“Oh, I can’t? So sorry, I didn’t realize. It seems like you’ll have to live with the consequences, I’m afraid.” Heron flicked his fingers, and a scalpel appeared in his hand. The blade was memory steel; it glittered in peacock colors against the black velvet of his glove. “I can cut out his heart, if it’s truly so important to you.”
“How dare you interrupt Senne’s training?”
Heron stepped closer to Silver. He was nearly a head taller than her, and her gray-streaked brown hair looked faded next to him.
“This is training? In that case, I must apologize. For a moment, it looked as if you were bullying a child into saving Seichre from having to pay its executioners.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m sure it’s an easy mistake to make.”
Silver bristled. “You insubordinate little—”
“I’m not your subordinate anymore. Haven’t you heard?” Heron moved his coat aside. There was a small silver chain attached to his chest pocket, dangling a pendant in the shape of a comet.
“They instated you as the next Lord Wraith?” Silver said.
“They did. I don’t answer to anyone but the Crown now. In short, Silver, I’m done with you.” He stepped neatly over the corpse of the prisoner and offered Senne a hand. “Come on, Senne. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She took his hand. The blood on her hands soaked into his glove, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“You can’t just take her. We’re not done here.”
“Is that a threat?” Heron said mildly.
“No,” Silver grumbled.
“I didn’t think so. Senne, you’ll need to find shoes and wash your hands. We’re going outside.”
“I can go outside?” Senne said.
“You can now,” Heron said.
“She’ll have to come back for training,” Silver snapped. “That child is a valuable asset. I don’t know what you’re planning, Heron, but Tin won’t let you get away with it.”
“Heron?” Heron said, with a tone of slight surprise.
Silver gritted her teeth. “Honorable Lord Wraith, I mean.”
“Ah. I wasn’t sure whether or not you were referring to me,” Heron said pleasantly.
“You can’t keep this up forever.”
“We’ll see,” Heron said.
He led Senne out of the small, bloodstained room. He found a pair of shoes that would fit her small feet. He helped her wash her hands in a basin of clean water. Then, finally, he led her outside into the sharp golden sunlight of the summer afternoon.
An older Senne watched them go. A realization billowed in her chest.
The Wraith Initiative hadn’t raised her, Heron had. If Senne had a duty, it wasn’t to the Wraith Initiative. It wasn’t to her country. It wasn’t to the Seichrenese monarchy, either. It was to Heron. Her true duty was to repay his kindnesses.
It hurts. It always hurt.
She had done a fine job of that lately, when her monstrous form had ripped his left hand from his body. There, as the memory of her childhood started to fray at the edges, Senne made a decision. It wouldn’t happen again. No matter what she had to do, she would never lose control of her own powers again, even if she had to rip her memory ore heart shard out of her chest with her bare hands.
The memory evaporated, leaving Senne standing in the street in front of Heron, who held a beating and malformed human heart in his hands.
She took it back, and it started to glow. Softly at first, then more intensely, the heart started to blaze with the many colors of memory ore. Peacock greens and violent sky blues and molten oranges and golds and pinks and reds raced up the sides of it, until the core of the heart started to glow like a miniature sun.
Senne grit her teeth and jerked the heart forward, severing the last few threads of flesh that connected it to her body. There was a searing flash, and then the light quieted.
The object Senne held in her hands was a perfectly-shaped human heart, constructed of something half-crystalline and half-metallic. Its colors shifted, silky and iridescent. Deep inside its glassy chambers, a golden glow pulsed like a heartbeat.
Senne looked up and met Heron’s eyes. He smiled.
“I told you you’d survive this,” he said.
And he was right.
✽✽✽
They went back into the manor and sat in the kitchen. Heron built a fire in the stove and stoked it until red flames rippled over the embers, breathing warmth into the room. Then he rummaged around in the cupboards until he found a bottle of amber liquid Senne hadn’t known she owned. He poured two glasses and collapsed into a chair at the table.
“I’m sorry for hurting you,” Senne said. “Are you okay?”
He flexed the fingers on the hand she had severed. His joints cracked. “I’m fine. You can’t kill me without destroying my heart. Which is true of you too, now.”
Senne looked down at the object in her hands. It glowed softly, jagged at the top where the petrified veins broke off and smooth at the bottom. It was very heavy for its size.
“Is that true? I can’t die unless someone destroys this?”
“As far as I know, yes. There may be some exceptions, but I’ve never been exceptionally eager to test it out.”
“Was this how you refined your heart shard?”
“More or less,” Heron said conversationally. “I was alone at the time, and I ripped it out of my chest myself.”
“That must have been horrible.”
“It wasn’t that—” He caught himself. “It was. But it’s over now. Your body belongs to you again.”
Senne put her heart down on the table and took a sip of the amber liquid. It was brandy, and it burned the back of her throat numb as she swallowed it.
“I’m sorry,” Heron said suddenly.
“What for?”
“Everything. If I had told you how I refined my heart shard, maybe this would have been easier for you.”
Senne shook her head. “It’s not your fault. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“You were right. It wasn’t the sort of thing you should have to deal with alone.”
