I gave up trying to catch Camille’s lowered eyes. “Will you tell—” I reconsidered. “Will youaskyour lady to attend her dauphine’s next Congrès? I miss her wisdom.”
Camille curtsied, then snapped the door closed in my face.
Ijolted in bed, a dream of Midnight and mirror glass shattering on sudden wakefulness. The last somnolent chime of third Nocturne lingered like a secret, and I saw a shadow hunched at the foot of the bed.
My pulse soared, then calmed. A sparking emerald. White-gold slashed over a furrowed brow. I sat up in bed, curling furs around me to fight the chill of Belsyre Wing.
“Sunder,” I breathed.
“I have to ask, demoiselle.” Sunder’s half smile gleamed like a knife. “What have I done to merit a dauphine in my bed?”
Since we’d retaken Coeur d’Or, I’d slept in Belsyre Wing. With the exception of the Imperial Suite, Sunder’s rooms were the safest in the palais. His wolves might not be sworn to me, but they were fiercely loyal to Sunder and his twin sister, Oleander. “I couldn’t sleep in my room. It’s too cold in there.”
“It’s colder in here.”
“You have warmer furs.”
“If you don’t like the cold, demoiselle, no one’s forcing you to share my chambers. Or my bed.”
“Who said anything about sharing?” I sniffed, haughty. “The floor looks perfectly comfortable to me.”
He did smile then, levering himself heavily off the foot of the bed. He sat beside me, slinging one long leg onto the mattress. A spear of red light slanted in from the skylight and cleaved him in half, rendering his features in the abstract—a fathomless eye ringed in purple shadow, hungry hollow cheekbones, plush lips set in a rigid line.
“Did you eat?” I whispered, leaning toward him.
“No.” He lifted a gloved hand and pushed a lock of hair off my cheek. The leather barely brushed my skin, but a pulse of energy coiled toward the base of my skull. I tried not to flinch.
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“You have to eat, Sunder.”
“My parents died when I was two. It’s a little late to be mothering me now.”
The comment wasn’t designed to sting, but it did anyway. I leaned back against the headboard and wrapped my arms around my chest.
“Did you find him?” I asked, curt. “Did you find the boy who tried to kill me?”
“Yes.” Sunder scrubbed pale hair off his forehead. It needed cutting—jagged strands brushed his collar and fell into his eyes. “When he realized your decoy was just that, he fled to the Paper City. We found him hiding in a slag heap outside an illegal ambric refinery. His name is Pierre LaRoche. His mother was Skyclad—she died during the coup. He’s the eldest of five siblings—he’d been scrubbing stoops and sweeping trash in Rue de la Soie when the Red Masks recruited him. Sounds like it wasn’t hard to talk him into murdering you in public.”
“Did he know anything else?” Eagerness blotted out a question growing inside me. “About the Red Masks? Who’s leading the movement, where they meet, what theywant?”
“No. He told us the names of his handlers, where he met with them. The names were fake—aliases. And the warehouse he mentioned, south of the Mews, was empty—cleared out. We won’t find the leaders of the Red Masks this way.”
“Scion help us. They’re like ghosts.”
“Worse,” Sunder said, grim. “Ghosts can’t kill the Duskland Dauphine.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It’s what they’re all calling you.”
I’d heard the whispers. It was what Etty had been about to say before LaRoche attacked me. But I hadn’t wanted to believe it.
Duskland Dauphine. The traditional name for the Sabourin heir apparent was alwaysSun Heir. The sound of my unwanted sobriquet clanged strange in the cavern of my heart. I’d come to the Amber City—to Coeur d’Or—to escape the Dusklands. To escape my past and find my future. It seemed I’d only found the same scorching darkness I’d tried to burn away with sunlight and impossible colors.
“Sunder.” I bit my lip. He cocked his head. “Even though it came to nothing, that boy—Pierre LaRoche—told you everything he knew. How did you get him to talk?”
