Amber & Dusk

by Lyra Selene

  The empress always collects when a debt is owed.

  “You want something from me.” I didn’t pretend it was a question.

  “I snuck into your wing by disguising myself as a servant,” Luca said. “But that won’t work with a bigger group. And Garan said the empress is heavily guarded from Matin to Nocturne. We won’t get halfway to her chambers before being slaughtered by Skyclad.”

  “Bigger group?” Horror strained my voice. “How many of you are there?”

  “Enough to make sure the job gets done, and well.” Luca’s voice was grim. “But we can’t do it without you.”

  “Me?” Surprise rocked me backward. “What can I possibly do?”

  “You’re a fantast—an illusionist. You could shield us. Make us invisible. Lead us there and back without anyone seeing us.”

  “So you can kill the most powerful woman in the daylight world?”

  “And possibly save that world in the doing.”

  “Luca—” I snatched my hands out of his grasp, choking on a hundred objections. “Even if I wanted to help you, this plan is insane. My legacy creates worlds from dreams—I’m not sure I’m capable of cloaking one person, let alone a group. And even if I could, I’m far from Severine’s inner circle. I can’t go waltzing into her private chambers unguarded.”

  “Planning can overcome all sorts of limitations. Just say you’ll do it.”

  “I won’t.” I plucked at my collar, sudden heat burning me up from the inside. “I can’t.”

  “If you won’t do it for me, Sylvie,” said Luca, and his face was suddenly hard, “and you won’t do it for the citizens of the empire, poor and starving and diseased as they are, then do it for yourself. I’ve heard about your precious legacies disappearing in the night, whisked away to fight her battles. Those who have the most to lose are always the most selfish.”

  “And manipulating a friend to do your dirty work?” I stared at him. Dread cast a shadow over my heart. “That’s not selfish at all.”

  Luca’s eyes dropped. I clenched a hand to a belly suddenly roiling with nausea.

  “I want to go home,” I whispered. “You promised to have me back before first Matin.”

  Luca gathered up the last of our scanty picnic without meeting my eyes. When he helped me from the rooftop his hand was chilly against my palm. I imagined ice creeping upward from my fingernails all the way to my heart, and when frosted lace crackled like cobwebs around my wrist, I hid my hand behind my back.

  We descended through the Paper City. We slipped down on loose shingles, and caught ourselves on rusted railings torn from listing balconies. Ladders fashioned from creeping lianas. Mortared shells curled tight like ears full of secrets. It grew warmer, the miasma of the city settling around us like a humid, stinky cloak.

  I stopped Luca at the pitted wooden door leading to the servants’ wing.

  “I wish you hadn’t come,” I whispered. “Our friendship was made for guttering campfires and dusty songs and half-remembered legends, not assassination and intrigue and manipulation. I wish you would have let me remember you the way you were.”

  “Sylvie—” Luca sucked in a deep breath. “You must know I didn’t want it to be this way. I wanted—”

  “Go back to Madame Rina and Vesh,” I pleaded, daring to press my hand against his chest. I couldn’t feel his heartbeat beneath the layers of cloth. “The convoy. Go back to the girl at the depot—what was her name? Anaïs? Let this talk of revolution and assassination die before it destroys you.”

  “I would, Sylvie.” He inhaled. “If you came with me.”

  “What?”

  “My offer still stands. Same as it was in the Mews. Run away with us. With me. I would be willing to forget all this—radical discourse, revolution, assassination—if I knew it meant having a chance to be happy with you.”

  I forced my gaze to meet his. And when the sun-bleached kembric of his eyes dulled with sudden uncertainty, I knew he was lying. He realized it the same instant I did. Panicked denial jarred his expression. His fingers found my wrist. His arm curled around my waist. My heart lurched. His fingers cupped the side of my face, and his lips pressed against mine.

  A taste of salt, and grit, and bitter discontent. A clash of tongue and teeth and lips. The tang of desire, soured by the promise of violence.

  He jerked away first. I stumbled back, and pressed an involuntary hand to my mouth. My gaze cut up to his, and when our eyes met something stretched and snapped in the air between us. Something delicate, and barely formed, like hope or a dream of distant stars.

