As she closed her eyes, she imagined the cold, unlit spaces of the Sleeping Palace. Somewhere inside this place layThe Divine Lyrics, the secret to more life. But nothing was without sacrifice.
The week before she had left her father’s home, he had given her a gift. Not her mother’s wedding bangles as she had asked for, but a small knife inlaid with ivory and gold filigree that swept like a peacock’s tail over the hilt.
“Better by your own hand, than thejaadugar’s,” he’d said.
His meaning was clear. Laila thought of it now as she pulled the covers to her chin. She turned her back on Séverin, on the evenings they’d spent playing chess, the minutes she pretended she didn’t see him waiting for her outside the kitchens of L’Eden, theway he didn’t realize he smiled when he looked at her, and every single second when he never once made her feel like she was anything less than his equal.
She thought of her father’s knife and words, of snow maidens with thawed hearts, and the collar of winter at her throat.
If surviving meant cutting out her heart, then at least she could do it by her own hand.
17
SÉVERIN
Six days until Winter Conclave…
Séverin had seven fathers, but only one brother.
There was a time, though, when he thought he might have two.
Wrath had dragged him to a meeting inside the Jardin du Luxembourg because now and then, Séverin’s trust lawyers needed to see he was hale before they allowed Wrath more finances. They did not listen when Séverin told them about the Phobus Helmet that conjured forth nightmares, the thorny rosebush where he and Tristan hid every afternoon, the bruises on his wrist that always faded in time for a new meeting. Soon, he learned to say nothing at all.
On one of those meetings, he saw Hypnos, walking hand in hand with his father beneath the swaying linden trees.
“Hypnos!” he’d called out.
He’d flailed his hand, desperate to catch his attention. If Hypnos saw, maybe he could rescue them. Maybe he could tell Séverin what he had doneso wrong to make Tante FeeFee leave him behind. Maybe he could make her love him again.
“Stop this, boy,” Wrath had hissed.
Séverin would have called Hypnos’s name until his throat turned raw had the other boy not caught his eye… only to look away. Séverin felt the turn of his head like a blade to his heart.
Some months later, Tristan saved them with a plant. Tristan confided that an angel had visited him and given him poisonous aconite flowers that—when steeped into a tea—freed them from Wrath.
Years later, the two of them would stand on the newly tilled earth that would become L’Eden Hotel. Tristan had hoarded his savings to buy a packet of rose seedlings that he promptly dropped into the ground and coaxed to live. As the slender tendrils spiked out of the earth, he’d thrown his arm around Séverin, grinned and pointed at the fast-growing roses.
“This is the start of our dreams,” he’d said. “I promise to protect it.”
Séverin had smiled back, knowing his line by heart: “And I protect you.”
SÉVERIN COULDN’T SLEEP.
He sat in the armchair, his head turned from the unmistakable shape of Laila’s silhouette behind the layers of gauzy curtains. Eventually, he drew out Tristan’s penknife, tracing the silver vein near the blade full of Goliath’s paralyzing serum.
Séverin reached for his greatcoat and shrugged it on. He didn’t look at Laila as he opened the door to their suite and took to the stairs. Instead, he turned Tristan’s knife over in his hand. He twirled it once, watching the spinning blade turn to molten silver. The roses Tristan had planted were long since dead, torn out of thedirt when he had ordered the hotel landscapers to raze the Seven Sins Garden. But a cutting remained in his office, waiting for new ground and a place to put down roots. He understood that. InThe Divine Lyrics, he sensed richness. A future where the alchemy of those ancient words would gild his veins, cure him of human error, and its pages would become grounds rich enough to resurrect dead dreams.
THIS EARLY, THE SLEEPINGPalace still slumbered.
The ice blossoms once open had closed. The gargoyles curled into tight crystals, horned heads tucked beneath their wings. From the windows, the blue light streaming into the glass atrium was the color of drowning and silence. Though the floor was mostly opaque, a handful of transparent squares revealed the lake’s depths far beneath him, and as he walked, Séverin caught the pale underbelly of a hunting lamprey.
In the eaves stood bent and broken statues of women with their hands either sliced off or tied behind their backs. With every step, the small hairs on the back of Séverin’s neck prickled. It was too cold, too bare, too still. Whoever made this place considered the Sleeping Palace holy… but it was holy in the way of saint’s bones and bundles of martyr’s teeth. An eerie rictus of a cathedral that called itself hallowed, and one needed to believe it just to bear the sight of it.
Séverin crossed the atrium, running through what he’d seen the day before in the ice grotto… the stairs leading to the sunken platform and the three iced-over shields, the pool of water and the ice menagerie turning their heads as one to watch them. Out of allthe rooms and floors of the Sleeping Palace,thatwas the one that felt like its cold, beating heart.
He was on the verge of rounding the corner to the northern hall, when he heard footsteps chiming behind him. He frowned. The others couldn’t possibly be awake already. But when he turned, he didn’t see any members of his crew. Delphine approached him, carrying a mug of coffee in one hand. In the other, a plate with a piece of toast, the edges cut and sliced in diagonals. It was heavily slathered in butter, and she’d used raspberry-cherry jam. His favorite combination as a child.
“I guessed you would be up early,” she said. “This is the time where only ghosts rouse us from sleep.”
