by Sara Wolf
I look out at the buildings of the city, scrying frantically for something to distract myself with. Gavik. If Varia’s made sure everyone thinks Gavik was murdered, he can’t be in the palace. But neither can he be far. He must be hiding in the city somewhere, doing Varia’s bidding in the shadows.
The princess tilts her head, her sheet of black hair glimmering in the oil light of the passing lampposts. “All I’m saying is you might want to be present tonight. There’s going to be a rather special announcement at the banquet that I think you’ll want to hear.”
Announcements can take a flying leap off a volcanic crevice for all I care. But it’d be cowardly, wouldn’t it—to run away from the people I’ve hurt? To hide in Varia’s apartments like some sort of pathetic worm cowering in its burrow? I used them. I traded their trust for a chance at my heart, and now that my gamble has failed, the least I can do is face them with the truth laid naked between us. They deserve that much.
“I hope I don’t have to remind you,” Varia says, “that speaking to anyone of what I am, or what you are doing for me, is the fastest way to lose your one chance at your heart.”
I frown. “But you need me. I’m the only one who can teach it how to Weep.”
She curls a tendril of shiny dark hair around her delicate finger. “You are merely a means to speed up a lengthy process that will happen, one way or another. Make no mistake—you are valuable. But you are also unnecessary. You are a luxury I would like to keep but would have no compunction sacrificing if you prove troublesome.”
My stomach churns uneasily. I should’ve known better than to get complacent around the princess. I hide my nerves in a scoff. “I suppose being called a ‘luxury’ is a step up from being called a monster.”
She’s quiet, and then, “That reminds me. You will not allow yourself to be cut with a white mercury blade.”
The command curdles my hunger, makes it rise up dark and swelling inside me, but it has nowhere to go. It simply lingers under my skin, and I hate every inch of it. She knows the only way for me to Weep and get free of her thrall is her white mercury blade. And now, even if I get ahold of it, I won’t be able to cut myself, to weaken our magical bond with it and Weep enough to escape.
Varia smiles. “Can’t have you running off, now can we?”
…
The moment the carriage pulls to a stop, I dart out of the uncomfortable atmosphere and take the palace steps two at a time. Mercifully, there are very few nobles out and about in the palace halls—the little Y’shennria now in permanent residence in my head tells me they’re too scared for their own well-being after the rumored murder of Gavik. There is one noble, though, looking down on me from a banister as I step into the verdant, flower-strewn entrance hall of the palace. He looms so far above me, pointed dark eyes lingering on places they shouldn’t. On monsters they shouldn’t.
His hair is short and black and ruffled, his posture immaculate even as mine slinks. There’s a moment that feels like years as my eyes drink him in—impossible and out of reach, tall and dark against so much white marble. He shows almost nothing on his noble’s mask of icy impassivity. There are no feelings behind his obsidian eyes. It’s a familiar look.
The first time he saw me at the Spring Welcoming, his eyes were the exact same. Cold. Impervious.
He’s looking at me like he looks at every other noble—with barely hidden disdain. No hint of warmth. Every emotion I’d seen in his eyes once before is now crushed to nothingness.
The prince is silent, his hand gripping the railing. He couldn’t speak to me, even if he still wanted to—I wouldn’t hear him this far down. It would echo too much. It would be lost. A thousand things flood my mouth and jockey for first place: I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you. I didn’t mean to hurt you—
but we did. and if it meant our heart, we would hurt you again. does that alone make us a monster?
The high collar of his coat hides his mouth as he turns away, and I’m left with nothing. Nothing but the taste of ash in my mouth.
Here is how my unlife falls apart—one high-heeled step at a time.
Clad in a strangely simple blue dress, modest as can be, I’ve never felt more naked. My lip tint makes my lips feel gummy, useless, and I half wish it would seal my mouth shut so I couldn’t make an ass of myself tonight. As I wander toward the banquet hall and the sounds of socializing nobles and faintly cheery instruments become louder, my breathing starts to fragment. I scoff at myself—even after my training, even after attending these things more than once, I still get nervous.
