What am I doing? There are more important things than my tangled web of emotions. Crav, Peligli. They’re relying on me. My own freedom is relying on me. I can be a mopey sack all I want once I’m human again.
I arm myself with a dress worthy of court—red velvet and orange taffeta, like the most violent sunset. A knock at my door brings me out of my thoughts. I call for them to come in, Reginall entering with a sheepish look on his face.
“Milady.”
I sigh. “I’m done throwing a tantrum. There’s no need to convince me to come out.”
Reginall opens his mouth, then closes it. “I am glad to hear it, milady.”
I’m quiet. Y’shennria sent him instead of coming herself because he’s an ex-Heartless. She thinks he knows me better than she does. Or maybe she’s too scared of me to approach herself. I slide on a pearl bracelet, marveling quietly at the rainbow sheen it gives off in the sunlight.
“I can’t let anything get in the way of taking the prince’s heart,” I say finally. “Not my emotions, not the hunger. Nothing.”
“Are you having trouble, milady?” Reginall asks. “With controlling the hunger?”
“You’ve clearly forgotten how hard it is to control to begin with.”
Reginall is quiet, and then: “Perhaps I have. It’s been many years.”
“You are impeccable with a duster, and a fearsome force of nature with a polishing cloth,” I say. “But your burning questions face could use work.”
“There was a way long ago, milady—a way we found in the war to suppress the hunger.”
“Oh, I know how to suppress it,” I assure him. “Devouring a hundred or so still-bleeding things usually does the trick.”
“I apologize, I misspoke.” Reginall strokes his mustache patiently. “I meant suppress the hunger entirely. Completely.”
I swallow. The sky is blue. The Twisted Ocean is made of crystal. The hunger cannot be suppressed entirely. These are all true and clear realities. The hunger is so powerful and pervasive, always. It haunts my dreams, my waking hours. But if that’s true—if there is such a way to subdue it—I could feel human again. Whole.
“How?” I demand.
“It takes much practice, milady. And the results—” His voice catches. “There are unintended side effects.”
“Like what?”
“The hunger doesn’t…prefer being subdued. You bleed from your eyes until you lose control, and the hunger resurfaces.”
I breathe out. “Bleeding? Like when we eat human food?”
“Yes. Both are such cases of the hunger rebelling against our actions. Eating human food, suppressing it. The pain feels as though it’s meant to break us, doesn’t it? As if it’s a warning to stop what we’re doing.”
“You speak of it as if it’s a living thing.”
“I don’t know if it is, milady. I know only what I have felt and seen. For brief moments, those Heartless who learned to suppress the hunger had minds running clearer than a winter stream. No matter how hard a witch commanded them to fight, no matter how hungry they were, they could resist. Not for long, but for long enough. It was a sight to behold, milady.” Reginall’s eyes light up from within. “Seeing them on the battlefield weeping, resisting—they instilled a great hope in the rest of us that we could fight our fate. Hope that we were still worth saving, no matter what we’d done under the banner of war.”
My breath comes shallow. The mere idea of it—of living for one moment free, free of this gaping emptiness as I haven’t been in three years, has my head reeling.
“You can teach me.” I stand from my chair and grab his weathered hands. “You can teach me to weep as they did!”
“You’ll have your heart soon enough,” Reginall insists. “And your freedom. I’m sorry to say—but taking the prince’s heart would be much easier than learning the ways of Weeping.”
It takes a moment for the all-consuming lust for freedom to cool, but when it does, his words ring true. Weeping sounds like a bare shard of freedom, but I can have the whole gem if I do what I came here for. Reginall pulls his hands gently from mine.
“It’s better that you don’t learn anyway, milady. There are certain…dangers associated with it.”
“Dangers?”
He knits his lips beneath his white mustache. “The witches didn’t take kindly to the Weeping gaining independence, no matter how fleeting. If they were discovered, if another Heartless betrayed them, their hearts were shattered.”
