"Nothing." I turned back to the window, feeling nauseous. The screaming had stopped—either the man had died or his voice had given out. The crowd was applauding now, that same polite appreciation I remembered from the ceremony where they'd whipped Yara until her back was a ruin of golden wounds. The same applause from the Purification Ceremony I'd attended a few weeks ago, where a girl no older than eighteen had trembled in chains while Instructor Selim smiled and called itdetection.
"I heard the most interesting rumour at breakfast," Sera continued, oblivious to my silence. "About the Shadow Court. They say Erlik's son Kaan is organizing the ball and he invited all the half-breeds. Can you imagine? I heard that Lord Kaan is a monster, but he's the most handsome male in the Shadow Realm."
"Mmm."
"And there are whispers of another son. A secret one, hidden somewhere, even more powerful than Kaan." She shivered dramatically. "They say Erlik has been searching for him for centuries. That when shadow finally claims what light has hidden, neither court will survive it."
Something cold moved through my chest. I thought, unbidden, of Elif's face at the dinner table — the terror that hadn't been about lordlings or politics or anything I could name. The way she'd said "what he is" and not "who he is." The way she'd looked at me like I was part of something she'd spent two hundred years trying to prevent.
No. That was absurd. Hakan was Light Court. His mother was from the border villages. There was nothing —
I pushed the thought away before it could finish forming.
"How terrifying," I said flatly.
Sera nodded, satisfied, and went back to arranging my jewelry.
The screaming had definitely stopped now. I watched the crowd begin to disperse, watched them stream out of the square clutching their souvenirs and their spiced wine, chattering happily about the spectacle they'd just witnessed.
This was the Light Court. This was what we were.
And everyone pretended we were better than the Shadow Realms because we called our atrocities mercy.
"At least we're civilised," Sera said, as if reading my thoughts. "At least we don't enjoy their suffering like those shadow savages do."
I looked at the crowd below. The smiling faces. The children playing. The vendors counting their coins.
"No," I said quietly. "We would never enjoy it."
Sera nodded, satisfied, and went back to arranging my jewelry.
I stayed at the window long after the square had emptied, watching servants come to scrub the golden circle clean of blood and ash, preparing it for the next purification. The next mercy. The next screaming soul offered up to my father's divine light while the people of his realm applauded and called it justice.
I called it darkness, knowing deep down that the Shadow Court couldn't have been as corrupted as the Light Court. It was impossible to experience this kind of level of evil and call it goodness.
Light Court corruption was in the core. And I knew I was dormant—complicit through silence, guilty through inaction, because I had done nothing so far to change it.
I turned from the window. Sera had left. I was alone.
I went to my writing desk, took out a sheet of plain paper — not the embossed royal stationery, just paper — and I wrote down three things: the man's name, if I could find it. His children's names. His wife's, if anyone would tell me. I did not know yet what I would do with a list. I did not know what a list could accomplish against a system that had been functioning perfectly for centuries without my objection.
But I wrote it down. So that someone remembered him as a person with a name, and not as an afternoon's entertainment in Justice Square.
From the windowsill behind me, Melo made a sound I'd never heard from her — a low, keening note that cut through the quiet evening like something torn. When I turned, she was staring toward Justice Square with her hackles raised, every line of her small body rigid with a fury that looked too large for a fox to hold.
"Melo?"
She didn't look at me. Her turquoise eyes stayed fixed on the distant square where servants were already scrubbing the golden circle clean, and something in her expression — the set of her jaw, the flattened ears, the way her whole body trembled with what I could only call rage — told me she understood exactly what had just happened. Understood it and hated it with an intensity that had nothing to do with animal instinct.
Then she tucked her nose beneath her tail and turned away from the window, and the silence that followed was worse than any sound she could have made.
CHAPTER 9
SHADOWS AND REGRET
Hakan
"Lady Mira called me harmless yesterday,” Sarp announced, and dropped into the chair across from me as though the fate of the realm hung on what came next. It didn't. "Harmless. Me. The terror of debutante balls across three provinces."
