And as the amaranthine light everlasting remembers, may all its hues brighten the Living Lands. Blade to bone, breath after breath, now and forever.
~ A blessing
I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING with the sunrise, lost and confused. It took me longer than felt safe to remember where I was. Then a soft little snore beside me brought it all back.
I’d just returned to the Sevaare chambers when Dyania and Zik burst in with Lisel on their heels. We’d all stared each other for a long moment before the questions came fast and furious. After I told them as much as I could—and it wasn’t everything, not because I meant to be mysterious but because so much of it made so little sense once I descended from the obsidian spire—Lisel left, frowning at some of my answers, and the lady kept prodding until Zik made a little noise, and then she’d abruptly stopped. They’d taken turns in the privacy chamber, and without consulting aloud, we all found our way to the lady’s bedchamber, Dyania on the big bed, Zik and I huddled on the trundle beside her. Apparently we’d all needed the creature comfort of each other’s living breaths.
Now rested after a surprisingly dreamless sleep, Zik’s breaths were a little too loud for me to keep sleeping.
When I peeked over the edge of the bed, Dyania was lying on her side, but her eyes were open as she looked over our trundle toward the window.
Her gaze dropped immediately to me when I peered up. And a worried furrow etched the space between her brows. “Tell me true,” she whispered. “Fei, are you all right?”
I almost signed a reply, but instead I kept my voice low when I answered. “As well as can be, considering.” There wasn’t much light coming through the window behind me—winter clouds obscuring most of the rays—but that was more illumination than I would’ve had spending the night in the Dragon Prince’s chambers.
Or if I’d ended up dead, for that matter.
A faint smile flickered across her lips. “So, not well at all.”
I did my best to grin back at her, but I feared even my very best wasn’t much.
“You told me once every breath is another chance,” she said quietly.
Eventually though, the breaths ran out. “I’ll meet you all in the library,” I told her.
Not trying to stop me, she just watched and I edged carefully away from Zik and rose. I freshened up quickly in the privacy chamber, still wearing the prince’s tunic, and slipped out before I had to answer any more impossible questions.
Needing to clear my thoughts, I didn’t go immediately to the library, instead taking a circuitous path. I didn’t stop in the kitchens for a sticky bun, just kept my head down as I tried to figure out my next step.
Except my steps walked me right into a pair of fine boots.
I staggered aside before I walked right over Petro no’Maru. “Pardon, my lord,” I gasped, ducking in anticipation of at least partly deflecting the blow I was sure was coming for my carelessness.
Instead he just gazed at me, his gray-green eyes assessing. “Lady Dyania’s attendant,” he mused, more to himself than me, I thought. “Feinan, yes?”
I nodded hesitantly. “Yes, my lord.”
“Not a lord,” he reminded me.
“If it pleases you to say so.” I let the unstated title hang.
He smiled. “Sir will suffice.”
Good for him. I nodded again and sidled aside. “Pardon, sir.”
“A moment,” he said, bringing me to a reluctant halt. “You were along for the marshal’s disastrous salvage operation?”
How much had he been told? Which part did he consider a disaster? Last night, Lisel had said she had not told her father about the lost whistle, but Lor Imbril had gone back to the haloric hall as soon as they returned, and no one was sure what he would say to Numinlor Kalima and his brethren. So I just nodded yet again to no’Maru. There were times even I knew to keep my tongue and every other part of my mouth under control.
No’Maru half-closed his eyes. “Prince Aric kept you after the attack?”
Ah, so he’d been told that much at least. Carefully, I nodded again, though I was aware he wasn’t going to be satisfied for long with my Rokynd impression.
But he didn’t snap. “I think you and I are not so different, Feinan.”
Inadvertently, I snorted out a laugh. Though pretending to confusion was probably wiser for me, he had all the power here, and for him to suggest otherwise deserved mockery.
“Hear me out,” he said. “Those like us, we’re given the name of our lightkeep but everything else we must take for ourselves—or make.”
The insinuation jostled my stubborn silence. Always more opportunity in knowing the game. “And what exactly would we”—I added a subtle emphasis to the word—“make?”
Though I’d been warned repeatedly to take no gifts from the Dragon Prince, this moment seemed more fraught to me.
