by Hannah West
“You’ll need to sneak me out in the night,” I said, my eyes tracking Brandar as he strolled through the garden, watching Calanthe sprint after a sparrow.
The princesses smiled conspiratorially. “That should be easy,” Glisette said. “The difficult part will be getting you face-to-face with Devorian before he has a chance to say no. We must not give him an opportunity to refuse you.”
“How?” Perennia asked. “The doors are barred, physically and with magic. Someone would have to admit her.”
“I have an idea,” Glisette said. “Devorian’s most trusted servant goes to the pleasure house most nights to pick out a new ‘guest.’ We’ll need to dress you to entice the servant.”
“That seems like a game of chance. You said Devorian would want to see me.”
“He will, I’m sure of it,” Ambrosine said, frowning at her sister. “We don’t need a silly ploy. If Devorian’s curious about her, a simple knock should suffice. And if he’s not, dressing her up as a whore won’t help the situation. He’ll just recognize her and throw her out.”
Perennia bit her lip in uncertainty. She looked at Glisette, who shrugged.
“All right.” Glisette turned back to me. “But if knocking doesn’t work, just know that I could have made you look astounding and you would have been selected.”
S I followed the sloping cobblestone streets, I noticed a reek of refuse and potent perfume. Pleasure houses lined the outskirts of the south end, and just beyond them lay a depression of weeded rubble that functioned as a border to the old city.
Grateful to be wearing boots and my training breeches, I sidestepped puddles of stagnant water and piss, making my way toward a makeshift bridge that lay outside the boundary of warm light pulsing from the streetlamps. I cast an uncertain glance up at the prince’s magnificent lair before crossing into the darkness of Pontaval’s neglected quarters.
The princesses had offered me a horse and an escort, both of which I had refused. I didn’t want to announce my approach too early. I’d considered bringing Calanthe, but she’d be more likely to take off after a rat than provide defense.
Yet I began to regret each choice that had led me here alone on foot. If even the pleasure houses remained within the limits of the new city, I wondered what kinds of sordid folks crept in the dark and called the old city home. My fingers closed over the grip of the dagger at my hip.
I could feel Perennia’s enchantment beginning to wear off. The guilt and sadness that had been my constant companions since Ivria’s death crept back, joining the fear that prickled up the back of my neck. The night breeze carried vestiges of winter’s chill. I shivered.
But a sense of duty, and moreover, of desperation, struck anew. I clenched my fists, shook off the tightness in my spine, and walked on.
I sensed movement in my periphery but refused to peer into the forsaken shops and smithies. Whether rats or wretches, I prayed the inhabitants would mind their own business if I minded mine.
I thought the sense of unease would diminish as I approached the vast palace at the hill crest, but the dark windows, arches, and spires felt as watchful as the shadows around me.
There were no sentinels at the metal gates surrounded by wild gardens. In fact, the gates stood slightly ajar, one side straining away from the hinges. I sucked in my breath and slipped through the opening to prevent the telltale groan of rusted metal. Weeds sprouted from the cracked stones of the courtyard. The frayed flags topping the shadowy turrets swished in the wind. My feet longed to race downhill to the light and safety of even the seamiest alley of the new city. But I took a breath and ascended the steps leading to the grand entrance.
The tarnished gold knockers were nearly too high for my reach. I touched the cold metal with my fingertips, hesitating. What if the prince stripped away my belongings and threw me out, like the poor girl his sisters had sent? My sympathy for her was renewed as I realized how treacherous the path home must have been.
At least he let her keep her shoes, I thought, as a means of self-encouragement. Then I shook my head. The prince would sense my fear, and he would sniff out my bluff. For whatever reason, the Water dried up beneath your touch, I told myself. The trees shriveled. The walls cracked. You do not fear a petulant prince.
Bolstered, I seized the heavy knocker and banged it three resounding times.
I took a step back and crossed my arms, attempting poise.
