I shook my head. “A few lines. That’s it.”
“Last span, during the coup—you were hoping to find a second Relic, weren’t you?”
I lifted both my eyebrows. Only Dowser, Sunder, and I were supposed to know about the Relics.
“Please.” She smirked, reading my thoughts. “We tell each other everything. It’s a twin thing.”
“Yes, all right,” I snapped. “We’re still looking.”
“Well, I think I just found a Relic,” Oleander breathed. “It’s right here in the diary.”
“I knew there was a second Relic!” Dowser cried, his dark eyes shining with triumph.
My heart sang to see Dowser so thrilled. He’d suspected Severine had a second Relic in her possession for tides, but like everything else in her court, the empress kept her secrets in a stranglehold. Not even Dowser—one of her oldest friends and most trusted advisors—had been able to wheedle its location from her. At Carrousel—while I faced Severine—Luca had set a diversion to distract the Skyclad, Sunder had rallied my dissident legacies, and Dowser had broken into her private sanctum in hopes of finding the Relic. But he’d failed, and I knew he blamed himself to some degree for the death and violence that followed.
But neither he nor mystical Relics with unknown powers could have prevented what happened. Once I revealed myself as a Sabourin heir—legitimate or not—and tried to kill Severine, there was no going back.
“What does the passage say, exactly?” Sunder asked.
He’d bathed and changed after sending Gavin away from the gates, but the confrontation had clearly worn on him. His hair, dark with moisture, was pushed away from his face, accentuating the harsh lines of his pain-taut features. I tried to catch his gaze, but his eyes were glazed, pupils so huge and dark I could hardly remember what color his eyes were.
I shook away a creeping shiver and tried to focus on what Oleander was saying.
“S has given me his Relic, for he knows how I covet it,” she read out loud. “It was not even my name day—he simply came into my chambers and handed it to me with one of his strange little smiles. In that moment I almost wanted to tell him what I’ve discovered about the Relics, but I did not. Not because he would change his mind about his gift—but because I did not want to burden him with the truth.”
“She still only mentions one Relic,” Sunder pointed out.
“There’s more,” Oleander snapped. “But this changes nothing. Just because S gave me his does not mean I want F’s any less. I will have them both and then I will find them all.”
Silence hung like a tattered shroud of treachery and deceit. It was Dowser who finally broke it.
“More than two.” He plucked his spectacles from his face and ran a hand over his smooth head. “Barthet was right, that stubborn old fool.”
“Is anybody else curious,” I said slowly, “about who S and F might be?”
“F must be her father,” said Dowser. “Sylvain, the dead emperor. For his Relic hung around his neck until the day I hung it around yours and sent you and Madeleine into the dusk.”
My throat contracted, as it always did at the mention of my mother. She did nothing wrong but fall pregnant with the wrong man’s child. Me. She died to save me—another death upon my head.
I swallowed, hard. “And what about S?”
“It’s Seneca,” said Oleander. “She talks about him with a depth of tenderness usually reserved for siblings.”
Sunder snorted. Oleander glared at him.
“I think—” She hesitated. “If you take Severine at her word, Sylvain abused them. With whatever his legacy was.”
“What was his legacy?” I asked.
“If I had to make a guess …” Dowser polished his spectacles and looked troubled. “I believe he could tease out your greatest desires. And perhaps use that information against you.”
“Whatever it was, he’d pick on Seneca specifically, to rile Severine,” Oleander added. “I think her brother was the only thing she really cared about.”
Sunder didn’t laugh at that. Neither did I—Oleander’s interpretation of the family I’d never known had conjured something hot and unyielding in my chest, a bonfire elegy for a life imagined. I’d met my sister—she was corrupt and vengeful and murderous to her core. And everyone I’d met—even Dowser, who once flirted with the Sabourin inner circle—painted a picture of a father wise as he was wild, as loving as he was lusty. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but good.
Good men did not torment their children.
“Maybe she’s lying?”
“It’s her personal diary,” Sunder said, not ungently. “Why would she lie?”
I clenched my eyes against a sudden wave of vertigo, my heart tilting on its axis. My past was like a mirror that had been broken into a thousand pieces, and each time I tried to fit its pieces back together I found them dark and tarnished—a reflection of things better left forgotten.
But I was the one who had to remember. I was the one who had to do better. Because I was the only one left.
Except Gavin.
I looked up to find Dowser pacing.
“Two Relics, at the least,” he rumbled. “One for the emperor. One for the Sun Heir. I know the Relics are supposedly tied to Meridian’s mythic line, but why? What do they do? Are they baubles, worn by heirs to assert their royalty? Or do they serve some greater purpose?”
I put my hand to my chest, thumbing the timeworn curves of my Relic. Made of pure ambric and shaped into a sunburst, it was pretty in an ungainly way. I’d long wondered whether it possessed some magic properties. Sometimes it glowed warm against my chest, but that was not unheard of—even low-quality ambric contained a spark of alchemical energy capable of powering ambric artifices, from lamps to engines to medical apparatuses.
“We have to find these Relics. They could be the key to everything.”
“I must speak to Barthet.” Dowser thrust his hands deep into his sleeves and made for the door. “Those esoteric manuscripts he found may hold valuable information, if only we can tease out the threads of truth from the tapestry of legend.”
Oleander shot Sunder an unreadable look, slapped the diary into my hands, and left on Dowser’s heels. Sunder moved to follow her, but I caught his sleeve.
“Are you all right?” I murmured.
His eyes snapped with frost and pain. “Perfect.”
I frowned. “Is this about my cousin?”
“Unsurprisingly, D’Ars is still a prig, but no.” He raked a hand through his hair and sighed. “We caught a Red Mask disguised as a palais servant, sneaking through the service corridors. She carried another painted blade. We can only assume her target was you.”
Fear spangled white-hot against the back of my eyelids.
“She—?”
“She’s dead. She was wounded in the struggle, and then—”
He flexed his fingers and put his hand to his side, gritting his teeth. “I’ll redouble the palais perimeter patrols, but we have to assume they’re going to keep coming for you. Don’t go anywhere without Calvet and Karine—they’ll protect you even if I can’t.”