Amber & Dusk

by Lyra Selene

  “Famous—?” I barely got the word out before shock bubbled up into laughter. I clapped a hand over my mouth. “You’re joking.”

  “Care to find out?” Luca stepped closer, holding out a mass of fabric—the same color and weave as the outfit he wore. Servants’ livery.

  “How—?”

  “My friend Garan. The servant. He snuck me in and lent me these.” Mischief brightened his eyes. “Come on. The palais may be asleep, but the Amber City is still awake. The city is always awake. What do you say—a reprieve from this prison of silk and secrets?”

  Reality sent a sharp knife slicing through my fizzing exhilaration. Luca shouldn’t be here. Luca couldn’t be here. Not in the palais, and certainly not in Lys Wing. And I couldn’t leave, not mere weeks before Carrousel.

  Couldn’t I? Sunder’s cool voice echoed in my mind. Get out of this labyrinth of lies while you still can.

  “Sylvie. Don’t you trust me?” Luca whispered, and the name froze me. Sylvie. Again, I caught that scent of him, like burnt wood and sun-kissed skin and infinite skies. The scent of outside.

  My teeth worked at my lip, and I remembered the day we arrived at the Amber City. The convoy transports, rattling along broad boulevards and narrow alleyways. The rush of unfamiliar sights and sounds. A thousand colors glittering like jewels in the ruddy light of a dim sun. A million people, with joys and pains and secret dreams.

  I never got to see any of it.

  “Just an hour.” I grabbed the servants’ livery from his hands, fixing him with my sternest glare. “If I’m not back before Matin I will personally have you executed by the Skyclad Garde.”

  His muffled laugh sent a flare of pleasure blazing up my spine. I ducked into my room and dressed quickly, shucking off the gossamer nightgown to step into the linen livery. After spans of dressing in only silks and lace, the fabric was rough on my skin. I repressed a shudder of doubt, and shoved my carefully curled hair beneath a nondescript cap.

  “Ready,” I whispered, ducking out. But Luca had moved toward my sitting room. His long, dark fingers splayed against the jardin of painted flowers draped about my chambers.

  “Did you do these?” In the dimness of my shuttered room, his eyes gleamed like the bronze écu in my chamois purse. “I didn’t know you could paint.”

  “The girl who lived here before me painted them.”

  “Where’s she now?” He caressed a splash of white lilies.

  “I don’t know.” Gone. I swallowed a bright burst of grief. Mender. I still hadn’t been able to bring myself to approach Thibo after the picnic, but I wanted— No. I shoved the moil of emotions beneath the unexpected thrill of seeing Luca. “She … left before I arrived at the palais.”

  “Ah.” Luca nodded, as though he understood something I didn’t. He crossed to my side, twisting his arm through mine. “Let’s go.”

  “Luca—” I hesitated one last time, but Luca spun to face me. He pressed one warm finger to my lips, his calluses brushing the tender skin. I swallowed, hard.

  “Hush,” he laughed. “No more excuses.”

  We drifted like shadows through the halls of Coeur d’Or, keeping to the inner passages and secret doors the servants used to get quickly from one wing to the next. I jumped at every footstep, but Luca’s hand was firm on the small of my back, pushing me forward.

  A flight of hidden steps; the quiet whisper of a wooden door; the dank press of an ill-lit tunnel. And finally, a splash of burnished light on pitted cobblestones. The distant murmur and chatter of a city that never slept. A breeze laden with the complicated smells of a million citizens and their daily lives.

  Outside.

  Luca didn’t let me catch my breath. We raced down streets where close-set houses frowned like distant Sisters. We squeezed along alleyways slick with moisture, where unseen creatures scuttled in the shadows. The air screamed in my lungs, and I was utterly lost.

  “Where are we going?” I hissed at Luca’s pewter-clad back, barely visible in the shadow of a warehouse with busted windows like a gapped smile. “We shouldn’t go too far!”

  “Don’t worry.” Luca tossed the words over his shoulder. “I want to show you something.”

  I swallowed my uncertainty and followed my friend, avoiding the refuse beginning to slop at my boots. I breathed through my mouth to avoid the insidious whiff of waste teasing at my nostrils.

