“Again. One … two … three … hold.”
I don’t know how long we stood like that, face-to-face yet miles apart, counting breaths and tallying regrets. Sunder finally calmed, his muscles unclenching as the livid lines striping his torso slid back to the ambric timbre, which dulled and winked dark. His shoulders slumped, and his hand dropped away from his stomach. I shifted my feet, suddenly awkward.
“Your shirt,” I said, to fill the yawning silence. “It’s ruined.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He dropped the shredded fabric to the floor. He ran a hand through his sweat-damp hair, and slouched toward the bed. “I’ll send for more tomorrow.”
He slumped into bed, flinging his head back against the pillows and clenching his eyes shut. I watched him for a long moment; the troubled line between his straight brows, the ragged ends of his too-long hair, the uneven pulse leaping in his throat. I gathered my dressing gown around my shoulders and crept toward the door.
“Rest well,” I whispered, with my hand on the knob.
The door had nearly swept shut behind me when Sunder’s voice drifted across the room.
“Demoiselle.” A long silence made me think I’d dreamed his voice, but then: “Do you want to stay?”
His words brushed my heart with translucent colors. Yes, I wanted to stay. Scion, I wanted to stay so badly it was like a laceration in my chest. I wanted to climb into that bed and fit myself into the circle of his arms. I wanted to touch him without feeling like it might kill us both. I wanted to kiss him and forget.
I had once reviled him for his legacy, for his inborn ability to cause pain with a touch. But it was I, in the end, who had hurt him. It might be the ambric timbre radiating agony through his body, but sometimes it felt like I had held the knife to his stomach and slid the blade home.
“Please?”
The word was barely audible, but it undid me. I crossed the dusk-lit room on quiet footsteps. I slid beside him beneath the mountain of blankets and furs, feeling the feverish heat unspooling off his skin. He used to be so cold. Beneath the familiar crisp bite of genévrier and frost, he smelled like sweat and something else—something dark and metallic that lingered on my tongue. He turned on his side to face me, lifting a hand toward my face. I suppressed the urge to flinch. He laughed, but it rang harsh as a tarnished bell.
“I wouldn’t dare touch the Duskland Dauphine without asking permission.”
The words lacked malice, but I winced nonetheless. He raised his hand to drift along the contours of my face, his fingers a hairsbreadth from my skin. My skin tingled as though he actually touched me. His eyes skimmed my features, following the path of his fingertips: the arch of my eyebrow; the bow of my lips; the seashell of my ear. Heat climbed my throat, and I searched his eyes for my own reflection—to see what he saw, to feel a hint of what he was feeling. But his eyes were fathomless.
“Sunder?”
A sharp shock of energy passed from his hand to my cheek. His mouth tightened. He fisted his hand and shoved it beneath the pillow.
“Mirage?”
“Do you regret it?”
“Regret what?” His green eyes flickered. “Do I regret protecting you from Severine when I knew who you were? Do I regret telling you the truth? Do I regret helping you murder your family in order to claim a throne?”
My throat worked. “Yes.”
“You dared to dream of a new world—a better world—and I will never regret that. I reserve regret for mistakes and broken promises. And so should you.”
When I finally found sleep, I dreamed of glowing faces and shadow mazes and stones bright as sunshine. And when at last I awoke, the bells were chiming for Prime and Sunder was gone.
“Reconstruction of the Atrium has commenced,” Mathis Barthet droned. “But the original Cascaran marble was mined hundreds of tides ago, and the foreman informs me they’re having difficulty matching the rich kembric luster to the beige tone of the modern stone, unless—”
I leaned my head on my hand and tried to focus on the words, not the monotone they were delivered in. I smothered a yawn, conscious of the weight of many sets of eyes watching my every move.
Since we’d recaptured the palais, Dowser had been intent on his self-assigned mission of building a Congrès to guide and advise me. (Do I really need a council? I’d asked Dowser. No, he’d answered mildly. Severine didn’t bother with one for tides. I didn’t need a mind-reading legacy to intuit his meaning.) And though the Congrès chamber was relatively small—a circular room with a series of curving bay windows overlooking the Concordat—it always seemed crammed full of people. Dowser, my new councillors, a handful of courtiers yawning behind fans, servants scurrying about with refreshments, Sunder and my dedicated pair of black-clad wolves guarding the doors.
Barthet was Dowser’s first pick—they’d been friends and colleagues at Unitas, the Amber Empire’s most prestigious university. But while Dowser’s unique legacy had landed him a coveted role at the Imperial Court serving my father, Barthet had happily remained ensconced in the ancient halls of Unitas, earning the highest honors of scholarship before going on to teach. It had taken strenuous wheedling and promises to rebuild a library before he agreed to join the council, but Dowser assured me he was the foremost scholar of political strategy and post-conflict peace-building.
I found myself wishing he was the foremost scholar of public speaking.
“—which has been further complicated by the matter of Michaël Villaincourt, Vidâme de Cascara.” Barthet nervously stroked his long greying beard. “He, along with several other relations of the legacies you have elected to, er, keep on at court, are refusing to pay taxes or sanction Imperial trade until the youths have been released.”
“Excuse me?” Panic flared in my chest. Scion’s teeth, but the parents of Severine’s loyal Sinister legacies were revolting? “Why wasn’t I told about this earlier? Mutinous nobles seem more important than rebuilding the Atrium.”
Barthet tightened his lips and glanced at Marta Iole, the other newly minted member of my Congrès. She shrugged. Dowser sighed, rubbed his temples, and fixed me with a disappointed stare.
“You were told,” he said. “The day before yesterday’s Congrès, which you were late for. We spoke of it just after the matter of the Skyclad prison camps, and before the issue of religious tithing in the Dusklands.”
I fought the heat climbing my cheeks. He was right to chide me. But I’d been meeting with these people once a day for the past span, and with every new piece of information I learned just how far my ignorance stretched. To have an opinion on Cascaran marble, I had to know a place called Cascara existed. To discuss taxation on my nobles, I had to understand tax code. To resolve civil conflicts arising from newly built prison camps in the foothills of La Belladonne, I had to learn the history of ethno-cultural erasure in the wake of the Conquest a hundred tides ago.
And I wanted to learn. To sit on Severine’s throne and rule her empire, I had to expand my horizons, broaden my knowledge, claw my way up from the depths of my own ignorance. And I’d been trying. I’d been reading (slowly) and listening (badly) and asking questions (when I wasn’t too embarrassed to not know the answers). But the harder I worked, the stupider I felt.