by Lyra Selene
“Thank you,” I whispered into the sun-washed crush of strange faces and untold stories. “Thank you for trying.”
Dowser didn’t say anything, just lit his tabak pipe with trembling fingers. The ember flared as he turned to leave, releasing a billow of sour smoke that followed him out of the portrait gallery.
I took the winding, less-populated route back through Coeur d’Or to Lys Wing, caught in the colorless wasteland between pity and compassion. An imprecise sensation nettled me, like being given a gift I hadn’t known I’d wanted. For I had never known anyone quite like Dowser: the man who cloaked himself in black robes and resided in the shadows, searching for magic in everyone but himself.
From my perch on the roof of Coeur d’Or I could see to the red river where it burned between the foothills. Bloated clouds rolled in overhead, snarling like shadow wolves. The wind whistled, tasting of moisture and foreign lands and the distant brush of midnight.
For three Nocturnes I’d practiced my illusions here, amid the gleaming spires of cool crystal and brushed bronze. Bribing the Gardes had cost me more of Sunder’s kembric livres than I cared to admit, but it was worth it. Up here, I could almost imagine I was an empress of bright dreams and brittle hopes, awash in the clamoring perfume of a million soul-safe secrets drifting upward from the city below.
I had practiced surrendering to my legacy, slowly unraveling tides’ worth of restraints upon the power belling inside me. I shattered fetters forged from fear and unlocked shackles chained with humiliation and inhibition. It was thrilling, to feel the unencumbered swell of strange pictures and dreamworlds, bigger and more fantastical than ever before. But it was unnerving too, to release the control that for tides had been a safeguard against punishment and a weapon for survival. The sensation was almost like falling: I felt as though I flung myself from the lip of the roof, again and again, with nothing but the pliant promise of ephemeral hope to catch me.
But it was working. Illusions of cities: glass spires and jeweled staircases, faceted with crisp clarity and translucent in the fantastical haze of an inky night. Great birds with feathers of onyx and wings of cold fire, sheared sharp as flaming swords. Liquid landscapes, rippling like pale honey below azure skies. Milk-white plains beneath cobalt mountains. Thrones of amber, drenched in blood.
I blinked, and scrubbed my palms against the slick brocade of my gown. High above, the wine-dark clouds grumbled, promising a deluge. And soon.
I’d nearly reached the edge of the palais roof when the thunderheads burst and showered me in blood.
Fat droplets splatted down, liquid roses blooming on the slanting tile. They struck my face and my arms, staining my bodice and skirt. The liquid dripped along my spine and between my breasts until I was red, as if my skin had been flayed from my body and I was nothing but glistening muscle. I imagined that soon even the muscle would disappear, and I would be nothing but bone, gleaming pale and white.
And when I looked down to see Coeur d’Or drenched in blood, I felt remade, as though I was forged of illusion, and always had been. An illusion of muscle draped over bone, covered in an illusion of flesh and hair and clothing. And at the heart of it all, an illusion of a soul, of a being, of a person.
I was nothing but what I had made myself.
The chime for sixth Nocturne hung in the air like a warning.
I hesitated near the top of the staircase leading from the roof to Lys Wing and glanced over my shoulder. The storm cast a pall of purple shadow over the unlit stairwell, and my scarlet footprints glittered dull like a trail of real blood.
Scion, but it looked like someone had been murdered. I muttered a curse. The Gardes would never let me up on the roof again if I trailed a broad river of red from their abandoned post straight to my rooms. Or worse—they’d be punished on my behalf, flogged for indulging the well-paying whims of flighty aristos.
I sent a prayer toward the Scion, and stripped. My ruined dress slapped to the ground, and I kicked the gown and my slippers behind the archway leading to the roof. Even if the Gardes discovered the garments, I’d paid for silence as well as discretion. I shivered for a long minute in nothing but my underthings, my bare feet cold against the floor. Then I made a dash for it, sprinting through the echoing halls of the deserted palais with my heart clogging my throat.
I shoved into my chambers. The panic clutching at my chest loosened, and my limbs turned liquid with relief.