Heron scrubbed a hand across his face, smearing grit and drying tears into his skin. “Yes. Well. This has all been very unpleasant, and... wait.”
“What is it?”
He gestured around at the kitchen, and then the narrow stairwell framed by the kitchen door. “Where’s Annara?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Lord of Archon dined at sunset, alone in a long room with a vaulted ceiling and high, pointed windows. Shadows stretched and lengthened across the tablecloth as he picked at a meal of roasted quail and tough, leathery greens. When he was finished, he pushed his chair out from the table and left. The servants would clean his plate.
The House of Archon was quiet, almost eerily so. Normally, despite Lord Archon’s best efforts, the tap of servants’ cheap shoes on polished marble floors would be audible no matter where he went, but today the house was silent. He could almost hear the white-uniformed guards breathe as they stood motionless at their posts.
The sun was a dying sear of light over the dark, sloping form of Chreon Se across the water. The shadows of furniture pulled themselves into strange, grotesque shapes on the floor. The house was so still.
When he made it to the throne room, the guards automatically pulled the door open for him in one fluid motion.
Annara smiled at her father. She lounged across the throne with her legs crossed and her chin in her hand, as if she belonged there. Her posture was casual without being slouched, and there was a trace of satisfaction in her face. For the first time in her life, the way she held herself breathed power.
Lord Archon slowly turned purple. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Seichre.”
“I thought I’d come back early and surprise you,” Annara said, with a sharp-edged sweetness that made the guards shiver.
“Get off the throne. You don’t belong there.”<
br />
“No.”
A vein twitched in Lord Archon’s forehead. “What is this?” he said, quietly at first. Then he raised his voice. “What is this? Is this supposed to be some sort of show of… what, defiance? You think to defy me?”
Annara just watched him, nothing but flat, cold superiority in her eyes. It was the exact expression he had worn when she knelt before the same throne nearly six months earlier.
“This idiotic rebellion ends here,” he said. “Guards, arrest her.”
His words echoed slightly off the high ceiling. The air was still, and the room flooded with silence as soon as the echoes disappeared. Annara smiled.
“Guards,” Lord Archon said sharply. “I told you to arrest her.”
“They heard you,” Annara said.
“What is the meaning of this?”
“You called it— what did you just say? An idiotic rebellion?” Annara snapped her fingers. All around the hall, doors flew open to reveal more white-clothed Archonian guards. They formed a circle around Lord Archon, unsheathing swords and lowering flintlock muskets. “I believe the proper term is military coup.”
The color drained out of Lord Archon’s face as he stared down the dark mouths of the muskets. Annara stood in one fluid motion, casually spinning her own pistol as she walked over to face him.
“Bring the rest of the court in,” she said to one of the guards. “I want them to see this.”
“How?” Archon said sharply. “How did this happen?”
“You didn’t pay your soldiers enough, to be honest,” Annara said conversationally. “As you know, it is hard to keep a standing army in the Crescent. The turnover in Crescentian militaries is very high, since most soldiers are mercenaries who sail in with the merchants and serve for a few months before moving on. It makes their loyalty very easy to buy.”
“Where did you get the money?” Archon breathed. “Is Seichre backing you? I never should have let you go there.”
“Let me? You forced me to go there for your own political gain. You would have made me an unwilling concubine to an assassin. Lord Wraith isn’t backing me. I don’t need her help. I did this all on my own.”
A door opened. “All the courtiers we could gather on short notice are here, Princess.”
“Bring them in,” Annara said.
A small crowd of nobles huddled in the back of the room. Annara recognized most of their faces. Some were her father’s people, but a few had already decided to side with Annara. Irvynne stood towards the back. Her glacial blue eyes burned coldly as she watched.
Annara pressed the cold edge of her pistol to her father’s forehead. “Now kneel.”
He looked up at her. She could see hatred in his cold gray eyes and the wrinkled lines of his face, but it was clouded with disbelief, as if he couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing. Annara and her father had lived in different worlds for years: Lord Archon in his cold palace, encased in a fictional world where every girl was happy to obey and no one ever lashed out against him, and Annara, in a cutthroat criminal underworld that shaped her into something brutal and ruthless. Her world was making an inroad into his, and he still couldn’t see it.
“On your knees,” she said, in a vicious monotone, “if you want to keep your kneecaps.”
Under the silent eyes of the court, Lord Archon slowly sank to his knees.
“Your crown,” Annara said.
He removed the golden circlet on his head with short, choppy motions and placed it in her hands. She placed it haphazardly across her gray-blonde hair and smiled.
“Your coat, too, if you please,” she added.
He started, then slowly removed his coat. It was white, dripping with silver embroidery, with his characteristic ermine collar. She placed it casually around her own shoulders.
“I’m sure you never thought it could come to this,” she said, examining her fingernails. “If I were you, though, I wouldn’t be surprised. The reality of ruling is that your smallest actions can have devastating effects. You sentence a traitorous concubine to death. You exile her daughter to a nunnery. And, eventually, she comes back to take your throne. My throne.”
“It will never be your throne,” her father said.
“Oh, you poor thing. It already is.”