No one is ever really ready.
With the ghost of Y’shennria at my side, I lift my head high and walk in.
The heat always hits you first—the heat of a hundred bodies packed in close. The smell hits you second—every conceivable floral scent floating through the air and mixing with the smell of sweat and alcohol. This much hasn’t changed. And the noise—the noise is a sea of soft and loud voices, of waves and dips and murmurs and roils. The clink of wineglasses on trays, the flash of the candlelight off grand jewelry. Every noble is draped in the most decadent silks and gems, and I’m wearing nothing but a borrowed dress and my own bravado.
Even with a murdered archduke, even with the country on the precipice of war, there is an order to the banquet. Tradition holds Vetris together when no other glue would. The older nobles watch the younger ones walk in, exalting over which of them is most suitable for marriage. The younger nobles do their best to look less nervous than they feel. The Steelrun and d’Goliev girls—Charm and Grace—who debuted with me at the Spring Welcoming, seem older now as I watch them walk in. I spot the Priseless twin boys, ever blond and ever snub-nosed. We lock eyes and, as if they share a skin, both of their faces go a startling shade of green at the same time. Their defeat at my hands in the duel still plagues them, I’m sure. I indulge them with a smile, and they scurry off without so much as another glance.
“And don’t come back.” I laugh, snatching a flute of wine from a passing tray, but the moment of joy lives short. I down the wine and it gives me courage enough to parse my eyes over the crowd, looking for a shock of familiar white hair, mouse-hair, midnight hair. Nothing. Fione isn’t here yet, and I’d know if the prince and Malachite were here.
The wine in turn gives the crowd the courage to whisper.
“Y’shennria’s niece, is she not? And His Highness’s favored.”
“—mysterious circumstances. She saw Gavik’s murder firsthand. Poor thing—”
“Lady Y’shennria isn’t here with her? How curious.”
“I’ve heard the Y’shennria manor does not stir of late—”
I hold my head high. Y’shennria’s gone—she told me she’d be heading for sanctuary outside of Vetris with the witches the moment I left for the Hunt. Coming back would be pointless; for all she knows, I’m either shattered and dead or reunited with Nightsinger. But if Y’shennria doesn’t show up to a noble function soon—and she won’t, because it’d be dangerous and illogical—she’ll garner more and more suspicion. Especially with news of Gavik’s “murder” going around. And that suspicion will shunt right to me, if it hasn’t already.
I’m on borrowed time. But I always have been in this city, have I not?
“Lady Fione Himintell,” the announcer standing by the door crows. My whole body freezes, and every noble watches the stairs to see her descend. Varia’s strong magic no doubt brought me back to consciousness quickly, so it’s been only a day, two at most, but it feels like I haven’t seen her in years as she walks down the steps in a pearlescent silver gown, her mousey ringlets done up in a cascade. She looks amazing, and yet her face is tense. She clutches her white valkerax-headed cane with equally white knuckles as she moves through the crowd, the whispers coiling around her like snakes.
“Archduke Gavik killed by witches—”
“—she’s now the younge
st and wealthiest of us by far, and she’ll soon be named an archduchess by the Minister of the Blood—”
“Not even married—”
“Only the most suitable man for Her Grace is required, then—”
Man? I’d forgotten how obsessed this court was with pairing children off to sire more. I gnaw my lip. I hadn’t even thought about a marriage for Fione, but I’m sure that’s all that must be on her mind now. That and the fact I’m a Heartless who lied to her.
Vetrisian society doesn’t condemn homosexual relationships, but the court is another matter. All they care about is carrying on their bloodlines. Two women are sometimes more than capable of creating children—but Fione is expected to marry someone who could provide her with heirs, no matter what. Not for love but for cold, unfeeling procreation.
