak, then,” she said, still hiding.

  Sky sat upon the rim of the lily pond, putting the potted cluster lilies between them. He gripped the stone in his strong hands, flexing muscles up his bare arms. He’d been dressed in formal black today, for the investiture ritual, and new black lacquered armor. But the armor was gone, and only the black finery remained, edged in vivid blue silk the same color that streaked his hair, for Sky was one of the demon-kissed, born to those families cursed generations ago by the Queens of Heaven. All such children had the demon-blue in their hair or eyes or underlying their skin tone and all received some additional gift: perfect pitch or night sight or an inability to lie. Sky’s gift was physical strength. He was rather huge. Once Kirin dared him to toss Nothing over a palace wall with only his forefinger. Sky had declined, as he’d not needed to prove anything.

  “They won’t find him,” the prince’s bodyguard rumbled. More than hear it, Nothing seemed to feel it reverberate through the stone rim of the pond and into her spine, which pressed there. “They sent the Warriors of the Last Means in only four directions.”

  Surprised, Nothing leaned forward, peering around the cluster lilies. The spirit grasped her hair. “Four is a balanced number,” she said. “And only a Mountain Sorcerer could have made such a convincing imposter. Of course they sent to the Four Living Mountains.”

  Sky closed his eyes. “But the sorcerers of the Four Mountains do not have him, and the warriors will not hunt for him where he is to be found. Kirin was taken by the Fifth Mountain and the Sorceress Who Eats Girls. You must go with me to steal him back.”

  FIVE

  NOTHING THREW HERSELF TO her feet, and the dragon-lily spirit hissed its fear as it clung to her hair. She said, “You are lying! The sorceress would not take Kirin! She only takes girls.”

  Twenty-three girls in the past seventeen years.

  Sky stared at her, eyes dark, haunted, and said, “You must not speak of this to anyone.”

  “Speak of what?”

  Nothing’s heart pounded as she clenched her fists and shoved them onto her hips, trying to appear stronger than she felt. Suspicion arrived in a burst of images and memories, tiny shards of Kirin’s life thrusting themselves suddenly into clarity: side glances and swallowed words, almost-confessions and very soft sorrow when he glanced at certain things.

  The demon-kissed bodyguard forged ahead. “Kirin trusted you over all others.”

  “Even you,” she said, lashing out in her fear.

/>   His eyes slid to her shoulder and the spirit dangling there. “Will this flower spirit tell? If so, I must strangle it into a demon and plant it in salted earth.”

  Nothing bit her lip and raised a hand to cradle the flailing claws of the dragon-lily spirit. “Tell what, Sky? Tell what?”

  The large young man knelt before her and tilted his face up in a pleading, penitent angle. “When I traveled the long roads this summer with Kirin Dark-Smile, I traveled with a wife.”

  “Oh no,” she whispered.

  Sky held her gaze. “Kirin said, ‘Sky, go with me for this three-month journey as if you go with an adventuring daughter, not a son. I will put on gowns and braid my hair with flowers. I will walk and speak as a woman might, and you will be like my husband, not my dearest friend. This is my only chance to live as I wish to live, Sky, with you. Do not make me beg. Do not deny me.’ And so what was I to do, Nothing, but agree? What would you have done?”

  His copper cheeks flushed with his deep-purple blood. “What would you have done, Nothing?” he demanded again, low and rough.

  Nothing had not guessed he had such depth of emotion in that hard body of his. Though she was afraid, she stepped close to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I always give Kirin everything he asks, even if I shouldn’t.”

  “Will you give me what I ask and go with me to the Fifth Mountain?”

  The Fifth Mountain, far to the north of the empire, was a dead mountain: its heart had erupted more than a century ago, its spirit transformed into a great demon. At the time, the Emperor with the Moon in His Mouth had bargained with the demon, sending it tributes in return for peace. But since the Sorceress Who Eats Girls had come, there had been no peace: she took girls from across the empire and turned emissaries away at her gates. The sorcerers of the Four Living Mountains would not attack a great demon so long as it held the border, and the great demon of the palace refused to rally itself.