I make it easy for the Arvens to remove me from the dais. Egg and Trio take my arms, leaving Kitten and Clover behind. My body goes numb as they escort me out of sight. What have I done? I wonder. What will this do?
Somewhere the others watched. Cal, Kilorn, Farley, my family. They saw that. The shame almost makes me vomit all over my wretched, magnificent gown. I feel worse than when I read the Measures of Maven’s father, dooming so many to conscription in payment for the Scarlet Guard’s action. But then, everyone knew the Measures were not my doing. I was only the messenger.
The Arvens push me forward. Not back the way I came, but behind the throne, through a doorway, to rooms I’ve never seen.
The first is clearly another council chamber, with a long table topped in marble, surrounded by more than a dozen plush chairs. One seat is stonework, a cold construction of gray. For Maven. The room is brightly lit, flooded by the setting sun on one side. The windows face west, away from the river, looking over the palace walls and the gently sloping hills covered in snowy forest.
Last year Kilorn and I cut river ice for spare coins, risking frostbite in favor of honest work. That lasted about a week, until I realized coppers for breaking up ice that would only refreeze was a poor use of our time. How strange, to know that was only a year ago, and a lifetime away.
“Your pardon,” a soft voice says, sounding from the only seat in shadow. I turn to it and watch Jon unfold himself from his chair, a book in one hand.
The seer. His red eyes glow with some inner light I can’t name. I thought he was an ally, a newblood with an ability as strange as mine. He is more powerful than an eye, able to see farther into the future than any Silver can. Now he stands before me as an enemy, having betrayed us to Maven. His stare feels like hot needles pricking skin.
He is the reason I led my friends to Corros Prison, and the reason my brother is dead. The sight of him chases the icy numbness away, replacing all that emptiness with livid, electric heat. I want nothing more than to beat him across the face with whatever I can. I settle for snarling at him.
“Good to see Maven doesn’t keep all his pets on a leash.”
Jon just blinks at me. “Good to see you are not so blind as you once were,” he replies as I pass him.
When we first met him, Cal warned us that people go mad puzzling out riddles of the future. He was absolutely right, and I won’t fall into that trap again. I turn away, resisting the urge to dissect his carefully chosen words.
“Ignore me all you want, Miss Barrow. I’m not your concern,” he adds. “Only one person here is.”
I glance over my shoulder, my muscles moving before my brain can react. Of course Jon speaks before I do, stealing the words from my throat.
“No, Mare, I don’t mean yourself.”
We leave him behind, continuing on to wherever I am being led. The silence is a torture as much as Jon, giving me nothing to focus on except his words. He means Maven, I realize. And it’s not difficult to guess the implication. And the warning.
There are pieces of me, small pieces, still in love with a fiction. A ghost inside a living boy I cannot begin to fathom. The ghost who sat by my bed while I dreamed in pain. The ghost who kept Samson from my mind as long as he could, I know, delaying an inevitable torture.
The ghost who loves me, in what poisoned way he can.
And I feel that poison working in me.
As I suspect, the Arvens don’t take me back to my prison of a bedroom. I try to memorize our path, noting doors and passages branching off the many council chambers and salons in this wing of the palace. The royal apartments, every inch more decorated than the last. But I’m more interested in the colors dominating the rooms rather than the furniture itself. Red, black, and royal silver—that’s easy to understand. The colors of reigning House Calore. There’s navy as well. The shade gives me a sick feeling in my stomach. It stands for Elara. Dead, but still here.
We finally stop in a small but well-stocked library. Sunset angles through the heavy curtains, drawn against the light. Dust motes dance in the red beams, ash above a dying fire. I feel like I am inside a heart, surrounded by bloody red. This is Maven’s study, I realize. I fight the urge to take the leather seat behind a lacquered desk. To claim something of his as my own. It might make me feel better, but only for a moment.
Instead, I observe what I can, looking around with wide, absorbing eyes. Scarlet tapestries worked with black and glinting silver thread hang between portraits and photographs of Calore ancestors. House Merandus is not so evident here, represented only by a flag of blue and white hanging from the vaulted ceiling. The colors of other queens are there too, some bright, some faded, some forgotten. Except for the golden yellow of House Jacos. It isn’t there at all.
