by Bec McMaster
“Princess.” He shifts to stand, but I wave at him to stay where he is.
“Are you all right?” I murmur, slipping onto the stone bench beside him.
Baylor leans back against the bars. Inside the cell, his brother’s body lies still beneath a white sheet. “He will rise with the moon.”
That’s not what I asked.
A shrug slips through him but I insist upon squeezing his shoulder. Baylor’s the quietest member of my husband’s loyal court—still waters running over stone—but that doesn’t mean he can’t be hurt.
And it hurt him today to drive a sword through his brother’s chest.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For saving me.”
Despite everything that has come between Andraste and me, I know exactly how that would feel. She’s my sister and we loved each other once, before my mother turned us against each other. There’s a part of me that will always love her, and I have to hope that her warning today meant something.
“He would never have forgiven himself if he hurt you,” Baylor finally says. “I know you barely remember him, but the two of you…. You were close friends.” A muscle tightens in his jaw. “To see him like this, so twisted by hate and rage…. It’s the worst thing the queen could have done to him, for my brother is love and laughter. We were born from the same womb, but he was always the one that others loved more.”
It’s an arrow straight through the heart, because I feel that too.
My mother’s people adore Andraste. She inspires confidence wherever she rides, because she’s the perfect princess. She’s better than I am with a sword. She’s dared to argue against my mother in court for the rights of some minor lord, whereas I never had that lenience. She proffers wise counsel, and she makes the court laugh.
She is the sun and I am the moon, and somehow, I never truly fit into the Asturian court.
“Some are easy to love,” I tell him quietly, “because they shine so brightly it’s difficult to look away. But others…. We don’t love them any less, Baylor. Because they are steadfast and true. They are solid rock beside quicksilver, but they will not break when quicksilver is too soft. It is a different kind of love. Steadier, perhaps.”
Thiago taught me the truth of that. And I’m learning to love myself—or trying to love myself as much as he does.
“Do you think he’ll remember himself when he rises?”
I won’t pretend I’m not a little nervous about meeting Lysander again.
“Dying hurts,” Baylor replies. “Sometimes it takes time to remember who you are and where you are.” He looks toward his brother. “I don’t know what he’s been through this past year.”
“Thiago told me about Clydain.”
What sort of weapon would my mother be keeping in the far north of Asturia?
Could it turn the tide of war?
“Do you think he found something?” I whisper.
Baylor stares blankly at the wall in front of him, running his knuckles back and forth over his knee. “I think he found something,” he finally rumbles, “though whether he’ll remember it is another matter.”
Chapter Six
“I need to go into the city,” Thiago murmurs the next morning. “Do you want to come?”
“I thought you’d be holed up with Eris and Baylor, plotting a counterattack against my mother?”
There’s a touch of leashed violence about my husband this morning. “An attack is what your mother expects. It’s what she wants. As someone pointed out, the border lords aren’t entirely in her favor. They will be if I strike now. No.” A thoughtful look comes into his eyes. “I won’t play into her hands. When I strike back, she won’t be expecting it.”
“And Lysander?”
Lysander woke with the first rays of moonlight, but Baylor is locked down there with him alone, trying to find some hint of his brother within Lysander’s monstrous form.
Mother did her job well. One of Thiago’s most dangerous warriors has been removed from the game board, and Baylor, as implacable as he is, has taken a blow.
“Thalia heard a whisper that the Prince of Shadows might have someone in his employ who is a hexbreaker. Hence my interest in venturing into the city.”
“Prince of Shadows?”
Thiago rolls his eyes. “Technically, I’m not supposed to know about him. He rules the catacombs under the city, and it’s rumored that—if such a person existed—he might be in charge of the assassin’s guild in the city.”
“Does such a person exist?”
