by Sara Holland
As I wash my face and arms and strip out of my traveling clothes, Liam gives terse instructions through the door. Ina is being crowned queen as we speak—the thought raises goose bumps on my skin—and after the ceremony, everyone will gather in the east ballroom to celebrate. The balcony there looks over the cove, and below that, at the bottom of a set of stairs, is a beach. We will go through the ballroom, down the balcony and the stairs, straight to the beach, where his friend Elias, another coronation guest, has arranged a boat to take us away.
As I pin up my hair and pull the dress over my head, I want to ask him if he really thinks it will work. And though the question feels like a blade pressed against my chest, I want to ask if he plans to escape with me, abandoning his ruse of loyalty and the safety that comes with it.
Instead, I let the veil fall silently over my face, and the world is overlaid with a translucent pattern of gray taffeta. It’s only then—as Liam instructs me to say, if asked, that I’m a visitor from Connemor, a cousin of Elias’s—that I can bring myself to look in the mirror.
The dress fits perfectly. It’s velvet, the dark blue of the night sky at the height of summer, with constellations of white lace at my elbows and collarbones. A dipping back reveals my shoulder blades. With my face hidden beneath the veil, and my knife concealed, strapped to my calf with my traveling belt, I could actually pass for a guest at the coronation. As long as no one looks too closely at what’s under the veil.
Liam is in the middle of describing the best route to take through the ballroom. But when I step out of the washroom, his words stop. His eyes go wide, and his lips part. For a second I want more than anything for this to be real. To be welcomed at my sister’s crowning, to walk into the ballroom arm in arm with someone who looks at me the way Liam’s looking at me now, to dance with him without having to hide my face.
But I have never belonged in that world. And even now, Liam’s look of surprise fades out into cool neutrality. He may be my ally, but he can’t be anything else. I can’t give Caro any more tools to break my heart. She’s already taken enough.
I swallow and step past him through the doorway. With Liam in my wake, I follow the sound of music rising up from below.
6
When we get to the ballroom, all my fear and anger melts away momentarily into awe.
The floor and walls are the same pale stone as the rest of the castle, veined with shining strands of silver and black. The ceiling is a dome of glass, letting in a blazing spread of red and orange and purple—the sun setting over the ocean. It bleeds gold light down the walls, over the floor, making the people spinning on the dance floor—so many, surely more than two hundred—seem gilded, even through the translucent gray of my veil. I forget myself, and my grip tightens on Liam’s arm.
But he is tense beneath my hand, reminding me that despite the smile on his face, he’s afraid and we are in danger. Firmly, he takes my elbow, pulling me down the stairs, toward the crowd. The hem of my dress sweeps the floor, the dagger beneath my skirt heavy in its sheath.
At the front of the room, the marble floor rises in a set of wide stairs, where an orchestra is arrayed over the steps. I’ve never seen anything like it: dozens of musicians are spinning out the melody on cellos and flutes and drums and instruments I can’t even name. One long flute appears to be made of a human bone. The melody is beautiful, though I can’t help but shudder. As we move forward, the music wraps around me like something tangible, a language I don’t speak, that nevertheless tugs at me in ways I don’t understand.
Above the orchestra, a throne carved from shining, dark wood sits empty.
Halfway down the stairs, Liam stops and turns to face me. He leans in close to whisper in my ear. I try not to shiver.
“The door. There. Do you see it?”
I follow his gaze to a set of glass doors all the way across the room, propped open to admit the sight of another lush garden and the faintest sound of crashing waves. It seems very far away, with a sea of people dancing between us and escape. I nod.
Liam smiles stiffly at a passing couple. “It leads to the balcony.”
As we descend the stairs, I expect the heads of everyone in the crowd to snap toward me, veil or no veil, and for shouts of murderer to fill the room.
But it doesn’t happen. The crowd—people in military dress like Liam, or sweeping gowns and veils, moving in pairs and complicated patterns, aren’t looking at me. They’re looking at one another, eyes gleaming beneath veils. A few glances land on me, and my heart begins to race—until I remember the sharp-edged gossip that used to wind through Everless, of the various wealthy prospects that Lady Verissa recruited for Liam, only to have him reject them all. A girl on his arm will draw attention, but it can’t be helped.