Coriane, Cal’s mother, has been erased from this place.
I search the pictures quickly, though I don’t really know what I’m searching for. None of the faces look familiar, except for Maven’s father. His painting, larger than the rest, glowering over the empty fireplace, is difficult to ignore. Still draped in black, a sign of mourning. He’s been dead only a few months.
I see Cal in his face, and Maven too. The same straight nose, high cheekbones, and thick, glossy black hair. Family traits, judging by the other pictures of Calore kings. The one labeled Tiberias the Fifth is particularly good-looking, almost startlingly so. But then, painters are not paid to make their subjects look ugly.
I’m not surprised to see Cal isn’t represented. Like his mother, he has been removed. A few spaces are conspicuously empty, and I suppose he used to occupy them. Why wouldn’t he? Cal was his father’s firstborn, his favorite son. It’s no wonder Maven took down his brother’s pictures. No doubt he burned them.
“How’s the head?” I ask Egg, offering a sly, empty smile.
He responds with a glare, and my smile spreads. I’ll treasure the memory of him flat on his back, electrocuted into unconsciousness.
“No more shakes?” I press on, fluttering a hand the way his body flopped. Again no response, but his neck colors blue-gray in an angry flush. That’s entertainment enough for me. “Damn, those skin healers are good.”
“Having fun?”
Maven enters alone, his presence oddly small in comparison to the figure he cuts on the throne. His Sentinels must be close, though, just outside the study. He’s not foolish enough to go anywhere without them. With one hand he gestures, sweeping the Arvens from the room. They go swiftly, quiet as mice.
“I don’t have much else for amusement,” I say when they disappear. For the thousandth time today, I curse the presence of the manacles. Without them, Maven would be as dead as his mother. Instead, they force me to tolerate him in all his disgusting glory.
He grins at me, enjoying the dark joke. “Good to see not even I can change you.”
To that I have no response at all. I can’t count the ways Maven has changed me, and destroyed the girl I used to be.
As I suspected, he flounces to the desk and sits with a cool, practiced grace. “I must apologize for my rudeness, Mare.” I think my eyes bug out of my head, because he laughs. “Your birthday was more than a month ago, and I didn’t get you anything.” As with the Arvens, he gestures, motioning for me to take a seat in front of him.
Surprised, shaken, still numb from my little performance, I do as he commands. “Trust me,” I mutter, “I’m fine without whatever new horror you plan to gift to me.”
His smile widens. “You’ll like this, I promise.”
“Somehow I don’t believe that.”
Grinning, he reaches into a drawer of his desk. Without ceremony, he tosses me a scrap of silk. Black, one half of it embroidered with red and gold flowers. I snatch it up greedily. Gisa’s handiwork. I run it between my fingers. It still feels smooth and cool, though I expect something slimy, corrupted, poisoned by Maven’s possession. But every twist of thread is a piece of her. Perfect in its fierce beauty, flawless, a reminder of my sister and our family.
He watches me turn the silk over and over. “We took it off you when we first apprehended you. While you were unconscious.”
Unconscious. Imprisoned in my own body, tortured by the weight of the sounder.
“Thank you,” I force out stiffly. As if I have any reason to thank him for anything.
“And—”
“And?”
“I offer you one question.”
I blink at him, confused.
“You may ask one question, and I will answer it truthfully.”
For a second, I don’t believe him.
I’m a man of my word, when I want to be. He said that once, and stands by it. It really is a gift, if he holds to his promise.
The first question rises without thought. Are they alive? Did you really leave them there, and let them get away? It almost slips past my lips before I think better of wasting my question. Of course they got away. If Cal were dead, I would know it. Maven would still be gloating, or someone would have said something. And he is far too concerned with the Scarlet Guard. If the others had been captured after me, he would know more and fear less.
Maven tips his head, watching me think as a cat watches a mouse. He’s enjoying this. It makes my skin crawl.
