8

TALON

It’s been a rough week. I’ve barely slept thanks to constant meetings and interruptions and fires to put out as I work to institute the command of the High Prince Regent and end this fourteen-year war. General Bloodscale is so resistant I’m worried I might have to force him into early retirement, but he’s been one of my best supporters, and I’m determined to keep him. The minister of works is the only council member on my side other than Aunt Aurora—and even though she puts on a loyal face to the public, in private moments I can see fear in her eyes. This is so sudden, such a change of policy—not to mention the anointing of a new Sphinx scion—and Caspian so unpredictable, she and I know if we make one wrong move, we’ll all be dead. A Dragon’s hoard is only as good as what he can protect.

And Caspian won’t talk to me. He’s avoiding me, just like he’s done for years, and I’m avoiding Darling, the instigator and heart of this problem. At least I expect she’s chafing under what amounts to house arrest and nearly as many meetings as me, as Aurora and the minister of prosperity pull apart family trees and untangle titles in order to rebraid them around Darling’s neck. I made sure half her staff are soldiers dressed up as new maids—pulled from palace guard duty and the eastern battalions so they don’t know any of the Teeth Darling killed last month—and I continue denying requests for her to join the regulars or palace guard for workouts. No matter how innocent a request it is on her part, which is doubtful in the first place, the Teeth remember Eovan, and Finn has only barely recovered. Somebody would take offense and try for revenge; then it would be a bloodbath—and I can’t lose any more people to her knife.

Caspian sent me a note asking I be lenient with our recovered Sphinx scion, and I sent him a response that we could discuss it in person.

When I seek him out, he’s nowhere to be found or just departed, despite the fact that Caspian doesn’t take meetings with anyone but his personal healer, Elias, and the occasional random courtier. I refuse the indignity of yelling at him through his locked door.

I’m forced to use my boon to ensnare him. It’s a tracking boon, better suited to hunters and spies than soldiers, but it’s also how I knew Darling was in that dark dining room back in Lastrium, and sometimes I can use it to track slightly forward and predict fighting patterns. So I know exactly when Caspian is ensconced in his master suite for his daily appointment with Elias, when they’re finished, and when Elias leaves Caspian to be washed and dressed for tonight’s gala.

The guards have just flung open the gates of Phoenix Crest to welcome guests through the spangled corridors, the musicians play the opening notes of Swiftwind’s “Variations on a Lament for the First Phoenix,” wine has been poured, and boonlights twinkle against the mosaic ceiling of the ballroom, and I arrive impatiently at Caspian’s suite door, ready. He cannot hide from his own scheming gala.

His first and second valets are within, have been for some time, and as I gather myself to barge in, two maids appear: one holds a delicate ceramic jar with a wax cap and a small liquor cup; the other, a plate of spice cookies. Their eyes widen at the sight of me, and they bow.

“Give those to me,” I say, holding out my hands. They quickly obey, and only one girl grimaces. “Now bring sweet coffee for both of us.”

The girl who grimaced bites her lip. I wait until she says, “War Prince, there’s no more coffee. The fortress ran out months ago and can’t get more.”

I grit my teeth. Many of our imports have been cut off for years, thanks to the Kraken pirates, and several overseas nations refuse to endanger their people with Pyrlanum trade.

“Fine,” I say. “The darkest Pyrlanum tea you can find, then.” I nod to the guard stationed beside Caspian’s door, and he pulls it open.

These rooms are opulent and barely lived in, a pointless performance for the palace when everyone knows Caspian sleeps in his tower workroom more often than not. I stride over thick rugs and past tall windows overlooking an inner garden—the same one Darling’s rooms give her access to. But Caspian is two levels up the climbing Phoenix Crest with no balcony or exterior access. Through the arched doorway I hear Caspian’s voice ring out. “The liquor! Wait to do my lips until I can swallow a bit down.”

Scowling, I open my mouth to speak, but Caspian glances at me, and shock flits over his expression before he hides it behind a huge grin. “Baby brother!”

