Everything she knew was a lie. Her parents. Her history. Her scars—had Siege lied to her, too? Had Siege known who she was all this time? She must have—she found Ana, after all. It must have been why Siege didn’t want her on the Tsarina. The realization hurt deeply, somewhere in the center of herself, carving out a hole like a bullet wound.
She was a lie.
People flooded into the throne room, more than there had been a few moments before, kissing the back of her hand, pressing their foreheads against her palms, telling her how happy they were that she was alive. But she wasn’t so sure she was anymore. She didn’t remember the faces of these Advisers who knew her name, or the servants who bowed to the floor, or even the Grand Duchess, who disappeared so quickly after everyone had risen to their feet in the throne room that Ana almost believed that she had been a ghost.
“Don’t overwhelm Her Grace,” a short man with a gray mustache said, shooing the Advisers away. Her thoughts were a blur, spinning. “I’m sure she is very tired. Would you like to retire to your room, Your Grace?”
“My . . . room? Who’re you?”
“I am the Grand Duchess’s, and now your, steward. And yes, Your Grace, your room. You are home.”
She was very far away from that. Glancing around the throne room for Robb, at a loss for what else to do, she realized he was gone. Of course he was. He’d probably left the second he could.
“Yeah,” she replied, defeated. “Yes—please.”
The steward excused her from the throne room, and in the hallways she could finally breathe. Large potted plants grew against the walls, flowering with moonlilies and roses and purple dragon-tongues.
A small patrol of Messiers accompanied her and her steward to her room. She doubted they were guarding her. The crown might not have rusted, but she had just been convicted of treason not an hour ago.
But at the moment, she was too tired to care.
The steward showed her to a room somewhere in one of the towers. Hallway after hallway, each lit with bobbing lanterns that floated in an invisible river above them. When the steward finally stopped at a room at the end of a long corridor, and the Messiers took up position on either side of the door, she was lost. There was a crest above the door—the Armorov insignia.
A crescent moon with a sword down its middle.
Inside was a queen-size four-poster bed with a silken white canopy draped over the mahogany bedposts. The breeze from the open balcony window fluttered the silks so they danced in the evening light and drew shadows across the marble floor. There was a dressing table against the far wall, filled with opulent perfumes and pearl-studded accessories, and a wardrobe so big she could live in that, instead.
The bedroom was so large she felt like a mouse inside a lion’s cage.
Through a connecting door there looked to be a parlor of sorts, and beyond that a study—there were certainly a lot of expensive-looking books. None of them must have been very good—the best stories were the ones with cracked spines and dog-eared edges.
“If it is not to your liking, please don’t hesitate to say so, Your Grace,” said the steward, his gray mustache twitching. “There is so much to be done before your coronation—”
“My coronation?” She wanted to laugh—or cry, she wasn’t sure which. “You barely know me! And you’re going to give me a kingdom?”
“You’re the lost princess, Your Grace. You are the Goddess returned—the girl of light who will lead us out of the darkness of the last seven years. You arrived exactly when you needed to,” he added smugly. “And on the morning of the Holy Conjunction, you’ll be crowned Empress to the kingdom.”
One week, she thought.
She had one week to escape this madness.
“Don’t fret,” the steward said as he backed out of the room. He must have sensed the desperation seeping through her sweat glands. “Ruling is in your blood. The Goddess will never lead us wrong—and neither will you.”
He closed her in this foreign room, promising to retrieve her for dinner.
As if she could eat at a time like this!
Her stomach twisted, nauseous at the thought of food.
Was this real? Or was she still in that terrible nightmare? Why had the Grand Duchess let her touch that crown? She was a citizen—Ironbloods would never let a normal citizen touch it. They were unworthy.
But you aren’t a citizen, she realized. You are Princess Ananke.
She needed to get out of here—now. Hurrying out onto the open-air balcony, she looked down at the drop into the gardens. Ten feet—she could handle that. Hiking one leg over the rail, she began to climb over when a voice made her pause.
“What are you doing, Your Grace?”
She glanced up. It was a servant girl.
“How did you get in here?” Ana asked, perplexed.
The servant girl waved toward a panel in the door that was still cracked open—a servants’ entrance. She’d heard Di read about them in his books about the palace. There was an entire network of secret corridors within the very walls of the palace. Maybe . . . maybe she could escape that way?
The girl was fourteen, maybe fifteen, with spun-gold hair pinned up behind her head, her dress the deep, deep purple of the royal family.
