Comprehension crept over me.
I thought of Neveni warning me, and even Elantra’s subtle taunt. This had to be a practice of Salivar and Devineé’s when someone young, vulnerable, and alone arrived new to court. These were two of the most powerful people in the galaxy, yet they still resorted to drugging their conquests. They got away with it because they were Domitrians. None could refuse a dip in their baths without insulting them. No one could refuse to drink their wine.
They used their power to force this situation, and although I had the luxury of being immune to whatever they’d slipped me, others did not.
The Matriarch had advised me about sex at court. It was to be regarded as an exchange of power or a means of exerting influence, nothing more. But I could gain no power here, and though it would be unwise to resist them, everything in me rebelled at the thought of allowing them these liberties.
And then as Salivar hoisted himself out of the water, and reached out for me, he said something that cast the situation into stark clarity. “How amusing it will be, to despoil the heir to the Impyreans. This is our greatest feat yet.”
Suddenly my heart stilled. This situation hadn’t been intended for me.
It was intended for Donia.
Rage like I’d never known ignited hot and bright within me. I wrenched Salivar’s arms from me and hurled him into the water. I caught only a fleeting glimpse of Devineé’s shocked face before I leaped in after him, blind fury electrifying me. I seized Devineé, and in a moment I had them both by their necks. They didn’t get a chance to yell out in surprise or fear. I drove their heads under water.
They began to thrash, to claw at me, but I never relented, thinking of what might have happened if it hadn’t been me, if it had been Donia. My grip on their throats tightened as they helplessly tried to resist, and all I could think was that these people had wanted to rape the Impyrean heir, my Impyrean heir. One squeeze and I could crack both their necks, crush them, and they would heartily deserve it.
But my head cleared, and I realized what I’d done. I pulled them both up out of the water, and thrust them away from me.
They coughed and sputtered, clawing at their throats, and I felt a sinking moment of dismay, trying to figure out what I’d do. I couldn’t let them live and speak to anyone of my unnatural strength, but it seemed inadvisable to commit a double murder my first full day at court.
Devineé recovered first, crawling out of the water, choking on her sobs. “What are you . . . what are you? What monstrous thing are you?”
Her flailing hand overturned a stray cup of wine, and then I knew. I knew how to deal with these two despicable creatures.
“Get back here.” My voice sounded low, bestial.
She shrieked as I splashed out of the water and crossed over to her. I seized her by the hair before she could escape me and slammed her head down. She grew still. Salivar hit me from behind as he tried to defend her, and I snared him readily in a headlock and drove him to the ground.
With my free hand, I poured a glass of wine.
“This wine makes one forgetful, does it?” I rasped. “Too high a dose makes you comatose, does it, Salivar?”
“Wait, wait,” he moaned.
“You have no right to speak,” I snarled in his ear. “Pray to your Living Cosmos that you survive this.” Then I began to force the wine down his throat. He choked on it, gagged on it, but I held his nose and forced more and more wine down his throat until he was lying limp on the ground, hazy and lost to the world.
Devineé roused. I twisted her arm behind her back, then fed her the rest of the wine.
When I was certain I’d done all I could, I threw them back to the ground. I rose and pulled on my garments, then wrung out my hair. My mind raced with thoughts about how I’d hide this, how I’d conceal what I’d done. Everyone knew I was coming here tonight! What should I do next? I didn’t even know . . .
A rustling in the bushes. I froze in place as Neveni Sagnau charged out—the curved blade of her necklace in hand.
My gaze sharpened, even as this new complication registered. The wine was gone. I couldn’t drug her. I’d need to drown her.
“Sidonia!” she cried, glaring at the Domitrians. The pair lay drugged out of their minds on the ground. “What—what happened here?”
“How long have you been here?” I demanded. “Are you alone?”
“Of—of course I’m alone. I just . . . I just slipped past the Servitors. . . .” She pointed backward.
So she hadn’t seen. Good. She wouldn’t know to fear me.