A cluster of people with wineglasses in their hands walk close, chattering loudly about the offerings of the banquet table. One of them, a man in a deep purple jacket, breaks off and begins to stride toward us, his eyes fixed on Liam. A stone drops into my stomach as I recognize Lord Renaldi from my first dinner party at Everless. He was the man who’d threatened to bleed Bea a year for spilling wine on him, before Roan diffused the tension with his charm.
“Fascinating times we live in,” he says, too loudly, words slurred. “Our first change of power in five centuries, and we get a little stripling of a thing for a queen.” He grins at Liam and claps his arm, braying out laughter.
My spine stiffens. Ina may not trust me, but it pains me to hear her spoken of like this. It takes all my effort not to yank the drink from the nobleman’s hands and throw it in his face for his tone.
“Isn’t that right, Lord Gerling?”
Liam smiles. His eyes are pure ice, but I suppose Renaldi is too drunk to notice. “We’ll see,” he says. He nods, punctuating the conversation, and peels away from Renaldi, still guiding me lightly by the sleeve.
Chiming laughter rises to the ceiling. The group drifts away. As Liam looks down at me, I realize my fists are clenched, my nails digging into my palms. Do you doubt Ina too? I want to ask him, but it’s not the time or the place.
“Like I said, no one will notice you,” Liam mutters. He reaches out and puts a hand on the small of my back. No outsider looking at us would be able to tell, but his hand on my waist is light and impersonal, his smile hollow. Formal, distant.
A cluster of people mill about the bottom of the stairs, everyone who descends stopping to join them. Liam steers us in their direction as I tilt my head, trying to see what’s at their center. And then my mouth goes dry.
A middle-aged timelender, dressed as prettily as the rest of us, in a forest-green gown with gold-lace trim, sits at a small table with her glittering instruments in front of her. Smaller and shinier than the tools of Duade in Crofton or Wick, the timelender who bled me of ten years in Laista, yet still sharp, still menacing.
But here, an odd, unsettled feeling sweeps over me. Something is different—because here, people come to her one by one, smiling and chatting as they willingly offer up their hands. In Crofton, the line outside Duade’s shop was long and desperate: heads were bowed, and low voices pleaded with the Sorceress to bless them with an extra hour or two. When I went to Wick in Laista, he drew a drop of blood from each giver, then measured their time by sprinkling a special powder into it and lighting it on fire—carefully counting the seconds of the flame’s life to make sure he wouldn’t overdraw and kill the giver. The timelender in green doesn’t measure anything now. Everyone here can spare years, maybe even decades, if that’s what she’s taking.
A couple peels away from the table and passes by us. I hear the woman say, “Darling! Careful, you’ll get blood on my dress.”
“What is this?” My whisper is too fierce. Anger at the injustice boils in me.
Liam’s eyes dart from side to side. He sees the same thing I see—that this line is between us and our escape. Whatever it is, we must go through it.
“A tithe for Ina,” he murmurs, taking my arm and drawing me cl
ose. “Everyone is to offer a year of their own blood. It’s meant as a gift of sorts. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—”
My stomach lurches. A year. And these people don’t even care; they’re laughing and smiling as they roll up their sleeves, exposing their arms and palms like fish bellies to the dancing candlelight of the hall. Their flesh is smooth. Unblemished. No signs of having been bled before.
A year is nothing to them. They’ve never had to sacrifice a single one.
As a silver-haired gentleman steps away from the table, I watch the timelender cork a vial of his blood, laying it alongside dozens of others on a bed of velvet. The man is more concerned about his finery, blotting a smear of blood with an embroidered handkerchief.
So much blood, sparkling prettily in vials like a nest of jewels. A man behind me catches my eyes and raises a brow. “In line?”
