Daphne must be dead—she certainly feels dead. Though as soon as the thought enters her mind, she sees the flaw in the logic. If she feels anything, she can’t be dead, can she? And certainly she wouldn’t feel like someone has dug into her chest with a sharpened spoon.
She knows before she opens her eyes that she isn’t in the castle. It is too warm here—almost sweltering—and she smells hay, hearth, and some spice she can’t name. When she does crack open her eyes a slit, she sees a darkening dusk sky outside a small window.
“Daphne?” a voice says. Bairre.
She rolls toward him, wincing as she does, and opens her eyes a little more. They’re in a small room, less than a quarter of the size of her room in the castle, and she’s lying on a narrow bed mere feet from a roaring fireplace. The roof above them is thatched hay and the walls are a rough-hewn stone. Bairre is sitting beside the bed in a carved wooden chair with a wool blanket draped over him.
“We need to stop meeting like this,” she tells him, remembering how he stayed by her bed while she recovered from the poison. “Where are we?”
Bairre glances away. “With a friend,” he says carefully before pausing. “After you were…”
“Shot?” she supplies.
He nods. “You were going to die,” he says. “You were dying. I wasn’t sure even Fergal would have been able to save you. But I knew someone who could, and she was nearer than the castle.”
“Who?” Daphne asks, frowning.
At that moment, a woman pushes open the door and steps inside holding a tray. She looks about the empress’s age, or at least the way Daphne thinks her mother would look first thing in the morning, before her hair was dressed and her face slathered with all the creams and pigments she uses. There is no varnish or polish on this woman—even her hair has gone gray, though in the bright sunlight it seems to glint silver.
She also looks familiar.
“Your mother,” she says to Bairre, who nods.
“You can call me Aurelia,” the woman says, setting the tray down on the foot of Daphne’s bed and pouring steaming-hot tea into a chipped cup. She offers it to Daphne, who takes a small sip—bitter, but tolerably so––as she looks the woman over. Cliona said Aurelia was the greatest empyrea she’d ever heard of, but the woman reminds Daphne of her childhood nurse more than anything else. “I’m sure you feel like death itself,” Aurelia continues.
“But I’m not,” Daphne says. “Dead, that is. I’m assuming I have you to thank for that. Is Cliona all right? Her shoulder—”
“She’s fine,” Bairre says. “She went back to the castle to tell my father what happened, that we’re safe.”
Daphne nods slowly, taking another sip of tea. She thinks back to the events in the forest, how Bairre hadn’t questioned Cliona’s skill with a dagger, or her own. How he’d handled himself better than she expected him to. She thinks back further, to Cliona’s implicit trust of him, despite the fact that her father was trying to overthrow his. To Bairre’s resentment of his new position.
“How long have you been working with the rebels?” she asks him.
For his part, Bairre isn’t surprised by the question. He holds her gaze, his silver eyes on hers. “It must be five years now?” he says, glancing at his mother for confirmation.
“Thereabouts,” she confirms. “You were twelve.”
Bairre nods, frowning. “I was in the woods one afternoon and a strange woman approached,” he says. “She claimed to be my mother.”
Aurelia shakes her head. “He didn’t believe me at first, but as you noticed, the resemblance is uncanny,” she says.
“But why?” Daphne asks Aurelia. “From what I heard, you put Bartholomew on that throne, you wanted to unite Friv. Why would you go through all that trouble and then assist the rebellion?”
Aurelia and Bairre exchange a look, but Bairre is the one to answer.
“She reads the stars,” he tells her.
“And?” Daphne asks. “All empyreas read the stars.”
“Not like me,” Aurelia says. “I never had to learn it or train my gift. The stars have been speaking to me my whole life, telling me tales of the world to come. For so long it was war and bloodshed and death, so much death. I was young and tired of it all and foolish enough to believe I could stop it.”
“But you did,” Daphne points out. “There has been no war in Friv in nearly two decades.”
“No,” Aurelia agrees. “But I’ve learned that the absence of war does not equal peace. The stars still tell me a tale of war, Princess, but now I’m wise enough to know that war never dies, it only sleeps.”
There is more Aurelia doesn’t say, Daphne is sure of it, but Bairre seems to have accepted her reasoning easily enough, so Daphne holds her tongue. For now.
She thinks of her mother’s plans for Friv, the way she’s forcing them into a war with Cellaria that no one wants, the many people who will have to die for a country and a conflict that aren’t theirs. She can’t be angry with Bairre for keeping secrets, not when her own are far worse. If he learns the truth about her, he will never forgive her for it. Suddenly, she understands why her sisters went against their mother—she can’t agree with their decision, but she does understand it.
“War is waking up now,” Aurelia continues. “I’ve known it for some time. So when Lord Panlington came to me and asked for my assistance, I gave it to him, and we’ve been working together ever since.”
“But why did you join?” Daphne asks Bairre. “To go against your father and Cillian?”
Bairre flinches and looks away. “I believed I could win Cillian over,” he admits. “I still think I could have, if I’d had more time. As for my father…I love him. But you can love someone and still disagree with them.”