My voice was very soft and dangerous. “Come closer. I’ll tell you what happened.”
She just stared down at the two, stunned. I started toward her, ready to break her neck. But Neveni surprised me. She bared her teeth in a ferocious grin and then drove a kick into Salivar’s side. I stopped advancing, trying to understand this. Neveni kicked him again, and then she kicked Devineé as well. She stumbled back from the two Domitrians, her eyes bright with unshed tears. She fought back tears and yet she was laughing.
“I don’t know what you did to them, and I don’t care. Are they going to die? Tell me they’re going to die!”
“I don’t know,” I said, utterly perplexed by her. I found myself staring at that blade in her hand again, and it dawned on me that she’d come here prepared to . . . help me?
“They deserve it if they do. They’ve done this so many times,” Neveni said viciously, waving the blade in her hand. “You’re not the first. I wasn’t either. I can’t even remember my first night here, but I’ve seen them inviting others, and I know what happened to me. I wasn’t going to just stand by this time and let it happen again!”
“You actually came here to stop them?” I simply couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea.
“I don’t know what I was going to do,” she confessed, her shaking hand still clutching the curved blade. “Probably stab them, or maybe just slash Devineé’s face, but . . . but I couldn’t let them do it again.” Tears spilled from her eyes now, fierce and angry, and it sank into me that this girl had come to save the Impyrean heir. To save Donia.
I could never hurt a girl who’d do this for Donia.
“Thank you. Truly, thank you.” I wasn’t used to saying those words, but I meant them.
“We’re going to have to cover up . . . whatever it was that happened here,” Neveni said, gesturing around vaguely. “I won’t ask, Sidonia. I really won’t. But listen, I know how to access the surveillance logs. I did it before I came here to make sure I could sneak in.” She smiled grimly. “I’ll wipe any recording of the last day or so. And you and I can come up with a story together.”
I gave a stunned nod. “Together.”
And just like that, I accepted Neveni Sagnau as an ally. She wasn’t my choice of allies, and she’d do nothing to improve the Impyrean reputation for heresy. . . . But sometimes fate did not offer the choices we preferred, but rather the ones we must accept for lack of better alternatives.
I wouldn’t kill her for now. I just hoped I never came to regret it.
13
DONIA was worried about me already, so when I spoke with her over subspace to fill her in on the events at the Chrysanthemum so far, I left out the episode with Salivar and Devineé. And the subsequent interrogation I faced.
The Domitrians had both been found the following day, comatose and undressed amid their salt baths. The Emperor learned quickly that I’d been due to spend an evening with them. Apparently, it was an open secret what Devineé and Salivar did to young people who were alone and friendless at court. Elantra’s taunt played through my mind as I sat before Enmity in my villa. She’d known what I faced that night. She’d enjoyed the thought.
One day I hoped to thank the Pasus girl for that. But not yet.
Enmity seemed to fill the villa as she loomed over me. Neveni wa
s trembling at my side, though I knew from my own experience that was most anyone’s reaction to a Diabolic cornering and questioning them—even when innocent.
She played her part well. “I found Sidonia outside the Tigris. She seemed so disoriented and confused.”
I nodded along, never daring to break Enmity’s gaze. “I really have no memory of what transpired. Their Eminences were so kind to invite me to their baths, and after that . . .” I waved my hand vaguely. “My head still throbs so terribly. It’s all a blur.”
“I took her back to her chamber to sleep and stayed with her in case she was severely ill. How are their Eminences?” Neveni leaned forward, mock concern on her face. “We are ever so worried.”
The Diabolic considered every word in dead silence, unblinking. I’d never really spent time with another of my kind. It struck me how strange it was I’d been able to pass as a person so far. Every movement, every breath this creature took screamed at me that she wasn’t like the human beings I saw around me, that she was a killer and a predator and I should be alert. She had to have done everything I had to get this far, to reach the point where she was worthy of being civilized. I forced myself to blink so she wouldn’t notice my fixed gaze.