  Finally, we wedged between two twisting heaps of scrap metal, and then all of my senses were simultaneously assaulted by noise and light and smells and the crush of thousands of people. Hundreds of booths and tables and blankets crowded together. Smoked meats and candies and breads piled between glorious bursts of exotic fruits and spices and wines. Cloth and jewels and food and trinkets and junk. People of every race and age and height and breadth moved between them, shouting and laughing and chatting.

  So many people.

  And behind the vast market, humped like the massive head and shoulder of a sleeping giant, was another city. Buildings and houses and streets and ladders, stacked and heaped and towering like the violet mountains at the city’s back. My palms itched with a sudden tremor of delight.

  “What is this place?” I heard myself shout. The crowd picked us up in its current and yanked us into the throng.

  “This is the Thieves’ Emporium,” Luca shouted back at me, “and that is the Paper City.”

  I stuck close by Luca. After I was nearly carried away by the shove of the crowd, he laced his callused fingers in mine and tucked me against his side. I could hardly believe it was third Nocturne—the Emporium was as lively and crowded as if it was Prime.

  “You should see it at Prime,” he shouted when I said as much. “It’s deserted!”

  Luca paused at this stall and that stand bartering and negotiating in garbled dialects I didn’t understand. Coins flashed between fingers, and keen eyes flashed toward my face, my clothes. I yanked the cap farther over my hair, panic stitching hot threads down my arms.

  Finally, when I couldn’t bear the crowd any longer, Luca ducked between two booths, down an alleyway, and up a flight of rickety stairs. An alcove in the shadow of a dead vine brushed cool air across my face. I could still hear the shouting of a thousand voices, and smell the crush of unwashed bodies and perfumed hair, but people no longer pressed against my shoulders and stepped on my feet.

  Luca’s face swam into view. Worry dragged his brows together. “All right?”

  “Fine,” I whispered, sucking in another lungful of humid air. After two spans in the palais, I wasn’t used to the sounds and stenches pouring over me like a waterfall. “Now can we go back?”

  “Back? No.” Luca’s mouth lifted in a crooked grin. “Now, we go up.”

  The Paper City was a mountain made of the debris and detritus of an entire civilization. Tiny cottages of wood and stone were crushed beneath towering suites built from corrugated metal. Dristic and steel were neighbors to slipshod masonry daubed between vast tracts of cobbles. The city was alive beneath my feet, breathing like a slumbering beast of legend.

  Luca took a circuitous route of ladders and ledges toward the roof of the city. We were never alone—faces peered from behind tattered curtains, and untethered voices drifted like phantoms. A flock of startled birds flew at our faces, and we had to beat away the barrage of feathers and beaks. The creak of improvised levers and pulleys warned us to whizzing buckets full of refuse and dirty water. Dampness slapped cold, clammy hands on the back of my neck. A child wailed, and somewhere I heard the frenzied barking of a trapped hound.

  And finally, when the muscles in my legs burned and the dank air seared my lungs, we reached the top. Luca clasped his hand around my forearm and hauled me up onto the final rooftop. A sudden wind yanked the cap from my head and flung it away. I turned to reach for it, and froze.

  An ocean of rooftops fell away from my feet, heaving up toward the foothills and churning down to the city gates. An entire city laid out before me like a tapestry, many-hued and knotted w
ith the threads of a million human lives.

  It was awful, and beautiful. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Luca’s muscled arm curled around my waist as the wind whipped his dark curls against my cheek. The press of his chest against my back was warm, but a shiver wrenched at my spine. I trained my eyes on the horizon, where a line of wine-stained clouds billowed in a honeyed sky.

  “Careful,” Luca whispered, his breath hot in the shell of my ear. “We should sit. The Amber Empress would never forgive me if I pushed her prized fantast off a roof.”

  We sat on top of the city, our legs pressed against each other and our hands entwined.

  Luca spread his trove of purchases around us. A small jug of tize, enough for two. Tiny fireworks that shrieked and spun circles before sputtering into nothing. Sweet buns bursting with fruit and honey and tasting nothing like the rich, fine foods of the palais.