Why give me this? Why even let me ask? Another question almost wasted. Because I know the answer to this too. Maven is not who I thought he was, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know parts of him. I can guess what this is, as much as I want to be wrong. It’s his version of an explanation. A way to make me understand what he’s done and why he continues to do it. He knows what question I will eventually summon the courage to ask. He is a king, but a boy too, alone in a world of his own making.
“How much of it was her?”
He doesn’t flinch. He knows me too well to be surprised. A more foolish girl would dare to hope—would believe him a puppet to an evil woman, now abandoned, now adrift. Continuing on a course he has no idea how to change. Luckily, I’m not that stupid.
“I was slow to walk, you know.” He isn’t looking at me anymore, but at the blue flag above us. Adorned in white pearls and cloudy gems, a rich thing doomed to collect dust in Elara’s memory. “The doctors, even Father, they told Mother I would be fine in my own time. It would happen one day. But ‘one day’ wasn’t fast enough for her. She couldn’t be the queen with the crippled, slow son. Not after Coriane gave the kingdom a prince like Cal, always smiling and talking and laughing and perfect. She had my nurse discarded, blamed her for my shortcomings, and took it upon herself to make me stand. I don’t remember it, but she told me the story so many times. She thought it showed how much she loved me.”
Dread pools in my stomach, though I don’t understand why. Something warns me to get up, to walk from this room and into the waiting arms of my guards. Another lie, another lie, I tell myself. Artfully woven, as only he can do. Maven cannot look at me. I taste shame on the air.
His perfect eyes made of ice gloss over, but I’ve long hardened myself to his tears. The first gets stuck in his dark lashes, a wobbling drop of crystal.
“I was a baby, and she hammered her way into my head. She made my body stand, and walk, and fall. She did it every day, until I cried when she entered a room. Until I learned to do it myself. Out of fear. But that would not do either. A baby crying whenever his mother held him?” He shakes his head. “Eventually she took the fear away too.” His eyes darken. “Like so many other things.
“You ask how much of it was me,” he whispers. “Some. Enough.”
But not all.
I can’t stand this any longer. With unbalanced motions, tipped by the weight of my manacles and the sick clenching of my heart, I clamber from the chair.
“You can’t still blame this on her, Maven,” I hiss at him, stepping back. “Don’t lie to me and say you’re doing this because of a dead woman.”
As fast as his tears came, they disappear. Wiped away, as if they never existed. The crack in his mask seals shut. Good. I have no desire to see the boy beneath.
“I’m not,” he says slowly, sharply. “She is gone now. My choices are my own. Of that I am infinitely sure.”
The throne. His seat in the council chamber. Plain things compared to the diamondglass artistry or velvet his father used to sit. Hewn of blocked stone, simple, without gems or precious metal. And now I understand why. “Silent Stone. You make all your decisions sitting there.”
“Wouldn’t you? With House Merandus leering so close?” He leans back, propping his chin on one hand. “I’ve had enough of the whispers they call guidance. Enough to last a lifetime.”
“Good,” I spit at him. “Now you have no one else to blame for your evil.”
One side of his mouth lifts in a weak, patronizing smile. “You’d think that.”
I fight the urge to seize whatever I can and bash his head in with it, erasing his smile from the face of the earth. “If only I could kill you and be done with this.”
“How you wound me.” He clucks his tongue, amused. “And then what? Run back to your Scarlet Guard? To my brother? Samson saw him many times in your thoughts. Dreams. Memories.”
“Still fixated on Cal, even now, when you’ve won?” It’s an easy card to play. His grins annoy me, but my smirk vexes him just as much. We know how to needle each other. “Strange, then, that you’re trying so hard to be like him.”
It’s Maven’s turn to stand, his hands landing hard on the desk as he rises up to meet my eye. A corner of his mouth twitches, pulling his face into a bitter sneer. “I’m doing what my brother never could. Cal follows orders, but he can’t make choices. You know that as well as I do.” His eyes flicker, finding an empty spot on the wall. Looking for Cal’s face. “No matter how wonderful you might think he is, so gallant, brave, and perfect. He would make a worse king than I ever could.”