Caspian stands up from his stool at a gilded vanity, spreading his arms so that the stiff brocade and silk engulfing him flare like wings. He’s in layers of green and gold, and the outer coat has a high collar that gathers behind his head to flare out into spines down his back. “Look,” he says, exuding glee. “It unhooks from here and here at my shoulders, and under that collar, so that once I’ve impressed everyone, these sleeves and outer skirt can drape over the throne and I can dance without tripping over myself.”

I have to admit it’s as impressive as it is draconic. So I nod and set his liquor and cookies down on the long table stacked with unopened letters and yellowing scrolls. I don’t open the wax seal on the liquor jar but say, “We need to talk before we go in there.”

The two valets have their heads down, pretending to fade away. The first holds a flat box of hairpins and earrings open on display; the other has a makeup brush in her hand. I nearly tell them to leave, but Caspian is peering at me through narrow eyes. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

Clearly he wants the answer to be no. But it’s my formal Teeth uniform: bloodred jacket over ivory trousers, real black dragon-scale buttons, and a matching scale pauldron armoring my left shoulder. The dress sheath for my falchion has some of the most intricate black-glass scale mosaic I’ve seen in my life, and I don’t know what Caspian’s problem is with how I look. So I just set my jaw and stare at him.

His lips flutter into a fond smile, and he waves me to him. “Come sit down, right here. Ninia, I need that powder back. Faelon, you pour me that liquor, then find something in your box for Talon. Or, no—do we have time to send for the great-grandmother’s claws? They might fit.”

My brother ushers me to the stool, gently pushing me down, and I look at Faelon, whose eyes go to my left hand, and he shakes his head. “No, Prince Regent, they won’t.”

“Alas, well, drinks first.”

The sound of Caspian’s heavy layers sweeps around me, and I look at our reflections in the mirror, telling myself if I have to let him dress me up a bit more for time together, fine. I meet his light green gaze and find myself seeking similarities: maybe the shape of our nose, the square cut of our jaws. My mouth is bigger, and I have a scar high on my right cheek caused by a gauntleted punch from Finn that I should have blocked when we were fourteen. Caspian’s long hair softens his entire look, even pulled back in sections and pinned with red jewels. He looks like a bolder but equally beautiful version of Aunt Aurora. Or maybe he looks like our mother. Except his eyes seem more crystalline than usual thanks to dark lines of paint around them, drawn out toward his temples. It reminds me of the black holes of Darling’s eyes in some of his paintings. I know he did it on purpose. I wonder what she’ll look like tonight, like a prince herself, I hope—and crush the thought.

“My blade?” Faelon asks softly, liquor jar in hand. I shake my head and turn to Caspian.

Caspian takes the cup of liquor and knocks it back. Then he turns me on the stool and touches my chin with two fingers, tilting my face up. He stares at me, through me.

I’ve worked to be in the same room with him, and now I can’t think of all my demands. I just want him to tell me what he’s planning. How to help him. How to keep him safe. “Caspian—”

“Faelon, Ninia, you may go,” he says, never looking away from me. His hand moves, and then his fingers return, rubbing something cool and soft into my skin along my cheekbones. “It’s just to make you glow,” he chides softly as I stiffen and try to draw away. “Don’t you think I can paint you up without ruining anything?”

I make myself go still, listening for the departure of his valets. When the outer door closes, I say, “I want to know what you’re planning tonight.”

“Introducing Darling to the world, dragonlet. You know that.”

“But what else?”

Caspian snorts and looks directly at my eyes. “Dancing. Drinking. Merriment. Showing off what power we still retain. The war is over, but we are strong. We have our hoard.”

“With the lost scion of House Sphinx brought home.”

“At our side,” Caspian emphasizes. He dabs more of the cream on my face, then purses his lips as he chooses a paint pot and Ninia’s discarded brush. “Look up,” he tells me, then smiles. “With only your eyes, don’t move your head.”