Liam responds for me. “Yes.” He positions me next to him and speaks softly. “It’s all right. I’ll give another year in your place—”
“It’s not that,” I stammer, a half lie. “It’s just—I don’t think my time can be consumed. It hurt Caro when she tried to drink it at first, at Everless. Do you think it would hurt Ina too?” My words dry up as another, even worse fear sinks into me. What if Caro lays hands on my blood again? What dark magic could she wreak then?
Even with the veil between us, I see shock and then doubt flash across Liam’s features. For all his years of study, he didn’t know this about my blood.
Suddenly, he seems younger than he is, and I feel exposed for what we are: a boy who, even with all his intelligence and education, is only nineteen, and a girl who has centuries of memories and knowledge and magic but can’t access them.
The line lurches forward—it’s Liam’s turn. He squeezes my arm gently and steps up, leaving me frozen, my head spinning with new information. This dark tithe. Liam’s offer to give a year of life for my sake. The overwhelming fear of Caro having more of my blood, making me complicit in her havoc.
I see the blade open Liam’s skin, and my vision fractures. It’s just his palm. Just his palm. I look away so I don’t have to see him bleed.
When it’s over, Liam looks back at me, smiling indulgently as the timelender bandages his arm. “I hope you’ll excuse my sweetheart,” I hear him say, dripping charm. “She’s quite unable to stomach the sight of blood.”
“Oh, come now.” The timelender’s voice in return has the same easy, aristocratic charm, but there’s a hard edge in it. “She can close her eyes, or have you hold her hand.”
She raises her voice, addressing me, and I don’t like how shrewd her gaze is. “Surely, my lady,” she says, a dangerous insinuation in her voice, “you don’t want to miss the honor of having your own time run through the Queen’s veins? I also hear that she plans to fashion a blood-iron jewel for her crown.”
My stomach drops as, all around, people begin to turn toward me. Heads tilt curiously. Their attention feels like a threatening breeze, ready to tear off my veil and expose my murderer’s face to the whole ballroom.
So though my limbs are leaden with fear, I step forward. “Of course not,” I say, making my voice whispery and timid as I roll up my sleeve. Liam puts an arm around me, and despite my earlier reluctance to let him touch me, I’m grateful for it now. As the timelender’s blade parts the skin of my palm, Liam bends down, as though he’s kissing my temple to give me comfort. Instead, his lips brush my ear.
“It’ll be all right.”
But just as the timelender reaches for a bandage, the room quiets, and all around me, heads snap toward the throne. The timelender drops my hand and dips into a low bow as a door in the wall behind the throne opens, and out step two girls in sweeping gowns.
Caro. And the newly crowned queen of Sempera: Ina Gold.
7
Fear spills into me—the protection of the veil seems flimsy with Caro in the room—but I can’t tear my eyes from Ina. She wears a veil too, but it’s translucent, threaded with small shining teardrops, each made of blood-iron. Not only can I see her face, but even at this distance, it seems to shine. Her gown spills down around her, like a black waterfall on the stairs.
A crown gleams in her dark hair—its spiked tips are also the red gold of blood-iron, I realize with a jolt, which gives the impression that the crown has been dipped in blood. She glides up to the carved-oak throne and stands there a moment before sitting down regally, every inch the queen. Around me, people leave off their conversations and head for the dais, and a crowd coalesces around her, lords and ladies lining up to kiss her hands and saying words I can’t hear.
I’m startled by the touch of Liam’s hand on my cheek, through the gossamer of the veil. A silk bandage peeks out from below his sleeve. His skin is much warmer than mine. I don’t know why this surprises me.
He turns me to face him. He’s smiling, but I can see the tension in his eyes, feel it in his racing pulse. I let him lead me toward the open floor, away from the timelender, who has gotten too caught up in the grand entrance of the new queen to notice that I fled the line.
I want nothing more than to push through the crowd and run up to Ina’s throne shouting everything I couldn’t only a few hours ago. That I am her ally, that she can’t trust Caro, that her handmaiden might try to control her just as she did the Queen. That she and I were born together in a town called Briarsmoor. That our birth mother’s name was Naomi.
