Another whimper pierces the door. Another.
Anger edges out any lingering sympathy. This then is her reaction to the prospect of our binding? Conceited prig. I start down the corridor to my audience with the King. I’ve no wish to be caught loitering outside her chambers like some lovesick whelp begging for scraps.
Never again.
I soon reach the central staircase which will lead me to the Orbium. I’ve only been back in Meissa two moonscycles, but already the palace is familiar again, though smaller than I’d embellished it in my memory.
My future-betrothed formed part of the receiving party that greeted me when I first arrived at the palace as a boy, waiting at the foot of this very staircase. Whispers had reached even the drab backwater where I was raised of the tainted heir. I’d envisioned some foul beast and was eager for a peek at her strange hair, her eyes, her marking. Instead, a small girl in full mourning, clad, like her parents, in the deep blue of the firmament to which her brother had so lately been commended. She alone wore a full veil. I couldn’t glean a glimpse of her. She was silent that first meeting, shrank behind her mother’s skirts, a limp rag doll clutched to her chest. Hardly the fearsome monster of my imaginings.
My own mother bade me show kindness to the Princess before I left her care, for the girl was a child alone, as I was soon to be. She fancied we might keep company together. It was a comfort to her. But Leilani stayed largely in her rooms, escorted by her liegemaid, the palace guards, or the cielsylph that shadowed her every move on the rare occasions she left them. There were precious few opportunities to speak to her, and I was soon too busy to pay her absence much mind.
For the King took me under his wing. Showed me the palace, the city, presented me with clothes finer than any I’d ever seen, my own horse. He rarely spoke of his daughter, and his clipped responses to my questions about her soon gave me to know he had no strong desire to discuss her. But not so the Queen. Despite her frailty, she visited my chamber nightly before I retired. Often, she would read to me. Missing my own mother, I was grateful for the surrogate warmth she offered, though the wheezing and the wasting were a painful reminder of my father’s passing. My hatred of the sand-rats burnt brightest in those late hours. While she thumbed through her Book of Starlore, the Queen would often reference her daughter. I learnt which stories were the Princess’ favourites, that – like me – she did not care for the legend of the night-birds, one of a host of shadow creatures the Dusk Sister sent from the Cradleworld to find and slay the Dawn Sister in a fit of jealous madness.
The King engaged a tutor to attend me while he was occupied with matters of state, instructed him to prepare me for my studies at the Asteum. But I resented the tutor’s stifling presence, his condescension at the gaps in my education, and contrived where possible to give him the slip. To ride out on Silvermist. I was not yet comfortable in the world of palaces and courtiers. Fresh air felt familiar. Safe. And I was permitted to ride unaccompanied so long as I kept to the palace gardens. During these rides, I learnt Leilani was also permitted short turns about the gardens on her pony in the early afternoon. It was the only time she was without a trailing liegemaid or host of Watchers. But she was never truly alone. Orthriel stayed close to their charge, even if the cielsylph wasn’t always visible to my mortal eyes.
I followed her on one such outing, keeping my distance at first, observing her through the hedge-maze. She stopped by the great fountain close to the Rotunda. After lashing her pony to a tree, she began to fill a drinking-skin with water. She slipped a glass vial from her cloak pocket, added its contents to the skin. Darting looks left and right, she knelt and slowly lifted her veil. A tightening plucked at my ribs as she peeled back the gauze, baring her face an inch at a time.
My breath came sharp. She looked up. Mercifully the hedge concealed me. But it wasn’t so much the shock of her lilac eyes, the flecks of colour marring the white of her hair, that drew the sound from me, as the ordinariness of her. She was just a girl. Delicate featured, pretty – save for her downturned lips.
She bunched her sleeves, poured the contents of the waterskin into cupped hands, began to lather them, to scrub at her forearm, her movements frenzied. I dismounted, inched closer. A strong stench of something caustic hit the back of my throat through the frost-rimed leaves. Whatever she’d mixed with the water was causing her skin to blister. She bit hard at the cushion of her lower lip, tears spilling down her cheeks. Cries tore from her, pitiful as those I heard echoing through the ceiling night after night. But she only scrubbed harder. It was then I realised what she was attempting.
‘Princess, stop,’ I said, surprising myself by emerging from the maze.
She stilled. Lifted her gaze to me. Her eyes more vivid at close range, captivating in their strangeness.
