by Lyra Selene
“Who cares where you belong,” he said, “if you’re dead?”
And then he was gone, disappearing like a phantom in a shifting forest of silken trees. I almost pursued him, but a sudden fierce intuition rooted my feet to the ground, and I knew that if I followed him I would fall. Fall through a brittle glass floor onto bright, mirrored spikes, fall from a fragile dream into a waking nightmare, fall like an incandescent Meridian through the sheer blue riot of lingering dusk.
He isn’t your friend, I reminded myself. And he would see you ruined.
I was nearly back to Lys Wing before I realized I still wore Sunder’s borrowed cloak of midnight and pine. And even when I shucked it off and kicked it into a corner, I knew that I must now smell like cold fire and dristic and the sharp blade of anguish at the edge of cruelty.
I entered my chambers to find Lullaby perched on a cushion beneath the window. The colored glass cast such lovely shapes and contours on her face that for a long moment I didn’t see how pale she was. Or notice her expression.
Dread was a living thing inside my breast.
“Where have you been?” Lullaby stood, and shoved something at my chest. It was a crimson envelope stamped in gilt and smothered in looping calligraphy. I couldn’t have read it if I’d tried.
“What is it?” I asked, although some cowardly part of me didn’t want to know, especially if Lullaby was so terrified.
“It’s an invitation.” Lullaby crossed behind me and glanced over my shoulder at the thick paper. “A grand ball, a week hence. Astrologists are predicting a Blood Rain. Everyone is to wear red, in honor of the occasion.”
I frowned. “So?”
“So.” Her lower lip trembled. “So, the invitation is for you, Mirage. The empress wants to see you. She wants to see your legacy.”
“But—” Fear gripped me as my skin flashed hot, then bitter cold. “But what about Carrousel? I thought I had more time.”
“Time is as fickle as a courtly game, Mirage.” Worry made Lullaby’s eyes stormy. “And the empress never plays by anyone’s rules but her own. You’ll have to be ready by the Blood Rain Ball. If not, we’ll all pay the price.”
And as she turned to leave, I heard the echo of her unspoken words: I’ll pay the price.
Anxiety stole my sleep, and trepidation followed me on silent footsteps.
The following days were a flurry of activity. Fittings for an ornate gown in a fabric as scarlet as temptation. Instruction in the latest dances: tempête, jaconde, angoisse. Lullaby’s eyes brimming with panic as I practiced the tiny twists of the wrist that meant much, much more than I would ever truly understand. Dowser, haunting the corners of his rooms like a ghost, insisting I envision, empower, express. Hours sitting on the floor of Dowser’s study and attempting to conjure each of the objects he set before me: a small horn comb, delicate and fragile; a tabak pipe, smoothed with age; an old book, its spine broken and shredded by overuse.
I barely managed snippets of shapes and dribbles of color.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell Lullaby that she’d have to be responsible for my failure.
Thibo sensed our collective unease, and attempted to distract me and Lullaby with various picnics and outings and adventures around the palais.
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to roam Coeur d’Or yet,” I hedged. Normally I would have jumped at the chance to escape my rooms, but I was sullen with dread.
“You received an invitation to the Blood Rain Ball from the Amber Empress herself,” Thibo said, making his eyes comically round. “No one is going to bat their eyes at afternoon tea.”
I glanced at Lullaby, who managed a brooding shrug.
“Come on,” insisted Thibo. “We’re going to the Solarium. If there’s one thing that will cheer you two preening lumps, it’s some sunshine and the mirrored images of your own vain faces.”
Set in a little wilderness beyond the Weeping Pools, the Solarium was a tall, circular pavilion with a curving dome filigreed in bronze and kembric. We stepped through huge, swinging doors into a space thunderous with light. I gasped, throwing one arm up to shield my eyes from the brightness. The interior of the pavilion was edged and winged with mirrors—a hundred, a thousand mirrors, angled and curved and flared. Sultry sunlight poured in through an oculus above the door, striking one mirror, then reflecting again and again until finally it seemed to hang in a spectacular orb of kembric at the center of the dome.