Shattering. Shattering without a hope of ever becoming human again. Dying as a tool, with only the hunger at your side as you leave this world. It’s my worst nightmare, second only to living forever Heartless. I shudder, Reginall’s faint voice as he bids me good night barely registering. The thought haunts me as I get ready, haunts me even as I descend the stairs, my makeup arranged just so for tonight’s banquet. Y’shennria quirks a brow.
“Where’s your corset?”
“I tried it on,” I assure her. “Five minutes of not being able to breathe was enough, thank you.”
“It’s the fashion,” she insists. “From Helkyris.”
“Well now it’s the fashion from Helkyris that’s in the garbage can.”
Y’shennria snorts. “You’re being difficult again.”
“And unless you’d like me to pass out in my bowl of soup instead of getting any socializing with the prince done, I suggest you let me continue being difficult.”
She takes in my face and the makeup on it—a red lip tint, and a three-line black pattern beneath my eyes, the little triangles like the fangs of a wolf. Y’shennria wears a deadly sleek black dress, her voluminous dark hair netted down with an intricate nest of silver cords. In the sunset light of the hall I can see exactly how breathtakingly beautiful she was, and is. Her own midnight lines drawn on her cheekbones are small yet elegant, like the tips of tiny bird wings. She wordlessly turns and walks out of the manor to the carriage.
I’ve made her angry again. This seems to be a trend. I follow her, pausing at the painting of Lord Y’shennria.
“You’ve got a beautiful wife, sir,” I murmur. “But she’s awfully stubborn.”
His wry, handsome smile seems to say, As equally as you.
I toy with the red ribbons woven in my fishtail braids as the carriage drives. The lack of a sword at my hip eats away at me, but Y’shennria insisted weapons were forbidden during a banquet.
“Have you told Lady Himintell what I am?” I ask Y’shennria. She quirks a perfectly sculpted brow.
“Do you think me mad? As far as she’s concerned, you’re a farmer girl I’ve hired to pose as my niece to steal the prince’s heart. Figuratively, of course.”
“So she thinks you just want to raise the Y’shennria family to power by making me queen.”
“Precisely.”
There’s a beat in which the sunbirds cry to one another, forlorn and melodious.
“Why didn’t you? Hire a farm girl, I mean.”
“Because you can’t control a farm girl.” Y’shennria exhales like I’m asking the simplest question in the world. “Humans are…unpredictable. Unreliable. They become blinded. They can fall in love—it doesn’t matter with what—noble boys, lovely dresses, power, luxury. A Heartless only ever burns for one thing—their own heart. And those who burn don’t easily blind.”
For some strange reason, that moment Lucien “saved” me flashes through my mind. The weight of him against me, the feel of his warm breath on my skin; it blew every thought of taking his heart out of my head. I was blind then—blind to anything but him.
He’s nothing but a means to an end, the hunger hisses.
As we arrive at the palace, the facade of whitestone absorbs the blaze of the peach sunset, setting it aflame. Y’shennria leads me through the doors and into the main hall, the water beneath the floor ruby-laced with sunset beams. The hall is crowded with extravagantly dressed nobles, clothes of mauve and emerald green and seastorm blue, gold and silver threads so en
twined and delicate it looks as if the fabrics just sprouted them naturally. I’m nearly blinded by the flashes of the sunset off their precious gems—the nobles clearly saved their best dresses and baubles for tonight. On the opposite spectrum are the modestly dressed servants in black, offering wine and iced fruit on silver trays.
“Why is everyone waiting?” I ask Y’shennria.
“The dinner is still being prepared,” she explains. “And lingering in the hall is a type of…tradition. We gather here and watch one another filter in, critique everyone’s presentation.”
I groan. “That sounds riveting.”
“It’s more for the adults. Not much else is expected of you other than to sit there and look beautiful.”
“Do I? Look beautiful?” I bat my eyelashes at her as a joke, but her face remains serious as ever.
“Very much so.”
I’m taken aback by the sincerity in her words, but before I can say anything she disappears into the crowd. Knowing her, she’d just been stating a fact. Seawhisper said it herself; I’m the prince’s type. That’s why they chose me in the first place.