Daphne considers this for a moment, leaning back against the pillows. “You must have been horrified,” she says slowly. “When your father named you his heir.”
Aurelia looks from Daphne to Bairre, her brow creasing. “I’m sure you’re hungry,” she tells Daphne. “I’ll warm some soup for you.”
When she slips back out of the room and closes the door behind her, Bairre lets out a deep breath.
“I wanted to wait,” he says. “Once I inherited the throne, I could refuse it. It would have been an easy ending, but Lord Panlington, my mother—everyone, really—disagreed. So nothing changed when I was named heir—it was a crown I knew I would never wear, no matter what happened. The only thing that changed, really, was you.” He pauses for a moment, and part of Daphne wants that pause to go on forever, because she knows where this is going, and even though it’s exactly what her mother wants—what she wants—she also knows that if they continue down this road, it will hurt them both.
“After the poison, when you were delirious and feverish, you said some things,” he says slowly.
Daphne nods, pressing her lips together into a thin line. “My memory is a bit fuzzy,” she says. “But I remember you saying some things as well.”
“Daphne,” he says gently, but it is a warning all the same.
She ignores it and reaches for his hand, taking it and squeezing it tight, the way she did before they went into the woods, as if to say I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. Another lie, she thinks, but one she wishes were the truth. He squeezes her hand in return, lifting it to his lips to brush a kiss over her knuckles.
Daphne understands, suddenly, exactly what she is—not a girl, not a princess, not a spy or a saboteur. She is a poison, brewed and distilled and fermented over sixteen years, crafted by her mother to bring ruination to whomever she touches. Poison is a woman’s weapon, after all, and here she is, a weapon of a woman.
And Bairre sees it, maybe he has always seen it, from the second he handed her out of that carriage on the Frivian border. Lightning, he called her before, and that was before he saw her stab one man and shoot a second, but maybe there is a part of him that has always known what she is capable of.
She starts to pull her hand from his, but he surprises her, reaching up to cup her face. And then he is kissing her, and she is kissing him back.
It isn’t her first kiss. When she and her sisters were fifteen, their mother dared them to see who could kiss the most boys at court over the course of a month. Beatriz won, of course, kissing five, and Sophronia was too nervous to kiss even one, but Daphne managed a perfectly respectable three. Practice, their mother had called it, to prepare them for this inevitable moment.
The thought seems ridiculous now, because nothing could have prepared her for this. It is nothing like those practice kisses, which were awkward and bumbling and pleasant enough, Daphne supposes. But kissing Bairre doesn’t feel awkward or bumbling, and pleasant enough doesn’t come close to describing it. It is a kiss that threatens to consume her, a kiss that feels as necessary to her as oxygen, but as hungry and desperate as it grows, the gentle touch of Bairre’s hand on her cheek, his arm around her waist, make her feel safe and treasured and maybe even loved.
It is a new feeling, she realizes, but it is one she would drown in if she could.
They break apart when his mother returns, a bowl of soup in her hand, and her brow furrowed. When she passes the bowl to Daphne, she hesitates.
“I don’t understand why you aren’t dead,” she says slowly.
Daphne frowns. “I thought we’d established that was thanks to you.”
Aurelia shakes her head. “I told you the stars speak to me. Lately they’ve been all but screaming. The blood of stars and majesty spilled.”
“The stars said that?” Daphne asks.
Aurelia shrugs. “It’s difficult to explain, but that is what I hear, at least. The words have been echoing in my mind for weeks now. Ever since you came to Friv. At first, I worried they meant Bairre; then when he showed up carrying you with what was very nearly a fatal wound…”
“The blood of stars and majesty,” Daphne repeats. “You used star magic to conceive Bairre.”
“Just as your mother used star magic to conceive you,” Aurelia says. “It’s why you have the same eyes—star-touched. The blood of stars and majesty, meaning someone both star-touched and royal.”
“My sisters,” Daphne says, every muscle in her body going taut. “One of them is in Cellaria, with eyes like mine. Last we spoke, she was in trouble—she seemed sure she could get herself out of it, but…I need to speak with them. I did it before, with Beatriz, using stardust. Do you have any?”
Daphne sits cross-legged on the bed with a vial of stardust in each hand and Bairre perched beside her. She uncorks the vials and smears the stardust on the backs of both of her hands.
“I wish I could speak to Princess Beatriz and Queen Sophronia,” she says, closing her eyes.
For a moment, nothing happens; then the world around her softens and mutes and she hears the distant roar of a cheering crowd.
“Sophie?” Daphne asks tentatively. “Triz?”
“Daphne, is that you? Thank the stars,” Beatriz says. “So much has happened—”
“What’s happening?” Sophronia asks, her voice more tired than surprised. “Why can I hear you?”
“It’s stardust—too much to explain, we only have a few moments,” Daphne says. “Are you both all right?”
“Not at all,” Beatriz says. “Is that a crowd cheering, Sophie?”
For a long moment, Sophronia doesn’t speak. “It is,” she says finally, her voice strained. “I believe they’re cheering for my execution.”