by Jodi Meadows
“Your Highness?” Sergeant Ferris caught up easily.
“Just stay out of my way, Sergeant.”
I slammed into the wraith boy’s room, adrenaline buzzing through my system as the door clapped against the wall and came bouncing back. I turned on the light, illumination flaring over the small space.
“You!” My voice was ragged. I hoped I looked stronger than I felt.
The wraith boy was curled up in an empty corner of the room, so small that the clothes swallowed his gaunt arms and body. His feet were bare, and he shivered as though cold.
“Wake up!” I snatched a discarded shoe and hurled it toward him, aiming just above his sleeping form. It hit the wall with a bang, and the wraith boy peered out from under his arm.
“Hello, my queen. I’m pleased you’ve come to see me.”
“Get up.”
He rose to his feet, unnaturally graceful and deft in his motions. He was too flexible, too inhuman.
Glancing at me, he straightened his clothes and adjusted his size so he filled them out better. The seams bore signs of strain from earlier.
Strange, though. The fuzz of hair on his head had grown, and the wraith-white skin had darkened into a more natural hue of soft brown around his eyes and mouth and ears.
I made my words hard, like steel. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t send you to the bottom of the ocean to rot for the next hundred years.”
He unleashed one of those strange smiles that didn’t fit right on his face. “You won’t do that. You won’t send me away, or kill me, or order me to chase the boy who will not be caught. You will keep me here with you. And now you will give me your attention.” He closed his hands together, a small hollow between them as though he held a mouse or sparrow. As though my attention were a mouse or sparrow to be trapped there.
I stalked forward, drawing the cracked mirror from my pocket. My reflection flashed at me, hard and bruised. “Is this the kind of attention you want from me?” I turned the mirror toward him.
As quick as lightning, the wraith boy threw himself into the corner, shrinking as he covered his face with the top of his shirt. “Stop! Please!”
I pressed the mirror against my thigh. “Tell me what you did earlier.”
He peeked out from inside his shirt. “I came to find you.”
“Why?”
“Every night you leave the palace, always without me.” He straightened, his clothes falling back to normal. “I want your attention. But not”—he held up his hands—“with that mirror.”
What I wanted now was to smash the mirror in his face, but my hands shook so badly I could barely hold on to it. “So you decided to destroy the cathedral with thousands of people inside?” My mouth curled into a snarl.
“I wouldn’t have let you get hurt.”
I hurled the mirror at him. “That’s not the point!” He ducked aside and the mirror hit the far wall with a loud crack. When it landed faceup, the wraith boy jumped away, as though I’d thrown poison or swords.
“What should I have done?”
“You should have stayed here. Or trusted that I would have returned. Or—I don’t know. Not risked thousands of lives.”
“Yours is the only life I care about.”
“Theirs are no less important.” I moved forward and grabbed the mirror, its glass shattered even further after the impact. “Do you understand that?”
“I wanted you to notice me.”
“Well I didn’t want to notice you, and what I want is the only thing that matters.” A note of hysteria edged my tone. “Do you understand?” I asked again.
He hesitated, and then nodded. “What you want is all that matters.”
“There will be no more attempts to get my attention like that. You will not endanger lives for mere attention again.”
“Yes, my queen.” He knelt and made himself small, not a threat at all. “I will remember what you have said.”
“Good.” I bit down the urge to yell. He wasn’t human. I had no idea how he’d respond to continued assaults, and already my head thrummed with pain and rage and a hundred other things.
I stumbled for the door and grabbed onto the latch to steady myself.
“Why didn’t you catch Patrick when I sent you after him?” I asked, my back still to the wraith boy.
“I don’t know. He was good at hiding.”
The pressure in my head was overwhelming, pulsing around my eyes as I slowly turned around. “You need to answer honestly or I don’t know what will happen with this mirror.” I waved it around for effect, but the motion just felt crazed.
“You don’t need to threaten me, my queen.” The wraith boy looked up through white eyelashes; he hadn’t had any before. “I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know why I couldn’t catch Patrick. He was fast. Good at hiding. I tried.”
Then it would be pointless to send him again—especially not knowing what kind of destruction he might cause in the effort. Sending him before had been reckless.
As we stood there, watching each other, his skin rippled and it was as though ink ran down his face and throat. The flesh darkened all at once, and his hair grew past his ears: a warm shade of golden brown, darker at the roots. When he blinked, his eyes shifted from blue to brown. His face, too, had slimmed at some point, though who could say if it would stay like that?
“What’s happening to you?” I whispered. There was something unnervingly familiar about his appearance.
“I am changing. It’s what I am. I am a changing creature, made from the changing lands.”
“Chrysalis,” I murmured. This room was his chrysalis.
The wraith boy straightened, a hound catching scent of his quarry. “You’ve named me?”
What? “No.”
“You said Chrysalis.” He wrapped his hands in the bottom of his shirt, stretching the fabric taut against his knuckles. “It sounds like a name.”
“It isn’t.”
He leaned forward, eyes wide and eager. “Please name me Chrysalis. I like”—he cocked his head—“the way it sounds. The way it fits on me. Like a skin.”