But no’Maru merely looked thoughtful. “Aric needs someone at his side, a point of contact to hold him to this place, to remind him of his purpose.”
I hesitated, surprised. Not at no’Maru’s insight into the prince’s estrangement—I’d already said as much myself, and really anyone could see it—but that he believed I could do anything about it. I just said, “He has Nenzo.”
“Who?”
“His Rokynd valet.”
“Yes, that is so. But even the most attentive valet doesn’t have quite the…ah, personal touch I believe our tormented prince needs.” No’Maru didn’t smirk, but the faintest quirk to his lips invited me to share in his alley-wise judgment.
Because I was no fool—not about this moment anyway—I not-quite-smirked back. “So true, sir.”
“Very well. I will find you again after you’ve had a chance to reflect on what you might need to best serve Aric’s needs.” No’Maru peered at me, for the first time seeming nonplused. “Clearly you have his notice already.” The plaintive how? was left unstated.
So it seemed he hadn’t heard about the missing whistle. Might my luck hold. “For the light of the Living Lands,” I murmured.
“Indeed.” The calculating look was back in his gray-green eyes.
Perhaps I’d sounded a bit too pious there, so I quickly added, “And perhaps slightly less lightness in my purse? Serving a prince properly requires some resources, after all.”
He smiled with a certain satisfaction, obviously pleased he had judged me aright. “I’ll see to it when we reconvene.” Stepping back, he inclined his head. “I look forward to hearing how you find him.”
In the obsidian spire, where they’d exiled him. At least Nenzo had only suggested that the prince needed a friend, not a doxy.
But I bared my teeth in a matching smile, because a doxy would, and watched the king’s advisor go.
Certainly if Imbril had told Kalima about the whistle mishap, she would’ve been compelled to tell the king, or at least rail at him about it, and he would’ve told no’Maru, yes? Apparently, the problem—and my part in it—could stay secret awhile longer.
Until the next attack.
Disheartened and anxious, I found my wandering steps taking me out of the palace. Too late to run, I wanted to tell my boots. But they kept going, all the way to the haloric cloister in the outer ward. The white lattice gates were closed—to keep out waifs, thieves, liars, cowards, and doxies?—but I tried the latch and it opened.
Neh, if such blessed auric purity caved to my touch, the Dragon Prince didn’t stand a chance.
Gulping back an inappropriate oath—I did have some manners after all—I tiptoed through the gate and whisked to one side of the entry hall, trying to be inconspicuous. But no one challenged me.
Because there was no one around.
But all the injured who’d been brought back from the caravan? Who was caring for them?
I hustled down the corridor of barred cells, not looking to either side—because I knew already, didn’t I?—until I got to Gryner’s.
Or where he had been.
The cell was empty, the braziers cold. The pallet was stripped of its winding cloth, but the black iron chains remained, hanging slack without a body beneath them. Only a tinge of faded incense hung in the air, the fragrance gone sour.
Gripping the bars, I hung against the iron, staring at nothing.
Of course I hadn’t really believed they could erase the poison of demon touch on his aura. If they could, we wouldn’t be so desperately losing this war. But seeing it and smelling it, knowing it beyond any doubt or hope…
How long I stood there, I couldn’t have said, but when I turned, I let out a yelp of surprise at seeing the white figure behind me. I needed to stop letting all my woes confound me; if I’d been stealing something, this might’ve been awkward.
Numinlor Kalima stood alone—another surprise—minus her heavy ceremonial robe and brilliant haloric crown. Her unadorned silkha gown revealed a body as stocky and strong as the market women who had occasionally caught and thrashed me when I was a child, and when she eyed me, her hazel focus was as sharp as a catamount’s. “You turn up wherever there is trouble.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to throttle the vulgar and likely punishable retort that sprang up between my teeth. Instead, I muttered, “Seems there is trouble everywhere.” I lifted my gaze to her. “Except here. Here seems suddenly trouble free.”
She didn’t pretend to not understand me; maybe her awareness of her own superiority wouldn’t let her. “The afflicted were blessed…and then delivered from their taint.”
I didn’t pretend to misunderstand her either. “You killed them all.”
“Their ashes are entombed in a burn pit beyond the outer bailey, for all our auric protection. But you can say your prayers at the dawn well to mark their sacrifice. And leave a coin at the gate in gratitude for the consecrated caretakers here.”