“The Dusklander has wheedled her way into someone’s bed,” drawled a voice from the depths of my shuttered room. “Will wonders never cease?”
I started, violently, banging my shoulder against the corner of the foyer. My eyes dredged at the gloom. A streak of white gold. A glitter of green.
Sunder.
Fury turned my blood molten. I sucked in a breath of twilight-tinted air, remembering at the last second that I was essentially naked. I wrapped my arms around my torso, ignoring the shudder wracking my spine.
“Lurking in dark corners?” I hissed. “Appropriate behavior for a spider like you.”
Sunder’s splash of pale hair loomed closer. I glimpsed a midnight-blue waistcoat, a glint of amber, and those fierce, fathomless eyes.
“I came to surprise you.” He lifted a languorous hand toward my shoulder and trailed a gloved finger along my collarbone. The tip of his finger came away scarlet, as if he’d dipped it in blood. His voice twisted in a taut spring—if he had been anyone else in the world, I would have named the intonation jealousy. “I confess, demoiselle, that you have surprised me instead.”
I took a purposeful step backward. My skin buzzed as though he was still touching me.
“Surprise me?” I made my voice chilly. “And what, pray tell, have I done to deserve such an honor? Insulted a beggar? Kicked a small animal?”
“Do I seem like a man who needs a reason to do anything?” A smile stretched his voice but stopped short of his eyes. He pivoted on his heel and stalked behind me. I followed him with my eyes, insolent. “I’m your sponsor. I wanted to give you something for the upcoming ball.”
“I don’t want anything from you.” I shoved the words between clenched teeth.
“And here I thought women enjoyed being showered in gifts.” He stepped close, pushing the sopping mass of my hair over my shoulder. His splinter of a laugh raised the hair on the nape of my neck. “Drenched, even.”
A snake of chilly metal slithered around my throat. My breath hissed between my teeth, and every muscle in my body tensed. Sunder’s cool hands coiled the chain, clasping the necklace at my nape. I glanced down. A waterfall of kembric and rubies nestled between my ichor-striped breasts, topped by an ambric jewel the size of a bird’s egg. Its facets caught the dim light, hinting at shadows in its depths.
Confusion prickled in my chest. Despite Sunder’s taunting tone, the gesture was almost … kind. A gift, for the first ball I was to attend as a courtier. It was the sort of thing a sponsor was supposed to do.
I remembered words flung like weapons across a room draped in ivy and glass. A sheaf of money, tossed at my feet like trash. Sand and blood and barbed words. The touch of blue silk, the taste of misplaced hopes.
Why would Sunder come to my room in the dead of Nocturne bearing gifts of expensive jewelry? What new intrigue could he be planning?
“You’ll wear the necklace to the Blood Rain Ball.” It wasn’t a question. He cocked his head to the side, white-gold hair drifting ghostly around his face. Another ice-honed smile bent the corner of his elegant mouth.
“What?” I demanded when he continued to stare at me, standing half-naked in the center of my chambers.
“Perhaps I ought to remind you,” he said, in a voice like satin, “to wear actual clothes too.”
He slipped from my rooms like a bad dream, leaving nothing behind but that piercing scent of him and the cascade of jewels at my throat.
I dragged off the necklace, tossing it to wink moodily on my vanity. But when I climbed into bed and dragged the blankets over
my head, I could still feel the pressure of it around my neck, the slinking weight of it between my breasts.
Did he intend it as an ornament? A collar?
A declaration of intent?
My blood frothed thick as the rain bathing the city in crimson. I could craft worlds from pale portents and promises, forgotten follies and remembered dreams. But not even I could think up a world in which he and I—
Enough. I squeezed my eyes against the feverish memory of his hands at my throat: cold metal and a profusion of jewels. I had finally forged the dristic bones of my own fortune in this pristine palais. I would not squander that on a man whose truths were laced with lies, whose face was a mask, whose price was power. He could only be a curse.
The Blood Rain bewitched Coeur d’Or with a dark, sweet languor.
I barely recognized the palais as I trailed Lullaby to the ball. The ink-stained clouds had darkened steadily all day, thrumming thunder through the halls and birthing secrets in the shadows. Ambric lamps pulsed a sullen red, and my heart quickened to match the throb of the light. We passed beneath two heavy doors into the transformed Atrium.