I was so transfixed by the light that I almost didn’t see Sunder. With one leg propped on a low bench against the wall, he leaned down to flirt with a lovely maiden in a cerulean gown. The hair pushed back from his brow glowed molten in the spectacular rays.
“It’s Sunder,” I said, grabbing Lullaby by the elbow. Wrath and embarrassment beat twin pulses in my heart when I remembered the last time we’d met. His cool fingers on my hot wrist, the taste of his derision in the back of my throat. Who cares where you belong if you’re dead? “Let’s go.”
But it was too late. The blue-gowned lady’s eyes had flickered to us across the room, and Sunder straightened to follow her gaze. His smile froze on his face.
“The most fearsome trio at court,” he drawled. His low voice echoed around the dome, seeming to originate from everywhere and nowhere at once. “The Blue Man’s daughter, the caterwauling Casanova, and our own filthy-faced Dusklander.”
The familiar ember of rage scorched my blood. I stepped forward, quelling a brief flash of rational panic.
“Lord Sunder.” I dropped into the curtsy reserved for royalty and hoped it looked sardonic. “I confess I’m not surprised to find you here, the one place in the palais where you can view your own reflection so many times. You must be in raptures.”
Sunder prowled closer, until he stood with me beneath the false sun bathing us in brilliance. Behind him, his flirt edged closer, unease and curiosity warring on her face.
“So you admit,” he purred, “that I am beautiful to look at.”
“He who admires himself so confidently,” I demurred, ignoring the hot throb at my temples, “must surely know more about beauty than one such as me.”
Behind Sunder, the girl’s mouth popped into a little O. Lullaby inhaled.
“You accuse me of vanity and poor taste in one breath.” Sunder’s droll tone hid an edge. “Perhaps, then, you might begrudge me your own explanation of beauty?”
I sucked in a breath of cool sunlight. Sunder’s smirk oozed condescension, but there was something in the straightforward weight of his eyes that made me think he might actually care what I was about to say. But this line of bantering had grown far too philosophical for my tastes. Were we talking about vanity, or taste, or beauty? I didn’t think so.
I only wished I knew what we were talking about.
“Beauty,” I began, before abruptly deciding to be honest. “Beauty is all the things we can see, but cannot touch. Beauty is a way of seeing the world, unsullied by convention and free from coveting. Beauty is a stripe of amber light on a shoulder dusted with kembric. A breeze chiming through petals of glass. A distorted sun in a mirrored room.”
“Beauty, by that definition,” murmured Sunder, with a searing flare of his unfathomable eyes, “is your legacy manifest, is it not? What we can see, but cannot touch?”
I swallowed, and frost feathered the length of my spine.
“Perhaps you will favor us with a sample of beauty, then, my most talented lady Mirage?”
The ice turning my blood to sludge told me I’d made a mistake. I’d backed myself into a corner. I was trapped. There was no way to say no.
Control. I reached through the haze of panic for an image. Any image. Envision. A horned comb, or a jardin full of glass flowers, or an amber throne, or—
I dared a desperate glance at Sunder, expecting a sneer of scorn. But he just watched me with cool regard. Waiting.
I took a sunlit breath and let myself drift toward the well of impossible colors latched away in the dusky prison around my heart. T
hey pulsed, hazy as amber and lazy as a heartbeat. These were the dreams that had carried me from the edge of the daylight world, but they were scorched with humiliation, shackled with thorny vines, stained with the gratuitous blood of gangling youths. I’d beaten them down so many times, throttling them and denying them, smothering them with rules even as I begged them to obey me.
Why couldn’t I control them? It wasn’t that the power wasn’t there. I remembered a dim dusk edged in shadows, and then colors bursting blithe and brazen through the gloaming. I remembered the reverent cadences of an ancient myth, and then a lush blackness opulent with argent light. I remembered a vile burst of fury, and then an impossible wilderness of spiked vines and grasping tendrils.
The empress’s voice echoed in my mind: Let the pas de deux begin!
A cruel joke; a beautiful veil for a hideous reality. Wrath burst to life within me, but so too did a bright, cold hope, clean-edged and gleaming like a silver thread in the dim. Another world, laid like a veil above our own: a scintillant hush of peace and harmony and calm.