Not so different from my hand out to no’Maru, I supposed. I didn’t say anything more, but she must’ve sensed my condemnation. “Lor Imbril told us of your failure.” When I froze, thinking she meant the bone whistle, she went on with clear scorn, “I explained to Mikhalthe the auric rune was just a child’s superstitious trick. A candle can’t hold back the dark.”
But we hadn’t even had the chance for Dyania to lure and distract the horde while Aric and the dragon attacked. What exactly had Imbril explained?
Not that Numinlor Kalima seemed interested in what anyone else had to say. I just kept biting the flesh inside my cheeks.
With a stifled noise of disgust, she stood back and pointed me toward the gate. “Trouble is always a weave, and there is more to safeguarding the Living Lands than slaughtering demons,” she said. “The king forgets that at his peril.” Her hazel gaze rested on me, the brown-green-gold hues bright like mountain morning light—her attention heavier than the discarded chains. “As for you, don’t fool yourself that Petro has any attachment to other exiles. He didn’t find his way to Mikhalthe’s right hand by mere chance.”
I forced myself to not react, but even if Imbril, for whatever reason, hadn’t told her about my mistake, obviously she had other eyes in the palace. Instead, I sidled out the gate.
I did not leave a coin.
Since I’d been accosted everywhere else in the lightkeep, I scuttled back to the dubious refuge of the library before the king himself had words with me.
My friends were there already, and Imbril too, just finishing the morning meal. They greeted me, even Imbril, and Zik gathered a plateful for me while I told them about encountering Numinlor Kalima and what I’d seen—who I hadn’t seen—at the cloister. For some reason I didn’t mention no’Maru and his suggestion that I sell myself into spying on the prince, but my friends were too busy speculating on Kalima’s meaning to notice that I’d fallen silent.
“I didn’t tell her about Ormonde’s bone,” Imbril said with a sidelong glance at me. “Yet. But they’ll be looking for it.”
Lisel hunched over her mug of kavé. “I haven’t told my father what happened,” she said in a low voice. “He’s been preoccupied since we returned, so maybe he hasn’t checked his pockets yet. Or maybe he just hasn’t told anyone—or me, at least—that the bone is missing.” She too cast an unhappy glance at me. “I don’t want to lie to him. That I’ve not told him already…” She shook her head.
While I didn’t necessarily mind that the numinlor and the marshal were left uninformed of my misbehavior, I squirmed a bit to think that Imbril and Lisel would suffer for protecting me.
Had anyone ever done that?
“It’s too much,” Dyania said. Most of the food on her plate, which I supposed Zik had gotten too, remained untouched. “We can’t untangle this on our own.”
Trouble is always a weave. I’d never been a part of anyone’s troubles but my own. And I didn’t like this feeling of onus and owing.
Since when do thieves offer to repay a gift?
The prince had meant to taunt me, but he wasn’t wrong.
“You must go back to him,” Dyania said.
Lost in my own knot of thoughts, for a long moment I didn’t realize she was talking to me. “Back to who?”
She frowned at me. “Prince Aric.”
“What? No.” I scowled at her in return. “He only kept me long enough to see if the dragon would eat me. Didn’t happen. But I’m not going to give her another chance.”
“It’s our only chance,” Dyania said. “He has to join us.”
Now everyone was staring at her in horrified disbelief.
Except Zik who nodded. “He saved us.”
Scowling at him, I corrected, “His dragon slayed the horde.”
To my surprise, he jutted his jaw back at me. “Which saved us, ya.”
I huffed out an aggrieved breath. “You make yaxen eyes at anyone who feeds you. The prince is no hero.”
“Fei.” The lady’s tone made my name a reprimand.
And I deserved it. I winced and leaned far over in my chair to bump my shoulder against his. “Sorry, Zik. I’m just jealous that you are a good person. Much better than the prince, even if he did save us.”
Zik gave me a forgiving little smile, but his eyes were worried. “If you are with the prince, none of them can get mad at you—the king and the marshal and the numinlor.” He frowned. “Or they can get mad but at least they can’t get you.”
And then, as if we’d conjured him with our words like blood in candleflame, Prince Aric strode into the library.
