The bond recognized danger.
So did she.
And the most dangerous thing in the palace was no longer the rite or the temple or the drowned brides buried in the garden’s memory.
It was the fact that she had kissed Lucien Vhalor in an archive full of dead women’s histories, and neither of them had wanted to stop.
Thirteen
The Trial of Hunger
Sabine woke hungry.
Not for food.
The thought arrived before she opened her eyes, before the cold of the room reached her skin, before the first bell carried through the palace walls. It lived low in her body, warm and insistent, and it had Lucien’s mouth, Lucien’s hands, Lucien’s rough voice in the archive when he had said he was trying not to want her in ways that would make him useless.
She lay still and let the dark hold her for a moment.
It did not help.
The memory came back in pieces sharp enough to sting. His hand wrapped around her wrist. His mouth a breath from hers. The sound he made when she kissed him. The force of him when control finally gave way. The look on his face after, when he had stepped back like a man dragging himself away from a cliff he fully intended to walk toward again.
Sabine opened her eyes.
The room was still dark, the fire burned low, and her marked hand lay against the coverlet like a thing set apart from the rest of her. The black lines were quiet. Too quiet. She knew better than to trust that.
She sat up and pressed her palm to her mouth.
Nothing.
Then heat stirred under the skin anyway, faint and slow, like her body remembering before her mind had fully caught up.
A knock sounded at the door.
Lysa entered with a tray, a basin, and the expression of a woman already prepared for trouble.
“The Trial of Hunger,” she said. “Mid-afternoon. The fast begins now.”
Sabine swung her legs from the bed. “Tell me.”
Lysa set down the tray and began laying out clothing. “You will not eat until the trial opens. Then you’ll be seated at a ceremonial banquet where every choice matters. Which cup you accept. Which dish you touch first. Who you answer. Who you refuse. Appetite, obedience, rank, self-command. All of it wrapped together so the court can pretend they’re watching virtue when they’re actually watching women navigate a minefield.”
Sabine crossed to the basin and splashed cold water over her face.
“What happens if you make the wrong choice?”
“You fail. Or you are marked as difficult. Or you offend the wrong faction and discover later that one mistake travels farther than the trial itself.” Lysa lifted a dark green gown from the wardrobe, then rejected it and reached instead for black silk edged in dull bronze. “This one.”
Sabine dried her face. “Why that one?”
“Because you are not trying to look soft today.” Lysa glanced at her reflection in the mirror. “And because you already looklike a woman who has not slept because she was thinking about something she should not want.”
Sabine met her eyes in the glass.
Lysa’s mouth shifted. “So I’m right.”
Sabine said nothing.
