Amber & Dusk

by Lyra Selene

  “Assuaging the rumors while saving both of our reputations,” he breathed against my throat. I shuddered; I couldn’t help it. “How dare you approach me here, in front of everyone? I’m not your friend, my most graceless demoiselle.”

  “I need to talk to you,” I snapped. His insult cleared my head, and I shoved at his chest. He drew back, slowly, trailing his fingers along my wrist and his eyes over the curves of my body. He gave me a leisurely smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes, and I knew it wasn’t aimed at me.

  “And I told you I don’t talk,” he replied, too soft for his friends to hear. “Did you come here to spite me? I can assure you—only your own position at court will suffer.”

  “This isn’t about revenge.” Spite was just an added bonus. “And I’m not concerned with either of our reputations. So if you don’t answer my questions now I’ll do something that will actually give you something to be embarrassed about.”

  Sunder’s eyes blazed. Pain needled up my spine.

  “Don’t you dare,” I commanded.

  He clenched his fists, and the sensation was gone, nothing more than a memory.

  “My apologies,” said Sunder. “You make a compelling argument. But I’m going to need you to simper.”

  “What?”

  “Do it.”

  I hesitated, then did as he said, dropping into a curtsy and tilting my head in a gesture of deference. I forced my wrist to swirl in the attitude for quiet admiration. I gritted my teeth at the sound of muffled tittering from the watching courtiers.

  “That will do.” He offered a hand to guide me toward the path. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him turn on his heel and cut an extravagant bow to his friends. They all burst out in laughter. I fought a hot flush threatening to climb my cheeks.

  “What was that?” I snarled as soon as we were out of sight.

  “Window dressing,” he snapped. “You may be content with the dubious state of your own reputation, but mine has been eighteen tides in the crafting. I will not allow an unrefined provincial upstart to ruin it with her meddling.”

  “I assume that’s supposed to describe me?”

  Sunder said nothing, just led me between the high walls of a hedged labyrinth. My captured pulse sang against his cool fingers. Finally, he dragged me up a shallow flight of stairs and through a set of glass doors, flinging me away from him and slamming the metal frame shut behind us.

  I stared around, rubbing my wrist. Potted trees marched in regimented rows, globes of orange and yellow and green peeking between neatly trimmed branches. The air was cooler than outside, but humid; the strands of hair loose around my face were already starting to curl. Low honeyed light slanted in from the curved glass ceiling, casting dappled patterns across the tile. A marble fountain plashed pleasantly at the center of it all, echoing off the paned walls.

  “What is this place?” I murmured, half to myself.

  “The Orangerie,” replied Sunder, before dunking his whole head into the basin of the fountain. He flicked his head back, and water cascaded down his neck and shoulders, soaking his white shirt and gluing it to the planes of his chest. I coughed and turned away, staring into the quiet army of citrus trees to avoid looking at the only thing I wanted to look at.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “There’s no dress code,” he drawled, raising an eloquent eyebrow at my blue gown, “and I can keep an eye on the door.”

  “What’s wrong with my dress?” I snapped, indignant, before throwing my hands up and shaking my head. “Never mind. I won’t let you bait me. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “No?” He leaned against the fountain, propping one leg against its curving basin. “I’m dying to hear why you thought it appropriate to accost me publicly, in front of my friends, in the middle of my leisure.”

  “Fine friends,” I muttered, before dropping my voice to a whisper. “It’s about the empress. I heard something, and it’s important to me that I find out whether it’s true or not.”

  “Ask someone else.”

  “I did. I asked Dowser, but I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to hide something from me, or tell me something else entirely.”

  “Clearly you didn’t ask the right questions,” said Sunder, looking bored. “Why in the Scion’s name do you think I’ll be any different?”

  “Because—” I hesitated, suddenly uncertain. When I’d decided to ask Sunder—before I scoured half the palais looking for him—I’d thought my reasoning was sound. But now, standing in front of him, I wasn’t sure I dared voice it. “Listen, I don’t know exactly who or what you are. Some people say you’re the empress’s dog, and you bark or bite at her command. Some people say you’re a dissolute libertine with decadent and depraved tastes.”

