by Bree Barton
“Take these. I don’t want them.” Pilar dug the letters out of her pocket and thrust them into Mia’s hands. “Welcome to the sisterhood of the warped and broken.”
She stomped out of the music room, the doors banging shut behind her.
Pilar wanted to break something.
She charged down the corridors of Freyja’s palace. Her eyes snagged on a drawing room filled with clay busts of noblewomen. Good enough.
She skidded to a stop. Clenched her right fist. Hugged her elbow close to her body.
Then froze.
She needed her knuckles to fight—and she needed her hands to play violin. Not that she’d ever touch one again. She’d never played as well as she had during her duet with Quin.
The Doomed Duet of Pil and Kill.
With a roar, she shifted her weight onto her back leg, landing a drop kick on the side of the bust. Pain shot up her calf as the woman’s torso soared off the platform.
The clay didn’t shatter. Only cracked into three large pieces.
Maybe love was like that, too. You only soared for a second before breaking.
Quin was a liar. Pilar had known that ever since she found the moonstone in his pouch. She’d still given him her heart. He’d still broken it.
She burned with shame.
Now Mia Rose and Quin had found each other once again. A love that survived even death. Insert epic ballad on mandolin.
The thought of Mia and Quin together made her sick, but it also felt inevitable. Even if Quin had felt something genuine for Pilar beneath the haze of enthrallment, he could cast it off now like a soiled sock. Boys like that didn’t choose girls like her—not when they had a Mia Rose.
Pilar Zorastín d’Aqila was damaged goods. No one would ever want her.
“Why, hello,” said a jolly voice.
Her head jerked up. Lord Kristoffin Dove stood in the drawing room, surveying the clay bust.
“I broke it.” She met his eyes, defiant. “I’m not sorry.”
“Fine with me. Honestly, we’re a bit overstocked in the bust department.”
Pilar’s shoulders relaxed, just a bit.
Lord Dove folded his hands. “I thought you were with Quin? When I passed the music room a moment ago, I heard you working your magic on violin.”
“I’m with no one,” she said firmly. “And I don’t practice magic.”
“Really? May I ask why not?”
“Because magic is just another way to make people suffer.”
Dove’s eyes lit up. “Then perhaps you can help me. The Illuminations are about to begin, but there is one display I can’t quite get right. Would you come and take a look? I am in dire need of a woman to help me mend my one last mistake.”
Pilar had no reason to say yes, but no real reason to say no. The realization hardened in her belly. She had nowhere to be—and no one to be with.
“Why not?” Pilar said darkly. “I’m all yours.”
Chapter 44
Splinters
MIA CLUTCHED THE STACK of letters. She had a sister. A second sister. She and Pilar d’Aqila were bound by blood.
Not to mention her first sister had been puppeteering their every move and was now careening toward them with rage in her heart.
Not to mention Quin hadn’t only known Mia was alive: He had brought her back from the dead himself.
“I need a drink,” she said.
“First you need to sit down,” Quin said, and she realized she was swaying on her feet. Gently he took her arm and guided her toward a frothy settee with trumpets embroidered in the lace. He sat uneasily on the cushion beside her, craning his neck to stare out the door Pilar had just barreled through.
“If you want to go after her,” Mia said, “go.”
“It’s not that simple.”
Mia didn’t know the whole story, but she didn’t need to. The energy crackling between Quin and Pilar had made things abundantly clear. They’d been yoked—in more ways than one. And they cared for each other. That much was obvious.
She couldn’t deny it stung. She knew she’d been gallivanting about with Zai for weeks, admiring the hard, rutted lines of his torso; and before that she’d brought plenty of boys—and one girl—home to her cot in White Lagoon. So it wasn’t as if she’d been pining away like a lovestruck widow in one of Angie’s novels.
And yet. She’d wanted Quin to pine for her anyway. Which wasn’t fair. She knew that. But then, what about love was fair?
Not that she loved Quin.