A world where grace reigned. Where compassion dwelled. Where children weren’t forced to fight to the blood.
I can do better than she can.
“Mirage?” Lullaby’s voice, uncertain, pierced my reverie.
Envision. Empower. Express.
And I suddenly knew—I didn’t want to mirror this world. I didn’t want to conjure horn combs or paperweights or even glass jardins. I wanted to create my own worlds. Impossible, ephemeral, elusive worlds at the edge of imagining. Dreams, reborn and rebranded, set free from reality.
Something like that didn’t have rules. And it certainly couldn’t be controlled.
I opened my eyes and let instinct take over. A pair of dancers appeared with a gasp of light. I shaped them from breaths of rose-colored air and the contours of featherdown. I left them translucent, and the gilded edges of the false sun’s rays cut them to ribbons before stitching them back together again. They glided, pellucid and lambent, through a breathless duet. Their feet never touched the ground. The mirrors caught their reflections and echoed them across the edges of other mirrors, until a hundred dancers whirled whisper-quiet through a world beyond touch.
Finally, the dancers drifted into oblivion. When I dared look at Sunder, I caught a glimpse of dazzled bemusement before his face smoothed into its cool mask once more. His eyes etched lines of fire on my face as he bent over my hand. The brush of his lips was the graze of a razor.
He returned his attention to the other lady, a gracious hand at her elbow. A second later Lullaby dragged me backward, away from the brilliance of the Solarium and out into the scorched dimness of our real sun.
“Scion, Mirage!” Lullaby burst out the moment the doors were closed behind us. “That was—why didn’t you tell us you’d come so far? That was exquisite.”
A whisper of pleasure heated my chest.
“But what in Dominion’s name were you thinking, challenging him like that?” Practicality crept back into Lullaby’s voice. “A philosophical discussion on the ideals of beauty with Sunder? That’s like standing on the edge of a cliff and asking Meridian himself to push you over!”
“I think,” said Thibo, smothering a gust of laughter and looping his arm through mine, “that you have proven yourself socially invincible in the most spectacular fashion on your first outing at court. I’m taking you everywhere from now on.”
But as we trekked back to the palais, my friends bickering and laughing over my head, I couldn’t think of anything but the chilly weight of Sunder’s astonished gaze, and the perilous, tremulous sensation of working with my legacy instead of trying to control it. Look what I’d done: A new world had spilled jewel-bright from my fingertips. An impossible world, woven from patterns of dappled sunlight and the threads of old dreams.
A world that belonged to me, instead of the other way around.
I found Dowser almost by accident, after spending nearly all of Compline searching for my teacher to tell him the good news.
He stood in a broad hall with his arms loosely clasped behind his back. I’d never been to this wing before, and I couldn’t help but catch my breath. Huge arching windows splashed rivers of amber light across a parquet floor. Lithe gilded statues twined themselves between jasper-limned pillars. Magnificent crystal chandeliers hung from a frescoed ceiling. And everywhere were portraits.
A hundred unfamiliar faces stared down at me. Smiling faces, severe faces. Laughing children with flower garlands and stern generals with medals spangling their jacket breasts and cool-eyed dames who’d seen the world. Dauphines astride destriers. Emperors dressed all in kembric. For a moment it seemed as though the weight of all that history and heritage would crush me to the earth and grind me into dust. But then I squared my shoulders, and strode toward my teacher.
“I heard about what happened in the Solarium.” Dowser glanced away from the portrait of a man with laughing eyes and a peppery beard. A smile lingered around Dowser’s mouth, a small ghost of the grin he’d given me that day in the glass jardin. “Congratulations.”
I gaped at him.
His smile cracked wider. “News travels fast at court, Mirage. And I have eyes everywhere.”
I turned toward the wall of portraits to hide a sudden awkward dazzle of mortification mixed with pride. News travels fast at court. Was everyone talking about me?
“I confess myself curious,” Dowser continued. “What was it, in the end, that set your illusions free? Incandescent sunlight? The mirrors? Lord Sunder’s unique attention?”
