Lys Wing smelled of crushed lilies and bittersweet memories.
Birdsong echoed through the green-draped courtyard. Clouds seared black lines across a cinnamon sky. It was too quiet. Most of the courtiers who’d fought with me in the coup had returned to their estates, to reconnect with their families and shore up their corners of this teetering empire. The legacies loyal to Severine remained in the palais, confined to their chambers until I decided what should be done with them. I trotted past chambers I no longer slept in toward Lullaby’s rooms. No one answered my knock, and I had almost turned away when the door creaked open.
“Yes, lady?” The petite girl who answered was one of Lullaby’s handmaidens.
“Is Lullaby at home?”
“No, lady.” Camille shifted her weight. A snowflake of dismay brushed my heart. Again?
Since I’d returned to the city, my relationship with Lullaby had been strained. Although she’d survived the coup unscathed, she—along with Sunder and a number of other legacies—had been captured and incarcerated by the Skyclad when I fled to Belsyre. While retaking the palais, I’d found her outside her cell, standing over the body of a soldat who should have known beautiful things could still be weapons.
Are you all right? I’d asked, urgent. Fingerprints bruised her arms and violence bruised her eyes.
Fine, she’d whispered.
But when I reached out to embrace her, she held up a shaking hand and turned her face away. Loup-Garou blurred around us, kicking open doors and subduing Skyclad. So I asked about the only person I still hadn’t found.
Sunder?
She pointed deeper into the dungeon. He might still be alive.
And she’d avoided me ever since.
I gave up trying to catch Camille’s lowered eyes. “Will you tell—” I reconsidered. “Will you ask your lady to attend her dauphine’s next Congrès? I miss her wisdom.”
Camille curtsied, then snapped the door closed in my face.
I jolted in bed, a dream of Midnight and mirror glass shattering on sudden wakefulness. The last somnolent chime of third Nocturne lingered like a secret, and I saw a shadow hunched at the foot of the bed.
My pulse soared, then calmed. A sparking emerald. White-gold slashed over a furrowed brow. I sat up in bed, curling furs around me to fight the chill of Belsyre Wing.
“Sunder,” I breathed.
“I have to ask, demoiselle.” Sunder’s half smile gleamed like a knife. “What have I done to merit a dauphine in my bed?”
Since we’d retaken Coeur d’Or, I’d slept in Belsyre Wing. With the exception of the Imperial Suite, Sunder’s rooms were the safest in the palais. His wolves might not be sworn to me, but they were fiercely loyal to Sunder and his twin sister, Oleander. “I couldn’t sleep in my room. It’s too cold in there.”
“It’s colder in here.”
“You have warmer furs.”
“If you don’t like the cold, demoiselle, no one’s forcing you to share my chambers. Or my bed.”
“Who said anything about sharing?” I sniffed, haughty. “The floor looks perfectly comfortable to me.”
He did smile then, levering himself heavily off the foot of the bed. He sat beside me, slinging one long leg onto the mattress. A spear of red light slanted in from the skylight and cleaved him in half, rendering his features in the abstract—a fathomless eye ringed in purple shadow, hungry hollow cheekbones, plush lips set in a rigid line.
“Did you eat?” I whispered, leaning toward him.
“No.” He lifted a gloved hand and pushed a lock of hair off my cheek. The leather barely brushed my skin, but a pulse of energy coiled toward the base of my skull. I tried not to flinch.
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“You have to eat, Sunder.”
“My parents died when I was two. It’s a little late to be mothering me now.”
The comment wasn’t designed to sting, but it did anyway. I leaned back against the headboard and wrapped my arms around my chest.
“Did you find him?” I asked, curt. “Did you find the boy who tried to kill me?”
“Yes.” Sunder scrubbed pale hair off his forehead. It needed cutting—jagged strands brushed his collar and fell into his eyes. “When he realized your decoy was just that, he fled to the Paper City. We found him hiding in a slag heap outside an illegal ambric refinery. His name is Pierre LaRoche. His mother was Skyclad—she died during the coup. He’s the eldest of five siblings—he’d been scrubbing stoops and sweeping trash in Rue de la Soie when the Red Masks recruited him. Sounds like it wasn’t hard to talk him into murdering you in public.”
“Did he know anything else?” Eagerness blotted out a question growing inside me. “About the Red Masks? Who’s leading the movement, where they meet, what they want?”
“No. He told us the names of his handlers, where he met with them. The names were fake—aliases. And the warehouse he mentioned, south of the Mews, was empty—cleared out. We won’t find the leaders of the Red Masks this way.”
“Scion help us. They’re like ghosts.”
“Worse,” Sunder said, grim. “Ghosts can’t kill the Duskland Dauphine.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It’s what they’re all calling you.”
I’d heard the whispers. It was what Etty had been about to say before LaRoche attacked me. But I hadn’t wanted to believe it.
Duskland Dauphine. The traditional name for the Sabourin heir apparent was always Sun Heir. The sound of my unwanted sobriquet clanged strange in the cavern of my heart. I’d come to the Amber City—to Coeur d’Or—to escape the Dusklands. To escape my past and find my future. It seemed I’d only found the same scorching darkness I’d tried to burn away with sunlight and impossible colors.
“Sunder.” I bit my lip. He cocked his head. “Even though it came to nothing, that boy—Pierre LaRoche—told you everything he knew. How did you get him to talk?”
An expression somewhere between pity and scorn spasmed across Sunder’s face before smoothing away. His words, when they came, rang harsh. “How do you think, demoiselle?”
My hands tightened, digging crescents of pain into my palm. Pain barely comparable to the atrocious legacy cursing Sunder’s touch. My face must have betrayed my conflict, because Sunder’s expression softened.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to.”
“What are you going to do to him now?”
“What did I just say?” he growled. “And I’m not going to do anything. He’ll languish in the dungeons until you decide his fate.”
“Me?” Surprise made my voice shrill.
“Yes, dauphine.” His lips tightened. “Or did you think ruling an empire was just sitting on a throne and looking pretty?”
“That’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair. Or haven’t you been paying attention?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I met his keen metal eyes and saw dread lurking in their depths—an anticipation of pain frothing like an anxious sea. His hand had moved to his side, palm pressed surreptitiously to his stomach. Guilt poured cold water over the embers of my irritation. I rose onto my knees and reached for the asymmetrical buttons lining his uniform.