“Such a person might once have sent me a warning about a threat. I told him if anyone ever tried to hire him to have me killed, if he came to me with word of it I would double his fee. In return, as long as his assassins don’t cross certain boundaries, I won’t make it my life’s duty to ferret them out of my city and destroy them. In general, we pretend the other doesn’t exist.”
I close the book I’ve been reading. It’s an old collection of fairy tales about magical relics, though there’s no mention of any crowns. It seems there’s no mention of them anywhere to be found, which is starting to irritate me. “I’ll come.”
“Just like that?” he drawls. “Was it the mention of assassins? Shadowy princes? Blood bounties?”
“You’ve been reading too many of my books. No.” I throw the blankets off my lap, where I’ve made a nest for the day’s research. “I’ll come, because I think it’s highly unusual that my overprotective husband wants to take me on his excursion to visit an assassin’s guild.”
Thiago crosses his arms over his chest. “You’re not coming with me to visit Theron. You’re going to a bookshop to see if you can find what you’re looking for.”
“If I can’t find any books about the crown in the enormous castle library which is run by thirteen highly inquisitive scholars, then I doubt I’m going to find it in an old bookstore tucked away down in the city. It’s almost as though you’re using me to cover your tracks, which would suggest you’re trying to keep your movements quiet from your advisors. Thalia was the one who brought you the news. Baylor is currently occupied. I saw Finn heading to the courtyard to spar…. Which leaves Eris. And knowing Eris as I do, she wouldn’t approve.”
“Eris is the only one of my people who has met the Prince of Shadows in any sort of capacity. She threatened to hang him from the tower walls by his heels if she ever saw him again. The prince retaliated by leaving a Sorrow’s Tear on her pillow. Every now and then she finds a fresh rose in her bedchambers as if he’s taunting her. The last time it happened, she took a practice sword to a dummy in the yard and there were only slivers of it left by the time she’d finished. If she knew where I was going, she’d start sharpening her knives and your mother’s war wouldn’t be the only one we’re facing.”
“If Eris discovers your ruse, she’s going to throw you off the tower,” I point out.
Thiago laughs, leaning on his knuckles on the bed, his eyes sparking with mischief as he steals a kiss. “Yes, but I can fly.”
The wind blows sea mist in off the harbor. Ceres is built around a natural bay, with two enormous outcroppings of stone guarding the entrance to the harbor.
An enormous statue as tall as the castle walls stands on each of the outcroppings, staring fiercely out to sea. The first one wears loose fae robes draped around her lean form like scalloped marble. One hand rests on the hilt of the sword sheathed at her side and a sunburst crown sits atop her head, but it’s the lantern in her hand that gives away her identity. Maia, guarding the mouth of the harbor, lifting her lantern as if to defy any ships that enter to pass by her with any darkness in their hearts.
Maia is the sun, the shining beacon of hope we pray to.
The other statue represents Selena, the goddess of Night.
Her crown bears seven stars, though a thin gold circlet hovers over it, representing their radiance, and while her face is serene, the implacable way she stares into the bay is a warning. Night is a time for mystery and seduction, but it is also
a time of secrets and assassinations. Selena, once the patron goddess of Evernight, is the goddess that thieves, whores, and assassins have claimed. To pray to her means to ask for her protection, no matter the cost, and I’ve been here long enough to hear petitions from the powerful guild councils that rule the old town, asking for her statue to be removed.
They do not wish to pray to a goddess who offers a whore or a thief solace.
Thiago refused. She was the goddess chosen by Evernight when a curse struck the northern part of the country and cast a veil of constant darkness over it. Only by her grace was the curse turned back before it blighted Ceres too, though some say the queen that was bound to the land at the time fought the curse by herself.
It’s only now, with no queen in Evernight, that the shadow of constant night has been creeping south mile by mile each year.
Thalia found pamphlets that were circulating in the city suggesting the reason for the blight’s advance is the prince who overthrew the rightful rulers of the kingdom. Thiago ignored it, but I saw the look Thalia exchanged with the others. It bothers her.