It was like standing inside a Devangelis ruby. The glass ceiling arched high above, stained crimson by the bloody rain falling from the wounded sky. The air tasted thick as nectar and sweet as wine. A curved and coiling chandelier hung from the apex of the ceiling, glass tendrils in black and scarlet grasping toward the floor. Silhouetted against a churning sky of violet and tangerine, Severine sat atop her ambric throne.
I glanced around the Atrium, fighting a nebulous sensation of exposure and shame. I tugged at the bodice of my gown, cut viciously low. I’d wanted a higher neckline, but the moment Lullaby set eyes on Sunder’s dubious gift she summoned my seamstress and demanded she slit the bodice nearly to my navel. Satin skirts billowed around my legs, the color smoothing from black at the hem to a lustrous maroon near the hips. A grindingly narrow waist. That obscene plunge of a neckline. Bare shoulders. Sunder’s jewels, heavy as iron manacles around my neck.
I suppressed a shiver. Courtiers pressed close, bedecked in the same brazen finery as me. Gowns in ebony and violet and scarlet. Wine-red lips and lusty eyes. Some danced slow, purposeful steps to the sultry strains of unseen musicians. Others lounged on cushions strewn in purposefully dim corners. Still more whispered behind their fans, watching me with brutal deliberation.
Lullaby shoved a wineglass into my hand. The liquid was sweet, and cool, and I drank gratefully. My throat was parched, and the air in the room seemed too thick—too solid—to drag into my lungs.
We edged around the room. Lullaby introduced me to friends and acquaintances, and I curtsied and nodded as politely as possible, striving to obey the modes of decorum demanded by the politesse of the court. No one mentioned my infamous introduction that day in the Atrium, and I was glad. But curious glances followed me around the room, and I heard my name murmured behind my back more than once.
Finally, Lullaby pulled me behind a gilt-limned pillar.
“Stay,” she ordered. “Don’t talk to anyone if you can help it. I’m going to get us both something to eat.”
Her words roused an answering grumble of hunger from my cinched stomach.
I waited, taking everything in. Nearby, a pale statue of a half-naked man acted as a strange candelabra; lit tapers of red and black dribbled waxy trails down his shoulder and around his uplifted wrist. I drifted closer, admiring the sculpted contours of his marble torso. His eyes cut to mine. He shifted his weight.
I jumped backward, shocked and embarrassed. It wasn’t a statue—it was a person, wearing real candles pouring hot wax onto skin painted to look like marble. I forced my gaze away, but when I gazed around I saw other men and women posed as living candelabras, tapers clinging to their skin.
Disgust battled with curiosity. How dare the empress order these servants—these people—to stand for hours as melting wax stained the planes of their well-formed bodies? Didn’t it hurt? I imagined the sensation, a hot drizzle prickling across my skin before cooling and solidifying. The thought sent a burst of warmth through my belly, and my eyes skittered across the room. I realized who I was looking for a moment too late.
Sunder, standing elegant and unsmiling beside his sister. Their pale hair gleamed diamond-bright amid the churning sea of red and black.
I shuddered. It was impossible not to admire the Suicide Twins, so alike in appearance and demeanor. But I couldn’t help but curse my traitor gaze, seeking my sadistic sponsor out across a room full of people just as handsome and rich.
I rubbed an absent thumb against the faceted cabochon of ambric resting over my heart.
Almost as handsome and rich.
The lazy hours of Nocturne crept by. I ate, and drank more wine. I met more courtiers—Vida, Mender’s curvaceous sister; a glowering Sinister lord named Haze; River, a young man with a laugh like sunlight on water. I drank a little more wine. I danced, my too-high slippers an easy excuse when I fumbled a step. I flicked my wrist and simpered; my dance partner laughed and handed me another glass of wine. Finally, I stumbled upon Thibo, tucked beneath a rose-draped alcove with a deck of cards and a coterie of rakishly handsome young men.