The silence drew on and suspense scraped at my resolve. But at last, a slat in the door slid open and I saw the top half of a face with ruddy eyebrows.
“Are you one of the girls they sent up?” the servant asked, eyeing my clothing.
I considered saying yes. It might gain me entry. But I remembered the princesses’ many ploys and said, “No. I’m Valory Braiosa.”
A beat passed, and then the slat shut firmly. After a few dragging minutes of increasing disappointment, a metallic thud signified someone unlocking the massive wooden doors.
They swung open with a stout creak. Light spilled across the threshold, revealing an entryway so unexpectedly splendid that I let out a gasp. I would have thought that a prince living in self-imposed exile would let dust and filth devour the place, but everything was immaculate, from the royal blue carpet to the ironwork that curved with the sweeping marble stairs. The silver lily motifs ornamenting the walls had been polished to perfection. Even the servant holding the door wore a clean, pressed tunic of silver and blue. “His Highness is waiting for you in the library,” he said with a bow. “I’ll take you to him.”
I stepped inside. The servant shut the door behind me, took my cloak, and led me upstairs. My palm didn’t even collect dust as it slid along the banister. The paintings in the halls had either been restored or so well maintained over the decades that they showed no signs of dilapidation. Perhaps Devorian’s father and grandfather had used this place as a secret retreat.
At last, we reached a set of double doors. The servant’s knock was answered by a gasp and a giggle.
“Come in!” a male voice called, laughing.
The servant opened the doors and stepped aside, leaving me to announce myself. But the words fled from my mind as I took in the scene ahead.
A perimeter of towering shelves lined the vast library walls. A large desk faced glass doors, looking upon a balcony overgrown with roses. At the center of the library, where one might ordinarily find a statue or a precious ancient text on display, there was instead an enormous canopy bed. A constellation of velvet chaises and tables replete with trays of food and drink surrounded it. Several barely clothed women draped themselves in languorous poses—except the one who straddled the shirtless prince on the bed.
“Ah!” Devorian said, seizing the woman by her hips and setting her aside. He was revealed to be wearing only thigh-high breeches. “Dear Valory, have you come to join the revelry?”
His lover cursed in a language I didn’t understand and collapsed back onto the bed in dismay. He answered her in the same language. His elicrin gift gave him command over all tongues and dialects.
“I should think not, considering I’m your cousin,” I answered, clasping my hands behind my back and sauntering over to a collection of instruments. I wondered what the kings who had used this library in the past would think of its current purpose.
“Distant cousin,” he amended, tossing back the dark blond waves settling on his shoulders. His magenta elicrin stone caught the dim light. “If you rule out your distant relations, there will be no royals left for you to marry. But Calgoranians are more obsessed with elicrin blood than royalty these days, aren’t they?” He hopped off the bed, strolled to a cart of liquor bottles, poured two tiny goblets of brandy, and offered one to me.
“I’m not here to take part in your decadence,” I said, sinking into a high-backed chair and slinging my legs onto a cushion, determined not to allow the spectacle of bare skin to discomfit me. “I’m here to convince you to return home and assume the royal duties your sisters think themselv
es wildly incapable of carrying out. Your uncle is keen to marry them off to the highest bidders, and, well, you can guess what he does next, can’t you?” I moved aside a tray of fruit and cheeses and picked up a handheld ornamental mirror lying facedown on an accent table. “Takes the crown, sits on the throne…you know the rest.”
Devorian traipsed over to rip the mirror from my hand. My own thorny expression passed over the glass, cast in shadow and moonlight, before he plunked the reflective side back down on the wood surface. “To be clear, I didn’t allow you in because I fear you or have any inclination to heed your advice,” he said, sinking back onto the bed. The woman he had left behind clawed at his chest and covered his neck in fervent kisses. “I did so because I’m intrigued by what happened at the Water.”
I tilted my head, locking him in a stare. “Maybe you should fear me,” I said, my voice even.