I exhale and lean against a marble pillar in a less busy spot of the bustling hall. If everything goes as planned, the prince will develop real feelings for me, feelings enough to blind him to his own safety. But how genuine can his feelings be, if my entire personality is faked? If I’m just carefully curated bait in a steel trap?
I shake my head and take a wine flute from a passing tray. Why do I care? If I deceive him, then I win this awful game. And winning is all that matters. What happens after the facade breaks is none of my business.
And yet some tiny voice in me chimes up, hoping the prince—no, Whisper—will be smart enough to not fall for me. Whisper is a thief, and I know a thief’s instincts. He can’t go soft, lose his cloak of wariness. If he does, I’ll be disappointed.
If he does, he loses his humanity.
A laugh born of despair works up to my wine-stained lips. “I really am a monster, aren’t I?”
Feeling suddenly uncomfortable in my own skin, convinced every person here can tell how selfish I am just from a glance, I walk out of the hall to the west wing. At least I think it’s the west wing. Y’shennria had me study the palace layout, but it’d been so huge and my lesson so brief I’ve forgotten it already. I let my feet wander; the farther I get from the nobles and their chattering, the easier I can breathe. That’s all I want—to get away, to be anywhere but here. The wine buzzes through my veins pleasantly as I waltz the vast, rich, and yet nigh-empty hallways, and I wonder back to Reginall for a moment; did he and the other Heartless drink during the war? It’s one of the few human things still left to us. I’m willing to bet they got drunk every night, so drunk they’d forget the blood they’d spilled that day.
I trace my own cheekbones, where blood tears would be by now if this wine was anything else. A celeon guard watches me from his post before a door, his violet eyes narrowed slightly.
“Good evening, sir.” I smile at him. “How are you faring tonight?”
The celeon grunts, the tentacle-like protrusions of his whiskers twitching. “Just fine, milady.”
“That makes one of us.” I giggle. When he doesn’t crack a smile, I quiet down. “So, what sort of valuables do they have you guarding? Treasure? Or perhaps stuffy, important documents?”
“Pictures, milady.”
“Pictures?” I raise a brow. The guard straightens, holding his halberd a little tighter, a little prouder.
“Behind me is where they keep the private d’Malvane family portraits of their dead. I guard them in case of defacers.”
“Who would ever want to deface a d’Malvane portrait?” I frown. The celeon cracks a fanged grin for the first time.
“You’d be surprised, milady.”
“Would I? I’m a new arrival in Vetris. I hardly know anything about this place, or the d’Malvanes—you don’t learn much about the royal family on a pig farm.”
The celeon fixes me with a stare. “You’re the Y’shennria Spring Bride, then?”
I curtsy with a smile, the wine nearly unbalancing me. “The one and only.”
“Rumor has it the prince doesn’t like you much.”
I look him up and down; no other servant in the palace would dare to say that to a Firstblood’s face. Maybe the palace guards are used to speaking their minds more.
“Well, rumor has it that I don’t like him much, either,” I say lightly. He blinks his large violet eyes.
“Then why are you here, milady?”
“Why are you here?” I shoot back.
“To make a living in this cruel world,” he rasps.
“As am I.”
He chuckles at this, the sound somewhere between a purr and a snarl. It’s cut off as a familiar bellow vibrates down the hall.
“Is that you, Lady Zera?” Baron d’Goliev waves his sunbird-feathered cap madly at me, several other nobles on his heels. He turns to them. “Come, you must meet her—she’s a Spring Bride, and clever at that!”
“Kavar’s bloodshot eyeball,” I curse. I dart my eyes around for a way out, the door in front of me pushed open all of a sudden by the celeon’s paw. He jerks his head inside, ears pricking in the same direction.
“Go on, milady. Hide in here. I’ll tell you when they’re gone.”
I shoot him a grin. “You’re a lifesaver.”
I duck into the dim room, and the guard closes the door behind me with a heavy thud. The door and walls are so thick I barely hear the baron’s and his cadre’s footsteps, though their voices demanding to know where I went are louder. The guard fends them off with as many miladies and milords as he can, but the baron won’t have it. I slide away from the door, tucking myself in a corner of the room in case they do manage to barge in here.