  “Garan says the court ladies hang handkerchiefs in their windows to signal their lovers,” Luca said. “If you change your mind, hang a red one. I’ll know what it means.”

  Tears prickled the back of my eyelids. We both looked away at the same time. Luca nodded once, then disappeared around the corner.

  We both knew that was hardly a kiss.

  That was goodbye.

  I didn’t sleep that Nocturne, nor the next.

  My conversation with Luca raged like a storm within me, thundering through my bones and striking lightning in my veins. The need to do something—anything—was a pulse within me, but with every thrum of that pulse I was thrown in another direction. Side with Luca. No. Betray my erstwhile friend to Severine. No. Confide in Dowser. No. Run, run, run away and never look back.

  And so I did nothing. I let my servants coil black Sousine pearls in my lacquered hair and varnish my lips until they gleamed like Devangelis rubies. I trod on polished marble shipped from quarries in the foothills of the Meteor Mountains. I perched on divans and drank Belsyre ice wine from crystal goblets crafted by artisans in Lirias. And every gesture—every glint of polished ambric or brush of fine silk—reminded me that just by being here, I was complicit in all the evils my empress committed.

  Every miner dead in a mine blast—my fault.

  Every sand skiff scuppered by Zvar militants—my fault.

  Every child starving in the stinking shanties of the Paper City—my fault.

  But when I passed through the gilded halls and peered from beneath my darkened lashes at the woman who ruled over us all, laughing behind her fan and tossing her auburn head, I didn’t think I could do it. Did she deserve to be overthrown? Possibly. Did she deserve to die? Maybe. But could I be the one to do it? Could I forge the sword that spelled her destruction, and hold it to her throat?

  I came to this place because I believed in a towering, tremulous, intoxicating world of beauty and grace. The world where I knew I belonged. Much as I’d fought for it, I hadn’t found that world here, where shadows spawned secrets and justice was a kind of farce. Hope smeared sunlit colors against my heart when I thought that maybe it wasn’t the world at fault, but her. If I destroyed the empress, cut out the cancer at the heart of the empire, maybe this world could fulfill its uncertain promise.

  But even contemplating the assassination of an empress meant that the world I’d sought from the start might simply not exist.

  And I wasn’t sure I was willing to admit that to myself.

  “Scion’s breath, Mirage!” snapped Dowser, yanking his spectacles from his face and fixing me with his sternest glare. “I said show me a tree bending in a breeze, not shred a forest with a hurricane!”

  I dragged my attention away from the illusory tempest spinning cyclones of black mist through copper-boughed trees. I imagined the tangled branches lashing at my arms and face, raising painful welts on the delicate skin.

  “What did you say?” I shouted over the sound of the wind.

  “I said, stop!” roared Dowser.

  I released the illusion. Pennants of fog drifted away into the shadows. I rubbed my hands together to dispel the faint sensation of nerves buzzing along my palms.

  “What’s wrong with you today?” Dowser’s eyes flickered with annoyance. “Your worlds are all spinning out of control. It’s less than a span until Carrousel.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping well
,” I said, which was miles away from admitting the truth. I shuddered to think what my teacher would say if he knew I had spent the past few Nocturnes staring at the ceiling and contemplating treason. “Bad dreams.”

  Dowser’s expression softened. “I don’t blame you for being nervous, after what happened at the Blood Rain Ball.”

  That wasn’t my fault, I wanted to scream. But how could I explain that to my teacher?

  “You must focus on the illusion you intend to perform at the fête,” he continued. “Your empress, not to mention your dynasty, is counting on you to be your best. As am I.”

  One of Luca’s accusations against the empress surfaced in the muddied ocean of my irresolute thoughts. She dissolved her Council ages ago … any nobles who defied her promptly disappeared. But Dowser had been a chevalier to the imperial family since before Severine’s coronation. His signature on that Writ of Guardianship proved as much. Surely he would know the truth about such an accusation.

  I couldn’t forget that Dowser was the empress’s creature. What would he do if he suspected I plotted against his mistress?