  The barest hint of a smile coiled in the corner of his mouth.

  “And I know you don’t care about me,” I plunged on. “I could fall down a flight of stairs to my death and you’d call for another glass of wine. But I know what you do care about. Maybe the only thing you care about: Bane.”

  Sunder looked away, the smile dropping from his lips. With his wet hair slicked away from his face, he was a collection of hard lines and harder angles. He looked like someone who rarely slept, and never deeply.

  “You’re not the only one who understands pain, Sunder,” I whispered, and ventured a step closer. “Bane’s pain is your pain. And who makes Bane hurt? The empress. Severine takes the thing your sister loathes most about herself and uses it as a weapon. And Bane isn’t like you, is she? She isn’t as strong as you.”

  “Enough.” Sunder’s voice was rough, and when he lifted his eyes to mine they were empty of that familiar sardonic spite. They were empty of anything—an abyss I didn’t dare stare into. “What do you want to know?”

  “Severine’s rise to power,” I said quickly. I wasn’t going to question my luck, or Sunder’s cooperation. “I need to know what she did, and how it all happened.”

  “Sedition, seduction, and slaughter.” Sunder’s eyes flickered left and right, but there was no one here but us—nothing but a vast circle of orderly trees and a glass dome to eavesdrop. “But how else do you think the rulers of the daylight world get their power? They steal it.”

  “Did she—?”

  “Murder the old emperor?” Sunder pressed his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes. “By all accounts the young dauphine was whip-smart, persuasive, and ravenous for power. Sylvain was wise, merciful, and moderate in his government. Sacrifices had to be made. As a matter of fact, rumor has it my own father, Guislain de Vere, possessed a legacy strikingly similar to my own. I’d ask him if the empress ordered him to assassinate Sylvain, but of course, he’s dead.”

  “She didn’t—?”

  “She did.” Sunder’s smile was a rictus of death. “Nearly half of her court—and most of her Council—suspected what she had done. There were … alternate opinions regarding succession, and plans in motion with those ideas in mind. But mere weeks before her coronation all of her dissident nobles dropped dead or disappeared in the dead of Nocturne.”

  “Your parents.” Sunder’s gaze flickered, a chink opening into the bleak expanse lurking behind his eyes. A dristic fist clenched my heart. “Sunder, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “I was barely old enough to remember them. It doesn’t really matter.”

  The sudden silence was broken only by the plink of water in the fountain.

  “What about—” I paused, fighting the sudden lump in my throat that threatened to crack my voice. “What about her sibling? Did she murder him too?”

  “Sibling?” Sunder’s laugh was a serrated knife. “Try siblings.”

  “There was more than one dauphin?”

  “The dauphin was sick and weak, and if she hadn’t killed him someone else would have,” Sunder said without passion. “There were more pressing concerns. Sylvain had appetites. He married, once, but Seneca and Severine’s mother died in childbirth, and let’s
say the emperor liked to keep his options open. Very, very open. By the time Severine came to power, there were seventeen tides’ worth of options to worry about.”

  “Illegitimate children?” I gasped. Dowser’s words trickled through my memory: Even had any natural children existed … “But if they were illegitimate—”

  “In the Sousine Isles,” interrupted Sunder, “the Gorma tell tales of a fearsome creature in the depths of the ocean. With its sharp teeth and cold eyes, it devours anything it comes across. But after it mates, a chilling ritual begins. A dozen littermates fight for space, and even in the womb, the unborn monsters have teeth. The biggest and strongest gobble up their brethren, growing larger and larger until finally, there is only one left to be birthed. Only the strongest, and the cruelest, and the hungriest offspring survives the womb.”

  A shudder wracked my spine. “How many?”

  “No one knows,” Sunder said with a shrug. “But rumors suggest that Severine makes that cannibal shark look like a magnanimous vegetarian.”

  A numb wave sent needles to prickle at my arms and legs. A low hum teased at my ears, and my palms tingled. I rubbed my hands together, shaking my head to dispel the buzz.

