My fault.
Monster. Monster. Monster.
I jerk against the restraints, kick out at the guards, strain towards Elvi. She twists towards me too, eyes wretched and full of tears.
Something hard strikes the back of my head.
I know nothing after that.
*
IT’STOODARKto see anything, but the Sanctuary, a windowless crypt buried deep in the bowels of the Observatory, is thick with the woody scent of rosemary.
My head is throbbing, a lump bloating where one of the Watchers must have knocked me unconscious. My heart is racing, my skin is crawling, the walls are closing in. I focus on the cool alabaster bed beneath me, use it to ground myself. Stars, I wish Orthriel were here. I reach for the door connecting our minds, but it’s shut fast. Our connection is weakening, ebbing along with all magic in Arcelia. All save my own cursed powers.
I count backwards from a hundred. Once my thoughts stop spinning and my pulse slows, I wrap my arms tighter around my knees, so far as I’m able with fetters still cutting at my wrists. The darkness, the cold, denying me water – my father’s instructions, I assume. Punishments for running away. My throat is scratchy, though I gave up screaming hours ago. At least, I think it’s been hours. You lose all sense of time down here.
There’s a rasp of boots on stone. I straighten as the door creaks open. King Hyperion himself. Flickering lantern-light throws my father’s sharp profile into high relief: blade-like nose, razor-edged jaw, ironclad lips. Steel-grey eyes glaring down at me. Behind him, shelves of curative crystals and elixirs. Row upon row of them, in all the colours of the rainbow. Beautiful but useless – at least as far as my mother is concerned. The healers’ preparations stopped working many moons ago, though they drudge on at my father’s insistence, desperate to cure her, blind to the awful truth staring them in the face.
She’s fading.
My fault.
I focus on the space around my father’s grizzled head. My vision blurs, dims, as it always does when I use my second-sight, and colours start to leach from his body, staining the air like the watercolour paints my mother favours. His neutral expression masks a jagged ruby aura of rage.
The bitter scent of frost-figs thickens as he crouches over me, his face mere inches from mine. If he notices the fleeting misting of my eyes, he doesn’t mention it.
‘What did you mean by fleeing the palace?’
I swallow, blinking my eyes clear. ‘I hoped to find the Book of Mysteries. I wanted to—’
‘Stars above!’ He brings his fist down on the bed an inch from my hand with a loud crack.
I start back, the manacles slicing my wrists, drawing a yelp from my lips.
I take a breath. This is my last chance. I have to make him understand.
‘I’ve done everything you asked of me, Father: taken the veil, resisted my powers, tried to keep out of sight and mind. But I can’t do this. I can’t allow myself to be bound, not to Astrophel, not to anyone, not while I still carry this affliction. Allow me to search for the book. Allow me the chance to purge myself. I-I wish to make amends.’
His face darkens. ‘I told your mother not to fill your head with this nonsense. The book is lost, the rumours it contains a means to revoke the brand, a fiction, like so many of those ancient tales she cleaves to. Thereisno way to cleanse you. If there was, don’t you think I would have found it?’ He sighs and turns away from me, starts running his fingers along the elixir bottles. ‘After everything you’ve put your mother through, I can’t believe you’re pursuing this idiocy, that you’d risk yourself – risk the future of the Stellarion dynasty – with so little thought. You’re only tolerated in Meissa because I make it so. Because you’re my only living heir…’
His voice snags on the word ‘living’ and I wince, in spite of myself.
My fault.
‘Do you know what the mountain-scum would do to someone like you? It’s not safe beyond the wall.’
I pick at my ragged cuticles. ‘I’m aware the chances of a cure are slim, but… but what if the Stars favour me? I could become a true heir to you, bind to a man I can respect, a full-blooded member of the coterie, someone worthy of siring the Stellarion line.’
He whirls on me. ‘I brokered the match with Astrophel, entwined your initials myself in the Silver Book. You’re spoken for on my orders.’ A muscle jumps in his throat as he sweeps a row of bottles crashing to the floor. ‘Lord Caelum was a patriarch of The Nine – he died a hero. That’s why I pronounced Astrophel heir to his father’s name and lands, despite his bastard-birth. And he’s more than risen to that honour. He’s never once let me down.’
The unspoken ‘unlike you’ hovers between us, cutting as the blade of the great broadsword that hangs at my father’s side.
Ever since Astrophel arrived at the palace, a gangly boy of nine, he’s been the son my father always wanted. Elevated by my father to ward-of-the-court from the Low Lands where he grew up, concealed from prying eyes, with his equally lowborn mother – an air-refugee if court whispers are to be believed – Astrophel’s made up for the five neverborns before my birth, and the one that came after. The one that almost made it, the one they know for certain was a boy.
To think I once looked forward to Astrophel’s arrival. With no living siblings and so few children born to the court, I hoped his coming might spell an end to my solitude. Two lonesome children – we should have been playmates; we should have been friends. And there was a moment – brief but precious – when it seemed all my prayers had been answered. But Astrophel soon realised I was a pariah, turned his back on me in favour of self-advancement. Time and again I was forced to watch as my father showered Astrophel with affection: the family heirlooms he gifted him, no thought for his daughter; the rides around the city I wasn’t permitted to join; the visits to check on Astrophel’s progress at the Asteum, though he never once enquired how my studies progressed with Izarius.
‘He’s willing to accept you, do his duty to the Throne, despite your taint. He’s more than you deserve.’ My father pauses. ‘You’ve already taken one son from me; you’ll not deny me another.’