“I should . . .” Quin said, but didn’t finish. He scoured the room, as if he would rather look at anything but her. That hurt too.
His gaze fell on the birchwood violin. Quin scrambled across the floor to retrieve it. This time he chose the farthest chair to sit in.
“Is it broken?” Mia asked.
“One of the strings unraveled. Catgut snaps more easily in the cold.” He began to untwist the peg on the instrument’s neck. “Dropping it didn’t help.”
Mia didn’t know how to talk to him. Had she really forgotten this simple act? She played out possible conversation topics:
M: How have you been?
Q: Enkindled by your sister.
M: How’s your family?
Q: Dead, thanks to you.
M: Are you and Pilar . . .
Q: Of course we are.
Needless to say, they all ended badly.
“So,” she began. A wildly courageous start.
“So,” Quin volleyed back.
She watched him feed the string through the peg’s tiny hole, looping the other end. He twisted the peg gently, the coil of string thickening as it turned. It reminded her of the night he’d prepared their supper in the Twisted Forest, how nimbly his fingers had eviscerated the dead hare for rabbit stew. He’d been quite chatty that night.
Now the silence was excruciating.
After a moment, he gestured toward the parchments without looking up. “You can read the letters. In fact you probably should.”
Mia was grateful to have a task. She skimmed the parchments. But her mind was spinning too fast; it was impossible to focus. After a few minutes she’d gotten the gist: Angelyne was obsessed with the Jyöltide myths, wanted to lure Pilar back to the river kingdom, and had a penchant for purple prose.
Oh, and she was probably insane.
Mia folded the letters softly and set them on the settee. Every second she wasted, Quin slipped farther out of reach.
An idea materialized in her head.
“If you could eat anything right now,” she said, hoping he’d remember, “what would it be?”
Quin didn’t answer. Had he forgotten? She certainly hadn’t. Mia conjured up the image of the two of them wandering cold and hungry through the Twisted Forest in the days leading up to the stew, Quin taunting her with his outrageous imagined meals.
“I would take some nice smoked lamb,” she prodded. “Add a little sage butter on the roll, and a dram of silver death to chase it down. A delicious Luumi supper fit for a king.”
“I’m not hungry,” Quin said.
The violin string popped out, destroying the tension he’d been so careful to maintain. He squinted at the notches, frowning as he ran his finger over the grooves. What was it Mia’s mother had said? A body without sensation is like a broken violin. Still beautiful, but empty without the music that made it sing.
Quin’s fingers ceased to move. He looked up at her, the muscles twitching at the hinge of his jaw.
“I dreamed about you, Mia. I knew you weren’t dead, but I still felt like I had lost you. I suppose, in all the ways that mattered, I had.”
He almost smiled. “I’ll admit it: in the moments my mind was my own, I thought you might come back. That instead of going to the snow kingdom, you would decide to turn around and help me. To free me from the tyranny of your sister’s control.”
She exhaled a long breath. “I was going to, Quin. I swear it. Every day I searched for my mother, I was thinking ab
out you.”
Mia plucked at the lace trumpets on the settee. There was so much she wanted to say, and no possible way to say it.
“I’m sorry, Quin.”
He set his jaw. “Life is too short for regret.”
“Life is too long to never say you’re sorry. And I am.”
Once again Quin drew the violin string taut, and once again it unraveled.
She waited, blood thrumming in her wrists. No matter how much she wanted to interject, she would let him speak.
“Did you know the piano is also a string instrument?” he said. “Most people don’t know that. The piano and violin look like different species—a giant and an ant. But in the end they’re not so dissimilar. That’s why they blend so beautifully together. Two different instruments playing the same song.”
“Do you love her?” She couldn’t believe she’d had the nerve to ask it, but there it was, suspended in the air. “Are you in love with Pilar?”
Quin stood. With the violin cradled in his arms, he walked over to the piano.
“Music is an instrument of grief,” he said. “An instrument is useless if there’s no one there to play it.”
