by Maya Motayne
“And then?” Alfie said quietly. Finn didn’t know how long she’d been quiet.
“We both were fighting over the bread, shoving each other around, scratching at each other and yanking at each other’s filthy clothes. Then I just . . .” Finn shook her head and mashed her lips together. If they’d just been standing in a different position, then maybe it all would have ended differently. “I tackled her. She fell onto her back with me on top of her. I didn’t know that there was a wooden plank on the floor behind her, one with sharp nails sticking up out of the wood . . .” For a moment Finn lost her words, but Alfie knew better than to say anything. “Someone must’ve been building something and threw that plank away in the alley.” Finn took in a breath and tried to make her voice run smooth, but failed. “When I knocked her to the ground, I could hear it happen. I swear I could hear the nails sink into her. She went silent, died in a moment. One went through her neck, through the back of her head.” Then her words were coming too rapidly to control. “There was blood everywhere, the bread was wet with it. Worst part is that when we were fighting over that maldito bread, I’d thought to myself, I don’t care if she dies as long as I can just get something in my stomach. Just a bite.” She blinked to keep her stinging eyes from spilling over. “My wish came true, it seems.”
There was a beat of silence before Alfie’s voice came, warm as a child’s blanket. “I’m so sorry.”
She forced herself to shrug nonchalantly, though her eyes kept darting to his face. The prince was so expressive that she knew the moment he felt disgust toward her, she would see it on his face, clear as day. She couldn’t help but search for it as she spoke. There would be a strange comfort in confirming what she already knew to be true—that she was as much a monster as Ignacio had always said.
His voice was feather soft. “But that . . . that wasn’t your fault at all.” She could hear every ounce of kindness pouring into his voice. She hated him for it.
“You weren’t there,” she snapped. “You wouldn’t know whose maldito fault it was.” She didn’t want to tell him about her parents, about what Ignacio had done to them, thanks to her. The wound was too fresh to speak of. She couldn’t bear to say it aloud. “Before this dark magic, the restriction on Ignacio’s propio was that he needed to know something about you to control you with his propio. Something you would share with hardly anyone.” Finn swallowed, her throat working. “When I told him about that little girl, he had all he needed to own me. He wanted to be the only person in my life. When I reached for anyone else, tried to make a connection, he commanded me to kill them.” The prince stilled, and she couldn’t bear the thought of looking at his face and seeing disgust there. Still, she couldn’t stop the words from parting her lips. “And the deaths were never merciful. With Ignacio it was always slow, personal. My hands wrapped around someone’s neck and him telling me to squeeze.” In a flash of searing memory Finn could remember the boy struggling beneath her, how he’d clawed at her fingers and scraped his heels against the ground as she’d closed her fingers tighter and tighter around his throat. “A stabbing and a slow bleed. Poison slipped into a goblet.” Finn couldn’t help but think of Bathtub Boy dying on the floor, his eyes weeping blood, the prince crying out.
“Finn,” Alfie said. “It wasn’t your fault.” He sat up then and looked at her. She turned away, her eyes trained on the road. “Look at me please.” With a ragged breath Finn met his eyes. There she saw concern and something else that she refused to name—an emotion that met her eyes without fear, yet she was afraid of it still. Afraid that seeing such a thing in his eyes would unspool something she’d kept coiled tight inside of her for so long. “You are no monster. Even if you’ve been made to think so.” His voice was quiet but strong. “I won’t let you die thinking it. I won’t.”
Finn’s breath caught in her throat. Ignacio had spent years hammering his words into her head about who she was and who she could be, all of it starting with that night in the alley. But the prince didn’t speak to her with disgust or pity. He spoke as if she could still be saved. As if she weren’t as broken and monstrous as Ignacio made her feel.
Maybe she wasn’t.
“That night with the bread, that was the night my face changed for the first time.” She’d never told anyone else about the moment that triggered her propio. But she didn’t want to die with that secret locked in her chest too.
“You just wanted to be someone else after that night,” he said.
Finn could only nod at that, her throat burning. Alfie sat back and stared forward again.
“My propio came for the first time at a moment that would look so insignificant to anyone but me,” Alfie said.
“What happened?” Finn said, more than glad to move away from her own memories. When he didn’t speak, she asked again, “Qué fue?”
“It really was a day like any other,” he said, but his voice carried a current of barely masked pain, like a river meant to gush held back by a flimsy dam. “I was nine. I walked into the library to find Dez. When I got there, he and my father were sitting together, laughing and smiling at each other.” Alfie’s voice quieted to a pained murmur. “They didn’t even notice that I was approaching. And I just, I saw this look on my father’s face. It was a look of such love for Dez. Such pride. And I’d never seen him look at me like that. I knew he never would. Never like that. That day was the first time I began to see magic and change my magic to match someone else’s. The first thing I did was change my magic to match Dez’s shade of gold.” Alfie cleared his throat, his voice thick. “Dez gained his propio after holding me as an infant for the first time, because he loved me. I got mine because I was jealous of him. Some brother I was.” He fell quiet for a long moment. “I just mean to say, you’re not the only person who wished you were someone else. You weren’t alone in that, even if it felt that way.”