It bothers me a little, because the etched figure on the pamphlets was of a monstrous creature ruling over all from on high, with vicious horns and flaring bat wings.
It looked like something my mother might have conjured if she was asked to describe my husband, and while Thalia doesn’t know where the pamphlets came from, they seem to be everywhere these past two months.
My mother has a finger in it. I know she does.
Because an army can be beaten back, but vicious rumors are the hardest battle to win.
If we go after the printing presses, the secret gatherings clearly going on, and the leaders of this whispered rebellion, then we’ll only confirm the rumors. See, they’ll say. The Prince of Evernight is vicious and dangerous. He promises us he’ll be a benevolent ruler, but only if we fall in line. Only if we dare not have a voice. He is a tyrant.
But if we don’t do something, then the rumors will only spread.
Any fae in the city who suffers hardship will start looking upward—to the castle looming over them—as the cause of their suffering. And the leaders of this rebellion—the one stoking anger in the guild halls and rumors in the streets—will find flames that only need fanning.
“This way,” Thiago says, lacing his fingers through mine. He’s wearing an illusion so well-crafted I almost wouldn’t recognize him if not for his smile.
A constant little tingle encases my own skin. I’d jokingly asked if I could be a redhead for the day, and he’d complied, though it feels strange to catch glimpses of myself—pale-skinned and blue-eyed—in the shop windows as we pass.
I squeeze his hand. I won’t let my mother or her efforts hurt him, and while he might be focused on the war—the direct thrust, so to speak—I will be waiting for my mother in the shadows, and all her gossip and innuendo too.
The older part of the city was born when the fae first arrived in Arcaedia.
It was built close to the cliffs guarding Ceres’s back, where it has prime view of the harbor. It’s marked on the map as Oldgate.
We walk beneath an arch that’s guarded by two stone drakon sentinels and slip across the Bridge of Bones. Water thunders through a sluice gate set high in the walls, plummeting past us into the gorge far below. I’ve studied the maps; there’s a walled dam far above the city, melded into the stone of the mountains. Once this section of Ceres was heralded as the City of Waterfalls, but the building of the dam means they’re mostly dry, except for this one which is named Phoenix Falls, though the locals call it Maia’s Tears. During the winter months, for a week or two the sunset will catch it at just the right angle so that it looks like a spill of pure fire.
Once we’re across the bridge into the old quarters of the city, something inside me relaxes. Hawkers call out their wares in the bustling marketplaces, and there are fluttering demi-fey in cages at one stall, and an assortment of potions promising all manner of glamors at another.
I can be no one here.
Not my enemy’s wife or my mother’s daughter. Just another female in a sea of fae going about their daily business.
“If you venture through there” —Thiago points to a long, narrow alleyway— “you’ll find yourself in the catacombs that weave through the mountain under this half of the city. The people here call it the Bone Church, and rumor insists that the fae lord who calls himself the Prince of Shadows rules down there.”
He says it carefully, just in case anyone overhears it.
“I thought the wicked prince who rules this city would squash all upstarts who seek to claim power within his walls?”
“Perhaps he’s not as wicked as they claim.”
“Oh, he’s definitely wicked,” I purr in his ear, enjoying the chance to melt against him. “You should see what he does with his mouth.”
“Behave.” Thiago drags me onward, shooting me a possessive look. “The Prince of Shadows and his followers worship the god of Death, and make offerings to him. You’ll recognize Theron’s assassins because they have a blood moon tattooed on their face—though the only time you ever see them coming is when they’re sent to deliver you into Kato’s arms.”
“Does that not make it easier to differentiate them from the general populace?”
“Theron’s glamors are powerful enough to rival the Prince of Evernight’s. Call it a double-edged sword. To become one of his people, you must wear the tattoo. In response, the only way to remain anonymous is to wear his veil of magic.”
“Sounds like an easy way to ensure loyalty. Betray him and you’ll never walk the streets again without everyone knowing exactly who and what you are.”