‘How dare you creep up on me unannounced,’ she stammered, dropping her hands, lifting her chin.
Without thinking, I reached out and cradled her injured arm. Her fingers stiffened. Blood wept silver down her arm where the scrubbing had opened sores. I remembered rumours that touching a Branded was bad luck and released her, eyes still fixed on the rivulets of silver tracking to her elbow.
Tears sprung anew into her eyes, but they glittered now. Fierce. Formidable.
I stepped back, attempted a clumsy bow.‘You’re hurt. Let me escort you to the healers.’
The stories I’d heard about the Starborn echoed loud in my ears. She might unleash starshine, knock me to the ground. But the fear in my heart, then, was nothing to what it became when Orthriel manifested a moment later, ordering me to leave the Princess alone, claiming she was their concern and none of mine. I’d clean forgotten about the cielsylph. I stammered some sort of apology and hastened back to my horse.
I didn’t see Leilani again for a moonsquarter. I heard her though, and her cries took on a new desperate edge in those sleepless hours. For I knew only too keenly what it was to wish oneself clean of a tainted bloodline.
As the King and I grew closer, Leilani gave me a wider and wider berth. I knew she resented our attachment, but I was so starved of affection, so desperate for a father figure, I made no efforts to pull back. I revelled in his company.
Six moonscycles after I arrived at the palace, Thawtide approached. I’d expected lavish celebrations to mark the start of Estelia’s former growing season, was disappointed to learn the King wouldn’t countenance large public gatherings, not since the Queen’s illness. On the eve of the feast, he summoned me to his chambers, told me he’d resolved to take his wife south for the celebrations, to visit a famed healer too old and infirm to leave the Low Lands. Under such auspicious stars, he hoped the erstwhile bounty of Thawtide might augur the Queen’s recovery. He presented me with a stick pin, the twin to the starred-sapphire Regent’s Ring he’s never without. As he fixed the pin to my lapel, he made first mention of a future alliance with the Princess.
‘Your father wished it,’ he said.
‘I thought the Princess was forbidden to marry?’
He must have seen a shadow of trepidation pass over my face as I remembered those rivulets of strange, silver blood. The rumours I’d heard about the Starborn and their powers. Would I be expected to breed with her?
He crouched down so we were of an eye. ‘Leilani is many things,’ he said, ‘but she is my heir, first and foremost. I’ve rescinded the law prohibiting her binding. It doesn’t follow that her blight must pass down the bloodline. There’s no reason to suppose you can’t sire strong, healthy heirs upon her. Untainted heirs, that is.’ He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. ‘You have what it takes to manage her. You are your father’s son, Astrophel. I would not trust her to anyone less worthy.’
I stammered my thanks, knowing full well the surviving full-blooded male members of the coterie, those yet unbound and of an appropriate age, must have already been approached and refused the match on the grounds of Leilani being Branded. This was less the King picking me, and rather him having no other available options. But I had never hoped for such an honour. I never dreamt so high.
I grew two inches that night.
I rode out after our audience, accompanied by my limpet of a tutor, to the market square to purchase a box of mooncakes from one of the many night-stalls heaving with them. My mother used to make the pastries every Thawtide and I thought to share a home comfort with the Princess the following morning, to start afresh now we were to be bound. But when I returned to the palace, I noticed a lit taper in her chamber window. After bidding my tutor goodnight, I waited for perhaps an hour, then stole upstairs, keeping careful watch for patrolling guards, but these were scarcer than usual, most already deep in their cups in the palace kitchens, carousing the health of the season. I rapped lightly at Leilani’s door. It was late, I knew her liegemaid would be safely abed in her own chamber at this hour. I waited, hands sweating where they gripped the box. It seemed paltry the longer I looked at it. I was about to leave, when the door creaked open. Leilani stood in her antechamber, hair unbound, sleep-lidded eyes growing wide as she registered me. I opened the box, stuck out my hand.
‘Happy Thawtide. Wishing you light of the season.’ I made the neatest bow I could.
She hesitated. The honeyed scent of the cakes lay thick in the air. Her fingers hovered above the box for what felt like an age. I swallowed when she finally seized hold of one, was about to step inside as a crooked smile edged at her lips, but then her fingers curled to a fist, the smile faltered. Her eyes rested on the pin at my throat.