I almost agree. I’ve spent too many months watching Cal walk the line between Scarlet Guard and Silver prince, refusing to kill but refusing to stop us, never leaning to one side or the other. Even though he’s seen horror and injustice, he still won’t take a stand. But he is not Maven. He is not one inch the evil that Maven is.
“I’ve only heard one person describe him as perfect. You,” I tell him calmly. It only maddens him further. “I think you may have a bit of an obsession where Cal is concerned. Are you going to blame that on your mother too?”
It was meant to be a joke, but to Maven it is anything but. His gaze wavers, only for an instant. A shocking one. In spite of myself, I feel my eyes widen and my heart drop in my chest. He doesn’t know. He truly doesn’t know what parts of his mind are his own and what parts were made by her.
“Maven,” I can’t help but whisper, terrified by what I may have stumbled upon.
He draws one hand through dark hair, pulling at the strands until they stand on end. An odd silence stretches, one that exposes us both. I feel as though I have wandered somewhere I should not be, trespassed into a place I really don’t want to go.
“Leave,” he finally says, the word quivering.
I don’t move, drinking in what I can. For use later, I tell myself. Not because I’m too numb to walk away. Not because I feel one more incredible surge of pity for the ghost prince.
“I said leave.”
I’m used to Cal’s anger heating up a room. Maven’s anger freezes, and a chill runs down my spine.
“The longer you make them wait, the worse they’ll be.” Evangeline Samos has the best and worst timing.
She blazes through in her usual storm of metal and mirrors, her long cape trailing. It picks up the red color of the room, glinting crimson and scarlet, flashing with every step. As I watch her, heart hammering in my chest, the cape splits and re-forms before my eyes, each half wrapping around a muscled leg. She smirks, letting me watch, as her court dress becomes an imposing suit of armor. It, too, is lethally beautiful, worthy of any queen.
As before, I am not her problem, and she turns her attention from me. She doesn’t miss the strange current of tension on the air, or Maven’s harried manner. Her eyes narrow. Like me, she takes in the sight. Like me, she will use this to her advantage.
“Maven, did you hear me?” She takes a few bold steps, rounding the desk to stand alongside him. Maven angles his body, ghosting swiftly from one of her hands. “The governors are waiting, and my father himself—”
With a vicious will, Maven grabs a sheet of paper from his desk. Judging by the florid signatures at the bottom, it must be some kind of petition. He glares at Evangeline, holding the paper away from his body as he flicks his wrist, drawing sparks from his bracelet. They light into twin arcs of flame, dancing through the petition like hot knives through butter. It disintegrates into ash, dusting the gleaming floor.
“Tell your father and his puppets what I think of his proposition.”
If she’s surprised by his actions, she does not show it. Instead, she sniffs, inspects her nails. I watch her sidelong, well aware that she’ll attack me if I so much as breathe too loudly. I keep quiet and wide-eyed, wishing I’d noticed the petition before. Wishing I knew what it said.
“Careful, my dear,” Evangeline says, sounding anything but loving. “A king without supporters is no king at all.”
He turns on her, moving quickly enough to catch her off guard. They’re close to the same height, and they stand almost eye to eye. Fire and iron. I don’t expect her to flinch, not for Maven, the boy, the prince she used to run laps around in our Training lessons. Maven is not Cal. But her eyelids flicker, black lashes against silver-white skin, betraying a sliver of fear she wants to hide.
“Don’t assume you know what kind of king I am, Evangeline.”
I hear his mother in him, and it frightens us both.
Then he turns his eyes back on me. The confused boy of a moment ago is gone again, replaced by living stone and a frozen glare. The same goes for you, his expression says.
Even though I want nothing more than to run from the room, I stand rooted. He has taken everything from me, but I won’t give him my fear or my dignity. I won’t run away now. Especially not in front of Evangeline.