Then Enmity said, “The med bots are unable to wake them from their coma. They seem to have ingested a very potent neurotoxin called Scorpion’s Breath in great quantities. It’s odd that you were in their company yet managed to escape their fate, Grandeé Impyrean.”
“I was supremely fortunate,” I said solemnly.
The Diabolic’s gaze crawled between us—and then locked on me as she really looked. For a fearful moment, I wondered if she was seeing our resemblance . . . if she could see something Diabolic in me just as I could see it in her, or if my fragile appearance had effectively deceived her despite her better judgment.
Enmity’s hand lashed out and seized my chin. I froze in place as she lifted my face into the light.
Blink, I reminded myself as our eyes held. Do not stare. Act like a person. I made myself swallow, fidget, just as Sidonia might do. Enmity merely studied me intently for a protracted moment, as Neveni gave a nervous laugh.
“What’s wrong?” Neveni said. “Is there something on Sidonia’s face?”
“You are not lying to me?” Enmity said in a dangerous voice.
My heartbeat accelerated. I knew she could feel it. But any person would grow uneasy with a Diabolic clutching them like this.
“No,” I replied steadily. “Now unhand me at once.” I’d managed to keep my voice soft, like Donia’s, but the tone brooked no questions. I was a Senator’s daughter, as far as she was concerned. She had to obey me.
Enmity had no choice but to let her hand drop. She looked between us one last time, and then she left us without another word. I did not relax after she departed, though.
“What was that about?” Neveni muttered, gesturing to her own chin.
I shook my head and didn’t answer. Enmity was suspicious of me. I knew that. What she suspected, though—I could not yet guess.
“Diabolics are so creepy,” Neveni said.
I smiled at her. Yes, I supposed we were.
The ceremony for the Consecration of the Cherished Dead was one of the holiest occasions in the Empire, so naturally Senator von Impyrean hadn’t celebrated it unless there was company. When he allowed the celebration, the Impyreans followed the same procedure every great imperial family did: they ordered an Exalted specially bred and engineered for the ceremony, spent a week doting on the creature and treating it like something much loved, and then loaded it into a starship and shot it into the corona of a star, where it would burn to death. By handing their Cosmos a creature of true innocence and purity, they hoped to mitigate whatever sins and wrongdoing their own cherished dead had possessed when they went to the afterlife themselves.
The Emperor always celebrated Consecration Day and spent the week leading up to it trotting around the Exalted, a tiny, hairless young man or woman with no eyelashes, no coloring, and no cognitive capacity for deception, impurity, violence, or any of those nasty human impulses that besmirched real people. The Exalted had a seat of honor at every feast and every high occasion and lived like the most cosseted pet in existence.
Until Consecration Day came and the Exalted died, of course.
“Come on,” Neveni urged me the morning of Consecration Day. “It’s for those of greater Grandiloquy, but I can go if you take me.”
Covering my crime against the Domitrians and enduring Enmity’s interrogation had created a bond between us. We spent our days in each other’s company.
Neveni wasn’t like Donia, shy and sweet and intellectually curious. She was restless and impatient and driven to explore, and unlike her, I couldn’t be denied entrance to most anywhere in the Chrysanthemum. I opened doors for her, and she directed our movements.
She also had an amazing capacity for gathering scraps of information or hearsay everywhere we went. The Matriarch had once said information was currency, and Neveni supplied it to me in spades. She told me her latest news as we walked to the heliosphere for the Consecration Ceremony.
“Tyrus Domitrian has already ruined the entire holiday. The Emperor’s furious.”
“Is he?” I said, distracted by the feel of my hair sticking up all around me.
We’d both arranged our tresses as all the attendees had, in star-shaped haloes about our heads with effervescent essence woven in. We wore gowns of glowing gold, as befitted the occasion. Everyone we passed with dead family members to mourn had stenciled teardrops on their faces to represent the grief the years had brought them.