He lifted his arm, swung the violin in a wide arc—and brought it down hard on the black-and-white keys.
A dark, jarring chord clanged as a sickening crack echoed through the room.
Mia jumped off the settee.
“Quin!”
He lifted the violin and smashed it into the piano. Again. And again. The keys stuck and jammed; the discordant notes clung heavy to the air, until they didn’t. Mia staggered back, away from the carnage, a safe distance from the piano’s chipped ivory teeth. It hurt to look at. Like staring into a crushed, broken mouth.
The violin bent and contorted, the wood fracturing more with each strike, until its graceful curves were nothing more than splinters.
Tears pressed at Mia’s eyes. Even if she couldn’t play either instrument to save her life, it frightened her to see Quin destroy them. She knew how much music meant to him.
And then it was over. He dropped the decimated violin to the floor. His shoulders shook; she thought he might sob. But when his eyes met hers, they were fierce.
“What’s happening?” She shrank away from him. “I’ve never seen you like this.”
“You’ve never seen me at all. I’m always someone’s puppet. Following you, following Pilar. Doing Angelyne’s bidding. When do I get what I want? When am I free to choose?”
“You said you were free.”
Quin walked to the window and peered out onto the port town below. Whatever he saw made his whole body tense.
“Look,” he said.
Cautiously she edged forward.
Her gaze fixed on the ever-present glacier in the distance, reaching down toward Valavïk like the knuckles of a giant hand. When Mia first saw the glacier, she hadn’t found it ominous. Now she wasn’t sure. A thin stream of water trickled off one white ledge.
But when Quin tapped the windowpane, she followed his finger to a much closer scene. Amidst the horde of Jyöltide revelers hustling to nab a prime spot for the Illuminations, she saw a ship freshly docked in the harbor. If Mia squinted, she could just make out a tiny figure stepping off the gangplank, the glint of sun on strawberry hair.
“It would appear,” Quin said, “that your sister has arrived.”
Chapter 45
Sapphire Silver
THE ACT OF ILLUMINATION required two ingredients: light and movement.
Take a book with pages limned in gold foil. In quiet darkness, the book was little more than ordinary. But if you thumbed through it under candlelight, the paper’s edges scintillated like liquid gold.
Illumination was by nature unstable. For an object to shine, it first had to shift.
Angelyne sauntered down the gangplank, out into the bustling port of Valavïk. She craned her neck to gaze up at the starless night. The Illuminations had not yet begun. She’d assumed the Weeping Moon would resemble a teardrop, but it was thin and sharp, a silver scythe in the sky.
She waved off the mariner who tried to assist her. Beneath her skirt she’d sewn a small pocket into the hem; other than the contents of that pocket, she had no luggage. She had come to Luumia to get, not give.
The air reeked of fish and rot. She leaned into a salt-crusted wood beam to regain her equilibrium. Before this voyage, she had never set foot on a ship. After she returned to Glas Ddir, she hoped never to again.
What bittersweet irony. The girl who could make whole rooms of men drop dead with a snap of her finger couldn’t heal her own seasickness. Magic was funny that way. Fearsome Angelyne, Queen of Glas Ddir, Savior of the Dujia. A waif clinging to a wharf.
“You all right, miss?” A dirt-smudged boy materialized at her side. “Need any help?”
“I’m fine.”
He took a step closer. “Looks to me like you’re about to heave up chunks.”
“I don’t need your help.”
He cocked his head, silver hair masking half his face. “You’re from the river kingdom.”
The boy reached toward her wavy ginger tresses. She recoiled.
“Are you evil too, miss?”
Angelyne had a fervent desire to crack his head open like a winter squash. What more did people want? She had reopened the borders. After dispensing with Zaga, she had rescinded her teacher’s more brutal policies—they were no longer stacking bodies in the castle halls. And she had repealed all of King Ronan’s hateful decrees, which meant Glasddiran women were now free to discard their gloves and practice magic with reckless abandon.
