Sunder nodded, curt, then pulled his hood over his eyes and turned on his heel. As one, the Loup-Garou followed, a sleek machine sprinting dark through the golden streets. Two remained at my shoulders, tall and still.
Indecision churned hot in my stomach as I watched them disappear into the labyrinth of the Mews. I didn’t doubt they would find the boy, but I almost wished they wouldn’t. A soft part of me cried out for his youth, stolen by poverty and violence and the treacherous allure of misplaced ideals.
Perhaps, once upon a time, we’d been the same, me and that boy. We were both children. We both had a lifetime of choices laid out in front of us. We were both innocent.
Innocence.I turned the word over in my head until it stopped making sense. When had I lost my innocence? Long ago, one forgotten day in that frigid dusk where I was raised, ignored by righteous Sisters and slapped by vicious children. When I too was a child, full of impossible dreams and sunlit wishes. But then I’d discovered the royal, magical blood flowing through my veins. And I’d changed. My magical legacy had changed.Everythinghad changed.
I turned toward my carrosse, gilded and gleaming in the shadow of a tenement building. Above the roofs of the city, Coeur d’Or dazzled like a promise, a vision in kembric and amber. My satin slipper nudged a tattered piece of parchment: a pale face, a winking eye, a sly mouth.
Perhaps we had once been the same, me and that boy. But now he was a half-hearted assassin with a blade in his hand and a dungeon in his future. And I—I was the Sun Heir, dauphine of the Amber Empire and soon-to-be empress.
We were not the same at all.
And I wouldn’t change that for the world.
Istalked through the labyrinth of Coeur d’Or’s twisting hallways toward the sick beating heart of the empire—the sanctum where the beast slept. Hanks of hair tumbled out of my elaborate coif and flapped over my shoulder, so I tore jeweled pins from my hair and dropped them to the marble floor to glitter like fallen tears.
Two of Sunder’s Loup-Garou trailed me to the Imperial Suite. It was still a shock to see them in the palais instead of the once-familiar Skyclad Garde—where the empress’s forces had been shining chips of Prime desert sky, Belsyre’s militia looked more like shards of Midnight. But the Skyclad had been too fierce, too unswerving, too loyal—toher.Not to me. Never to me.
“You’ll wait outside,” I commanded, as I’d done each time I’d come here. “Only Dowser and your commandant may enter. No one else.”
“Yes, dauphine.” The male soldat—Calvet—was a few tides older than me, with flaxen hair and a set of enviable dimples. He moved to open the door.
“Dauphine,” echoed the female soldat, his partner—lean and muscular, with a crown of braids and paper-white skin. She posted at the threshold.
Severine’s rooms were quiet as a coffin. Despite the empress’s outward extravagance at court, her private chambers were almost austere. The white marble walls were free of gilt, the crown molding bare of filigree. No hangings or portraits or landscapes marred the clean walls. And yet, in contrast, papers and books sprawled across a vast ambric desk. In the dressing room, a thousand stained-glass gowns were flung haphazardly over armoires; priceless tiaras and necklaces slung limp across bureaus and between broken high heels. I’d barely begun to sort through the chaos of Severine’s affairs—frozen in time on the day I’d launched my insurrection—but already they perplexed me.
Beneath a skylight bleeding red loomed Severine’s bed. It was huge, draped in gauzy curtains drifting in an invisible breeze. A slight form occupied its center.
Severine.
I stood at the edge of the bed and regarded my sister. She looked so small and ethereal like this—a lost queen from legend, cursed to a lifetime of sleep. Her face, scrubbed of cosmetics and absent its customary regal mask, looked young—too young to have ruled an empire for seventeen tides, too young to have hurt so many, too young to have earned the fate I dealt her.
Too young to have been murdered.
Almostmurdered.
Because Severine wasn’t dead. Her body had been recovered by the Skyclad after I fled the city, but it was Dowser who realized she still lived. He’d spirited her here in secret, expecting her to expire quickly from her injuries.
Only she kept living. If you could call thisliving.
She hadn’t woken once in the nearly two spans since I’d tried to kill her, even as her heart beat and her lungs pumped air and her wounds knit. Whether she was kept alive by a stolen legacy or the sheer force of her wicked will, we didn’t know.
I lifted a hand and circled it around her neck. Her pulse beat a faint rhythm against my palm—frail as a dying bird. Remembered pain sliced up my bare arms, following the path of barely healed nicks and cuts. I tasted blood in the back of my throat, and when I lifted my hand away from her neck, I saw it was slick with the stuff. Sticky fluid glued my fingers to a splinter of mirror glass reflecting my savage eyes back at me. I gasped, but no air filled my lungs. I reeled away from the bed as red flowers bloomed on Severine’s pale bedclothes, ruby liquid seeping from her mouth and nose as she choked and frothed and—
A door clicked shut behind me.
“Mirage.” Dowser’s firm, low voice. Surprise dragged my attention away from the vision of gore before me, and when I glanced back, I knew I’d conjured it involuntarily—Severine lay amid pristine blankets with diaphanous drapes sighing around her.
Dowser brushed past me to the bed, severe as a raven in the bright white room. He loomed over Severine’s frail body, and I was reminded of how big my mentor and teacher was—hunched behind a parchment-piled desk in a smoke-dim room, it was easy to forget. He put his fingertips to Severine’s wrist, counting heartbeats. Finally, he pursed his lips and released her arm. He polished his glasses on his robe, a sure sign he was perturbed about something.
“Isn’t it a bit ghoulish to keep coming here?” he scolded.
“You’re here too,” I pointed out.
“As one of only a handful of people who knows she’s alive, I confess I feel responsible for her.” He heaved a sigh. “As I do for you. I heard about what happened at the marché. I’m glad you’re all right.”
“I suppose you’re here to reprimand me for inciting a riot?”