Devorian blinked at me a moment, then laughed. “I always liked you, little Valory. You’re so wry, so melancholy. And surprisingly dauntless. A Calgoranian woman of your standing ought to have shrieked and bolted at the sight of so much bare skin, yet here you are, sustaining an impressive façade.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You are gifted, Devorian. Your elicrin talent for languages would make you a fine and industrious king. You could strengthen peace with outside kingdoms, establish relations with countries we haven’t even dreamed of visiting. You could do great things, and you wouldn’t have to give up your passions. A king can do what he wants behind closed doors.”
“You think that hasn’t occurred to me?” he asked flatly.
Springing out of the chair, I crossed the room to a portrait of a young Devorian with his parents and sisters hanging above the hearth. He looked so innocent, so docile. Death coarsens us all.
“Are you going to allow someone to steal your birthright?” I asked, trying another angle. I didn’t want to bring up the men in white cloaks for fear he would show me the door. I whipped around. “Your parents would object.”
His jocular expression froze over. “Let my uncle take the crown. He will be forced to step aside.”
“By you? When you feel ready? Why not prevent him from claiming it in the first place?”
“It is not I who will overthrow him, cousin,” he said, tearing away from his lover again to pace the room. With a tormented sigh, he flung open the balcony doors and stepped into the night.
I plucked a lantern off the desk occupied by a sleeping woman swathed in sheer fabric and followed him outside. Hundreds of roses flaunted their sanguine red and blush hues even in the darkness. They clutched at the balustrade and crawled up the walls.
“Lovely, aren’t they?” Devorian asked.
I cupped a pink rose in my palm, minding the thorns.
“They’re remnants of Tamarice’s curse,” he said. “Before it was broken, impenetrable briars surrounded the palace, and its inhabitants were stranded between life and death.”
“Strange, that something so beautiful could spring from such wickedness,” I whispered.
“All beauty is laced with darkness.”
I released the petals and lifted the lantern to read his expression. “What do you mean, that someone else will overthrow your uncle?”
The single flame danced in his eyes. “You must know there are other kinds of magic besides elicromancy…ancient and fearsome, capable of awesome and unthinkable deeds.”
Unsettled, I strove to penetrate the ambiguity with a straight question. “What kind of magic, Devorian?” I asked. “Who are the men in white cloaks, the Summoners?”
“What really happened at the Water?” he countered, his blond eyebrows playful. “If you tell me your truth, I may tell you mine.”
“I have told it. I have only told it.”
“Is that so?” he asked with a mirthless chuckle. “Ambitious yet powerless little Valory Braiosa didn’t look at the Water and see…opportunity?”
“What do you mean, ‘opportunity’?”
“You’ve striven your whole life to be worthy, watched your cousins prance through the academy with their showy magic. And then Ivria sneaks to the Water…” He trailed off.
The incredulity slid from my features. Perhaps I could use a lurid false confession to earn his trust.
I lowered the lantern, letting the shadows play on my face. “She snuck away, picked the lock, and went through the portal. All I did was follow her. As I stood in front of the Water, I knew I was meant to have power. And I knew that if I touched it, even if it was wrong, it would all look like Ivria’s fault.” True resentment slipped into my false admission. “The anger would roll off her back. Everyone loved Ivria. They couldn’t punish me more than her for trying to save her.”
“But then she died, and all the anger stuck to you.” He clucked his tongue. “Inconvenient.”
A sneer pulled at my lip. “What do your visitors want from you?” I demanded, hoping he would make good on our bargain.
With a canny look, he strode back inside. I followed. Once again, he spoke in another language—Perispi, this time—to request something of the woman sprawled across the desk. She sat up to face him with a feline smile. I sighed with impatience as he leaned down to kiss her mouth, biting her lower lip like a luscious fruit and seizing her small breasts. Just when I worried he was trifling with me, he purred in her ear and she slid off the desk, tendering a mischievous look in my direction.
