He pulled away first. “You shouldn’t let me do that.”
“Why would I punish you for something I did to you?”
“You didn’t do this.”
“Didn’t I?”
He lifted piercing green eyes to my face. I gazed into them, glimpsing the edge of that seething abyss where he hid all his pain. He always seemed so hard, so sharp—a blade honed on ice and violence. But this Nocturne he seemed forged from broken metal—when I looked hard enough, I could see all the cracks where the pieces didn’t fit. “Do you really want to do this now?”
Trepidation chilled me. “Do what?”
He looked away, shuddering with blank dread. I watched him put himself back together again, bricking away his want and his hurt and his fear with painstaking care, until all that was left was a veneer of composure, slick as ice. He jerked his jacket more tightly across his stiff shoulders and buttoned it quickly over his heaving chest. When he looked at me again, it was his courtly mask I saw. I swallowed a froth of dismay.
“Do you mean to go through with it?”
“What do you mean?” I shivered.
“This Sun Heir business.”
I made my voice colder than his face. “Do you think I should let Gavin become Sun Heir? Do you think I should let him have the throne? Is that what you want?”
For a long moment, silence was a purgatory between us.
“Don’t you understand?” Sunder’s voice was slick with strain. “We have all done terrible things. The Nocturne of the coup, I saw Oleander breathe tangerine fire on a platoon of Skyclad soldats and watch as their faces melted off. Lullaby sang a man todeath, Mirage. And I—Imauleda half-dozen legacies I’d once called friends before one of them shoved an iron spike through my liver. Their names will be a shadow in my throat until the day I die.
“You yourself drove a sharp pane of glass into your half sister’s chest and watched her bleed out. But we did these bad things for a good reason, a reason everyone seems to have forgotten about—to putyouon the Amber Throne. And every moment we hesitate—every moment we equivocate about what we should and shouldn’t be doingnow, about who we should let edge in on our dubious triumph—takes away from the things we already did. The longer we wait to see you crowned, the more likely it becomes that all of this was for nothing. And the only thing worse than doing what we did … would be having done it for nothing.”
Anguish choked me. “What are you saying?”
“I’m sayingscrewGavin. Screw these Ordeals. My wolves hold this city together with their bare teeth, buttheyhold it. It’s less than a span until Ecstatica—until your coronation. Then you’ll be empress, without competing against an undeserving cousin or sacrificing any of the things you’ve already earned.”
“Earned?” I repeated, chilly. “What have I earned but the city’s loathing? I have to prove I’m worth their love.”
“You think these Ordeals will make them love you?” His laughter cut me. “Everything I’ve done—every sacrifice I made—was because I believed in that strange, beautiful world you dreamed of so long ago in the dusk. You should be showing them that, not competing in some archaic farce of a competition with a man who would never be Sun Heir if you weren’t handing him the opportunity!”
“I’m continuing a tradition stretching back a thousand tides,” I argued, spiky.
“Don’t you remember railing against the world the Sabourins built? A world that spawned Severine, and Coeur d’Or? A world full of dangerous deceits?” His words carved out a hollow in my chest. “These Ordeals—they are the epitome of that world. Violence and death. Siblings pitted against each other. Blood-drenched thrones. You swore to me you would break that world to see it remade into the world you dreamed of. Even if it made you a monster.”
I choked on memories that seemed impossibly far away. “That world was an illusion.”
“It must have been.” His forced sarcasm slithered toward sadness. “At Pierre’s trial you demanded the deaths of Sainte Sauvage and his Red Masks. A boy died, and you called for more blood—you screamed at me to hunt them down in the street like dogs.”
Guilt punched me in the stomach—I’d barely thought of Pierre since he’d collapsed, lifeless, to the boards of the pavilion. But now it came rushing at me like a gale—his broken body, small in life and smaller in death, ended with all the gravitas of a twig snapping underfoot.
“That wasn’t my fault.” The edge of my voice winged up like a question and I knew I was done for.
“You gambled with his life and his loyalty, and you both lost,” Sunder said, grim.
“I was so sure.” A note of desperation curdled my voice, and I folded my arms tighter around myself. “I was so sure he would turn on Sainte Sauvage.”
“But he didn’t.”
“He tried to kill me. Twice. Didn’t he deserve to die?”
“Death for death is a monster’s parade.” Sunder pushed himself off the bedpost and stepped close. His gloved hand skimmed my neck and whispered against my chin, urging my gaze toward his. I resisted for a long moment, then met his eyes. They were pain-scored and almost pitying, and part of me cried out as I fell toward a shattered sea of fragile hopes. Cried out for him, for all the agony he’d borne; cried out for me, and all the promises I’d broken. “But do you know what the worst of it is?”
I shook my head, not because I didn’t know, but because I didn’t want him to tell me.