My unheart aches for her, but she turns, and for a moment our eyes meet through the crowd. We’re just close enough that she could strike a conversation with me, if she so chose. And she has to choose, because I’m a much lower rank than her. I always have been, but now with the mantle of archduchess hanging over her, it’s more obvious. Her eyes are so blue—cornflowers at high noon, impassive, and mine, I’m sure, are tired discs of gray. I force a smile.
If she hates me for what I’ve done, what I am, I’d understand. But I don’t want her to. Gods, I don’t want her to.
Gods, I want to talk to her. To talk with her about the stifling court, about their eye roll–worthy expectations and prejudices, would lessen the pressure on my own shoulders. I want to walk around the room with her, arm in arm, like true friends might, like we did in the gardens days ago.
I could. I could bypass decorum and speak to her first, but that’s acceptable only if she accepts it, if she still sees me as a friend. She turns in the crowd, so close to me, and I seize the moment.
“Come here often?” I try, addressing her first as a friend might. The people dotted between us fall terse and silent, looking to Fione expectantly. I hate putting her on the spot. I hate this taut string between us at all, but it’s here, and I’m tugging on it like a curious seamstress trying to find a mistake. Like a friend, who’s trying to tell if she still has the chance to be friends at all.
Fione’s face doesn’t change, the wax-drawn lines down her cheeks curving into crescent moons around her rosebud mouth. Is she furious? I can’t tell. She’s always been so immaculate with the noble mask that hides one’s true feelings. She was the first friend I ever had. Not only in Vetris but—I think—in life as well.
I take a step forward, and the effect is instant—she promptly takes a step back, her mask breaking and her blush paling.
“I-I’m sorry.” Her eyes dart around, anywhere but in my direction. “I have to go.”
With a sinking stomach, I watch her push through the crowd, her short frame swallowed up by them in a blink. Hate or fear? Which is it? Both? My presence didn’t make her feel comfortable, that much is certain. In the aftermath of what I’d done in the clearing, when I passed out, she must’ve seen all the blood and the bodies—
how courageous can a mouse be, when it faces a wolf tearing mice apart? The hunger sneers. and yet there you stand, foolishly, still thinking a mouse and a wolf could ever be friends…
I snatch another flute of wine from a passing tray and down it, hoping the bitter liquid will blur the hunger’s voice. Or drown it, with any luck.
Watching Fione go, hammers the first and hardest nail into my chest; I can’t change what I’ve done. Is this what life is? Pushing through the days hurting others, making mistakes, and yet left with no choice but to do it again and again? Now more than ever, I want Y’shennria here with me—my eyes search for her face in the crowd, her puffy dark hair set with gems and her easy, graceful poise. She’d know exactly how to deal with such things: what expression to put on and, when we were alone in the carriage home, advice. She’d chide me, too, for believing I had real friends here in Vetris, but I know between the chiding would be kernels of kindness.
alone, always.
I straighten my shoulders. I can’t rely on her. Comfort is a luxury I don’t deserve. This crushing pain is mine alone to deal with.
There’s a hush that runs through the room when the royal family enters. The nobles wait with bated breath to see exactly how splendid the garb is and, more importantly, how to emulate it. Excitement courses through the room as dread courses through me. My body’s on point like a foxhound in the reeds, waiting for the slightest movement to send me into a frenzy.
There—King Sref and Queen Kolissa come out first, dressed in matching maroon velvet with deep gold threading. Queen Kolissa looks as beautiful as ever, dark eyes as sharp as her children’s and yet soft with obvious happiness. King Sref’s long salt-and-pepper mane is braided with red velvet ribbon, but it’s the only thing that tells me he’s the same man I’d seen before the Hunt. Everything about his face has transformed with Varia’s return; his wrinkles are eased, his amber skin glowing from within. His gray eyes, once so exhausted and apathetic, now brim with life. He nods and smiles at nearly every noble he passes, sweeping his grin over them all. He looks like a much, much younger man.
And then, the inevitable.