I do, rolling my eyes to look at the ceiling. There’s a mural of the Drakes of Every Season lusciously painted from wall to wall. Not Caspian’s work, but much older. From when the Phoenix ruled here, not House Dragon. The makeup brush touches the inner corner of my eye, cold and teasing, and I blink at the tickle. If I talk, will it mess him up? He’s got me trapped for the moment.

And part of me revels in it, in being under my brother’s care. I don’t wear makeup, but I might if Caspian would do it for me every day. I was so little the sole time I tried to paint with him, a year after Mother died. He let me have a corner of a canvas and whatever color I wished. I covered my hands and smeared in shapes I thought were like his, sad and warm at the same time—until Caspian gasped suddenly and shoved me away, tore our painting into shreds, and screamed until I ran into Aunt Aurora’s skirts as she rushed in. After that I was handed to the Teeth permanently, and I had a hundred older siblings in the barracks instead.

Caspian moves to my other eye. When he’s finished, he turns to the jewelry and gives a thoughtful hum.

I glance in the mirror: he’s used dark lines to enhance my eyes into a true dragon green. Hard to notice if you weren’t expecting it, unlike his striking style. And I do look . . . brighter. “Caspian. Give me something. Everything is on the line, and I am working very hard to end this war, to do as you will. But you’re avoiding me like a child. It undercuts our solidarity—it undercuts both of us.”

“You can handle it,” he assures me.

I do not feel complimented. “Why did you suddenly decide this?”

“You want the war to go on?”

“No—but I want to know what changed. Why now? Is it just Darling?”

Caspian says, “This is the beginning. She is the beginning.”

“Of what?”

“The end of the war.”

“Caspian.” I take a deep breath. “What do you know that I do not? Tell me why you trust her. Why are you giving her this? Putting the weight of our future on her shoulders?”

“So dramatic,” he murmurs, and I bare my teeth at him, clenching my jaw to bite back this deep anger.

“Tell me.”

“Justice?”

“Are you asking me?” I grind out.

Caspian laughs and slips me a mischievous grin. “Justice,” he says more firmly.

I don’t laugh, and his expression falls. He stops sifting through rings and earrings and chains of gold. Turns fully to me. Nothing shows on his face, a chilling contrast to the makeup and vivid flare of the dragon collar and the garnets glinting in his hair like blood spatter. He’s looking through me again.

“She lived in darkness for years,” he says.

The breath in my lungs seems to freeze. He doesn’t mean metaphorically. There’s a lightness in his tone, a dreamy remembering.

“Raw darkness, Talon, and it forged her—it made her eyes, those eyes . . .” Caspian’s head tilts as he looks at something that is not there.

If I didn’t know Caspian’s boon is simply for art, at moments like this I’d think he had one of those ancient, long-lost boons like dreamwalking or mindsight.

“It’s our fault,” he says. “She was in hiding, desperate and alone and orphaned, because of Father’s war.”

“They killed our mother,” I say, though even as I say it, I know I don’t think that justifies slaughtering children.

“Yes.” Caspian’s voice grows sharper. “We mustn’t forget they killed our mother. And we killed theirs in return. And Darling lived in darkness, but it did not hurt her. She did not falter or wither like a flower. In that darkness, Chaos found her and reforged her once already . . .” He pauses as if to drift again, but then his attention snaps entirely back to me, to the moment. “We made her, is my point. Oughtn’t we continue making her?”

“I don’t like it,” I say, meaning this entire conversation.

Caspian lifts his eyebrows. “But you like her.”

I glare. “She’s dangerous. We can’t trust her.”

My brother shrugs, shifting silk and brocade. Then he says, “Put these on. Oh, Chaos teeth, your ears are pierced, aren’t they?”

The horror makes his voice breathless in a way he was not when he spoke of real horror. I don’t understand him. We’ve been apart for too long. I left and he made himself into this. He never wanted me close.