Thiago’s lips quirk. “I think you underestimate our good Prince of Shadows. Betray Theron, and they’ll find pieces of your body floating in the river. Or not at all.”
“Will they let you into the Bone Church?”
“If I pay the entry fee,” he replies.
“One tenth of your fortune?”
Another dangerous smile as he plucks a red-black Sorrow’s Tear rose from within his cloak. “I have something Theron might consider more enticing.”
Brushing it against my lips, he winks.
It’s gorgeous. The scent of it is dark and heady, and hints at magic. They grow only where the blood of a Sorrow has fallen, and the thorns are tipped with a poison that’s lethal to the unseelie, and toxic to the seelie. To get them to bloom requires a Sorrow’s tears. They’re impossibly rare.
“If Eris finds out you’re using her to catch this Theron’s attention—”
“Oh, he’ll know it’s not from Eris.” Thiago chuckles. “Eris wouldn’t send him flowers. But he’ll be curious enough to wonder what I want.”
“And I’m to wander through the bookstore? Alone?”
Thiago gives me a long, slow, heated glance. “You won’t be alone. Finn’s been trailing us since we left the castle.” He captures my chin as I unconsciously turn to look. “Don’t. You won’t recognize him, and I don’t want any watchers marking him.”
I bite his thumb. “I knew this was unusual. You can’t help yourself, can you?”
Fingertips trace little circles on my cheeks. His voice roughens. “I spent thirteen years hoping that one day I would be able to hold you in my arms. Forever. And every morning since the Queensmoot, when I wake it feels as though I’m still dreaming, because you’re right beside me. I don’t have to send you back to your mother. I don’t have to beg you to remember me. I don’t have to feel that knife to the heart every time she gives you back, when you look at me as if I’m a stranger. You’re mine, Vi. Finally mine.” He places a punishing kiss on my mouth, tension shivering through him before he finally lets me up for air. But the beautiful green of his irises is gone, leaving nothing but chips of polished obsidian in their place. “But sometimes it feels like it’s too good to be true. Am I still dreaming? Is the dream going to shatter if I wake? And I won’t let it. Nothing will take you awa
y from me again. Not your mother. Not Angharad’s fetch. Not the Mother of Fucking Night. I will drown this world in Darkness before I ever let you go again.”
I clasp his wrists, trying to catch my breath.
Around us, shadow dapples over the cobbles as clouds gather above the city.
Fae cry out, pointing to the skies.
“Thiago. Thiago.” I dig my nails into his wrists so he’s forced to look at me. All his attention locks on me, and suddenly we’re the only two souls in the world. “I love this world. And this world needs light.” Heat flares in his eyes, but I press my finger to his lips. “Nothing is going to take me away, but if it does, then I will fight my way back to you. No matter what it takes. No matter who has me. And if the worst should happen, not even death could part us. I would wait for you on the edge of the Bright Lands.”
The god of Death rules over all, eventually. According to ancient myth we were once immortal, but when we fled the origin world and arrived here in Arcaedia, we were cursed by the Old Ones and fall prey to Kato’s judgement in the afterlife. He dictates whether we ascend to the Bright Lands or are doomed to suffer eternally in the Underworld.
His breath exhales with a rush. “And I would wait for you in the Darkness.”
In the Darkness…? I frown, but he captures my hand, brushing my knuckles against his lips. Inch by inch he swallows down the daemons inside him, until his eyes blaze with emerald fire.
“Thank you,” he whispers, as the clouds above the city thin.
I swallow down the hard lump in my throat. All this time he’s been wearing the mantle of charming prince, but I didn’t realize how close to the surface his daemons lurk. Or maybe it’s the curse, sinking its hooks in him. “I’ll go to the bookstore. I won’t look for Finn. And I promise I’ll come back to you.”
“This way,” he says, offering me his arm and vanishing the rose.