“And why should I give you anything that you like?”
“Because I want to give you what you like.”
“I like answers.”
He clasped his hands together. “If I give you answers, will you give me the name?”
The last thing I wanted to do was bargain with him, but I’d take what I could get. “Why do mirrors frighten you?” As though it were a weapon, I flicked the cracked hand mirror so it reflected the ceiling.
The wraith boy skittered away, though the glass hadn’t been aimed at him. “Careful! Careful!” His chest heaved as he peeled himself off the far wall.
“Tell me why you don’t like mirrors.”
The wraith boy touched his face, as though memorizing his own features. “There’s something about them, isn’t there? Don’t you feel it when you look in the mirror?”
“What do you mean?”
“Mirrors.” The wraith boy’s voice dropped lower as he slinked around the room, watching the hand mirror as though it might leap at him. “Mirrors are both truth-speakers and liars: a contradiction made of glass and shiny backing. Don’t you know anyone who’s hated their own reflection? Haven’t you ever seen something you wouldn’t have without a mirror?”
I’d have never seen my own face without a mirror.
“I know people who’ve been disappointed by their reflections. And—” A memory moved in the back of my thoughts, one of leaping across rooftops and catching a figure in one of the city’s mirrors. It was how I’d caught Black Knife while he’d been following me one night.
The wraith boy nodded. “There’s this truth about mirrors. It’s inescapable. But they can lie, too. They can distort the truth, even hide the truth. They create illusion.”
Like the glow of starlight all across Skyvale, or the way afternoons were so bright as the sun fell toward the horizon, shining in the mirrors.
&n
bsp; “I see.”
“Do you?” He crept around my mirror, careful to keep out of its reflection.
“You don’t like mirrors because you see them as unpredictable. Unreliable. You never know what you’ll get from them, or how they might turn against you, even though they’re inanimate objects. You don’t like mirrors because they’re just like you.”
He bristled and shot a dark frown. “We are not the same.”
I gripped the handle of my mirror. “These don’t frighten me. I’m not afraid of the truth.”
“There are tales of losing oneself in reflections, or the essence of self being drawn out . . .” He went on, but I’d lifted the mirror to look into the biggest of the glass shards. My breath caught, and the wraith boy paused. “Do you see?”
His face was my face.
Not exactly, but the similarities were undeniable. His jaw tapered to a point, same as mine. The shade of his roots was the exact color of my hair. Even his eyes had changed to match mine.
Looking at him was like looking at the brother I’d never had. Anyone who saw us would have insisted we were siblings.
“My queen?” He spoke softly. Cautiously. “Do you want help? Are you trapped?”
I slammed the mirror glass-down against my thigh, making him leap back. “No. I don’t want your help. I want you to tell me what you’re doing. Why do you look like me?”
“Does it offend you? Frighten you? Do you not like what you see?” He drew himself up tall, shaking off the illusion of a scared boy. With his hands behind his back and his shoulders straight, he revealed shades of Patrick Lien, who he’d followed for days.
“You are a mirror.”
“No more a mirror than you, my queen. No more a mirror than anyone else who unconsciously shifts to reflect those around them. But”—again he touched his face—“some of my changes are more physical and I find I cannot transform as I once did.”
Was that good? Or a problem? I couldn’t even tell anymore.
“If you’d let me be around other people, I think my face would hold echoes of theirs as well. But yours is the face that matters the most. So yours is the one I wear. My unconscious reflection of you.”
“I don’t want you to look anything like me.”
“It is too late to stop it. If you let me see others, maybe—” He shook his head. “But you will not. You want to keep me locked in here where you don’t have to think about me. With walls between us, you can focus on everything you think is more important.” He settled into a neutral stance, his arms at his sides and his face clean of any expression. “Don’t worry.”
That was like a hailstorm telling crops not to worry.
“You created more wraith tonight,” he said, “when you awakened the cathedral. But that amount was so insignificant to the enormity of what is coming.”
“I know.” I swallowed hard. “Will it be able to break mirrors, too? Like you did?”
“I broke the mirrors because you made me strong. They scared me—and I still don’t like them—but I was strong enough to break them because of you. Because I wanted to be with you.” His gaze flicked up to meet mine. “This other wrath? I don’t know. It’s not alive. It’s not like me. It doesn’t have you to make it strong enough to fight the mirrors. But there’s a lot of it.”
Another non-answer. “The wraith was slowing not long ago, but now it’s touching the Indigo Kingdom.”
He tilted his head and dared step closer. “Explosions do not extend infinitely. The progress slowed because it was time for it to slow. But soon this land will change, too. Everything will.”
“What can I do? How long do we have?”
“I don’t know. Soon, I think.” He slinked closer. “Time for you is different. Or, it means something different. For me, it’s not as important. But the change will come on this land like an ocean pouring over the mountains. It will be fierce and fast.”
“That sounds like a prediction for something that’s supposed to be unpredictable.”