The room itself is so different from the rest of the palace—no marble walls or floors, only soft, polished wood. The curtains are black, not pale green, and no gold decorations or statues stand in this room. It’s kept plain save for the walls, which are lined with stunning oil portraits of people long dead. There’s a common thread to them—all wear expensive furs, most of them have Prince Lucien’s dark raven-wing hair. A few are much younger than the dead should be. The first paintings are faded, worn by time and air, but as the wall extends and the paintings grow, the brighter the hues and the fresher the canvas until, at the very end, tucked away in the same corner I stand, is the most recent painting.
The eyes are what take my breath away—her eyes, like obsidian daggers. There’s no mistaking those eyes; this must be Princess Varia. Though, unlike her brother’s blade-eyes, forged with anger and seriousness, Varia’s eyes glimmer with mirth, like she’s keeping some hilarious secret all to herself. Her broad lips are twisted in a half smirk, but something like heartbreak rests in the corners of them. Her black hair is pulled up into an elaborate bun, her dress bright crimson. She stands before a chair and holds a sheaf of bellflowers in one hand and a strange white sword in the other. The painting is so lifelike and distinct I know instantly it’s the same painter who did Lord Y’shennria’s portrait.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?”
I start out of my skin at the voice. I turn to see none other than King Sref rise from a chair in the deep shadows on the other side of the room. I fold into a curtsy.
“Y-Your Majesty,” I start. “I didn’t know you were here; the guard didn’t tell me—”
“Be at ease.” He smiles, face crinkling. “I loathe to admit it, but I’ve been here for many hours, since before his watch started. He didn’t know. I hope you won’t hold it against him—Noran is a good man.”
“Not at all,” I protest. “I thought him g-good as well. A little intimidating, but I suppose that comes with the job.”
I curse my runaway mouth—this isn’t the time to be glib. But the king just laughs softly.
“Indeed.” He turns, his pure gold robe whispering over the wood floor as he approaches Varia’s por
trait. His salt-and-pepper mane is tied in three long braids, which are twisted together in an intricate pattern at several points down his back. A gold circlet graces his fierce brows—Lucien’s brows, and Varia’s too. He takes the portrait in with gray, melancholic eyes, as if searching for something he knows is there but can never grasp. I feel almost awkward at his reverent silence, until he turns to me and smiles.
“Forgive me, Lady Zera. I tend to get lost in this painting, much to the chagrin of my Ministers and the queen. I’d blame the painter for it, but the man was a genius—and you can be angry at genius for only so long.”
I knit my lips. The nobles said Varia had been the king’s favorite, that he changed so much when she died. It’s a delicate subject, and I’m in a far more delicate position. Y’shennria didn’t train me for one-on-ones with the king of all Cavanos. But I can’t remain mute.
Will he mourn for Lucien when I turn him Heartless, the way his eyes mourn for Varia now?
The king asks suddenly, “What moons were you born under, Lady Zera?”
“Um.” I scrabble to make something up—my birthday is a missing memory locked tightly in my heart. “The Flint moons, Your Majesty.”
“The Giant one-third waning,” he murmurs. “The Twins two-thirds full. Good moons. Dreamer’s moons. I thought for certain you were an Onyx. Varia was born under Onyx.”
He goes quiet, and then turns to me, smile gone.
“What you said to me at the Welcoming—it was something she would’ve said. She was always so painfully aware of the common people she was to someday rule, more than even I. If she could’ve heard your quip, I’m certain she and you would’ve become fast friends.”
I should bow and take the compliment modestly. But instead I look to Varia’s smirk, so amused with herself and yet somehow broken deep inside. It’s a familiar sight—I see shades of it in the mirror every morning.
“I like to think we would’ve, too,” I finally manage. I burn to ask him a thousand things—why he lets Gavik purge innocents, if he knows they’re innocents at all, if he truly hates witches and the Old God enough to turn a blind eye to such carnage. But I can’t ask him. It would be beyond impolite—it would be treasonous.