  “Everyone speaks of Severine with such admiration and pride,” I mused, making my way to the wall, where maps new and old clustered thick as wallpaper. I examined the crisp edges of continents dark against pale oceans. I traced my fingers along charter lines vivisecting the land. Names swam into view, names of cities and oceans and mountains.

  “But what of the old emperor?” I continued, casually. “What was his name?”

  I dared a glance at Dowser, and saw his eyes flatten with something like surprise. He hesitated, then sank into his worn leather chair. He polished his spotless glasses on the front of his black robe.

  “Sylvain Sabourin was a decent man, and a good emperor. He died too young, and with many things left undone.”

  “Too young?” I frowned. “How old was he?”

  “Barely forty tides,” Dowser murmured, “and until his heart gave out on him we thought he’d live to see eighty. A stronger, healthier man you never would have thought to meet.”

  “How did the empress take it?” I asked. “She couldn’t have been older than … ?”

  “Severine was seventeen,” Dowser replied. His eyes sharpened on my face. “She was your age. And she was as distraught as any young dauphine losing her father ought to be. What have you been hearing?”

  “I haven’t heard anything.” My pulse quickened, and I cursed my lack of tact. “I just wondered—”

  “You shouldn’t listen to rumors, Mirage,” Dowser interrupted, fixing me with a severe stare. “Every palais physician ruled Sylvain’s death as nothing more than a weak heart and bad luck.”

  I tried to hide my surprise. “I didn’t—”

  “And before you even ask, the dauphin was always a sickly child. He never would have been considered an appropriate heir to the throne even if he had lived to see his majority. And even had any natural children existed, they never would have been deemed suitable to succeed Sylvain.”

  What dauphin? What natural children?

  I turned back to the wall of atlases to hide the twin serpents of curiosity and dread coiling around my heart. My fingers trailed toward the north of the empire, to the range of hard-edged peaks jutting from the earth like giants’ teeth. The Meteor Mountains. I traced the tips of those snowcapped mountains, sounding out their strange names. Dom. Le Brigand. La Belladonne. And there, nestled in the cupped valley between two massifs: Belsyre.

  I snatched my hand away as if I’d been stung.

  “You’re right,” I said to Dowser. “I shouldn’t have listened to the rumors. It’s none of my business.”

  Dowser’s gaze searched my face. “If you must know, you’re better off asking someone who knows what really happened.”

  My head snapped up, and I stared at my mentor. Was he trying to tell me something? Was he giving me an opening to ask whatever I wanted? I opened my mouth to ask the question I was dying to ask—Did Severine disband her Council and murder her dissenting nobles?—but the bell chimed for Compline and Dowser looked away.

  The moment was over.

  “Get some sleep,” Dowser commanded. “And come back tomorrow with your head full of illusions and empty of rumors. We’re running short on time.”

  Dowser’s bald pate gleamed in the dimness, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many secrets were stored in that head, stacked like books and dusty with disuse.

  “Your tremors,” I remarked, tentative. “They’ve stopped. Should I be pleased, or worried?”

  “Inquisitive and intrusive today.” He rubbed an ink-stained thumb over his brow. “I still wonder why you feel obliged to care.”

  I thought of my teacher, sitting day after day—tide after tide—in this dim, musty study, tattered books and bad dreams his only company. A colorless life punctuated by demands on his legacy and his loyalty.

  “Do you have a wife or husband? Children?” My words conjured something doleful in his gaze. “Well, then. Everyone ought to have someone who feels obliged to care. I guess you’re stuck with me.”

  Dowser’s eyes glittered behind his spectacles, and a tenuous understanding seemed to bridge the space between us.

  “I’m trying,” he finally muttered. “If you must know, I’m still trying.”

  I paced back toward Lys, curiosity and frustration tangling within. Dowser hadn’t answered any of the questions I’d intended to ask; he’d only raised more questions. How had I never heard the rumors about Severine? A father, dead much too young. A sickly brother, dead before his majority. Illegitimate half siblings. A Council, dissolved. Nobles, disappearing.