He bowed. “I tell you only the truth, my queen. Not because I don’t want to be trapped in your mirror, but because you are my queen and I will always do what I can to help you.”
As though we were friends. As though he cared about me beyond the control I exerted over him.
“It doesn’t matter why you answer me, or tell me the truth. Only that you do.” I spun and left the room, and when the door fell shut behind me, I slumped against it and sucked in a heavy breath.
“Your Highness?” Sergeant Ferris approached, cautiously. “What happened?”
“Call an emergency meeting of the wraith mitigation committee. When is the soonest I can address them?”
“First thing in the morning, Your Highness.”
I hated waiting even that long, but the delay would give me time to figure out what I intended to say.
“What shall I tell them the meeting is concerning?” Sergeant Ferris glanced at the door beyond me. “Him?”
“We need mirrors.” I lifted my eyes to his, and offered the hand mirror to him. A tin-backed shard of glass dropped to the floor. “It won’t be enough, but it’s the only chance we have.”
“For what?”
“To stop the wraith.”
PART TWO
THE DRAGON CROWN
THIRTEEN
AN ICY BREEZE fluttered through my bedroom as the clock tower struck four.
Darkness moved on darkness, and I was out of bed with my daggers drawn, every piece of my body groaning in protest. “Announce yourself or I’ll kill you.”
“I’m sorry.” It was Black Knife. The prince. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Everything startled me now, but I didn’t want to tell him so. I just sheathed my daggers and dragged a blanket from the bed to wrap around my shoulders like a cape. My nightgown afforded little in the way of modesty. “I should be apologizing to you.”
In the far corner of the room, the prince was a motionless black shape. Only the glint of moonlight on polished leather boots and the slither of silk on silk gave him away. He’d dressed as Black Knife to come sneaking over the rooftop, just as I’d done. My heart squeezed.
“But I don’t think there’s any way to properly convey my regrets.” I glanced toward the light switch, but this was better in the dark. It was easier to think of him as Black Knife and not the prince. “I’m afraid of the wraith boy. I don’t know what he is, or how to stop him, and I’m terrified of what he’ll do next.”
Black Knife crossed the room, a shifting heat and presence. A gloved palm cupped my cheek, hesitantly. “I don’t blame you for what happened.”
“You’re the only one.” It took everything in me not to lean into his touch; he was warm and solid, and like this he was my friend. But he was also Tobiah, and meant for someone else. I pulled back, and he let his hand drop to his side. “What about the memorial?” I asked. “Will it affect your ability to take the throne tomorrow?”
“I had the memorial completed in the palace chapel last night. It was small. Private.”
“That’s for the best.”
“There was no choice. My enemies would have protested my enthronement otherwise.”
Another apology sat on my tongue, but I couldn’t make it emerge. I’d almost cost Tobiah his crown. “Do you have many enemies?”
“Everyone here has their share. Worry about yours, not mine.” He spoke kindly, though he shifted away from me. “Tell me why you want a mitigation committee meeting called.”
I pulled my blanket tighter around my shoulders. “The wraith boy thinks we have no time at all before the wraith floods the Indigo Kingdom, and because right now, after the Inundation and the cathedral collapse, the committee will need to listen and explore every option available.”
“Then let’s do this right. List every point you want to discuss. Give me warning so that I can help.” He sounded like the prince, but nothing could break the spell of this boy in those clothes. The way he moved, and the way he wanted to
do what was right: those were qualities I’d grown to admire in Black Knife. “I think you’d go rushing into this with your convictions and good intentions, but one of the more difficult lessons I’ve learned about politics is patience, and planning, and knowing that no matter how good you are at both of those, there’s always someone who’s better and willing to go further. Unfortunately, my uncle is very good at it.”
“I don’t need to be rescued from Prince Colin—”
“I’m not trying to rescue you, but I am trying to help you succeed. There’s a difference.” He moved to the balcony window. “You have a hundred enemies, Wilhelmina. Thanks to your magic, the wraith boy, your various identities, and your connection with Patrick Lien, there’s a lot going against you.”
Did I have anything going for me?
“Let me help you, Wil. You don’t have to do this alone.” With that, he was out the window, a black blur on the balcony, and then gone.
He was right. I did need to plan the committee meeting, just as I’d have planned anything with the Ospreys. I needed to understand what actions would get me the results I wanted, take all variables into consideration, plan for possible counteractions. I needed to strategize.
Perhaps politics was not so different from revolution after all.
By design, I was last to the meeting.
Theresa was at my heels, still looking like a refugee who’d stolen a noblewoman’s burgundy gown. No matter how she lifted her chin and straightened her shoulders, she never quite managed the mask of confidence she needed. But she’d been in the palace only a few days, and already everything had gone wrong.
Having Theresa here wasn’t the same as having Melanie, but it was better than being alone.
Sergeant Ferris opened the committee chamber door, and when I strode inside, the buzz of conversation fell away. Every face turned toward me, most with crafted neutrality, others with open dislike.
Theresa paused just behind my shoulder, and Sergeant Ferris let the door fall shut as he took his place with the legion of bodyguards along the wall.