There had been casualties along the way, of course. Subjects who refused to kneel, proving themselves more valuable as corpses. An inevitable side effect of progress. For a kingdom to shine, it first had to shift.
“If I can’t help you, miss,” said the boy, “you can help me.”
She felt a fumbling at her hip, then a quick tug, followed by lightness. The urchin scampered off down the pier, his dirty fist clutched tight. She didn’t have to check the secret pocket in her skirt to know it was empty.
“Little thief,” she muttered.
She tapped her throat. Instantly the boy fell onto the dock, face slamming into the uneven wood planks. He let out a sharp cry.
Angelyne strolled leisurely toward him. He flailed and writhed on his stomach, clawing at his throat, gasping for breath. She bent over his body.
His fist unclenched. Empty. What he’d stolen was no longer in his hand.
By now a small crowd had gathered. She heard whispers of “witch” and “monster,” fear rolling off them in sweet, icy gales. Sometimes Angelyne gazed into a looking glass when she practiced the kind of magic only she could do, manipulating another person’s body without ever touching their skin. She knew exactly how she looked. Savagely calm.
The boy’s coughs rasped and deepened. He lurched onto hands and knees, chest seizing, as if he were struggling to hack something up. In fact he was. An object lodged in his throat, spit and breath mangling around the lump, until finally he spewed it out on a stream of bloody black.
No one said a word as the boy rolled onto his side, still choking, but breathing nonetheless. A shiver of disappointment ran through the crowd. They had missed their chance to witness a gruesome death. In Angelyne’s experience, people’s hunger for catastrophe almost always outweighed their concern.
The other urchins edged forward to see the object their friend had heaved up. When it quivered and extended seven black legs, they gasped.
“What is that?” one of them whispered, shrinking back.
Angelyne swooped down and snatched it up. She crouched on the edge of the pier, dipped it into the ocean, and shook off the remaining blood and phlegm.
“Is it a spider?” squeaked the smallest girl, who looked like she might burst into tears.
“This?” Angelyne held it up with an insouciant shrug. “This is merely a stone. He stole it from my pocket.”
/> In her palm, the creature had hardened into a wheel with seven spokes, no bigger than a plum. Pale white particles shimmered in the lustrous black stone like snowflakes.
Angelyne crouched beside the thief, who had managed to lift himself onto wobbly elbows. She brought her face level with his, dangling the dark gemstone inches from his terrified eyes.
“You ought never to steal something,” she said coldly, “when you don’t know its worth.”
Hordes of people thronged the streets of Valavïk as Angelyne made her way to the palace. She passed families huddled together, children bundled in festive Jyöltide scarves and striped wool hats, parents clasping mugs of cinnamon-swirled cocoa. The Luumi chatted and laughed and sometimes stared up at the sky, waiting for their history to be writ in lights.
She felt sorry for them. They were so awestruck that the Illuminations had returned after twenty years, it hadn’t occurred to them to ask where the lights had come from, or what they even were.
As a girl Angelyne had been afflicted with the same wide-eyed wonderment. She’d read everything she could about the Luumi festival of Jyöl, smitten by the magic and majesty. She loved the Addi myths most of all. The story of Græÿa and her six children—the Seven Souls of Jyöl—were infinitely more compelling than the lackluster Glasddiran tales of four squabbling brother-gods creating the four kingdoms.
Of course, the more she dug into the old myths, the more she understood the darkness at their hearts. Græÿa and her children had suffered in ways too horrible to imagine.
Now, as she drew closer to the palace, she cared not one whit about the twisted scribbles that would soon paint the sky.
What she did care about was their source.
Angelyne hugged the eastern side of the palace and, with no guards to stop her, circled round the back. She followed a winding garden path through an atrium, then down a flower-scented corridor to an iron gate where a stout boy about her age was waiting.
“Your Grace,” he said, bowing. “You’re even lovelier in person.”
“You’re not the man I was expecting.”
“When day breaks, frost becomes a flame. When dusk falls, beasts become the prey.”