Perhaps we had once been the same, me and that boy. But now he was a half-hearted assassin with a blade in his hand and a dungeon in his future. And I—I was the Sun Heir, dauphine of the Amber Empire and soon-to-be empress.
We were not the same at all.
And I wouldn’t change that for the world.
I stalked through the labyrinth of Coeur d’Or’s twisting hallways toward the sick beating heart of the empire—the sanctum where the beast slept. Hanks of hair tumbled out of my elaborate coif and flapped over my shoulder, so I tore jeweled pins from my hair and dropped them to the marble floor to glitter like fallen tears.
Two of Sunder’s Loup-Garou trailed me to the Imperial Suite. It was still a shock to see them in the palais instead of the once-familiar Skyclad Garde—where the empress’s forces had been shining chips of Prime desert sky, Belsyre’s militia looked more like shards of Midnight. But the Skyclad had been too fierce, too unswerving, too loyal—to her. Not to me. Never to me.
“You’ll wait outside,” I commanded, as I’d done each time I’d come here. “Only Dowser and your commandant may enter. No one else.”
“Yes, dauphine.” The male soldat—Calvet—was a few tides older than me, with flaxen hair and a set of enviable dimples. He moved to open the door.
“Dauphine,” echoed the female soldat, his partner—lean and muscular, with a crown of braids and paper-white skin. She posted at the threshold.
Severine’s rooms were quiet as a coffin. Despite the empress’s outward extravagance at court, her private chambers were almost austere. The white marble walls were free of gilt, the crown molding bare of filigree. No hangings or portraits or landscapes marred the clean walls. And yet, in contrast, papers and books sprawled across a vast ambric desk. In the dressing room, a thousand stained-glass gowns were flung haphazardly over armoires; priceless tiaras and necklaces slung limp across bureaus and between broken high heels. I’d barely begun to sort through the chaos of Severine’s affairs—frozen in time on the day I’d launched my insurrection—but already they perplexed me.
Beneath a skylight bleeding red loomed Severine’s bed. It was huge, draped in gauzy curtains drifting in an invisible breeze. A slight form occupied its center.
Severine.
I stood at the edge of the bed and regarded my sister. She looked so small and ethereal like this—a lost queen from legend, cursed to a lifetime of sleep. Her face, scrubbed of cosmetics and absent its customary regal mask, looked young—too young to have ruled an empire for seventeen tides, too young to have hurt so many, too young to have earned the fate I dealt her.
Too young to have been murdered.
Almost murdered.
Because Severine wasn’t dead. Her body had been recovered by the Skyclad after I fled the city, but it was Dowser who realized she still lived. He’d spirited her here in secret, expecting her to expire quickly from her injuries.
Only she kept living. If you could call this living.
She hadn’t woken once in the nearly two spans since I’d tried to kill her, even as her heart beat and her lungs pumped air and her wounds knit. Whether she was kept alive by a stolen legacy or the sheer force of her wicked will, we didn’t know.
I lifted a hand and circled it around her neck. Her pulse beat a faint rhythm against my palm—frail as a dying bird. Remembered pain sliced up my bare arms, following the path of barely healed nicks and cuts. I tasted blood in the back of my throat, and when I lifted my hand away from her neck, I saw it was slick with the stuff. Sticky fluid glued my fingers to a splinter of mirror glass reflecting my savage eyes back at me. I gasped, but no air filled my lungs. I reeled away from the bed as red flowers bloomed on Severine’s pale bedclothes, ruby liquid seeping from her mouth and nose as she choked and frothed and—
A door clicked shut behind me.
“Mirage.” Dowser’s firm, low voice. Surprise dragged my attention away from the vision of gore before me, and when I glanced back, I knew I’d conjured it involuntarily—Severine lay amid pristine blankets with diaphanous drapes sighing around her.
Dowser brushed past me to the bed, severe as a raven in the bright white room. He loomed over Severine’s frail body, and I was reminded of how big my mentor and teacher was—hunched behind a parchment-piled desk in a smoke-dim room, it was easy to forget. He put his fingertips to Severine’s wrist, counting heartbeats. Finally, he pursed his lips and released her arm. He polished his glasses on his robe, a sure sign he was perturbed about something.
“Isn’t it a bit ghoulish to keep coming here?” he scolded.
“You’re here too,” I pointed out.
“As one of only a handful of people who knows she’s alive, I confess I feel responsible for her.” He heaved a sigh. “As I do for you. I heard about what happened at the marché. I’m glad you’re all right.”
“I suppose you’re here to reprimand me for inciting a riot?”
“Those people who got hurt—that wasn’t your fault.” He paused meaningfully. I knew whose fault he believed it to be—Belsyre’s wolves. Dowser had disliked the Loup-Garou’s presence since we’d recaptured the city. He didn’t like their optics.
“Dowser, Sunder’s militia is the only thing holding this city together.”
“You can’t buy peace with weapons of war.”
“I’m not trying to buy peace. I’m trying to buy time. Until my coronation—until Ecstatica.”
Ecstatica—one of the high holy days of each tide, marking the rapturous moment Meridian caught sight of the Moon’s exquisite face and fell from the sky, ushering in the beginning of the longest day and the world as we knew it. We’d celebrated it in the Temple of the Scion where I grew up, but as a purely religious holiday, complete with periods of fasting, three days of silence, and hours of prayer that left me with bruises on my knees. The Amber City celebrated it as a secular holiday—gifts were exchanged, cakes were eaten, and plenty of wine was drunk.
The last three Sabourin rulers—Severine; my father, Sylvain; and his father before him—were crowned at Ecstatica. We hoped following suit would lend an air of legitimacy to my tumultuous rise to power. But the holiday was still nearly a span away. And the city had begun to gnash its teeth.
I decided to change the subject. “Did Sunder find the boy who attacked me?”
“I believe so.” Dowser retrieved a package from the door, and laid a blade across the foot of Severine’s bed. “He attacked you with this.”
Long and slender, the sword was forged of dristic, but a coating of bright red glossed the blade. At first it looked like blood, but when I dragged my fingertip along the balance it flaked away like paint.
“A painted sword?”
“I’m no expert on weaponry,” said Dowser, “but I know a few things about history and mythology. You’re familiar with the story of Meridian and the beginning of the longest day?”
“Of course.” Me and every man, woman, and child in the Amber Empire. The story of a wicked Sun enamored of an uninterested Moon, who tasked a powerful god-king named Meridian to slaughter the object of his affection. He flew across the heavens in a chariot of fire, with a golden net meant to capture the Moon, a silvery spear meant to pierce her heart, and a diamond vial meant to catch her blood. But when he saw the Moon, he could not kill her, and he fell to earth with his terrible tools. The net became kembric; the spear, dristic; and the broken vial, stained with mystical blood, became the ambric bones of an empire. And lost Meridian became the Scion, worshipped in many forms across the daylight world. “What does that have to do with this?”