by Lyra Selene
Fire flashed white-hot on my cheeks and roared in my ears, drowning out the accompanying roar of laughter from Sinister. I watched with slitted eyes as Sunder sketched a mocking bow, then turned to clasp gloved hands with a tall girl behind him. Ice-blond hair looped high around her head, and her amethyst gown was edged in black velvet. She favored him with a cool smile, then turned to pin me with eyes like emeralds.
I jerked my gaze away.
“Mirage it is.” Severine sank into her chair, her expression suddenly bored. “Now go, the both of you. You have much to attend to. Neither of you will be expected at Salon this Nocturne.”
The girl beside me—Lullaby—dropped another deep curtsy. I didn’t even make the attempt. Blood stung my palms and rushed hot in my ears.
I allowed myself to be propelled toward the gilded doors at the end of the Atrium. Lullaby’s liquid eyes flickered toward mine, silently begging for me to leave quietly. She could probably feel the hot jump of the pulse at my wrist. Or sense the anger and humiliation rolling off me like yet another stench.
As the doors swept open, I skidded to a halt. Lullaby jerked my wrist, but I twisted out of her grasp and turned to face the chamber. Already, the nobles had returned to lounge on cushions and divans, limbs languid and heads swaying.
“And you, Majesty?” I called out. Defiance made me bold, and for once my voice was strong and powerful. “Severine Sabourin, Empress of the Amber Empire, Protectress of the Dusk, Warden of the Shore, and Glory of the Setting Sun? What should I call you, here in Coeur d’Or?”
The empress’s smile was sharp: a blade forged from dristic and whetted with secrets.
“If you’re very, very clever, little Mirage,” she said, “you’ll make sure to call me nothing at all.”
The door whispered shut behind us. Lullaby turned on me immediately, her lavender gown billowing.
“What was that?” she hissed in my face. “Are you absolutely mad?”
“Sorry,” I muttered. Already that lunatic burst of daring was fading, leaving me hollowed out with unease. “I know I shouldn’t have spoken so brazenly in front of the empress, but I—”
“Her legacy, you idiot,” she spat. “Has your head grown bored of its place atop your neck?”
“What are you talking about?” Confusion chased away the last of my anger. “I don’t know anything about her legacy.”
“Scion be damned.” Lullaby rocked back on her heels to study me with depthless eyes. “You really are a country gamine. Although I suppose you’d have to be ignorant, fighting your way into the palais like you did.”
“This is where I belong.” I squared my shoulders. “Isn’t it?”
Her mouth twisted. She slid her eyes down the empty corridor.
“We have much to do.” She turned on her heel, her movements graceful as a dancer’s. I trotted to catch up, my ratty boots loud on the tile.
“There are rules here, Mirage,” she muttered, emphasizing the strange syllables of my new name. “So many rules. I’ve been here two tides and I still don’t know all the rules, much less when I’m allowed to break them. If you have any sense, you’ll keep your head down and watch, and listen, and maybe you won’t be ostracized or killed.”
“Killed?”
“You think this is paradise. That we’re all powerful and wealthy and beautiful.” Lullaby’s voice swelled with caustic humor as she swept through a portico and down a flight of gleaming stairs. “You’re wrong. Living here is like living on the edge of a sword. One misstep and your reputation is ruined. And your reputation is the cheapest thing to lose.”
Luca’s words echoed through my mind. They’ll contaminate your soul with toxic games. Unease tiptoed into my heart.
“You shouldn’t have come.” Lullaby’s lovely face warped, then smoothed once more. “But you’re here now, for the next few spans at least. So. The first rule is never—ever—allude to Severine’s legacy. And that’s exactly what you did when you asked for her court name. You’re lucky you’re still alive. The last lord who dared ask wasn’t so lucky.”
A shiver wrenched at my spine. “She had him executed?”
“Worse.” Lullaby bared a set of small white teeth. “She set her dog on him.”
“Her dog?”
“You’re familiar with his name.” Her gaze was full of blunt fear. “Sunder.”