She looks at me again, eyes flitting over every inch of my appearance. Memorizing what I look like. She must see me beneath the healer’s touch, the bruises earned in my escape attempt, the permanent shadows beneath my eyes. When she focuses on my collarbone, it takes me a moment to understand why. Her lips part, just a little, in what can only be surprise.
Angry, ashamed, I pull the collar of my dress back up over my brand. But I never look away from her as I do. She will not take my pride either.
“Guards,” Maven finally says, pitching his voice at the door. As the Arvens answer, gloves outstretched to hurry me away, Maven points his chin at Evangeline. “You too.”
She doesn’t take well to that, of course.
“I am not some prisoner to be ordered around—”
I smile as the Arvens pull me away and out the door. It eases shut, but Evangeline’s voice echoes behind us. Good luck, I think. Maven cares even less about you than he does about me.
My guards set a quick pace, forcing me to keep up. More easily said than done, in the restricting dress, but I manage. The scrap of Gisa’s silk feels soft against my skin, clenched tightly in a fist. I fight the urge to smell the fabric, to chase any remnant of my sister. I steal a glance back, hoping to glimpse exactly who might be waiting for an audience with our wicked king. Instead, I see only Sentinels, black-masked and flame-robed, standing guard at the study door.
It wrenches open violently, quivering on jumping hinges before slamming closed with a smack. For a girl raised a noble, Evangeline has a difficult time controlling her temper. I wonder if my old etiquette instructor, Lady Blonos, ever tried to teach her otherwise. The image almost makes me laugh, bringing a rare smile to my lips. It stings, but I don’t care.
“Save your smirks, lightning girl,” Evangeline snarls, doubling her speed.
Her reaction only goads me on, despite the danger. I laugh outright as I turn back around. Neither of my guards says a word, but they quicken their pace a little. Even they don’t want to test an irritable magnetron itching for a scuffle.
She catches us anyway, smoothly sidestepping Egg to plant herself in front of me. The guards stop short, holding me with them.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a bit busy,” I tell her, gesturing to the guards holding both my arms. “There isn’t really room for bickering in my schedule. Go bother someone who can fight back.”
Her smile flashes, sharp and bright as the scales of her armor. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve got plenty of fight left in you.” Then she leans forward, stepping into my space as she did with Maven. An easy way to show she is unafraid. I stand firm, willing myself not to wince, even when she plucks a razored scale from her armor like a petal from a flower.
“At least I hope so,” she says under her breath.
With a careful flick of her hand, she cuts the collar of my dress, stripping back a piece of embroidered scarlet. I fight the urge to cover the M brand on my skin, feeling a hot flush of embarrassment creep up my throat.
Her eyes linger, tracing the rough lines of Maven’s mark. Again she seems surprised.
“That doesn’t look like an accident.”
“Any other wonderful observations you’d like to share?” I mutter through gritted teeth.
Grinning, she replaces the scale on her bodice. “Not with you.” It is a reprieve when she pulls back, putting a few precious inches between us. “Elane?”
“Yes, Eve,” a voice says. From nowhere.
I nearly jump out of my skin when Elane Haven materializes behind her, seemingly from thin air. A shadow, able to manipulate light, powerful enough to make herself invisible. I wonder how long she’s been standing with us. Or if she was in the study, either with Evangeline or before she even walked in. She could’ve been watching the entire time. For all I know, Elane could’ve been my ghost since the moment I got here.
“Has anyone ever tried to put a bell on you?” I snap, if only to hide my own discomfort.
Elane offers a pretty, tight-lipped smile that does not reach her eyes. “Once or twice.”
Like Sonya, Elane is familiar to me. We spent many days in Training together, always at odds. She is another of Evangeline’s friends, girls smart enough to ally themselves to a future queen. As a lady of House Haven, her gown and jewelry are deepest black. Not in mourning, but in deference to her house colors. Her hair is as red as I remember, bright copper in contrast to dark, angled eyes and skin that seems blurred, perfected, and flawless. The light around her is carefully manipulated, giving her a heavenly glow.
“We’re finished here,” Evangeline says, turning her laser focus on Elane. “For now.” She throws back one daggered glance to make her point clear.