I accept the little black drops. As I fasten them to my ears, he takes another paint pot and dabs color onto his lips. “Your turn!” He grabs my chin again, and I manage not to grimace. It makes my lips sticky, but he turns my face to the mirror, skin pinched in his strong fingers. To our reflections he says, “We match!”

It’s barely a blush of color, and I shake free of him. “We’re late already.”

“You’re the one who wanted a heart-to-heart right now, Talon.”

Trying not to huff at that truth, I get to my feet. “Is that what this was?”

Caspian slings his arm through mine and nearly drags me to the door.

“Caspian,” I say, planting my feet before stepping out of the chamber.

He glances at me, inquiring.

“No surprises tonight.”

“Not of my making, dragonlet,” he promises.

We go together, shoulder to shoulder as we should, and it settles something in me.

The gala is being held throughout the second level of the fortress, centered in the Phoenix Hall but spilling out into one of the ancient courtyards and narrow corridors carved into the side of the mountain. A path is made for us by palace guards, and I step back at the wide doors of the hall to let the High Prince Regent enter first. But I keep up at his shoulder, avoiding the sharply scalloped trailing edge of his dragon cape.

It’s dazzling inside, boonlights catching jewels and gilded decorations, shining off glasses of champagne and the flash of dancing couples. The music fades with a final trill when Caspian arrives, and he is bowed to in a great wave that tracks from one end of the Phoenix Hall to the other as he makes his way toward the great phoenix statue overhanging the throne. I keep my eyes sharp, note the guards, the Teeth in their own bloodred uniforms, the colors of House Barghest and House Gryphon nearly overwhelmed by the green and gold of Dragon.

Waiting for Caspian at his throne is Aunt Aurora and every member of his council—and a filled flute of champagne, which he takes with a flourish as he faces the assembly with a smile. “Enjoy yourselves at my party, friends,” he calls, informal and brash, then drinks most of the wine in a single motion that displays his long neck to anyone’s knife.

I catch Aurora’s eye, and she lifts her champagne toward me, sips lightly, and then pulls her own performance back on, lovely and flirtatious and just a little bit like the mother of a charming, if foolish, king.

I take a cup of fresh fruit juice—oranges from the dry southern tip of our land where the Sphinx once reigned. The minister of the hoard says something to me, and I respond shortly. I will stand here, I will show my full support to my brother, but that support is martial, is dangerous, and that is not something anybody needs to forget. I drink the juice; my other hand rests on the pommel of my falchion. I watch and I nod; I do not smile as the gala whirls around me. Caspian lounges on the throne, beckons guests to come closer. He knows all their names and ranks, their families and holdings, and charms them, flirts, and expertly tilts everyone away from important subjects, and absolutely away from the declaration we’ve all come tonight to hear. He promises with a sly grin, a wink, and a toast to peace and prosperity given to us all by the surprising opportunities of Chaos and the benevolent memory of the Last Phoenix.

It is a waste of money. A waste of food and wine, and it’s been less than a turn. I need this over with and am nearly ready to storm off and find out what’s delaying Darling—though I expect the lateness of her arrival is also Caspian’s doing—when Caspian gestures to someone I don’t see, and the lights in the entire Phoenix Hall dim.

The sudden shadows cause gasps and startled cries, and the musicians easily transition into a soft march: the “Song of House Sphinx.” High against the ceiling the boonlights begin to sparkle and turn like stars against a misty sky.

And there she is.

Framed by the gleaming dark wood of the arched doors, Darling Seabreak stands in a dress of intricate ivory and desert-yellow panels, and a capelet of downy feathers. House Sphinx regalia. White leather bracers lace up her forearms, and there are knives sheathed there. I cannot believe Caspian armed her, but it’s such a display of her—their—power. She looks odd, but breathtaking.

And then I realize it: the reason the hall has been made into a dusky starscape, the reason she seems strange to me.

Nothing covers Darling’s eyes. They are wide open and glittering dark brown, but filmed over with something—an illusion, a Chaos scar—of eerie, lustrous blue and purple green, a rainbow of shifting hues.

And staring directly at me.