Ana had begun to loop her other leg over when the bushes rustled in the garden below her, and as if called by some remote dog whistle, a Messier came to stand underneath her. Its blue eyes watched patiently.
Frustrated, she climbed back over the rail and cleared her throat. “What do you want?”
The girl curtsied. “Your Grace, I was assigned to be your handmaiden. My name is Mellifare. I will see to your personal needs for the immediate future.”
“I don’t—I don’t need anyone to help me dress or anything.”
“Then I can assist you with other daily matters. Altering your clothes, deciding what to wear, bathing—”
“I don’t need that kind of help, either.”
“It is my job,” the servant girl replied, her dark eyes flickering down the length of Ana, making her keenly aware of just how filthy she looked. Dried blood stained the knees of her trousers, her braid half fallen out of its tight coil. “The Grand Duchess has asked me to see to your needs. Is there anything you would like?”
To leave—to get as far away from here as she could. To change clothes and—
“A bath,” she heard herself saying, feeling the dried blood beneath her nails. “A warm bath.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
With a bow, Mellifare left through the far door.
The moment she was gone, Ana peeked over to the balcony again, but the Messier was still below, watching her with its vacant gaze.
So she’d have to find some other way to escape.
There was another way, wasn’t there?
The strangeness of the day was wearing thin, unveiling an itchy panic in her chest. From her balcony, she could see the stars and the other moons and Eros—but it didn’t quell the uneasiness broiling inside. If she couldn’t escape, she’d be trapped here—forever. In rich silks and beautiful petticoats and marble hallways—
She’d rather be in a Cercian mine. At least that looked like a prison. This wasn’t the Dossier, and she missed the ship so much.
But all these years, Siege had lied to her. What if the rest of the crew had, too? And Di?
He wouldn’t lie to me, she reminded herself, but she hadn’t thought Siege would lie to her, either. Jax couldn’t, but she didn’t remember ever talking about family with Jax. It wasn’t something that mattered.
Family was the Dossier.
And family had lied.
“Your Grace?” her handmaiden called, and she followed Mellifare’s voice into the far room, to a bath made of marble and ornate golden carvings, a tub that was more like a pool, bubbling and hissing, pouring the aroma of moonlilies into the air.
When Mellifare left, Ana undressed herself, peeling off her clothes, hearing the crackle of Wick’s dried blood, her eyes burning with tears. He was dead. The fact sank in, like an anchor into the sea. He was dead, and Barger was dead, and Di was dead—
Stop thinking, she told herself, dipping her foot into the bath. It was so hot it tore the thoughts right out of her.
Slowly, she sank beneath the water and stayed under for a long time letting the hot water sting her cuts and wet her curly hair. She stayed under for so long, her pulse leaped into her throat, but the sound calmed her. It was the same one she’d heard since the Tsarina.
A broken heart beating on.
She didn’t know who she was anymore. She wasn’t that orphan girl from the stars. She wasn’t the girl who Siege raised, who shot beer bottles out of the air and knew every word to Wick’s drunken lullabies. That girl was part of a lie that no longer existed, a ship that sailed across her memories like a phantom, leaving a cold room in its wake.
But she was not an Armorov either.
Her lungs shuddered, so she pushed out of the water, sucking in a breath. The air tasted sweet—like moonlilies. She washed the blood from under her nails, and the stains from her skin, scrubbing until she was raw, and finally stepped out of the bath, pulling her hair over her shoulder. Her scalp still ached from when that Royal Captain had grabbed her.
She still remembered the patient way Di took hold of her hair, cool fingers twining each lock, as if he was built of all the things she lacked.
Di would never braid her hair again.
Her fingers fell away from her damp hair. It hadn’t hit her until that very moment. All the things they would never do again. All the moments she would miss. All the ones he would never again be part of.
She stared into the steamed bathroom mirror, at the blurry image of a girl with warm bronze skin and golden-brown eyes and black hair that fell in tangled curls across her bare, muscular shoulders. She didn’t have the body of someone dainty—fit for royal balls and beautiful dresses. She was hard, and strong, her hands covered in calluses and her fingernails bitten to the quick. She had always wondered where she came from, but now she picked herself apart, trying to find which parts were Valerio, and which were Armorov.
But all she could see was herself—and she didn’t feel like Ana anymore.
She searched through the drawers in the bathroom until she found a small razor, and sharpened it on a flint, the way she had back on the Dossier when she needed to shave up the sides of her head. Then she turned back toward the mirror, wiped the steam away, and pressed the razor to her scalp.
Di was gone, and so was the girl Ana used to be.