I stopped in the middle of the room, my head too full of thoughts to walk and think at the same time. Lullaby paused too, the set of her shoulders impatient. Around us, a living chamber of vine-wrapped pillars and leaf-drenched ceilings sighed in time to the trickle of a thousand clear rivulets branching across the floor.
“Sunder. Lullaby. Mirage.” I took a deep breath, as though I could absorb all the new information through my lungs. “What do the names mean?”
“The names represent the essence of a legacy. Take me: When I sing, my song affects the emotions of those who listen. I can just as easily inspire a dance or encourage sleep. So—Lullaby. You are a fantast—your power lies in illusions. While your new name was intended as an insult, Mirage is nothing if not accurate.”
“And Sunder?”
“Pain.” Lullaby walked on, hiking her skirts to avoid the skitter of water across tile. “He can tear flesh from bones, rip limb from limb, tighten your skull until your brain liquefies. Sunder.”
I shuddered, remembering the slash of his hard eyes across my face. The shrieking pain in my mind, over nearly before it began.
Sunder. My sponsor. For better or for worse.
I couldn’t help but think it was probably for worse.
“And Dexter? Sinister?” I hurried to catch up with Lullaby, who moved much quicker than her high-heeled slippers should allow. “The empress called them dynasties. Are they separated by blood?”
“No. Our dynasty represents our dispositions and motivations. I have seen siblings and cousins split between dynasties. Our dynasty is defined by who we are on the inside, not the manifestations of our legacies.”
“So—” I chewed on my lip, remembering the bright garb of Dexter, and the sneering, calculating gazes of Sinister. “Dexter is good, and Sinister is evil?”
“I doubt Sinister would appreciate that judgment.” Lullaby’s soft bark was barely amused. “It’s more complex than that. Take Blaze and Spark, for example. Their legacies manifest in essentially the same way—they both create fire. But while Blaze enjoys setting conflagrations to devour buildings and eat away at forests, Spark prefers sending glimmer-lights to dance spirals against the ceiling. Which of them do you think belongs to Dexter?”
“Spark?” I guessed.
“Exactly.”
“But what about me? I didn’t get to choose. Sunder sponsored me for Dexter.”
“Don’t remind me.” Lullaby frowned over her shoulder. “Scion knows where someone like you belongs.”
I buried a spasm of horror. “And why is everyone so young? No one looks older than twenty-five. Where are your parents?”
“Most of the highborn families keep to their estates, monitoring harvests and trade and taxes,” said Lullaby. “Only the most beautiful and talented of the noble children are hand-selected to remain at court. Jewels in a crown.”
Lullaby led me down a curving set of steps into a subterranean grotto set behind artfully tumbled boulders and a curtain of ferns. Hidden fountains filled the air with the sweet music of water. The scent of lilies hung heavy.
“Where are you taking me?” I whispered.
“The baths,” Lullaby replied, with a faint twitch of her nose. “Now hush, and do as you’re told. If you’re even able.”
Blood heated my face, but something stopped me from releasing the rising flood of angry words. I stared at my new mentor, chosen for me from Dexter at the empress’s whim. For all her sharp words and sidelong glances, she spoke to me without scorn, and had answered my barrage of questions with no small degree of forbearance.
She was treating me like a peer. Like an equal.
/> She might find me dirty and rude and uncultured. But she wasn’t trying to pretend that I didn’t belong in Coeur d’Or.
Rose-scented steam from the baths caressed my skin, promising hot water and perfumed soap and escape from half a tide’s sweat and grime. A keen burst of satisfaction warmed my chest, loosening my ribs and conjuring a smile to my face.
I made it. I crossed half an empire to find a world I’d only dreamed of, and it was more spectacular than I could have imagined. Despite Luca’s misgivings and Lullaby’s daunting words, I knew this was where I was meant to be. My legacy swarmed against my palms, a beguiling promise of a better future yet to come.
I’d made it to Coeur d’Or. I belonged here—I knew that. Now I just had to convince everyone else.
“A bath sounds lovely.” I lifted my chin and tossed my head. “Lead the way.”
