“The legend didn’t spring into being fully formed. Like many stories, it evolved over time—each voice shading its meaning, each telling a new expression on a familiar theme. In a much earlier myth, Meridian did not carry a spear, but a sword. And because it was forged in the bosom of the Sun, the metal was molten—red-hot in Meridian’s hand. He was only able to carry it because in payment for his terrible deed, the Sun had promised him his own throne. He had named Meridian the Sun Heir.”
“You think this blade is supposed to represent that sword?” My head throbbed as if I’d slammed it on cobblestones again.
“That red mask the assassin wore too.”
That made sense—the pointed red nose did resemble a blade.
“But why?”
“I think it is an old image resurrected for a new problem.” Dowser hefted the blade. The skylight’s amber glow played over its contours. “Whoever these people are, they don’t believe you are the rightful Sun Heir. And they’re willing to die to try and stop your coronation.”
Dowser’s words fit sharp teeth around my heart, releasing a trickle of doubt down my ribs. Once upon a time I’d dared to dream of a strange, lovely world where I belonged. Jewels of memory gleamed at me from the dim—a dream of paradise and an empress’s sharp smile; a winter jardin and blood-red talons in the dusk; a kiss frozen in ice and a question that never had an answer.
But had that dream been nothing but illusion? I’d fought for that impossible world, but it had come with such steep costs. There had been bloodshed and death, pain and broken promises. The Skyclad banished to sprawling detention camps in the foothills of La Belladonne, replaced by Belsyre’s forbidding militia. A city chafing against the shackles of martial law. My own friends, broken and reeling, trying to repair lives shattered like the mirror glass I’d used to kill my own sister.
Almost kill.
Reflexively, I looked at Severine. Her continued existence was a threat to everything I’d fought for, every faint breath an accessory to my creeping doubts. I reached for the bright hope I’d welded to my heart these last spans. All of this would be worth it in the end. I just had to keep fighting for my dream of a more perfect world—a just, glittering world, where the poor had enough to eat, where magic created beauty instead of violence, where the promise of sunlight meant more than a wish.
That dream had once felt impossible. Now I just had to keep it from fading.
“We have to find the other Relics,” I said, wrapping my hand around the sunburst ambric pendant hanging from my neck—the only known Relic of the Scion, abandoned with me as a baby in the Dusklands. Dowser had searched for others during my coup against Severine, but had failed to find them. “With the Relics of the Scion, it won’t matter where I came from or what I did to seize power. They’ll have to accept me as empress, regardless of their red swords and old superstitions.”
Dowser nodded. “I’ll keep looking. I’ve been meaning to explore some old texts Barthet found in the Unitas library—perhaps one of them will give us an idea of what we’re looking for.”
“If only she had told you,” I hissed at my sister’s prone form.
“If only she had told me,” Dowser echoed. He turned toward the door, then turned abruptly back.
“One more thing—I nearly forgot.” He drew a sheaf of parchment from his sleeve. “It’s been nearly three weeks since you had me send the emissaries out. We’ve had some luck in the Dusklands—there was an outpost near Toulet with a few still alive. Near the sand ports in Dura’a too, although I hear more than a few defected to join Zvar corsairs in the desert.”
Severine’s lost legacies. Hope writhed hot and wild in my chest. “And?”
Wordlessly, he handed me the pages. I thumbed through them with trembling fingers, eyes scanning as fast as my brain could keep up.
Mirabeau.
Alveche.
De Laurion.
I flipped to the last page. “No Montrachet.”
“No.” Dowser shook his head, spectacles slicing through reflections. “But we’ll keep searching for him. Are you sure—?”
I wasn’t. All I could remember was that last, horrible moment when I’d found Thibo lying broken and empty in the undergrowth. I’d run for help, but I’d been too late. By the time I’d gotten back, he was gone. And now he kept slipping away from me, like water through my fingers—a sweeping feather hat with no face beneath it, laughing words with no voice to speak them, a ruffled silk shirt with no heart beating inside it. These were all the things I had left of my friend.
“His heart was beating, the last I saw him.” I handed back the sheaf of papers like they’d scalded my fingers. “Just find him. Find all of them. If it’s the only thing I do before—”
I clicked my teeth together, unwilling to finish the sentence. Before what? My unspoken doubts roused restless heads. Before another red-masked killer attempted to assassinate me in the street, and succeeded? Before Severine roused from her coma with vengeance in her eyes and violence in her heart to steal my legacy and regain her throne?
“Just do it.”
Dowser nodded. His footsteps receded.
I turned to Severine’s desk with a sigh. I’d already examined its contents more than once, but I kept hoping to find my sister’s secrets—where she’d hidden her Relics, where she’d banished her lost legacies, why she’d ruled her empire with a dristic fist and manipulated her nobles with gilded lies.
I tidied a few books—a heavy treatise on the principles of war by an Aifiri philosopher named Dax Kinza; a tome of translated Lirian death poetry bound in crackling leather that looked enough like human skin to make my skin crawl; a collection of famous love letters between my ancestor, Celestine Sabourin, and the beautiful and accomplished courtesan she never got to marry.
A slender volume tucked inside a Cascaran history book fell to the marble with a slap. I picked it up. Bound in suede, it had a simple lacy pattern embossed along its spine, but no title or author to speak of. I flipped it open. Elegant, girlish handwriting looped across the pages, fine as spider silk, and I squinted at the letters. I still wasn’t as literate as I’d like, and while I could usually get by with printed words, handwriting always posed a challenge.
… F punished me again today, although I did not deserve it. He knows I never meant to drive her away, but it is a convenient excuse. And so he made me watch as he tormented S with the twisted power he dares call legacy. I know my brother will not blame me, as F intends him to. But I blame myself.
A notion dark as the winds out of Dominion chilled me. My eyes cut toward Severine’s limp body, motionless in its bed. This was a diary. Could it be—?
I shoved the journal away, as though by increasing its distance from my body I could diminish my desire to read it. But it was no use. I snatched it back up, flipping through pages and pages of looping writing. Just past the halfway mark, the entries abruptly stopped. I thumbed to the last entry, curiosity and a distant kind of inevitability spurring me on. It was a single line, inked in black at the top of a swathe of staring white.
The baby is dead, it read. My last sister is free. And I am finally alone with my burden.
Ice crackled along my bones and congealed in my veins. A low buzzing teased at my ears and tingled along my palms. I dropped the book, then picked it up again and shoved it into my pocket. And when I fled Severine’s spare, silent chambers, I swore I heard her laugh—a distant sound like chiming bells and anticipated pain.