  Luca was right. Worse—Luca’s accusations were too kind. Severine wasn’t just a tyrant, she was a butcher. Not only did she murder her father, her brother, and countless nobles, but she hunted down scads of children whose only crime was being sired by a lusty emperor.

  I was beginning to think assassination was too kind.

  “And you’re sure about this?”

  “Nothing is ever sure, especially not in Coeur d’Or,” said Sunder. “But dig deep enough, demoiselle, and even beneath marble you are certain to find dirt.”

  I lifted my eyes to the glass ceiling. Spears of light lanced between the staid rows, and I felt suddenly as though I was one of these captive citrus trees, cultivated and pruned, my world reduced to the space between four glass walls and one arched ceiling. Luca was right to scoff at this place and everything it stood for. But revolution? Assassination? Could death and destruction ever lead to peace? To a world where dreams had wisdom and hopes had depth?

  “Thank you.” My words sounded distant and feeble to my own ears. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your parents. I’m—I’m just sorry.”

  My footsteps were soft on the tiles as I turned toward the door.

  “Mirage,” said Sunder, and it was the first time he used the word as my name and not as a weapon. Surprise spun me toward the sound of his voice.

  He closed the distance between us in a few spare strides. He looked down at me, and the press of his canny eyes on my face sent a thread of heat unspooling through my veins.

  “I confess that I find you nearly as surprising as I find you annoying,” he murmured. “But not all surprises are good, my most unexpected lady. So whatever decision I just saw cross your face, I suggest you reconsider.”

  “Decision … ?”

  “On one so unerringly brash as yourself, coyness is an unflattering mask.” He stepped closer, and a bar of low sunlight bleached his skin to marble and brightened his eyes to turquoise. “However highly you may consider yourself, I can assure you: Whatever you’re planning, you are outnumbered, outpaced, and outwitted. You are neither as brave nor as clever as you imagine yourself to be.”

  I couldn’t stop the breath of air that hissed between my teeth. Was I so obvious? Or was Sunder bluffing?

  “I’m not afraid,” I whispered. “Not of the empress, and certainly not of you.”

  He bared his teeth in a laugh. “You should be.”

  “Isn’t fear what allows people like her to seize power?”

  “Fear is what keeps people like me alive,” Sunder said, “when all around the world is dying.”

  “You’re a coward,” I hissed.

  Sunder’s hand jerked toward my face, and I flinched away from the anticipated jolt of pain. But he just brushed a strand of hair off my cheek. His cool fingers skimmed the curve of my ear.

  “And you’re a fool,” he whispered. “And there’s nothing I fear so much as a fool.”

  He brushed past me, tossing his brocade jacket over one shoulder and striding between the glass doors.

  I stood for a few long moments, inhaling the sultry scents of mulch and bright citrus and sorting through the coil of emotions looping inside me. Maybe Sunder was right—maybe I should be afraid. But when I closed my eyes all I could see were the snapping jaws of an underwater monster, hungry for flesh and hungrier for power.

  I pushed out into the jardins. A line of heavy clouds had rolled in over the palais, casting dull shadows over the crisp lines of rosebush and hedge. I didn’t know exactly where I was—between the Gauntlet arena and the Orangerie, I’d gotten lost in Coeur d’Or for the first time in spans. Crystalline spires and ambric domes glinted over my left shoulder, so I headed that way, cutting through a wild copse edged in lavender and sedge. My broad skirts were loud in the underbrush, and I almost didn’t hear the staccato rustle of someone else’s footsteps retreating through the scrub.

  I jerked my gaze toward the sound.

  A maze of slender trees sliced my vision into shreds of brown and white and grey. I squinted. I glimpsed limp feathers clinging desperately to sharp twigs. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. A bird, caught in a trap? Pity clogged my throat, and I lifted my skirts to move closer, scattering dried leaves and moss behind me. But no—beneath the silvery brush of pale feathers I saw dove-grey velvet and fawn-colored chamois. My bemused gaze lingered on a glister of jeweled rings before drifting to the curled sweep of bronze hair beneath a rakish hat. Hair I recognized. A hat I recognized.

