by Lyra Selene
Dowser was silent, nothing more than a flash of spectacles in the smoke-dimmed chamber.
“You said the Sisters who raised you burned that Writ of Guardianship, to keep you from leaving,” he murmured at last. “And yet here you are. Why didn’t you obey them?”
“Obey the distant and sanctimonious Sisters who hid the secret of my heritage, denied my legacy, and locked me away when I dared ask questions?” I swallowed bile. “I’d had enough. I conjured shards of piercing sunlight and billows of glittering clouds. I blinded them with colors they’d never dared imagine, and escaped while they prayed for mercy from their Scion. I never looked back.”
A frisson tripped brokenly down my spine: satisfaction prickled with guilt. I lifted my chin, and didn’t tell Dowser about the waves of bone-deep exhaustion that had slowed my fleeing heels, or the jagged screams and curses that haunted my dreams for weeks after.
“You’re ambitious,” Dowser remarked. “You’re arrogant. Perhaps even a little cruel. Whatever gave you the idea that you were owed so much, when you offer so little?”
My nostrils flared, and a low ringing teased at my ears.
“Poor abandoned highborn lady,” Dowser said. “If only anyone wanted her around, she might be able to do great things.”
I choked on my fury. “Why are you saying these things?”
“You have no discipline, barely any control over your thoughts or emotions. I want to see what happens when you lose what little control you have.”
My breath hissed in my throat. Thorns needled my palms, and a familiar numbness coursed from my wrists toward my elbows.
“I’m not losing control!”
“Aren’t you?” Dowser’s hand lashed out. The flat of his palm struck my cheek. Pain exploded behind my eyes.
Shock twisted into rage in one dizzying instant. The sting at my cheek blended with the buzzing numbness coursing up my arms until I was roaring. Images and colors flickered and flooded and pulsed out of me in a perilous cascade.
Flaming sunlight. Cursed wasteland. The translucent whisper of jeweled fingers, pale as opals and sharp as glass. Flashing eyes. Runnels of shadow, unspooling like threads of smoke.
Darkness, hot and pulsing behind my eyes.
I must have fallen, because my knees were hard against the tile and my palms were slick with sweat. I shuddered, my head bursting with spikes of color and shadow.
“What were you saying about control?”
Dowser’s voice was inches from my ear, composed as ever. My hands twitched with the urge to reach out and pitch him to the ground like the savage Dusker kids used to do to me. But I fought the urge, clamming my fingers and setting my jaw.
“You made me do that,” I whimpered. “I was fine before you goaded me.”
“I didn’t make you do anything,” Dowser replied. “No one can make you do anything, Mirage. Everything is a choice.”
“That’s not true.” I pulled my feet underneath my shaking body and dragged myself upright. “I didn’t choose to be abandoned at the edge of the world. I didn’t choose to be raised by unloving zealots, praying to Meridian like he’s about to swoop out of Dominion and save us all. I didn’t choose this legacy coursing through my veins.”
“Perhaps not. But you chose to abandon everything you’d ever known to travel halfway across the daylight world. You chose to reveal your legacy in a bid for recognition. And when I hit you barely hard enough to smart, you chose to lash out at me with the one thing that makes you powerful.”
“I didn’t lash out—”
“Which is it, Mirage?” Dowser’s voice sliced my argument to shreds. “Did you lose control, or did you want to hurt and disorient me?”
Silence mingled with the rich scent of leather and tabak. The tremors wracking my chest subsided, and I forced my breathing to slow.
“I was angry,” I finally admitted. “But I can’t always choose when I use my gift. I don’t know how to control it.”
“And that is the most frightening thing of all.” Dowser shifted in the shadows, a wraith in his black robes. “You let your legacy control you, instead of the other way around. That makes you powerless. And without power you have no control, no choice.”
“I know.” I shuddered in the dim. “That’s why I need your help.”
Dowser contemplated me. “Are you willing to work?”
“Yes.”
A smile ghosted across his face. “Then let us begin.”