Neveni nodded eagerly, her own hairstyle slipping. She didn’t have styling stilts like I did. “The Pasus family gifted the Emperor with an Exalted named Unity a year ago. A hand-raised one, so no accelerated growth. It was actually a male Exalted who grew up over a normal human span of life.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That must have been expensive.” Even Diabolics were pushed through accelerated growth our earliest years of life. It made little economic sense to feed and care for a humanoid creature before it became useful.
“Senator von Pasus can afford it,” said Neveni. “And the Emperor knew he needed a top-quality Exalted because so many of the imperial royals die young. Everyone says they’re sun-scorned.” She rolled her eyes a bit as she said it, because we all knew the Emperor couldn’t actually be superstitious about all those deaths. He knew well the cause of them.
“This year,” Neveni said, “he was thrilled to get Unity. He was sure the Living Cosmos would favor him. But Tyrus ruined everything. He despoiled the Exalted.”
“He had sex with it?”
I wasn’t even a believer and the Successor Primus’s blasphemy astounded me.
Neveni nodded eagerly. “He only admitted it yesterday when Unity was being prepped in the ceremonial oils. Now it can’t get sacrificed because it’s impure, and the Emperor’s furious.”
“No wonder.”
Tyrus Domitrian truly was a madman. The irony was, his lechery had saved that Exalted from a hideous fate.
Neveni and I entered the Great Heliosphere to observe the fallout. Roving Servitors passed by with sumptuous trays of drinks, finger foods, and narcotics. There were bags of powder, phials of inhalants, droppers of various intoxicants to add to drinks, some ointments to dab directly on skin. Sutera nu Impyrean had shown us how to use all of them, and made us practice their use. I made a show of taking an ointment and dabbing my skin simply because I knew it would not affect me, and it might raise eyebrows if I scorned chemical entertainment at one of the greatest imperial holidays.
The Emperor had ordered Tyrus chained to the brightest window and had the UV screen temporarily stripped away so the Successor Primus could endure a full day of glaring sunburn. He was also forbidden to partake in any of the pleasures of the festival. br />
Tyrus’s skin was already bright red by the time we beheld him, but he looked thoroughly unashamed of his public disgrace. In fact, from the smile on his face, I’d guess he was enjoying the scandalized looks from the people passing by him.
“. . . I cannot help it, Grandmother,” Tyrus was drawling as we neared him.
My ears picked up the conversation. I glanced at Neveni, but she was busy surreptitiously dumping out her phial of intoxicant while pretending to dab it over her wrist. After her experience with the Domitrians, it was only natural she detested anything that altered her ability to control herself.
I turned my attention back to the conversation.
“You don’t know what a combination of hairlessness and innocence does to me,” Tyrus said. “Asking me to refrain is like holding the rarest delicacy before a starving man and demanding he abstain from eating it. It’s inhuman to expect such self-restraint.”
“You are a disgrace to this Empire!” scolded the matriarch of the Domitrian family, the Grandeé Cygna. “You haven’t even stenciled yourself.” Her own face, by contrast, was decorated with an elegant display of tears.
“Those inks irritate my skin most terribly.”
Tyrus wore a lazy-lidded smile. His blue eyes were light and almost coy beneath his short-shorn copper-colored hair. His nose was long, and his chin had an unfashionable cleft that he’d never corrected. Neveni had told me he never changed any of his features, even for special occasions. Like many madmen, his outward guise seemed to be a low priority to him. He must have incurred his uncle’s wrath and been subjected to this window treatment several times, if those freckles were anything to judge by. The mystery was the fact that he’d never had them removed.
“Have you no respect for your departed mother?” Cygna demanded. “Your siblings? Consecration Day is staged in honor of our dead!”
Tyrus’s tone shifted subtly, some of the lightness gone. “Why, Grandmother, I should think the deaths of my parents such a tragedy, no commemoration can compare. . . . As I’m quite sure you and my dear uncle would agree.”