I frowned. At Coeur d’Or I had a reputation as a notorious lightweight. “Only if it goes both ways. If I think you’re lying,youdrink until I believeyou.”
“Salut.” Luca clinked his glass against mine. “You go first.”
“Do you know a boy named Pierre LaRoche?”
“Only by name.” Bitterness touched his voice. “Everyone knows Sunder’s wolves knocked out half his teeth at Maison Creux before dragging him through the Paper City in chains.”
Hard not to take that as truth. I nodded at him to go. He considered.
“What did it feel like to kill your sister?”
The question swept my tongue into the back of my throat, and I nearly gagged.Brittle diamonds of glass strewn across a tile floor; a shattered oculus seeping blood; the livid imprint of my sister’s desperate gasps.
“It felt good.”
“Drink.”
The liquor burned my throat and scalded my soul. “My heart broke like mirror glass, and that was what I stabbed her with. I dream sometimes that I am her, and I feel the force of my own hatred when the blade breaks my skin. Sometimes I think I died that Nocturne, right along with her, and now I’m a ruthless ghost of the dauphine I hoped to be. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
Luca’s bonfire eyes flashed. He downed his portion, then sloshed more booze into both our glasses.
“Does this work if you drink on both our turns?” My voice felt raw.
Luca shrugged. “Your turn.”
“Do you know who leads the Red Masks? Who’s been trying to kill me?”
“Yes and no.” He propped his elbows on the table. “He’s a priest of some kind, if his rhetoric is any indication. Calls himself Sainte Sauvage. He showed up out of nowhere after the coup, preaching Scion theology to anyone who would listen.”
Sainte Sauvage. That was news. “Why are they listening? I thought Ambers tended toward the secular.”
“Tensions are running high, Sylvie. Higher than they were before your coup against Severine. Nobody likes your wolves—they’re quiet and fast and they fight too clean. At least with the Skyclad, people could hear them clanking around—you always had time to pack up your stolen goods or pull the shades over your lotus den. And if they did catch you, a nice stash of joie or kembric livres would convince them to look the other way. The Loup-Garou are above all that.”
An odd flash of pride warmed my stomach. Although it might’ve just been liquor burning its way through my intestines. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
“It might be, under different circumstances. But people are scared and isolated and, above all, uncertain. They don’t know who you are or what you stand for or what’s going to happen next. They’re looking for something to believe in—to put theirfaithin. And Sainte Sauvage has given that to many of them.”
“Whoishe?”
“I don’t know. I tried following him once, but he lost me in the Paper City after five minutes. I do know he’s recruiting. Young people with nothing much to lose. People he can bend to his will. People he can convince to kill.”
“Will it end?” The words hurt to speak. “After my coronation at Ecstatica, will they stop trying to kill me?”
Luca clicked his tongue against his teeth. “You asked four questions. My turn.”
I bit down a selfish protest.
“Are you—” He downed his drink and cleared his throat. “Are you and Sunder together?”
My mouth opened, but no words came out. Of all the questions, that was what Luca wanted to know? There had been a time when we’d been close, when we’d flirted with the idea of …something. But that felt like an age ago. Sudden melancholy threw dust against my heart, and I looked at the candy-bright rings on my fingers and my crushed velvet cape. I’d come so far from the pathetic orphan heating scraps of borrowed meat over a cook fire. And Luca? I studied him, his hammered kembric eyes and lean muscles, his three-day stubble and liquor-sharp breath. He wasn’t the same boy who’d sung me Tavendel songs and offered me friendship at no cost.
We might as well be strangers to each other.
Luca watched my hesitation, eyes full of candlelight. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“Elaborate, or drink.”