His words dusted her skin and clung there, like fallen snow. To share one’s faults was a weakness; this had been clear to her for most of her life. Your faults could be used against you, used to control you, hurt you. If she’d known this as a child, she would’ve kept her secrets to herself instead of entrusting them to Ignacio. But Finn always prided herself on being a fast learner. Since then, she’d known that her scars and the stories that came with them were to be suffered in silence. They were something to be carried on the skin and the soul as a map of her most wretched moments. But it had never occurred to her that scars could be shared, the burden slung across two pairs of shoulders instead of one. It was a stunning feeling that sprouted and grew from the boy beside her and the soft cast of his eyes when he regarded her, as he tucked her secrets into his pocket for safekeeping instead of unsheathing them like a dagger to hold beneath her chin.
“Blue,” he said suddenly.
Finn tilted her head. “Blue?”
“The color of my magic, it’s blue,” he said. “You asked me before. It’s dark blue. When I showed Luka what it looked like with paint, he said it looked like the color of the night sky in a children’s book.”
She could imagine that. Something clean and soothing, calm, but a bit sad too. It was his color. “That makes sense.”
“And your magic isn’t one color,” he said, his words hurried, as if they didn’t have much time left. She supposed they didn’t.
“It isn’t?”
“No, it’s a deep red but it’s constantly shifting shades. Constantly changing.”
Finn smirked. “Just like me.”
“Just like you. I have never met—seen anything like it.” Alfie cleared his throat.
Finn was glad to have an excuse to keep her eyes forward, the wind cooling the flush warming her cheeks. She gripped the reins tight as the horses moved with a curve in the road. “Why were you going after Englassen books?” she asked.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked, his voice hushed.
“You get to know who you’re dying with, but I don’t?”
The prince was silent for a m
oment before he heaved a sigh. “I thought something in those books might help me bring my brother back. Or that’s how it began. It continued for much stupider reasons.”
“Like what?”
“To be reckless. To do something, anything, that would prove I’m just as wrong for the throne as I’ve always felt.” From the corner of her eye she saw him rubbing the back of his neck, a gesture that would be forever paired with him in her head. “My parents call it the weight of history. They tell me that I am the product, the progress of our ancestors—people who were enslaved by Englass, disconnected from their magic, their culture. And I believe them, I believe in our history and I’m grateful,” he said, his words hurried as if he feared she’d think him spoiled. “But when I think about all that was sacrificed for me to be who I am, have what I have, I get so paralyzed with nerves, I can’t think. Can’t do anything. It sounds stupid, but if I can’t handle the weight of history, how can I ever hope to become king? I’m wrong for it, I know it. Sometimes, I suspect my parents know it too. Especially Father. I know he wishes it were me, not Dez, who’d been taken.”
Finn shook her head. “No, it’s not you who’s wrong.”
“Hmmm?”
“It’s not you who’s wrong for the throne. It’s how you’re looking at it.”
“You’re an expert on ruling now?” he said dryly.
She shook her head again. “No, but I’m an expert on people, breaking them down so that I can mimic them.”
“So you’re an expert on me, then?”
She thought for a moment. “Sí.”
His laugh rang hollow and sad. “Well, that makes one of us.”
Finn remembered how he’d draped his cloak on her after they’d fought on the night of the cambió game. As if she were someone to be protected instead of a stranger who’d robbed him and knocked him flat on his back.
“You’re the kind of person who sees everything as something precious, something fragile. You’re afraid that you’ll break it.”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“You can’t see things that way. I’m not saying that Castallan isn’t great. It is. But it isn’t perfect. It never has been, never will be. Forget history. Forget legacy,” she said, and she wished she’d spent more time taking her own advice. She should’ve lived her life instead of running from the past. “If what you actually want to do is rule, gods help you, then just accept that your kingdom is a giant cesspool of shit like everywhere else. Then you won’t be afraid to take risks to make it better. And then maybe you’ll fix some things. If you walk around acting like you’re ruling over something perfect and fragile as glass, you’re gonna do nothing but polish it up and admire it. If you want to be a half-decent king, forget about everything that came before you, look at this place as it is, and deal with what you see.”
Alfie looked at her then and his eyes held her in a way that no one else’s had—as if beneath the grime of everything she’d done, the lives she’d ended, the pain she’d caused, there was someone worth knowing.
“I wish I’d met you earlier.” Something in the way he said it made her eyes sting.
“Right now, I wish for a lot of things.” More time would be the first, and she could hear the same feeling in his silence. The fear of death creeping behind them, following their footsteps.
But maybe this was as good as it could be. The moment she’d met Ignacio, she’d been on borrowed time. Still, her heart hammered in her chest, speeding up its rhythm to match how quickly her life was winding down, ending.
“Finn?”
“Yeah,” she said, her throat burning.
“You’ll never have to go back to him. We’ll kill him or we’ll die trying. And if we should die tonight,” he said, “I’m glad we will go together.”