Dowser’s lesson consisted of sitting, blindfolded, in the dark.
“Be still!” he snapped, again. From the ever-changing direction of his lashing tongue, I assumed he was stalking around his study like a cat.
I tried to obey, but I’d been sitting like this for what felt like an eternity. My neck ached with the effort of holding up my elaborate hairstyle, and I was reasonably certain the corset was cutting off blood flow to my legs.
“How much longer?” I whispered. “I thought we were working on my legacy.”
“I am teaching you discipline,” Dowser repeated. “Discipline comes before control. And control comes before capability. You have none of any of these things. So we begin with discipline.”
“Is everything a moral lesson with you?”
“Must you insist on approaching every lesson with petulance and insubordination?”
“I’m trying—!”
“Find the stillness inside, Mirage. Still your mind, and the body will follow.”
I lapsed into frustrated silence. Dowser’s unceasing footsteps circled me. I chewed on my lips, and forced myself to think of nothing. But the instant I tried to think of nothing, every doubt and worry squawked and clamored for attention. Lullaby’s lessons on etiquette, eddying into one giant pool of curtsies and addresses. The forced smile on Reaper’s—Thibo’s—handsome face when I asked for his court name. The sting of Dowser’s palm on my cheek.
Sunder.
The bell for fourth Prime shattered the stillness, dispelling the images swirling between my ears.
“Enough. Get up.”
I stumbled to my feet, dragging the blindfold off my face and swinging my arms to get my blood flowing. Dowser had lit long tapers in a burnished candelabra, and the guttering flames fractured his face into a patchwork of red and black.
“That was terrible, Mirage. You’ll have to show more initiative if you ever hope to prove yourself for Dexter and win a permanent place at court.”
Disappointment soured my stomach. “Tell me how.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” He pursed his lips. “Come back tomorrow before Prime. We have a great deal of ground to cover.”
I swallowed against the bitter tang of failure and reached for the clear-glass certainty that had carried me all the way from the Dusklands. I belong here. But the sensation was fractured and distant, like looking into a broken mirror and seeing someone else’s face.
A flick of Dowser’s fingers dismissed me. I plodded toward the door, confusion and dismay eating holes in the dristic cage I’d built around that ancient, desiccated heartache.
Discipline. Choices. Control.
“Dowser?” My voice sounded hoarse. I cleared my throat. “I know I said I didn’t care about my parents, and I don’t. But your signature was on that writ. Do you know why they left me? Why I was abandoned in the Dusklands?”
His obsidian eyes stared at me over spectacles flaring with reflected candlelight. Silence stretched chilly fingers to push at my chest.
“I’ll say this, Mirage,” Dowser said, at last. “It wasn’t because your parents didn’t want you. The rest of it, I would advise you to forget.”
“I can’t forget what I don’t know.”
“And what you do not know is less likely to hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” A spark of curiosity burst to life inside me. “How—?”
“Merely a figure of speech,” Dowser interrupted. “There is nothing in your past but forgotten ghosts and bad memories.”
I shivered. He had no idea.
“If you truly wish to earn a place at court, you must focus. Learn the rules of your legacy. The rules of your station. Everything else is a distraction. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said. I nodded my head, as much for myself as for Dowser. “I do.”
Stepping out into the scarlet-striped passageway of Coeur d’Or was like being reborn. I leaned against the smooth alabaster wall and lifted my face to the shafts of coral light glimmering through a row of carved spandrels. Dowser was right. I had made myself a promise, in the shimmering waters of the baths, to do whatever it took to earn my place here. Too-tight corsets and mean little games and unspoken secrets—these were small prices to pay for the endless exhilarating exuberance of belonging. I was willing to work, I was willing to cooperate, I was willing to—
I jammed my hand into the pocket of my gown, where a small, smudged note had been burning a hole in the fabric since I shoved it there hours ago. The writing on the creamy envelope was nearly illegible at this point, crumpled and smeared. But I could still make out my name—my new name—spilling across the paper.
