The acrid ashfrom her brother’s funeral pyre still hovered in the air when a maid brought a note summoning Melia to her father’s study.
Death never left Melia’s side. Its high voice rang with the desert winds blowing through the empty corridors of Syr, its shadow stalked her through the abandoned rooms, its shape materialized in the dust rising on the empty plains. Melia let it engulf her, for the idea that she still existed, took up space, breathed, ate, drank, felt like an offense. Her survival felt like an insult to Rovin, burnt to dust, blown across the sky by the wild wind.
She made herself invisible in her grief, perfecting her shadowy existence, praying her father would forget about her.
It was a futile hope.
Roderi of Elmar lifted his head when his daughter entered his study and looked at her with eyes that were as cold and dead as two shards of black marble.
“Melia,” he said, and there was no warmth, no hope, no affection in his words. Between them, invisible but forever present, lay her brother’s bloody remains. “It’s time to discuss your future.”
Future?Discuss?
“What do you have in mind, Father?”
“You will wed Prince Amron.”
The winter sky outside bled the colors of the sunset. The massive desk, looming on the frayed carpet, threw long shadows,reaching for Melia. Her fingers twitched in an involuntary reaction; she tucked them behind the folds of her skirt.
“I thought I was promised to Cousin Maren,” she said softly, not as a contradiction, but a gentle reminder.
Her father scoffed. “That was when you were a nobody, a spare daughter whose dowry I could not afford. Now your dowry is the whole of Elmar and you deserve a prince.”
Melia wasn’t sure what she deserved. Since Rovin’s death, all the eyes in Elmar had been turned to her, the lord’s only child, the heiress. Her destiny had suddenly become greater than the confines of her person. And yet, she felt like a cold shadow, a skulking bad omen, a handmaid to death.
Her father had always worn mostly black, but since Rovin died, he took pains to wear no other color. Even his linens were dyed black. Servants whispered and rumors spread: Melia had heard people in Syr calling him the Black Lord. The name fit him, surely. Looking at him, she could see nothing but darkness, even greater than her own. He’d aged ten years in one month. His olive skin used to have a golden glow, now it looked deathly sallow. His eyes were dead and cold, and the corners of his mouth now rose only in derision.
“I talked to the king,” her father said, measuring her up. “You’re the greatest heiress in the kingdom now, so I offered your hand to the crown prince. Do you know what the king replied?”
That she was an empty husk, unworthy of his son.Melia shook her head, trembling. She was supposed to be insignificant, invisible, not a bargaining chip on the king’s desk.
“He said,” her father continued, “that the peace talks with the Empire were almost done and that, if everything goes according to their plans, the crown prince will marry one of the emperor’s daughters.”
Those words shook her out of her self-loathing stupor. “Peacewith the Seragians?” she asked, careful to keep her voice flat, to hide any morsel of hope she might feel.
“Imagine that.” Her father’s lips twisted into a grimace of disgust, as if he’d bitten into a rotten plum. “So much blood spilled and he thinks he’ll solve it with a wedding.”
Melia looked at the sky, now the deepest purple of the imperial banners, behind his head. So much blood had been spilled, so naturally, more blood should be spilled to avenge it. Rivers of blood, flowing from here to eternity, mountains of bleached bones, thousands of lost souls, whispering about lives that had been cut too short, too soon.
Death was her father’s horizon, all that he could see.
“The king offered me his younger son instead,” her father said. “It’s barely a suitable match for my heir. But I accepted. Do you know why?”
She could guess, and had she still cared about anything at all, she’d have been furious. But she’d long stopped caring, about herself, about Elmar, about the whole kingdom and their endless war. So she shook her head and waited for her father to say it out loud.
“Because I want you to go to court,” Roderi of Elmar said. “I want you to watch them for me.” His eyes glinted with dark fire. “That peace treaty would be a dagger stuck in the back of every man in Elmar. A betrayal of every life lost on the border. It must never transpire.”
• • •
His Royal Highness,Prince Amron of the House of Amris.
The name meant little to her. She’d seen him once, a couple of years before. He’d spent six months on the border with Rovin, and they showed up one evening for dinner, laughingall the way through it at their end of the table, with that easy companionship young men sometimes shared. The prince was fair where Rovin was dark, soft-spoken where her brother was loud, and pleasant enough to look at. She’d felt a spark of interest, but Rovin and he were thick as thieves, inseparable throughout the evening. Melia left them to their boyish antics that night, and never thought about the prince again.
She hardly ever thought about men at all. She had no beauty, no cheerfulness or sweetness men found attractive. In any other city, at any other court but her father’s, she would’ve been unremarkable. Black hair and dark eyes, a slightly crooked nose and lopsided smile, a body composed of sharp angles, lacking grace. But in Syr, where women were scarce and noblewomen rarer than hen’s teeth, men noticed her. Soldiers followed her with their eyes as she passed.
For a brief period of time, before Rovin died, she’d imagined meeting someone interesting—more interesting than her moody cousin Maren, twice her age, holding a border fort even more desolate than Syr—and doing something with her life other than quietly fading away. After all, she was young and strong and healthy, a resilient desert breed, reared for survival. There was a spark of life inside her that refused to go out, a streak of stubbornness pushing her forward. She imagined that there could be a different kind of life outside the massive red walls of Syr, slowly crumbling to dust. A life that didn’t necessarily include weapons and horses and men endlessly waging war.
But now, as she walked through the empty corridors, marrying a prince didn’t seem like an opportunity to escape—quite the opposite. It seemed like the dark desperation of Syr spreading out, pouring over the border like thick mud, drowning everything before it.