  Maybe Dowser was right. Maybe it was cruel speculation and idle gossip.

  Or maybe it was something more.

  I thought of Luca’s face, resolute in the light of our weary sun. His eyes bright with the promise of violence. His tongue heavy with conviction and death.

  And for the first time, I stopped to consider if he might be right. Maybe violence did demand violence. Maybe death begat death. If the empress truly murdered and connived her way onto the throne of an empire, then what kind of world would I be condoning by letting her get away with it?

  I gnawed on a lip already raw with my uncertainty. After everything he’d said to me, I wasn’t sure I trusted Luca’s judgment. I had to know the truth before I condemned anyone—empress or pauper, noble or thief—to the Scion’s mercy.

  Much as I hated to admit it, there was only one person I could ask. I didn’t trust Sunder. But something about the unflinching way he looked at me made me think that maybe—if I could just ask the right questions—he might tell me the truth.

  I stood in the shadow of a clematis-draped arch and watched Sunder fight.

  I’d only recently discovered that many courtiers made a game of dueling with their legacies as a precaution against being called to the Gauntlet. Angled sunbeams sliced the sandy arena into wedges. It was hot, and most of the men had thrown off their overcoats and vests in a pile of brocade. They loitered in the long green shadows of boxy hedges, sipping from flagons of ale and exchanging bets as they watched their friends spar. A coterie of ladies lingered nearby, clad in pale linen and hiding their gossip behind colorful fans.

  Sunder stood in the center of the arena, hair blazing gold in a bar of ruddy sunlight. His white undershirt was rolled to the elbow. Muscle corded along his forearm when he lifted his hand. He saluted his opponent—a glowering Sinister lord named Haze—then bowed. Anticipation hummed in the air as they slid into crouches. The game turned dangerous.

  Sunder lunged, his long fingers snaking toward his opponent’s heart. Haze blocked the blow with his elbow and aimed a pennant of dense fog at Sunder’s face. He danced away, his steps quick and sure in the sand. He circled Haze, wary, then lashed back in. His fingers found his opponent’s wrist. Haze roared with sudden agony and kicked Sunder in the stomach. Opaque smog rolled outward, disorienting Sunder as he searched for his foe.

&nb
sp; It was a dance of death, meticulous and savage and ancient as the sun. Each step was choreographed, each maneuver deliberate. Point, counterpoint. Attack, parry, riposte. I was transfixed, hypnotized by the measured sway and dart, leap and flicker. They orbited each other in elegant circles, flashing in and out of bars of light and shadow. There was no sound, only their silent legacies singing promises of blood to the thirsty earth.

  A misstep; an ankle rolling. My heart beat a fervent pulse as Haze stumbled. Sunder was a viper, striking fast and sure. He tackled Haze to the ground, who hissed with pain. Scarlet bloomed like a flower on a white shirtsleeve.

  Sunder won first blood.

  The pair separated, breathing hard. Polite applause scattered across the arena; coins exchanged hands. Sunder saluted. Haze did the same, although the look on his face verged on murderous. Sunder sneered and turned away, flagging an attendant as he dragged a hand through hair dark with sweat.

  I swallowed hard, and stepped from the shadow of the archway.

  I saw Sunder’s face in the split second before the rest of the courtiers spotted me. And it occurred to me that if I had wanted to keep this meeting private I should have waited deeper among the hedgerows.

  Sunder stalked toward me with a vicious smile. Behind him, I saw the courtiers turn to each other with raised eyebrows. One girl flicked her wrist at her friend in a gesture I recognized as true love. A sarcastic smile coiled in the corner of her mouth.

  Sunder cut me an ironic bow, then pushed me back against the curve of the archway in full view of the courtiers. My breath caught as he captured my wrist with a hand and pinned it against the bricks. He covered my body with his own, sliding his knee between my legs and bunching my skirts against the backs of my thighs.

  “What are you doing?” I gasped out. Every inch of me was molded to him. I could smell the hot musk of sweat and sand clinging to his skin, see the moisture beading the fine hairs at the base of his neck. I could barely think.