But instead I mimic the actions of all the other couples around the ballroom, putting one hand on Liam’s shoulder and letting him pull me close—his hand on the small of my back, the fingers of my right hand interlaced with his. I can tell from the tightness of his jaw that he’s afraid.
I glance to either side, sure that at any moment someone will see that I don’t know the steps and recognize me for an imposter. And I’m fearfully aware of Caro at the front of the room. Even though I can’t see her, her presence exerts a kind of dark gravity. But Liam catches my gaze and shakes his head. He leans down to whisper in my ear, and his dark curls brush my cheek. A chill runs through me.
“Don’t look around,” he says, a little curtly. “Don’t be nervous. We just need to make it to the door and slip out without being seen.”
My dress falls all the way to the floor, masking the traveling boots that I still wear beneath. I’ve managed to tug my hair up into something that resembles the elegant updos that the other women wear, braided crowns to hold up our veils. But I still feel conspicuous, set apart from everyone else. Only people with centuries running through their veins know how to dance like this. I fumble along as best I can. The couple from the bloodletting line swirls by us, resplendent now in the dance. Through the woman’s veil—lighter than mine—I glimpse her face, smiling shyly up at her partner.
A pang of loss for something I’ve never known goes through me as the musicians tip into a plaintive chorus. In another world—in another life, that could have been me. I let myself imagine it, dancing here as an honored guest, the thought fizzing in me like a sip of madel. I wouldn’t be wearing a veil. No one would be, because there would be nothing to mourn, only to celebrate. Ina wouldn’t be cold and distant on her throne but dancing among us, as joyful in her queendom as I knew her to be as a princess.
And Roan would be dancing with her. Liam and I would dance past them and smile, too—maybe touch and smiles and shared laughter would be possible for me, and not just possible, but easy, flowing, free, instead of locked and forbidden.
Instead of deadly.
But that world is not this world. There is a vein of sorrow running beneath everything, all the beauty here, showing itself in our veils and the mournful song of the violin and in Ina, so close and yet so far away, untouchable. There’s so much hollowness in me, the space left by everything I’ve never had—everything that until recently, I could never have imagined missing. I’ll never dance like that with Liam or anyone, without a care in the world.
Not until Caro is dead.
Not until
I learn how to kill her.
Suddenly, the need to escape swamps me, and it’s all I can do to keep from sprinting for the door.
A young man with bronze skin and striking gold hair spins past us, his arm brushing mine, a woman in purple silk laughing in his wake. I see him smile warmly at Liam as they pass. Liam nods, though his smile is strained. The man nods back, then melts into the crowd and disappears.
“That’s Elias,” he says in my ear, once we’re a few feet away. “He’ll meet us outside.”
I can’t stop myself from snapping my head around to stare after Elias, my mouth going dry. Without knowing it, I have brushed past someone from outside Sempera, someone who doesn’t have time in his blood. Only our country bears this curse.
When I catch another glimpse of Elias between dancers, I search for something strange in his broad shoulders, his laughing smile, and find nothing. At first glance, he appears normal—albeit handsome, clearly wealthy, and graceful—but am I just imagining the slight supernatural grace in his movements, like the blood in his veins is somehow lighter than the rest of us? Is it a blessing or a curse, never to know how much time you have?
“Can we trust him?” I whisper to Liam.
“As much as you can trust me.”
The song changes again, to something louder and faster. I glance surreptitiously around the room so I don’t have to meet Liam’s eyes as we inch closer toward the door to the balcony. Only a few minutes, I tell myself, heart racing, and then I will slip away, camouflaged by the other guests. Only a few songs of this too-tense, prickling closeness, and I will be gone.
But as we move toward the door, we get nearer and nearer to Caro, her silent shadow of a presence beside the throne.
Liam leans down to whisper again. I make myself not react, not shiver at his nearness.
“At the end of this song is our best chance,” he says. Outside, I can see a stripe of sunset-painted ocean. As we watch, two women detach themselves from the waltz and slip through it. In the background, Caro looks for a moment after them. My heart races.