  The cold anticipation of trauma gripped my spine with barbed fingers and turned me on my heel. I took two shaking steps, as though I might undo a thing before it happened, just by walking away. But the thing was already done. I felt it in the drumming pulse at my temple, the sick roil of acid in my stomach, the keening horror unfurling thunderous wings inside me. I turned slowly back.

  It was Thibo, beautiful and lavishly dressed and empty. He lay askew in the shadow between two trees. His hazel eyes stared toward the sky. I dropped to my knees beside him with a crunch of dead leaves. Terror bubbled hot below a slick sheen of denial.

  “Thibo.” I curled my hand around his shoulder. “Thibo, what are you doing out here?”

  His only reply was silence.

  “Is this supposed to be a joke?” I shook him, hard. His head lolled.

  “Thibo, stop it.” Panic made my voice shrill. I shook him again, my fingernails breaking as they crushed the rich nap of his waistcoat. “Thibo, this isn’t funny!”

  He blinked, slowly. Too slowly. My hands crept to his neck. His pulse—fast but even—throbbed in time to the desperate litany clogging my mind.

  No, no no. No, no no.

  But I couldn’t wish this away. This—in the churning confusion of disbelief and nausea I could hardly fathom what this was. Thibo injured? Thibo dying? My hands fluttered uselessly, and I shook him once more, just to give them purpose. A burnished circle on a kembric chain slipped from beneath his cravat.

  Thibo’s locket.

  I snatched at it with more force than I meant to, and the locket came away in my hand, the delicate chain slithering around my fingers. Disjointed words bubbled upward. My youngest sister. Mender. I would marry him, if he’ll have me. Reaper.

  And finally, like a boot to the gut: gone.

  I jolted to my feet and took off at a run. I hiked my skirts around my knees and sprinted, faster than I’d ever run in my life. Branches slapped at my shoulders and raised welts on my face, but I didn’t care. A strange, serene world of smooth velvet and chilled wine threatened to drown me in the dead, muffled silence of despair. I pushed the glassy calm away, forcing my leaden legs faster. The wilderness gave way to a sward of smooth green, and I glimpsed sky-bright chips of armor pacing calm along the palais wall.

  “Help!” The
word was jagged in my throat, a strip of raw metal tearing me from within. “Help!”

  The Skyclad Gardes spared barely a glance at my rich jacquard gown and coiffed hair before jumping to my aid. They asked brief, pointed questions. I answered as best I could through the bewildering fog of grief and shock as I backtracked toward the copse, retracing steps that felt painfully slow. My thighs burned as my corset dug pitiless fingers into my waist. I fell to my knees in the grass, tearing with my fingernails at the prison of satin capturing my ribs, the rigid stays stealing away my breath.

  The pair of Skyclad Gardes paused, confusion marring their trained impassivity as I shredded the bodice of my gown.

  “Go!” I screamed at them. I realized I was weeping; hot tears left scalding tracks against my cheeks. I pointed a trembling finger at the pale trees rimming the copse. “Save him!”

  They sprinted away. Others had heard the commotion and came running—servants in palais livery and courtiers in organdy and moiré. More Skyclad Gardes. They flickered through the trees like fireflies in the dusk, their calling voices a quivering lament.

  Reaper! Reaper! Reaper!

  And I—I churned with sorrow in the blanched glare of the staring sun. This was my fault. Instead of comforting my friend in the wake of his lover’s disappearance, I had cavorted through the Paper City with a rebel. I had wrenched sick secrets from a lord who only spoke in riddles. I had thought only of my own desperate longing for an impossible world, dreaming of belonging when the people who mattered to me were scraping and scrambling to simply stay alive.

  I should have kept him close. I should have watched his back. I should have protected him.

  I wasn’t sure whether it was minutes or hours before the Skyclad Gardes returned to me. Their eyes were full of pity and disbelief and a distant kind of scorn. I knew what they would say before they had a chance to say it.

  They weren’t able to find the body I’d supposedly stumbled upon. There was no one in the copse, or the jardins beyond. Their final verdict splintered my bones.