I can feel Lucien’s very presence cut the air like a heated knife as he walks in. Dressed entirely in deep indigo silk laced with platinum beads, he looks like the night sky itself. But there’s a strangeness about his outline—something missing I’m used to. His hip is absent of his usual white mercury sword. It was originally Varia’s. I wonder—did he give it back to her? We spoke of it, didn’t we? Keeping our family’s swords so that when they might return, we could give it back to them.
But that’s a distant memory.
His midnight hair is combed back, short and slick, and a wave of horror moves through the crowd when they see it.
“Who would dare cut the prince’s hair—?”
“I heard he did it himself, at his Hunt—”
“Does he want to be a commoner?”
“It’s repulsive and shameful—Cavanos’s prince, with the hair of a servant!”
I watch Lucien’s obsidian eyes, but they’re staring straight ahead without so much as a flicker. He won’t give them the satisfaction, and part of me swells with twisted pride. He cut his hair that night at the Hunt in front of all his noble peers as a message—fragments of his speech still ring in my mind. He wanted to eschew Vetris’s reliance on tradition, and on the tradition of hate. Cutting the long hair that marked him a royal had been a gesture. But the nobles don’t see any of that. They simply scorn someone daring to do something different.
“Should I ask him to fetch my tea?” a nobleman whispers to another man just beside me, and they share a snicker.
I whirl on them. “You really shouldn’t, considering he’s still—by blood and birth—your prince. And I’m not sure about you, but I enjoy keeping my head attached to my shoulders.”
The noblemen cough, their eyes skittering away from me abruptly. Queen Kolissa suddenly turns to Lucien, his father the king follows suit, and for a moment all three of them smile at one another. Lucien’s grin to his father is wide, warm, genuine. It’s a different smile from the one I’m used to—more wholesome, more free. In the same way Varia’s return has lit the king from the inside, so, too, has Varia’s return eased the loneliness in Lucien’s smile.
He looks so happy, and my unheart warms with it.
Lucien turns his gaze this way and that, searching the crowd. My stomach leaps and curdles at the same time as he lands on me.
His smile fades instantly.
But of course it does. It’s imaginary, and impossible, but something circuits between us—like a rope of flame burning back and forth and back again. For a moment, when his eyes meet mine, there’s something like relief in their inky depths, but almost instantly they cloud over into unreadable discs of black iron. His word from
the clearing rings in my unheart.
Traitor.
I can see the break between us, the gulf in his eyes, the both of us standing on opposite sides. There is nothing I can do to close the gap. He won’t let me—or anyone else—see the hurt, but I know it’s there, the same way one knows beneath the lid of a cauldron boils a red-hot liquid. He keeps his noble mask taut and lacquered with pure, bristling pride. To the nobles, we’re still close. The last time we were both at court, the rumors swirled that the crown prince would choose me as his Spring Bride at the Hunt. In their eyes, right now he should offer me his hand.
And yet all he does is watch me for a moment before turning on his heel.
It’s a small movement. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, like a rusted spear to the chest. The nobles around us dissolve into frantic whispers.
“A disagreement?”
“Surely His Highness picked Lady Zera at the Hunt?”
“The murder might have shaken him—”
A murder has shaken him, I want to say. The murder of nine men whom I killed in front of him.
tore them apart easily, like rusted old puppets—
Lucien walks away, his smile returning as he and his parents converse easily. In his shadow walks the willowy Malachite in his dress armor—jet black and inlaid with garnets. His snow-white hair and skin stand out even more in the dark armor, the red of the garnets matching his bloodred eyes. His long, bladelike ears can hear every rumor in this room, I’m sure.
The broadsword on his back glints ominously as he looks my way. He’s not Lucien—not a noble trained from birth to hide his true feelings. His fury is obvious—no, disgust? Something between the two, etched in his long white eyebrows and slender chin. I’m used to his easy, lazy, joking smile—always, no matter how serious the situation. But now those lips are set, serious.
I’ve lost even him, too.
The firehorns suddenly blare a new melody—not the usual introductory one but something grander. More important.