Mirage.
I gusted a breath and slid my fingernail under the edge of the envelope. The note inside was written on the same rich parchment, and when I lifted it to my nose I caught a whiff of something sharp and clean, like genévrier needles.
“Money,” I muttered, to distract myself from the skein of trepidation unspooling in my belly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what terrible price Sunder had decided to ask for his dubious sponsorship.
And wasn’t sure I wanted to find out whether I was willing to pay it.
I sounded out the elegant words sauntering across the page. There were only a few.
Come to my residence. Belsyre Wing. Now.
Signed,
Sunder
I sucked in another gulp of that searing perfume, but this time, it tasted of bitterness and pain. My stomach soured. The vermilion light pouring in through the glass stained the fingers on my right hand, triggering a memory of Luca, and a guttering cook fire, and iron clouds scudding across a dim sun.
What had Luca said, when he’d told me the tale of the dust devil, with its terrible eternal thirst?
Maybe by paying a demon what he needs, you keep him from stealing what he desires.
I crushed the terse note into a crumpled ball of paper, and shoved thoughts of Luca from my mind. From what I’d heard and seen, this Sunder was little better than a devil himself. But what did he desire?
To inflict pain? To see me suffer? To watch me fail?
I tossed the hateful note behind a gilded statuette and stomped through an archway draped in velvet and strung with diamonds.
I wouldn’t give him what he desired, and I might not be able to give him what he needed. But maybe I could give him a little something of what he deserved.
Sunder’s chambers were a wing unto themselves, a sprawling residence I only found after an hour of wandering in circles and cursing whatever vindictive architect had designed Coeur d’Or’s curving hallways.
A blank-faced servant in black-and-white livery bowed me into a verdant foyer. Hanging terrariums spilled tendrils of green from a vaulted ceiling. Invisible fountains filled the air with the drowsy splash of water. A songbird trilled a soprano glissando that lingered sylphlike among the drooping heads of lush flowers.
“This way,” prompted the servant.
We threaded down a hallway lined with polished silverwood and studded with carved ambric, and I couldn’t help but wonder how rich my suspicious benefactor was. Just one of these exquisite finials or precious ornamentations was worth more than my life. And all of this together? A treasure trove unlike anything I’d ever imagined.
The servant led me out beneath a pergola draped in foliage. A crystalline chandelier dashed prisms against a pillar slim as a cygni’s white throat. Gauzy veils tangled with rubies splashed blood across a glossy floor.
And at the center of it all was Sunder.
He was sleeping, draped along the curving tongue of a white chaise. His head was thrown back, and strands of pale kembric hair caressed the collar of a charcoal surcoat. Tall black boots left stark smudges on the couch. His lips, curled into a sneer the last time I’d seen them, were parted ever so slightly. Black lashes stained his high cheekbones with ink.
He was beautiful.
“I employ a portraitist, if you care to use his services.”
He was also apparently not sleeping.
Sunder swung into a seated position, brushing hair out of his eyes. His gaze slashed up to meet mine. I glimpsed a vivid burst of pale green ringed in dristic before agony shuddered down my spine and clawed at my mind.
I gasped, clapping a hand to my forehead. But like before, the pain was gone in an instant, no more than a memory of suffering foaming on an ocean of unease.
“I apologize for the tickle,” he drawled, rising to his feet and crossing to a low table tucked between two vine-wrapped pillars. “Some legacies are more volatile than others. And try as I might, I can’t seem to look at you without wanting to hurt you.”
A thrill of outrage heated my blood. Sunder sloshed liquid into a goblet before draining the glass in one long gulp. He refilled the cup, then turned to face me. I braced myself for the flare of pain, but it never came. He inspected me, cool eyes raking me from head to toe.
“A miracle indeed,” he murmured. “You really are a talented fantast. An illusion to hide all that dirt—I’m amazed you didn’t think to use it before.”
A searing heat crept up the column of my throat. Sunder smiled at me over the rim of his goblet.