Devorian sat in the chair and lifted the top away from the desk, exposing a compartment lined with blue velvet. Inside was a parcel as big as my torso, wrapped and tied with soft leather. He extracted it with great care and closed the secret cabinet, laying the large item down as gently as if it were an injured bird.
“Is this what the Summoners stole?” I asked.
“I know nothing of theft.” With a graceful movement, Devorian loosened the tie and swept away the covering, revealing an iridescent slab of lustrous cloudy white, gray, mauve, and golden-pink. It reminded me of the inner layers of shells I used to collect from the beach in Beyrian. Minuscule engravings marred the mother-of-pearl surface.
“They want me to translate the runes,” Devorian said.
“And what do the runes say?”
“This lost language is so ancient that it tests even my gift of tongues. I can sound out the markings, but I can’t draw meaning from them. It’s never happened to me before. I speak every language known to man.” He ran his finger backward along a line of runes. “The Summoners asked me not to speak the entire incantation aloud. When I’ve finished parsing it out, they want me to participate in some sort of ritual.”
“Do you know their identities? Can you describe any of them?”
“They wear masks,” he said, salty. I glowered at his insufficient answer and he added, “No, I don’t know who they are.”
“What did they offer you in return?” Everything in me longed to ask what the incantation on this arcane tablet might accomplish. But Grandmum seemed to already know that, and I wasn’t here to satisfy my own curiosity.
“They promised me a place of authority in a new world order. But that’s not what interested me.”
A new world order? “What did?”
The hungry gleam in his eyes perturbed me. Here he sat in a room of resplendent beauties, shielded from responsibility and free to pursue every luxury thanks to the privilege of his birth. What could these men offer him that he lacked?
“They told me precious little about the incantation”—he looked from the tablet to me, the spark in his eyes glowing ever more infernal—“but I gleaned more than they shared. There were whispers of an ‘awakening.’”
For the first time since taking the princesses up on their challenge, it occurred to me that I had chosen the wrong path, a foolish path, and that I possessed neither the wisdom nor the aptitude to maneuver a ship headed for disaster back on course. I circled round the desk and spoke in as calm a tone as I could manage. “Devorian, resurrection rituals are forbidden to the utmost. Professo
r Strather said that even the darkest elicromancers of the olden days feared them.”
“Because the rituals always go awry,” he said. “But that’s elicromancy. This is beyond, more, stronger, greater.”
“Then we understand it even less.” I glanced back at the portrait of his family, noticing two urns on the mantel. If his sisters realized he had taken his parents’ remains and displayed them in his den of vices, they had spared me that unsavory detail.
Perhaps, at first, Devorian had hidden himself away to flee his duties as heir. But he stayed because the darkness of this place and the murmurings of his mysterious visitors had fomented a shadowy hope in his heart. He planned to resurrect his mother and father.
“Listen,” I said, waiting until he severed his infatuated gaze from the tablet to continue. “Resurrection rituals multiply tragedy a thousandfold. Your parents are at peace. You wouldn’t want to do anything to rip them from that, to give them back the misery of life.”
“What about my misery?” he growled, eyes red-rimmed. “They were torn from me.”
“Your sisters lost them too. Instead of closing yourself off, draw from their strength. Your parents are at peace in the land of light.”
Devorian took deep breaths, glaring at nothing in particular. Everyone in the room watched his heaving shoulders with rapt attention. My fingers ventured to the edges of the tablet, smooth beneath my touch. When Devorian didn’t react, I grasped it. It was large but slender, light enough to slide off the table without dipping with the weight.
I turned slowly, the urge to escape with this dangerous artifact racing through my bones. It would be a long journey back through the abandoned city, wondering if at any minute Devorian might catch up to me.
“What about Ivria?” Devorian asked, brusque, as I neared the library doorway. “What if this incantation has the power to bring her back?”
With an intake of breath, I turned back to him. “Devorian, I—”