The underground corridor opened into a broad, tiled chamber. Perfumed air caressed my face, hot with steam and lit with a thousand glowing ambric lamps.
Attendants led me behind a screened alcove, where my clothes were stripped away. The way they handled the foul scraps of my ancient dress, I doubted I’d ever see the garment again. I wrapped a panicked hand around my amulet when the attendant reached for it, but the girl pursed her lips and insisted I’d get it back when I finished bathing. She brushed out my hair with deft fingers, then, without warning, drenched me with a spray of lukewarm water. I spluttered and dashed the water out of my eyes, but another cascade drowned out my protestations.
By the time the attendant was finished with me, I was cleaner than I’d ever been. I reached for the robe by the door, but the girl slapped my hands away and gestured for me to return to the main bathing chamber.
I gritted my teeth, fighting a blush as I snatched a hanging towel.
I guess I needed a bath … before they would let me take a bath.
Lullaby was already in the steam-swirled pool. I clutched my towel closer when I noticed she was perfectly naked beneath the water. She laughed and sipped from a jeweled goblet.
“Another rural habit?” she asked, quirking a slender eyebrow. “Modesty is a choice, Mirage, but prudishness will get you nowhere in this place.”
I sucked in a lungful of humid, fragrant air, then dropped the towel to my feet. I darted down shallow, tiled steps, only releasing my breath when I was safely neck-deep in warm water.
In the shards of light dancing around the chamber, Lullaby’s eyes looked paler, and her skin deeper, so that they were both nearly the same color as the water. Her long black hair trailed behind her, twisting like a strange aquatic plant. Her gaze on my face was reflective.
“What?” I demanded. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing,” she murmured, then smiled. It was the first time I’d seen her smile, and it was lovely, like the sun breaking through a dark cloud. “You’re passably pretty, you know. Although much too thin. Perhaps things aren’t so dire after all.”
She ducked her head beneath the water. A stream of tiny bubbles burst upward as she surfaced with a splash and a giggle.
“You seem … more relaxed,” I ventured.
“I am.” The thought seemed to sober her. She pushed sopping hair out of her eyes. “It’s the water. I shouldn’t let it get to me.”
I stared at her, at the tint of her skin, the lively coil of her sleek hair. I’d never seen anyone who looked like her. Not that my life experience was particularly broad.
Lullaby caught my gaze, and blew out a loud sigh.
“By the Scion, you don’t know anything, do you?”
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“It’s all right.” She grimaced. “People talk about it, but usually behind my back. Have you at least heard of the Blue Men of the Sousine?”
I had, in Luca’s fanciful legends. Men with skin like blue ink; women with the scales of fish, and wings of glass.
“I didn’t know they were real,” I said. I reached for the twin to Lullaby’s glass sitting on the edge of the pool, and breathed the aroma of sweet wine and rare spices. The cool liquid burst on my tongue.
“They are,” said Lullaby, “although they call themselves Gorma, and they are neither as fearsome nor as magical as the stories tell. My father was one of them.”
“Your father? How?”
“My mother is a baronne. She trades extensively in the Sousine Isles, along the empire’s southern coast. She met my father on one of those journeys. They loved each other, but he would not leave his home. And she would not give up hers. And so they parted. But not before he gave me these.” She touched her hands to her tinted cheeks. “These.” She ran slim fingers along the lids of her cool eyes. “And this.”
She opened her mouth, and sang. It was a song of overwhelming longing. It rippled through me, and suddenly all I could think of was the water. Of ducking my head beneath the surface. Feeling the warm liquid embrace me. Drifting between the currents. I slid down to the edge of the water. My chin touched the surface. I closed my eyes.
The song broke off. I blinked, my mouth half-open and filled with perfumed water.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, after I’d stopped choking. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“Nor had anyone else.” Bitterness spoiled the sweet tones of Lullaby’s voice. “I only came to Coeur d’Or two tides ago. The empress has known of my legacy since I was a child, but my gift was stained with my father’s origins. I wasn’t pure. She didn’t want me. Not until my mother secured trading rights with Lirias.”