I barely registered the light teasing. Dowser’s question had struck to the heart of my own seething conflict: What exactly had I done, and would I be able to do it again? All I knew was that I had relinquished the control I’d fought so hard for, and magic had happened. I chewed on my lip for a long moment. Finally, I flicked my wrist at a diamond-bright mirror wedged between two hulking portraits and dug deep for the words to explain.
“When I was a child, I kept a scratched and tarnished mirror under my pillow.” I leaned forward until my own features loomed close. It was still a shock to see myself gowned and gilded, my hair an elaborate coiffure and my lips rouged. “I’d nicked it from a village kid and used to take it out when the Sisters thought I was asleep. I would trace the lines of my nose, the edges of my eyes, fascinated by the sensation of being in my own body, and no one else’s.”
Dowser gave a slow nod.
“But though my reflection may look identical to me, it is not me. She has no flesh, no blood. No thoughts, no opinions. No substance. She’s not alive. She’s merely a reflection of something that is alive.” I sucked in a breath, focusing on the brilliant certainty that had soared through me at the Solarium. “Back in the Dusklands, the Sisters taught me that to control my legacy was to deny it. And when I came here you taught me that to control my legacy I had to give it rules. So I tried to bind it to reality—chain it up in the blood-hot space between sinew and bone. Make it real. But I am not a mirror, nor am I a god. I can neither reflect life, nor create it.”
Dowser turned his head to regard me with quiet absorption.
“I am a fantast. My legacy is illusion—a blaze of strange colors born to rail against the pallid dusk. I burn, Dowser—with marvel and magic and a yearning I can’t name. I finally stopped fighting for control. I surrendered to the impossible. I stopped trying to create the world I saw, and chose to create a world I wanted to see.”
“And in that surrender, you have triumphed.” Dowser’s eyes glittered behind his spectacles, and I suddenly felt as though I was plummeting through a fathomless twilight: the boundless space between bright mirrors, lit by stars and hope and distant laughter. But then his eyes went flat and colorless once more, and he looked around the hall as though remembering where he was. Who he was. “Your success is my success, although I seem to have led you more wrong than right. I suppose you will no longer be needing my guidance now that you’ve found your own guiding ligh
t.”
Disappointment plundered my heart. I looked up to stem a sudden well of tears, and caught a glimpse of the arching fresco adorning the ceiling. Another Meridian story—a fallen star and black mountains, the Blasting of the Wastes. I remembered another Scion fresco, and beneath it the spread of colorful tesserae in a mosaic of the daylight world. Thibo’s easy explanation of lands I’d never heard of, never dreamed of. Lullaby’s cool tones, picking out the weft and weave of the empire’s political tapestry. The scrawled ink of Sunder’s haughty hand.
I’d only just learned that the key to wielding my legacy was not control but surrender. Still, I allowed myself to hope. If I could finally prove I belonged here … I wanted all that—art, artifice, knowledge—for myself.
“Quite the opposite,” I murmured. “I’ve unlocked my legacy, but I’m far from mastering it. I think I will need your guidance more now than ever. Also … it will come as no surprise to you that the Sisters were remiss in my education. The basic scholarship highborn sons and daughters attain—geography, politics, art—was denied me. If you wouldn’t be opposed, I wonder if you’d be willing to spend some time … catching me up.”
“I’d be more than willing.” Dowser smiled again, but the expression looked suddenly strained. A tremor shook his fingers as he adjusted his spectacles. “But perhaps we can begin another day.”
I frowned, glancing more closely at my tutor. Although it was hard to tell in the harsh blanch of amber sun, his eyes looked shadowed, and grey stubble flecked his jaw.
“Are you sick?”
Dowser splayed his hands, then clenched them tight. Another spasm feathered the muscles along his jaw.
“Only of you,” he said, but the comment carried neither malice nor humor.
And then I remembered Mamie, the woman who used to sweep for the Sisters. When the peddlers were late or weather delayed the convoys, she would turn grey and quivery, her teeth chattering even in the warmth. The ague, she used to insist, it’s just the ague. But when the peddler jangled through the village and replenished her secret stash of coquelicot—rêve, joie, lotus, whatever you wanted to call it—her face warmed and her muscles strengthened.