Breath caught in her throat, Risa removed a slim book bound in pale leather titledCairn, In Memoriam. The taste of copper flooded her mouth as she bit her tongue, apprehension washing over her as she flipped through the pages.
The bit of blood on her tongue wasn’t going to be the last spilled that night.
“Prince Javi—” she started.
“Call me Javi, prince of seduc”—he hiccuped—“tion.”
“I think we’re going to be sacrificed,” she continued, because his drunkenness was suddenly not the worst news, and she wasn’t too sure the reality of the situation was processing in her air-deprived mind.
The prince made a sound at the back of his throat that might have been dissent, might have been him choking on his own stupidity. “No, we’re going to be king and queen of the festival and you’ll love me forever!”
“Knight and maiden,” Maria corrected, giving up on the door. She settled on the ground, back against a bookshelf, legs crossed and tucked beneath her ragged skirt. “And only the maiden gets sacrificed.”
“Same thing,” the prince mumbled.
Risa hardly heard him. She was aware only of being short of breath again, though this time she couldn’t blame Brunhilda’s spell. “Why?” she asked Maria.
“Every day can’t be sunshine and rainbows.” Maria shrugged. “Literally.”
“This is for therain?” Risa whined, shaking the book she held in her hand. “The rain wants human sacrifice?”
“Rain isn’t sentient,” Maria scoffed, mildly offended. “It’s an ecological phenomenon where water vapor in the atmosphere condenses into droplets that, when gathered in the form of a cloud, eventually fall back to the earth in a cycle that, I suppose, could represent renewal and the cyclical nature of our mundane existence—the gods’ sick sense of humor, I guess, though supreme heavenly beings are just a human invention to explain all we don’t understand, like death, and to manipulate the masses into observing a code of conduct that may or may not make sense—”
“What does that have to do with anything?” The prince made a very good, if drunken, point. He punctuated his brief moment of lucidity by hurrying to a large dead potted plant by the window and proceeding to be sick all over it.
“What I’m saying is that,hypothetically—”
“Not this again,” Risa huffed, trying her best to breathe through the onset of panic that was making a home in her chest.
“—a town convinced that they’ve been granted a boon by a god might wish to curry further favor by, say, putting on a festival and sacrificing an adolescent girl in the hopes that the sacrifice might please the god, not that a god really cares about gender—it’s a god, gender is a societal construct, and society is a farce—though that townprobablyshouldn’t tempt retribution from the Crown by sacrificing the prince, so the prince will have to be the knight and kill the maiden, but it does make one wonder why this hypothetical town in this hypothetical kingdom has allowed a monarchy to gounquestioned when blatant misuse of power is an affront to the people and their right to choose the type of governance they wish to abide—”
The brass doorknob turned and the mayor strutted in, then stopped short at the sight of all of them.
“What is going on here?”
At least there wasn’t any singing.
Maria climbed to her feet. Her eyes went vacant, her face slack with disinterest. “The prince wanted to read.”
Prince Javi scoffed from his stooped-over place by the now-deader plant. His face had gone from sickly gray to the same olive shade as Maria’s dress. “I can’t read. I’m drunk!”
“Get out,” the mayor barked at the girl.
Maria walked out of the room without a second glance.
“Well, then,” the mayor announced, watery brown eyes wide and bright, rictus grin cracking at the corners of his lips. The more Risa stared, the more it seemed like his face didn’t fit. Something wriggled beneath his skin, desperate to be unleashed. “Let’s get on with it. We have a god to appease.”
Risa took one last look at the bookshelf. She couldn’t believe she’d have to face her death with the knowledge that someone, somewhere, was readingConvince People You’re a God, and Other Holy Aspirations.
The mayor had two men—who were identical down to the last wispy strands of brown hair on their heads—tie their hands behind their backs and escort them out of the study through halls and down stairs that Risa knew well. Outside, she could tell without lookingthat they were taking the snaking path toward the center of town, where death would be waiting.
“Bad news,” the prince muttered to her, his long legs striding in time with hers. He was ghostly pale now, moonlight bathing him in cold silver. “I think the purple drinks they gave me that tasted of starlight contained more than just alcohol.”
“Yes.” She spared him a look. His flush was gone, but the brightness in his eyes remained, feverish in the colorless light of the moon. Staring at him too long still made her feel queasy, heat waves undulating in the air before his face. It was unnatural. “You were poisoned.”
Those amber eyes of his squinted in confusion. “I was going to suggest I was cursed since it turned my hair blond.”
“Well, you wouldn’t be cursed-slash-poisoned-slash-drunk if you had listened to me when I said we should leave. But you were too busy being fawned over.”