My brow furrowed at the sudden change in subject. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t.” Lullaby looked away. “Otherwise you never would have come here. We—the children of the empire’s wealthiest noble families, gifted with unusual legacies—we are more than her court. We are her crown jewels. Hers to flaunt to the world, and use as she desires. But most importantly, we are her insurance.”
“Insurance?” I echoed. I knew the word, but I’d never heard it used to refer to people.
Lullaby hesitated, dropping her voice to a whisper.
“We live here at the empress’s pleasure. Our presence guarantees that our noble parents and families behave according to her wishes. Do you understand?”
I struggled to wrap my mind around this new information. “She keeps you all as hostages? But why?”
Lullaby smoothed her mouth into a smile. Her light laugh danced across the rippling surface of the warm water.
“Scion, how should I know?” she asked, loudly. Her gaze moved toward the pale-garbed attendants drifting like phantoms through the haze of steam and perfume. “I never pay attention to politics. Why should I, when there’s so much fun to be had here in Coeur d’Or?”
I opened my mouth again, but the sudden flint in Lullaby’s eyes silenced me. I subsided into the bath, a whirlpool of questions swirling in my mind. I ducked down, and as the surface of the water closed over my head I felt as though I was drowning in a world I had spent most of my life longing for.
Politics. Lies. Games.
I had yearned to be welcomed with open arms and kind words. No—I had expected it. And why wouldn’t I? These were my people. This was my world.
But they didn’t see it that way. I was an outsider to them—an unwanted complication dirtying the pristine floors of the palais. I could see it in Dowser’s calculating eyes, in the empress’s gentle, mocking smile. In the sneering gazes of Sinister, and in the pitying glances from Dexter.
I dashed water out of my eyes, and gazed up at marble pillars twisting toward a ceiling of cracked green agate. I breathed deep the scent of cleanliness, edged with the perfume of opulence—pomade and crushed pearls, privilege and entitlement. And I compared it to the taste of my own desire, thick as the sweet wine in my jeweled goblet.
This world still felt right to me. I knew it in the way my blood beat like a drum in my veins, bursting with possibility. In the way my insatiable mind inhaled the incredible magnitu
de of that first, tantalizing sip of belonging. And I knew it in the way my legacy glided soft against my fingertips, sifting shards of color between waves of liquid glass.
I curled my hands into fists, and made myself a promise. If this world liked games, then I’d learn the rules. If intrigue bought friends, then I’d collect secrets. If Dowser could teach me to control the kaleidoscope of colors blooming like jeweled flowers from my fingertips, then I’d endure the tabak stench of his gloomy chambers.
I would not falter.
And whether it was the wine or the wonder, I felt suddenly light-headed; the world pulsed against my eyes, tremulous with promise. I leaned back, letting the warm water buoy me up as the world spun on its axis. I drank in the mosaic of unfamiliar colors, painting their rich pigments upon the cadence of my heart: sun-streaked marble, sapphire water, emerald agate—
Sunder’s eyes, green with poison, invaded my mind. I suppressed the shudder running from the tips of my ears down to the base of my spine.
No. Not even a man with pain in his gaze and chaos in his heart could stop me from earning the world I’d always deserved.
When the sweet wine was drunk and my limbs were so heavy I thought I might collapse, Lullaby led me to an overgrown courtyard striped in long ruby shadows. Gleaming stone pathways meandered toward terraced villas tucked behind lush foliage and trellised flowers.
“This is Lys Wing,” Lullaby said. “All the Dexter girls live here.”
“My lady.” A severe woman appeared at Lullaby’s elbow. The silver tray balanced on her gloved hand bore a slim envelope. “Lord Sunder’s steward brought this.”
“Madame is the châtelaine of Lys,” Lullaby explained. Then, eagerly: “Promissory notes, I hope?”
“Not until the transaction is complete.” The woman handed me the envelope without meeting my eyes.
I recognized my new name, inked in a hand so fine it sent a wave of helplessness coursing through my veins. Transaction. I turned the envelope over, fitting my thumb beneath the flap.