“Or did someone finally tell you about bathing?”
My newly buffed fingernails cut semicircles into the palm of my hand. The cursed corset tightened around my lungs. I couldn’t drag enough air into my chest.
“You summoned me here, Lord Sunder,” I managed between clenched teeth, dipping into what I hoped was the appropriate curtsy befitting his rank. I wouldn’t respond to his insults. I knew he was trying to make me lose my temper, but I refused to let him know it was working. “And, as your note requested, I came.”
“Forgive me, but did I neglect to specify a time?” His voice feigned innocence. He stalked closer. “When did I say you should come?”
He paused close enough for me to smell that sharp, clean scent wafting off him. I could see the dark embroidery etched along the ridges of his sleeve, and count the rings on his fingers.
“Well?” he prompted.
“Now,” I admitted, reluctant. “The note said I should come now.”
“Yes. And when was that?” His voice was an unstrung bow.
“Yesterday.”
“Ah!” He snapped his fingers. His voice grew taut. “How strange, now being yesterday. Are Dusklanders unfamiliar with the concept of time? Or are you just as stupid as you look?”
Flames zinged out toward my fingertips, raising the hairs along my arms. My eyes cut up to his. “Sinking to my level, Lord Sunder? You insult my looks and intelligence so bluntly that no one would claim you are adept in the art of dealing pain.” I dragged an insolent gaze around the lavish chambers. “Although subtlety hardly seems to be your forte.”
His hand snapped out to wrap around my chin. His skin was cold. A low thrum of discomfort vibrated along my jaw, burrowing into flesh and bone. I met his gaze with as much malice as I could muster, and he smiled sharp as a knife’s edge.
“It’s alive,” he whispered, leaning closer. “And it bites.”
I held my breath against a choking flood of fury. Too late, Lullaby’s warning about comportment echoed in my head. Whatever you do, don’t insult anyone.
Too late.
“Tell me, my most clever lady Mirage.” Sunder’s hand trailed a cool, aching line along the column of my throat. “Do you understand the concept of reciprocity?”
I swallowed, hard, fighting the urge to shove his creeping, stinging hands away. Dread
cooled the anger heating my blood. I’d promised myself I would do whatever it took to earn my place here. Corsets, cruel games, cold secrets—these were things I could endure. But this—this was asking too much.
“Let me remind you.” He leaned closer. I felt the whisper of his breath in the shell of my ear, the brush of his hair against my cheek. “I offered you money. Power. Position. Now you offer me something in return.”
I sucked air into my captured lungs, but still I couldn’t seem to breathe. A shudder climbed my spine, vibrating against Sunder’s fingers. His hand tightened, sending an icy twinge lashing along the plane of my collarbone.
“No,” I choked out, taking one huge step backward. My skirts gasped along the slick floor as I wrenched my throbbing shoulder out of Sunder’s grasp. “I owe you nothing.”
“Nothing?” Sunder’s hand drifted to his side. His smile was little more than a ghost. “You owe me everything.”
“Your wager was with the empress, and so my debt lies with her.”
“You will not repay me, then?”
“Only in vindication, lord.”
He stared at me for a long moment, his gaze calculating. And then he swept me a deep bow I distantly recognized as being reserved for the most illustrious of nobility. But what must surely be mockery barely stung through the haze of surprise and confusion.
What just happened?
“Bane!” he shouted over one shoulder. “I win!”
I took another involuntary step backward as a willowy girl appeared from behind a curtain of blushing eglantine. She was the same lady I’d seen with Sunder in the Atrium, a chilling beauty with blond hair coiled high above her head and eyes like cut emeralds. The midnight damask of her gown made her skin look like marble. She wore satin gloves stretching to the elbow.
Sunder bowed over her elegantly proffered hand, then straightened with a half smile.
“You owe me.” He gestured to the clock, which chimed as if on cue.
“I do not,” she said. Her lovely red mouth twisted into a moue of derision. “You said it would take half an hour. Not that she wouldn’t give in at all.”