Ridiculously, my heartbeat stuttered, my pulse frothing in my veins like silvery bubbles rising from the depths.
Fear, I told myself, fear and anger at all he’d done to me: threatening me, insulting me, rejecting and then ejecting me. Neh, and maybe I was suffering just the slightest remembrance of his mouth opening under mine…
Wearing neither his armor nor the padded under layers, he was clad simply in a sleek black tunic and wider trousers. Flowing down his shoulders, his black hair was as smooth as a dream of midnight thievery. Like the shadow of a royal scion on a bright summer day.
Except for his scarred skin and ice-white eyes.
Stopping at the end of our table to clench his hands on the back of an unoccupied chair, he didn’t even look at me directly. Instead, his clouded gaze circled our little quintet. “I need you.”
Spoken in another tone, such a statement might ring with pleasure. But in his grating voice, it sounded like a lament.
Very slowly, with obvious reluctance, his focus shifted to me. On the back of the chair, his knuckles blanched. Imagining my throat again, maybe? “If I am to have a chance at holding the dragon, I need at least the illusion of the relic bone, for as long as it will last.”
When I stayed silent, Dyania gave me a look. I just stared back at her, and she folded her hands together with a sigh. “Prince Aric, won’t you have some kavé while we converse?”
“What I don’t need is to talk,” he growled. “No words stop the demons.”
Imbril cleared his throat. “No, but words move people.”
Dyania glanced at Zik who went to the sideboard and poured from the carafe of kavé. He crept toward the prince at an oblique angle to set the mug on the table in front of his fists.
Tensing, I readied myself to lash out at Aric if he made any move to frighten Zik. But after a strained moment, he yanked the chair out and sat.
Wrapping one hand around the mug, though he didn’t lift it to drink, he averted his face, studying the rest of the room. “All these words,” he mused. “Inked and etched, on parchment and skin and bone, woven into threads of every hue. None have guided us out of the darkness.”
“No, we must do that ourselves,” Dyania said.
He pivoted back to her. “The whistle was a guide, of sorts. A lash pointing us the way toward the horde. But it’s gone now.”
I put my own fist on the table. “And yet you guided the dragon back without it.”
“She was satiated on the tatters of auras she took from the horde and willing enough to return to her lair. It won’t last.”
Imbril twitched uneasily in his seat. “We…we still have the purest of auras.”
The Chosen Ones, he meant.
“Really?” I growled over his apologetic grimace to Dyania.
“Those words are only the truth,” she murmured.
But Aric shook his head. “Your haloric auguries called for a Devouring for a reason. An unbalanced offering with what’s left will only weaken my hold on her. For now, at least I know Feinan can serve as a provocation.”
I scowled at him.
From her seat next to Dyania, Lisel frowned at the prince too, and I thought she might counter his somewhat unfair assessment of me. “With my hart, Nars, I know he is too stubborn and strong to force to my will, so I must guide him with a gentle touch.”
The prince lifted his chin to stare down his nose at her, a fine feat with the long table between them. “The dragon is not a burden beast.”
She didn’t look away. “I meant your handling of Fei, not the beast.”
I gave her a look and then the rest of my friends. None of them objected to his characterization or hers? I, a provocation? How rude!
But she went on, saying, “Why not spare the whip with both if you can? What do you have to lose?”
“An entire dragon,” he snapped. “And the Living Lands as well. Are you not listening?”
“I am no one’s whip,” I announced, not that anyone was listening to me either. “And I am definitely not to be whipped myself, no matter the provocation.”
Dyania lifted one finger gracefully. “If Fei can aid Prince Aric in restraining the dragon while not being the focus of thorny questions about the missing relic, we should seize this opportunity.” She gave him and the rest of us a decisive nod. “Before we were called away to the attack, we had gone through many of the historical chronicles and records here, and I believe we are so close to an answer.”
Not appreciating how she’d hijacked my beliefs about seizing any and all opportunities, I looked at her sidelong. Worse, there was no reason for her to believe we would succeed where others had failed and died.
Except belief didn’t need reason, I supposed.
“We should also be looking for references to Claeve’s glowing sword,” Lisel added, apparently satisfied with what seemed to me like the unfinished discussion of whether I should be whipped or not. “Certainly a weapon so remarkable would be…remarked upon.”