  “Do you like it?” Luca’s eyes flitted, grazing the dirty bricks and the flushed horizon and the glowering clouds. “Living in Coeur d’Or, I mean.”

  The question caught me off-balance, and I swigged tize to delay answering. The tangy fermented liquid heated my blood and loosened my words.

  “It’s not what I expected,” I admitted. I reached for my throat, where my old amulet hung for the first time in spans. I felt suddenly split in two—the innocent Dusklander with towering dreams and a hundred incandescent worlds living inside her, and the pampered courtier with muddled doubts and mounting secrets. How could I be both girls, and yet neither? “Everything is so beautiful—a paradise. I can still hardly believe I live there.”

  Luca’s eyes glittered. “And the Amber Court? Have you found your place bowing and scraping at the empress’s feet?”

  “That’s not—” Air hissed between my teeth. “It’s complicated. I’m still navigating the intricacies of court life.”

  I thought Luca would say something—something like I told you so, or What did you expect?—but he just bared his teeth at the city ebbing away from our feet.

  “And you?” I asked. “That day in the Mews, you told me your mother’s convoy was leaving in two weeks. You were meant to go with it. Why are you still in the Amber City? What about Madame Rina? Vesh?”

  Luca surged to his feet, stalking to the edge of the rooftop, where the wind snatched his hair from his face.

  “Maman and Vesh are safe in the Mews,” he said, “until the whispers of violence are silenced.”

  “Violence?”

  Luca’s eyes on my face were filled with curiosity, disappointment, and something else—something like pity. Even when I was poor as the dust rolling beneath the wheels of his mother’s ore transport, I never saw that look in Luca’s eyes. It sent the scant sips of tize roiling in my belly. Bitterness coated my throat.

  “They sure keep you sheltered, up there in the Heart of Gold,” he said. “How can you not hear the murmurs? Civil conflict in Aifir restricts shipments of the valuable weapons and machinery the empire trades for its natural resources. Famine and plague ravage colonies in the Sousine Isles, forcing up the price of luxury commodities like silk and kachua. More Zvar corsairs in the Meridian Desert, scuppering imperial sand skiffs and threatening trade along the Amber Road. Moneylenders are struggling to raise enough capital to fund the pursuits of honest merchants and traders like Maman. The empire is hemorrhaging capital even as the empress raises taxes and encourages her nobles to bury themselves in debt to finance continuously lavish lifestyles.”

  I leaned back. Sunder’s words echoed through me. We are on the brink, Mirage.

  He’d told me of the troubles in Aifir, and the threat posed to trade across the Meridian Desert. But Luca made it sound so much worse. I gnawed on my lower lip, thinking of the sheaf of promissory notes Sunder had tossed at my feet when he sponsored me. It was hard to imagine anyone in the palais being in debt to the empire, but now that I knew how Severine treated her legacies, I wasn’t too surprised to hear she encouraged her nobles to rely on her financially as well as politically.

  “You and those—those courtiers, and the empress—none of you bother to see how your actions affect the people,” Luca spat. “The people like me, and my family, who eke out a living from the meager castoffs of the rich and never ask for more than we deserve. When contagion blackens trade ships, we are the sailors who sicken. When corsairs launch fire globes at sand skiffs with only a few weak legacies for protection, we are the men who must fight with swords against magic. When soldats require free mounts, we are the horse breeders who die.”

  “Legacies?” My heart gave a bewildered leap toward the word. “What legacies?”

  “Of course you would only care about the legacies.” Luca’s harsh laugh scraped inside my chest. “I shouldn’t have expected you to stay the same. How could you? You have everything, when you used to have nothing.”

  “I was nothing.” I found my voice. “Penniless and indigent, with nothing to my name but bad memories. Now I have a place where I belong. Would you really begrudge me that?”

  We stared at each other. My pulse throbbed with the rumble of thunder, and I imagined my heart as dark and purple as the horizon. I clenched my fists against a sudden buzzing thrum.

  “There’s more.” Luca dragged a hand through his mop of curls. “Maman postponed our departure date indefinitely, saying it would give us time to gather supplies and contracts for a more prosperous trip. But I was restless. I wandered the city from Matin to Nocturne, from Unitas to the Concordat, Jardinier to the Paper City. I visited teahouses and wine bars and lotus dens. And in the shadows—wherever the light of the palais doesn’t reach—there are whispers.”

