That, at least, had worked in my favor.
“In a moment, we will take you to meet Our Queen Marianna da Ignasi.” Emerald lingered over her name, voice dropping. “You will not approach her. You will address her by her title, and you will bow until she bids you to stand. You will not touch her. You will answer her honestly, and you will never turn your back on her. When she dismisses you, you will back out of that room in a bow so low your nose scrapes the floor. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” I nodded, swallowing back the nerves and fear lodged in my throat. “What about our proof? The coin?”
Ruby shifted forward and held out his hand. “Whichever one of you is selected as Opal will formally present Our Queen with proof of your first contract.”
“It will serve as your oath of loyalty.” Emerald leaned her elbows on the table, resting her chin on laced fingers. “Any other questions?”
“If it’s Two,” I said carefully, “what happens to me?”
None of them looked at each other, but I could feel their eyes raking over me and glancing toward each other.
“You’re free to go.” Ruby spread his hands out in front of him, dropping them to his chair, and a muffled, tinkling laughter leaked from behind his mask. “Provided Our Queen doesn’t take issue with your alternative agenda, you will be given an invitation for the next audition and compensated for your assignment.”
“Enough to buy your uniform.” Amethyst rose and held out her hand. “Come. Our Queen waits.”
Lady, give me this. I’d repay the blood I’d spilled with my own. Let me have this life.
I took Amethyst’s hand.
“Calm down.” Amethyst led me to a plain-looking door guarded by soldiers too grim-faced to be real. She knocked twice—once with two slow beats and once again with two quick ones. “We’ll be watching but not listening. It will be fine.”
“Thank you,” I tried to say, but my fear twisted the words into a whimper.
Amethyst laughed and opened the door. I glanced up, trying to get far enough from the door to bow fully, and my breath stuck in my throat.
I knew why those who’d worshipped The Lady had rebuilt their temples to honor Our Queen. She was power trapped in mortal form. I dropped into a bow to keep from staring.
“And you are Twenty-Three.” Her voice drew out my name and rang in my ears. Silk and velvet rustled, and her nails clinked against the chair. “Come sit.”
I rose, head still bowed, and folded myself into the chair at her feet. Her seat was undecorated but raised, set on a platform rising out of the ground and placing her a full head above me. She crossed her ankles, feet vanishing beneath her dark-blue gown.
“Now let’s start at the beginning.” She leaned forward, black eyes flashing, and the storm-gray chemise slid down her left shoulder. The lightning—twists of dark-brown scars against her warm, deep skin—curled around her neck. It was like everyone said, crawling up her flesh where the magic had left her body. She’d channeled all the magic of The Lady through her flesh and only been left with brittle hair and scars. “Who are you?”
“Sallot Leon, Our Queen.” I glanced at her face and looked away.
“From Nacea.” She’d salt-flecked eyes like Rath. The old runes, still dark as the day they’d been inked into her skin, lined her left eye and curled around her ear. They wrinkled with each word and blink, giving the illusion they still moved beneath her skin. “How many people have you killed and who?”
I swallowed. Here it was—my alternative agenda. It couldn’t be different from hers. If she knew what they’d done to us, she’d agree. “Grell da Sousa, Eight, Seven, Horatio del Seve, and Thorn da Tonin. I got Shan de Pau arrested for murder, and I might’ve killed more when I was a street fighter, but I don’t know for sure.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Horatio del Seve fell from his garden and snapped his neck. A tragic accident.”
She knew. Everyone knew, and yet here I stood.
I opened my mouth, stopped, and shuddered. She’d seen the monsters who’d created the shadows and turned them on civilians. She’d killed them to save us.
“Because if it were anything other than an untimely accident,” she said softly, “the lords of what was once Erlend would have cause to challenge my rule and our nation’s sovereignty, and we would be at war again.”
“They shouldn’t even be lords anymore. Not with Nacea—” I’d not spoken this aloud in years, and my tongue fumbled over the words. “They left us. Every single Erlend soldier left us before the shadows came. They didn’t even warn us, just used us to slow down the shadows so they could save Erlend. They shouldn’t get to be lords, alive while Nacea lies forgotten.”