The prince frowned. “I’ve never encountered such a blade, but Nenzo might have heard stories.”
With a sigh at my own likely scourging, I explained to the others, “Nenzo is Rokynd.” I hesitated, thinking of Kalima’s scornful words about the king, as well as no’Maru angling for a spy in the prince’s retinue. “Does anyone else feel there are more vermin nibbling at the weave of the Living Lands than we knew?”
Imbril waggled a finger at me. “We all want one thing: the light eternal.”
That seeming truth silenced everyone until the prince said, “The only place the light never changes is the grave.”
Or the obsidian tower, I thought morosely as I followed him back there.
“I can’t believe they kicked me out,” I muttered.
From his place a half stride ahead of me—he was setting a pace with his longer legs that I suspected was deliberate to keep me that half stride behind—he didn’t look back. “I’ve heard you’d rather run away. Maybe just pretend that’s what you’re doing now.”
I hadn’t told him that about myself. I grimaced. “Were you gossiping with Nenzo about me?”
“No.” The prince walked even faster. “He wanted to yell at me for kissing you.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t yell,” I said.
“He gesticulated loudly.”
“Also, I kissed you. And then you ran away.”
“Which I told him.” He tossed a glare at me over his shoulder. “Not that I ran away, but that you waylaid me.”
“Waylaid?” I wanted to argue more, but… “I apologize again for kissing you without your blessing.”
“I have no blessings to give.”
“You’ve given the Living Lands the blessing of continued existence,” I pointed out.
He was silent the rest of the way to the maw of the obsidian tower. He paused at the slope where I’d slipped that first night. “And maybe that is why such a touch frightens me.”
Considering he’d vociferously denied that I’d unnerved him, this confession made me stop too. “One kiss won’t doom the Living Lands.”
At first he didn’t answer, then he slowly turned toward me.
In the murk of the black spire, I shouldn’t have been able to see anything, but his icy eyes caught the light in the corridor like diamondes. “I felt it,” he whispered. “I felt the yielding of your mouth on mine, your sigh on my skin. I shouldn’t have felt anything, not through the cold, not through the scars. And last night, I dreamed. If I feel, if I dream…”
My heart beat so hard that the surge of blood down to my tingling fingertips, deep into my belly, ached, as if nerves too long constricted were coming alive. “Is that so wrong?”
But even as I asked, my voice plaintive, I already knew it was bad. I knew what happened in the middle of the night when I let myself remember what I’d had or, worse yet, dreamed of what might have been.
It wasn’t worth the pain upon waking.
I swallowed hard as he took a step closer to me. Caught as we were between the palace morning and the black spire, anyone could come upon us—even the dragon, should she slither down through the mountain.
But it was just us.
When he reached up, his fingers curved to match the contours of my face. The shivery sensation of his powerful aura, invisible to me but impossible to ignore, brought heat rushing to my cheeks, but he didn’t touch me.
“In the darkest hour of the night, in the deepest cavern of this mountain, I dreamed of a light,” he murmured. “It streamed down on me, surrounded me, sank beneath my skin. It felt… I felt wanted. And I wanted that light, wanted it to be mine alone. Not the dragon’s, not the kingdom’s. No one else’s. Mine.” A savage edge to that growled word sharpened his tone, and the shiver swept from my untouched cheek down my spine, making my knees weak. “I would cut them all loose, let them fall for that light. That’s not just wrong, Feinan no’Sevaare. It would be the end—I would be the end, for everyone and everything. And I wouldn’t even be able to blame the demons.”
The blood rush stilled, the hot flush in my cheeks turning to chill. I had wanted to argue against the lady’s avowal that she must sacrifice for the rest of us, and I wanted to fight him now, just for myself.
But maybe I had finally learned some wisdom in my days in the High Keep. Because despite the lingering waver in my knees, I took a step back, away from the threat and promise of his hand.
Wisdom or wariness might both be worthy guides, but my wayward tongue—which had tasted the Dragon Prince—was not yet ready to take direction. I gazed up at him. “If the kingdom would fall at a mere touch, maybe we should let it.”
He took his own step back; shocked, maybe.
A little horrified myself, without waiting for his condemnation, I plunged into the dark spire.