Irvynne made a small, involuntary noise of despair. Annara’s head snapped up immediately.
“Who spoke just now?” she said.
One of the other courtiers bowed deeply. “Miss Irvynne, Lady Archon.”
“Irvynne. I remember you. ‘You might have gotten your title back, but you’ll never be a princess,’ right? Where are you from?”
Irvynne’s lip trembled. “Chreon Arda.”
“Chreon Arda, hm? Perhaps you ought to return there. If you can’t stand seeing me as a princess, I hate to imagine how you must feel now that I’m a queen. Exile,” Annara said. “Choose your next words carefully, Irvynne. There are far worse things I can do to you.”
Irvynne cast her eyes down. Annara could feel hatred radiating off of her in waves. “Thank you for your generosity, Lady Archon.”
“You’re welcome. And you,” she said, whirling around to point her gun steadily at her father’s face, “know that if you play your cards right, you might get out of this alive. Who is the one rightful ruler of Archon?”
“You are,” he said. Hoarsely, as if the words seared his throat.
“Say my name.”
“You are, Annara.”
She dipped in close, so that the tips of her hair brushed his ear. “Don’t you fucking forget it.”
He swallowed. A vein beat in the soft part of his neck. For once, it wasn’t out of anger, but out of fear.
Annara turned back to the courtiers. “I would like to have a private chat with my father. The rest of you are dismissed.”
The courtiers filed out, one by one. Haol and the soldiers remained. The temperature in the throne room seemed to drop by degrees. They retreated to a respectful distance, and Annara let her warped sunset shadow fall over her father’s face. He looked smaller than he ever had, and his skin was so pale it was almost translucent, like it belonged to a blind, eyeless thing dragged out from the dark waters of some prehistoric cave.
“What happens now?” he said, although the undertone was clear: what are you going to do with me?
“Do you want to live?” Annara said.
His tone changed to something ingratiating, and Annara was reminded that before he got drunk on the divine right to rule, he used to be a politician. “Of course. I’m certain we can work something out.”
“Yes,” Annara said. “I’m sure we can.” She retreated a step, lowering the pistol so that it hung loosely by her side. “But know this. After all these years under your rule, every slight, every belittlement, I will accept nothing less than you dressed in rags, in exile, waking up hungry in the middle of the night. I want you to watch as I build an empire and destroy everything you ever worked for in the process.”
His eye twitched. “You can’t do this to me.”
“I can.”
“You’re just like your mother. Traitorous bitch.”
“I see you’ve made your choice, then,” Annara said. “I was prepared to make this a bloodless coup. The first one in Crescentian history, as a matter of fact. But on second thought...”
She lifted the pistol very quickly. Before anyone could process what was happening, a shot echoed off the vaulted ceiling, and the former Lord Archon’s body slumped backwards onto the spotless marble floor. There was a small wound cratered in the center of his forehead. Perfectly symmetrical. Blood stretched out behind his head like a shadow. A line of saliva ran down his chin.
Annara stood there, waiting for her heart to settle. Her breathing slowly calmed from a frenetic rush. She could feel gunpowder residue staining her fingers in flecks, hot but not hot enough to blister.
Haol politely turned his face away, an unreadable expression written across it. One of the younger guards took a
deep breath, which was audible in the silence. He walked up to Annara, and she could see wide brown eyes beneath the winged silver of his helmet.
“He deserved it, Lady Archon,” he said.
Some of the guards on Annara’s payroll weren’t just mercenaries. The late Lord Archon’s rule had left a bloody trail across the history books, full of executions and abuse, and he had made himself plenty of enemies.
“I know,” Annara said shortly. “Haol, find someone to clean up this mess.”
Haol bowed. “Yes, Lady Archon.”
Annara tucked the pistol into the pocket of her father’s— her coat. When she caught her reflection in the cold, polished marble of the floor, her expression was familiar. It was the same flint-hard look she had worn whenever she was alone since the day of her mother’s execution.
This time, though, her shoulders were covered in ermine with black flecks like drops of dark blood against snow and soft edges that reached up to frame her cheeks. And on her head, there was a crown.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Four days later, Senne still hadn’t seen a sign of Annara.
She and Heron strolled side by side in the Royal City, around puddles covered in lacy ice that would melt by the afternoon. Winter was coming, and with it, a lull in trade as the merchants faced increasingly inclement winter weather. Senne bit her lip and watched the flat cobblestones go by.
“I’m fairly sure she’s fine,” Heron said, for perhaps the third time that day. “I assume she has her own plans. It was rather unkind of her not to leave a note, but it is Annara we’re talking about, so...” His tone changed abruptly. “Actually, I know she’s fine.”
“What? Why?”
Heron pointed. There was a broadside pasted to a brick wall nearby. It had gone slightly transparent from moisture, and the paper was already starting to deteriorate at the edges. DEADLY COUP D’ÉTAT IN ARCHON, it said, in a bold black font. Underneath, there was a black-and-white etching of a young woman sitting on Archon’s white swan-shaped throne. The illustrators had added a cruel twist to her mouth.
“Ah,” Senne said.
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