“Mirage!” he cried. In his poppy-colored suit studded with rubies, Thibo looked every inch the libertine. His ringed hand rested on Mender’s slender thigh. “Tonight you are exquisite in the way of new flowers and old money.”
I curtsied. “And your compliments are as fleeting as wind in the desert or a roué’s kiss.”
The gentlemen all laughed.
“We’re playing peine, Mirage,” said Thibo. “Would you care to join us?”
“I have no head for gambling, nor a face for bluffing,” I mused. “But I am of a mind to waste some Belsyre coin.”
“A noble ambition,” Mender said, nodding gravely.
“Indeed!” A wicked gleam brightened Thibo’s eye. “Altruism at its finest.”
I’d just been cleaned out when the empress rose from her throne of luminous amber and waved to the musicians, who ceased their slow sarabande. I raised my sluggish head from where I’d propped it on my hand to watch Thibo bluff his way into another stack of livres.
“A bountiful Blood Rain to you all!” the empress called, her voice as fluted as I remembered. She was resplendent in a gown glowing like molten kembric. “May it bring you luck in love and audacity in ardor!”
The courtiers all clapped, and turned to plant light kisses on their neighbors’ cheeks. One of Thibo’s foppish friends leaned in, but I pushed him away, wrinkling my nose. Not a tradition I cared to ascribe to.
“The Blood Rain comes but once a tide, carrying with it important nutrients and minerals from the Meridian Desert. Without this rain, our crops could not flourish. So it is a time to celebrate fertility and fortune.” Severine paused, and cast her eye over the crowd. “It so happens that my greatest fortune is you! My prized court, full of beauty and wit and talent. But we should also remind ourselves that sometimes fortune comes from afar, and we don’t know we have it until it knocks on our door.” She smiled. “Sometimes literally. Mirage, where are you?”
I was pleasantly drunk, warm and buoyant with wine. The sound of my name ringing like a bell across the silent Atrium sobered me in an instant. Thibo and his friends stared nervously at me over their cards. I stood up automatically, a marionette with strings attached to my arms and legs. The courtiers in front of me moved away, clearing a path to the raised dais where the empress waited.
My unsteady steps in my precarious shoes rang loud on the marble floor. I swallowed against a throat that felt suddenly dusty, and I cursed the amount of wine I’d drunk. What I wouldn’t give for a cool glass of water. I clenched my trembling hands in the skirts of my revealing gown, wishing I had fought harder to keep the design modest. I felt excruciatingly exposed, as though the assembled courtiers could see through all the satin and boning into the kaleidoscope cavern of my soul.
I reached the botto
m of the dais. I slid into my best curtsy, lowering my coiffed head in the posture of utmost deference. I waited there, spine screaming and waist aching, for a long, miserable moment.
The empress’s chiming laugh rang in my ears like a seductive curse.
“How our fantast has changed!” she exclaimed. “What a difference a span makes! Those eyes! This dress! That necklace!”
I fought the scarlet flush climbing my exposed décolletage. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended.
“Rise, child.”
I obeyed, forcing my tottering knees to behave as I pasted a smile on my face.
“You are much changed in appearance, Mirage,” remarked the empress. “But tell us, are you so changed in ability as well? The last time you appeared before us, your abilities seemed to render you … rather faint.”
Yes, if you called collapsing on the Atrium floor rather faint.
“I beg Your Highness not to torment me so,” I simpered. “Surely my teacher keeps you apprised of my efforts.”
“But you’re wrong,” said Severine, a bite to her tone. She tapped her closed fan against the side of her thigh. “My Dowser has maintained an irritating silence on the matter. Perhaps he hopes to shield me from disappointment.”
“Or perhaps he hopes merely to raise your anticipation.”
The court sucked in a shocked breath. Someone laughed. It rang in my ears, sounding appreciative, but I knew it must be mocking. I dropped my gaze and silently ran through every curse word I knew.
Why are you bragging? I snarled at myself. This is your opportunity to prove you’ve earned a place here, not act the arrogant upstart with absurd ambitions.
“Perhaps,” agreed Severine, but her voice was too smooth, a desert pard closing in on its long-awaited prey. “Either way, we’re all dying to know. Won’t you favor us with a little sample of your talent?”