Our Queen leaned back in her seat, eyes narrowed, and laced her fingers in her lap. Light reflected off the four rings on her left hand, and red, purple, white, and green flickered over my feet. “The world is not so simple.”
“They slaughtered us.” I shook my head. This wasn’t what I wanted. This wasn’t what I’d dreamed. She’d known and she’d done nothing. “And you’ve let them live in comfort while I got tossed from town to town. You know how many orphans you’ve got with no place to sleep and no food to eat? While Erlends are running round rich?”
“Sallot,” she said, voice caressing the peaks and dips of my name properly. “I have many regrets, but none so painful as what happened to Nacea.”
“Regret does nothing but soothe your own guilt.” I sniffed. “I thought you didn’t know. You’d have done something.”
“I bided my time.” She beckoned me forward, eyes on my face and sad. Lady, they were as teary as mine. She cared—she had to. She couldn’t fake this. “The lands of Erlend are fertile but wild, and the charges of the nobles are as stuck in their ways as anyone else. I couldn’t erase a nation overnight. The lords had to stay if Igna were to thrive. We’re thriving now though, and the old lords of Erlend are restless. I need them no longer.”
“But you’ve never done anything about it?” I said. “I waited and waited, went to all your processions, and you never even mentioned us.”
“I could not acknowledge Nacea without acknowledging what Erlend had done, and my rule has been dependent on Erlend until now.” She exhaled slowly through her nose. “I could not move against them without giving Lord del Weylin reason to attack Igna. More people would’ve died.”
“And now?” I lifted my head and met her eyes. “What can you do now that you don’t need them anymore?”
Her face didn’t change—no frown or smile—and a high whine built up between my ears. I’d talked back to Our Queen. I’d talked back to her, and I wasn’t even nice about it. I was dead. Disqualified or dead.
“I believe we want the same thing, Sallot Leon.”
I jerked, mind reeling and nodded. “Truly, Our Queen?”
I froze. She’d spoken Nacean, and I’d responded in kind. It was clumsy and old, like an old door rusted shut and stuck, but it was there. I’d forgotten how smooth the words were on my lips. How my name really sounded.
“Thank you, Twenty-Three.” She dismissed me and switched back to Alonian. “You may leave.”
“Of course, Our Queen.”
I bowed so low my head ached, but she said no more. The door slammed shut between us. I blinked back tears and sniffed. I still loved her.
But I did not trust her.
Forty-Four
I was either Opal or dead, but Our Queen was so steady that I couldn’t make sense of what my chances were.
Great.
Maud and Dimas talked with each other in the corner, neither meeting the other’s eyes properly. I slid behind her, and Dimas startled. He tore his gaze from her shoes.
“Maud?” I asked.
Dimas bowed to me and took off.
“Are you still in the running?” Maud turned to me, shoulders straightening despite the downward crook of her mouth.
I nodded.
She led me out the door. “Good, at least that’
s working out in our favor.”
Maud had me unfancified and the clothes folded neatly faster than I could’ve done it, and I slipped out the door. She said I’d permission to be anywhere we’d trained. I headed to Emerald’s greenhouse.
“You’ve seen her?”
I jumped. Two smiled from her perch in the branches of a tree above me. I nodded and raised my hand in greeting. I’d not even thought to look up.
“Our Queen?” I leaned back to get a better look at Two. She’d not bandaged the cut on her arm. “She’s something different.”
“She is.” Two pried up a piece of bark and crumbled it in her hands. “I saw her once at the carnival. Even with the crowd between us, I stumbled when she looked at me. Dropped a knife on Four’s foot.”
“You all right?” I glanced around, pulling myself up so I could meet her eyes.
“Thinking.” She shooed me off her branch. “Meeting you was nice. Don’t ruin it.”
“See you in the after.” I grasped her wrist and bowed my head. “Or not. However they do it.”
I passed two guard patrols before reaching the greenhouse. I picked the lock and slipped inside, inhaling deep, damp air. The deadly blooms nodded with each step, the wooden boards beneath my feet bending, and I sat next to the cleared table in the back. The dirt was soft and wet, smearing over my fingers. A bee landed on the sunny blooms of a poisonous shrub.