  “Whispers?” My throat rasped dry. “Of what?”

  “Of revolution.”

  “Revolution?” The incredulous word slipped out louder than I intended.

  Luca’s expression flamed. “For tides the Amber Empire has flourished enough that even the poorest of her citizens didn’t want for much. When your children are fed and your house is warm you may gripe about the excesses of the aristocracy, but taking up arms to overthrow an imperial family with a vast and powerful army is nothing short of madness.”

  “It is madness. The Skyclad Garde is highly trained and armored. Any attack on the palais would fail. A war would never—”

  “Not a war. Assassination.” The word had been forged by unrest and cooled with patience.

  “Assassination?” I repeated. The word tasted like poison on my tongue. “The empress?”

  “Who else?”

  “But what will that do?” I was on my feet, my voice a fierce hiss. “She isn’t even the reason most of these things are happening. Like you said—it’s civil war in the Aifiri Archipelago, plague in the Sousine Isles.”

  “Why are you defending her?” Luca was on his feet too, a bonfire in his eyes. “In the seventeen tides since she came to power she has run the empire halfway to the ground. She dissolved her Council ages ago. Any nobles who defied her promptly disappeared or met with accidents, only to be replaced by a farce of a Senat filled with the nouveau riche. She personally instituted the harshest immigration and refugee laws in history. Taxes on ores have soared, while technological innovation has plummeted. She’s a tyrant, Sylvie. She needs to be stopped.”

  “I’m not defending her,” I protested, swallowing down the taste of bile. I closed my eyes against the sick rush of images Luca’s words conjured. I hadn’t had the most pleasant experiences with Severine, but these revelations brought her into clearer focus. But even if she was a despot, did she deserve to die? Did anyone deserve to die without a proper trial, without justice? “Assassination just seems—extreme. And like you said, there’s no Council. She has no heir or consort. Murdering her will leave a hole at the heart of the empire. Who will fill it?”

  “Not another power-hungry aristo, that’s for damned sure,” Luca snarled. “Maybe we can finally throw off the yoke of imperial rule and build a government ruled by the people, for the people.”


  Realization finally hit.

  “We,” I repeated, rolling the word over my tongue and tasting everything it implied. “This isn’t theoretical. You’re not just telling me what people in the city are saying. You’re a part of this. You want to assassinate the empress.”

  I couldn’t ignore the froth of eagerness in Luca’s eyes.

  “You’re not a revolutionary, Luca!” My voice came out shrill and desperate. Every muscle in my body trembled. “I remember the day you told me that your father chose you to be a Tavendel Guardian. You were handpicked to honor the ways of your land. To remember the songs of your people. To honor your family by defending them. Where is the honor in assassination? In revolution?”

  A shadow darkened Luca’s face. “There is honor in standing up for a cause. In protecting people who cannot protect themselves. There is honor in making the world a better place.”

  “There is also little to no chance you will ever succeed,” I hissed. “If you fail—if you’re captured—you will be tried and sentenced as a traitor, Luca. You will be publicly executed.”

  “I’m not afraid to die.”

  “What about Vesh?” I whispered. I felt a shred of jagged satisfaction when Luca flinched. “Your brother is barely seven tides old. You may not be afraid to die, but how will your family survive seeing your head mounted on a spike by the city gates? Who will teach your little brother how to be a man after you throw your life away on a futile cause?”

  “Stop,” growled Luca. His hot hands cuffed my wrists, his pulse thrumming in counterpoint to mine. “You’re making this about something it isn’t. Revolution is a distant possibility. War could not be further from my mind.”

  “Then what is this?”

  “Do you agree the Amber Empress needs to be stopped? She’s tearing her empire apart from the inside out.”

  Luca’s words opened a yawning chasm between my ribs. I closed my eyes, and sifted through the bloodstained images painting themselves against the back of my eyelids. Sand and flaming torches, black vines and torment. Wine-scorched clouds and sharp red nails gouging a bare throat. Lullaby’s swollen eyes and stolen pain, a scar of oblivion on the landscape of her mind.