“He’s your cousin.”
“You’re my friend.”
Oleander considered me a moment longer before lifting her lovely chin.
“Sunder and I were fifteen when we came to Coeur d’Or,” she began. “Gavin was nineteen, and as a distant Sabourin cousin, one of Sinister’s most popular courtiers.”
I gave my head a little shake, and quickly did the math. The Suicide Twins were two tides older than me—nineteen themselves now. But that made Gavin …twenty-three? And his dynasty had been Sinister? I stumbled on a loose pebble, rocking off-balance.
“Like I said—the first few spans at court were misery,” Oleander continued. “The hazing was unbearable. A legacy named Bender found out I was immune to most poisons. He held a knife to my throat and forced me to guzzle arsenic until my eyes bled. A girl named Ruin threw acid at my face and cackled with glee until she realized she’d just burned away my clothes while giving me the ability to shoot acid myself.
“Gavin was different. He’d laugh, sometimes, at these public humiliations, but he never participated. So when he started towoome, I thought he must be kind. He wooed us both, in a way. He treated Sunder like a brother—something he’d always longed for but never had—and showed me every condescension. Fancy dinners, carriage rides through the lower city, his gallant companionship at parties and balls. He was handsome, and funny, and mature. I thought the fact that he never even tried to kiss me was because of my legacy. I thought I was in love with him, and when he told me he felt the same way I believed him.”
She paused so long that I almost thought that was the end of the story.
“I married him. We snuck down to the Paper City, where he’d found a Scion priest who didn’t care about the banns of marriage or the parental consent. I still remember the vows—I am the solace to banish your blight. But he was no solace. It turned out he was broke. Penniless. He’d discovered I was the wealthiest bachelorette in the Amber Empire and decided my unfortunate legacy made me an easy mark. Unlike most aristocratic weddings, a Scion-sanctioned marriage made us equals in everything. He planned to steal my fortune, then leave me. He told me five minutes after we left the chapel, and laughed when I cried.”
Shock and horror struck me mute. Were we talking about the same Gavin?
“What happened then?” Lullaby’s voice rang with a bare note of sympathy.
“I got lucky, I suppose.” Oleander shrugged. “Two days after our farce of a wedding, the empress made her third attempt on Gavin’s life. He fled back to Aifir and the marriage was eventually annulled. But—”
“But what?” I whispered.
Oleander’s throat worked. “That was the first time Sunder worked for the empress. He volunteered to murder Gavin, to avenge my honor or some other male idiocy. It was how Severine found out how to manipulate us both into doing her ugliest deeds: by using our love for each other against us. And it was how I found out that the only thing that comes from love is pain.”
A Duskland shadow coiled around my breaking heart and breathed nightmares toward my fingertips. I clenched my eyes against the sudden push of images—
“Scion help us,” Lullaby breathed, the melody of her voice burning off the fog in my head. “There’s something down here after all.”
The passageway deposited us into a vast dark cavern. No—I had to keep reminding myself that although we were underground, these Oubliettes weren’t caves. They were a château, buried and forgotten by time. With a little effort, I pushed my illusion outward, sending a ruddy dawn cascading toward the ceiling. Dust puffed around us as we stepped slowly into an elaborate ballroom or banqueting hall.
Once upon a time, this place would have been magnificent—although designed to be a fortress, I could nevertheless glimpse the hallmark Sabourin glamour that characterized Coeur d’Or. Reaching trees carved from black stone and veined with kembric took the place of pillars. A stained-glass ceiling arched high above. Ambric tiles beneath our feet ignited as we stepped on them, coiling in complicated spirals toward the center of the room, where a raised dais sat.
“This is where the throne would have stood,” Oleander said.
I squinted around the vast hall. “Not to question your interior design aesthetics, but why the center of the room?”
She lifted her eyes from the dais to the ceiling above, and I did the same. Faceted ruby panes picked out the pattern of my family’s sunburst emblem on the arching dome. But instead of being centered in the ceiling as I might expect, the sunburst rested nearly on the lip of the dome. And away from the emblem, the tiles grew darker—more opaque—until they disappeared into shadow on the opposite side.
“The sun would have streamed in through the sunburst like an oculus,” I realized. “The bar of light would have been like liquid ambric, and it would have landed right on the dais. But half the court would only have seen the back of the throne.”
“None of the court would have been on the floor.” Lullaby pointed above the glimmer-black pillars, where she’d noticed what I hadn’t—platforms. Or were they tiers? “They would have been up there.”
“Watching,” said Oleander, a touch darkly.
Watching?I frowned, and pushed my illusions deeper into the shadows. As I stared at the tiers, I was suddenly reminded of Severine’s brutal Gauntlet, where she pitted her legacies against one another—there had been stands of seats for her courtiers to spectate. It wasn’t a long stretch to imagine this as a kind ofarena.
Which had to mean—
“The Ordeals of the Sun Heir.” My voice filled with wonder, and for a moment I could almost imagine my words echoing through space and time, an infinite reverberation of blood and history anddestiny.“This is where they chose their next ruler.”
“The Ordeals ofwhat?” Lullaby asked.
While Oleander brushed dust off the dais, I filled them in on what Dowser had told me about Meridian’s heirs.
“Exactly as I thought,” Oleander interrupted, triumphant.