“I don’t want to go at all.” She hated how small she sounded. Finn let go of the reins with one hand to rub her eyes before gripping the fabric of her trousers.
“Neither do I, but at least we won’t be alone,” he said. “I’ll introduce you to Dez when we get there. You’d like him.”
Finn had never bothered to think about the afterlife. She’d assumed that if there was some paradise of eternal rest she wouldn’t qualify. But maybe with a prince to vouch for her, she’d make it through.
“My parents died when I was really young,” she said. She remembered so little of them. Some of her most cherished memories were of how they would look down at her tenderly and swing her by the arms while they walked. How they’d called her Mija and pressed kisses to her cheeks. “I won’t know anyone in the next world.”
“You’ll know me,” he said. His hand grazed hers tentatively, a question in his touch. Only when she moved hers closer did he interlace their fingers, a touch of softness cutting through the wind blowing past the carriage. “And now I know you.”
She’d always imagined the weight of someone’s hand in her own to feel like an anchor, tugging her into a forced stasis when she only wanted to run, to be free. Yet now, she wanted nothing more than to stay. She felt more freedom in this moment than all her years combined.
Freedom, she was coming to understand, could be found in a person instead of a place.
The road straight and clear ahead of her, Finn turned and looked at the prince. In his gold eyes was the same unguarded fear that she felt in her bones, a vulnerability that left her raw and exposed to all that was to come. But there was power in the fear that surged between them, power in knowing that death was coming and that there wasn’t time to pretend, to be anyone but who you were, to feel anything but what you felt. She cast her eyes back on the road.
“All right,” she said. “Then we’ll go together.”
The thief and the prince rode on, the lacework of their fingers a promise that where one of them went, the other would surely follow.
33
The Substitute Prince
Luka was nervous.
The last time he’d been nervous at a ball he was—well, he couldn’t remember. Social functions were more his element than fire was. This was all very out of character and annoying. Needing to do something with his hands, he worried the collar of his deep blue overcoat that Alfie himself would have worn to the ball, if he were here to attend it. But he was not.
Instead, Luka was sitting on Alfie’s gilded throne beside the king’s and queen’s on the far side of the ballroom, opposite the grand marble staircase. Guests were announced, sauntered down the stairs, and strode across the ballroom to bow before the royal family with practiced smiles as the ball unfolded before them. Luka cursed himself for destroying the parchment Alfie had given him. Now he had no way of knowing if Alfie was okay. The worry pounded between his ears, its rhythm steady and fierce.
Castallan’s noblest danced and mingled on the glimmering, tiled floor. The ballroom was dressed in curtains magicked to darken and brighten throughout the night. Candles floated throughout as if stars had been charmed down from the heavens. The Equinox Festival was about the balance of dark and light, and the ball’s decor never ceased to reflect that. The domed ceiling of the ballroom was a patchwork of stained glass that, during the day, cast shadows in every color imaginable. But today he could only see the outline of the moon looming overhead, as if blocked by sheer, colored tissue paper, but Luka couldn’t let himself get lost in the tequila and the opulence of the ball as he usually would. Not with Alfie’s words echoing in his mind in an endless chant.
But if I fail, if I don’t come back, I need you to tell Paloma the truth and try to put a stop to this.
Was now the time? Had he failed? The world had yet to come crashing down around him, but still, Alfie had been gone for so long. He would not miss such an important night unless something terrible was happening.
If he was still alive, that is.
At that thought, Luka stood from the throne and started across the ballroom, his gold cape swishing at his ankles as he moved. He stepped around the nobleman who had come to greet him without a word. He prete
nded not to hear the queen ask where he was rushing to. He ignored the faces confused at his rudeness. There was no time for that anymore. Not now. Paloma stood in her formal dueña robes, trimmed in gold, at the far side of the ballroom, always preferring to keep out of the social politics of royal balls.
“Paloma,” Luka said, gripping her by the shoulder. She raised her brows, glancing at where his hand gripped her shoulder before looking at his face.
“Prince Alfehr,” she said, her eyes searching his face. “What is it?”
It was wholly improper to touch a dueña in such a way, but Luka was done with propriety. “I’m not Prince Alfie,” he admitted. He thought saying that aloud would be freeing, but instead he felt as if he’d been stripped of his coat in the dead of winter, exposing himself to the elements, to the consequences of this foolish lie he’d agreed to.
“I beg your pardon?” Paloma said, pulling from his grip. Her voice dropped to a murmur, conscious of the nobles looking their way. “Have you been drinking?”
He swallowed thickly, his fear that Alfie was already dead crawling up his throat like bile. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
34
The Two Princes of Castallan
The carriage rolled down the stone bridge across the lake and onto the palace grounds, where guests walked daintily up the castle’s stairs to be announced at the ball.
“Out of the maldito way!” Alfie shouted as a pair of nobles yelped, picked up their skirts, and dashed away as Finn pulled the carriage to a screeching halt at the palace stairs. The ride had given him the rest he needed and though his body still ached from Sombra’s magic, he felt renewed, ready to fight for his kingdom.