I couldn’t fight the urge to move, and every bee and butterfly except the bravest fled to the other side of the greenhouse. I tapped holes into the dirt.
“I don’t recall giving you permission to be here”—Emerald drifted before me, trailing her fingers along the petals of twining primroses—“and I distinctly remember locking the door.”
“It was open, and no one told me I couldn’t come here.” I shook a butterfly from my boot. Best it was gone if she attacked. “It’s nicer than anything we’ve got in Kursk. And quiet.”
She tilted her head, surely arching an eyebrow and scowling behind her mask. “And full of poisonous plants.”
“It’s my weakest area.” I shrugged. “Not like I’ll get a chance to apprentice with an apothecary.”
She snorted softly, such a common sound for Our Queen’s Emerald to make. “I’d say you’re weaker at archery.”
She gestured for me to stand and led me to the back of the garden. She pulled a hidden bow wrapped in oiled leather with a small bundle of arrows from behind a trellis, glancing to make sure I followed her. We ended up outside, off to the left of the building. She handed me the bow.
“I don’t think quiet suits you.” She pointed to a tree. “Practice.”
I sucked in a breath and pulled back the string without an arrow—stomach in, arms up. A breeze ruffled my collar.
Emerald was gone. Figured. But she was right, and I’d never hold a bow so fine unless I stole one.
“Shoulder to the target and one finger above the arrow,” I muttered.
My side burned holding this position. Maybe Two had the right idea, spending the last few moments tucked away where no one could find you. This was it.
North Star. Deadfall. Riparian. Caldera. Winter.
My first true shot went wide. Another three shots barely corrected the misfire, and I shuffled my feet and took aim. The arrow thwacked against the tree’s neighbor. I fired another.
Wide again. I repeated this monotony of misses and barely-there hits a dozen more times till I reached down and the quiver was empty. The frantic panic in my chest eased with each shot, and I collected the lost arrows from the little forest she’d me shooting into.
My aim got better with time. I fired, missed, fired, hit, fired, and collected arrows till my muscles burned, my arms ached, and I’d no desire to run anywhere. I just wanted to know.
“Stomach in, shoulders perpendicular to your target.” Emerald’s brass fingers pressed my spine straighter, twisted me back, and pulled me into place. Her breath tickled my ear. “I already taught you this.”
My arrow burrowed into the trunk—not center but closer than before.
“Your stance is still shaky.” Emerald lifted a recurve bow from her back and held three arrows in her hand. “Bad practice, bad forever.”
She shot three arrows faster than I could see, each striking the tree in a neat line.
“We’ve come to a decision.” Emerald tapped my instep with an arrow. “Feet farther apart.”
“Two is calm, followed the rules, got her fair share of kills.” I let loose another shot, striking the tree closer to Emerald’s shots. “Five’s good but a risk.”
“Yes, those were certainly things we discussed.” She stared at me and fired another shot. “Your body directs the arrow, not your eyes.”
I fired my last one. Emerald cocked her head to the side, green mask casting sickly light around our feet. She shrugged at my off-center shot.
“Still too tense.”
“It’s been a tense day.” I moved to collect my arrows.
“Stand there. Don’t move.” She raised her bow and final arrow. “Trust me.”
I froze, then faced her.
“Watch the arrow and don’t turn your head. Tell me how it moves.” She fired. The arrow, a blur of brown wider than the shaft, hit the branch behind my head. “See?”
I shook my head. “It wobbles?”
“But stays true to where you shoot unless it’s windy or raining,” said Emerald. “If you want to be better, you’ll have to learn more than the stance.”
“I will.” I stopped next to her and raised the bow again. A wavering pain that had nothing to do with my exhaustion burned up my chest to my eyes. “Army’ll beat proper everything into my head.”
She hummed.
“There will be a more formal announcement at dinner.” Emerald placed my feet in the dirt and ran her hands up my side till she was content with the line of my shoulders. She pulled my elbow up. “You are our new Opal.”
I struck the tree dead center between her shots.
Forty-Five
The Left Hand met me at the final door separating me from the nobles. The path there had been littered with guards, all wide-eyed and at attention, taking in everything before them. The sharp lines of my white outfit hung heavy over the knives at my waist and fading ink still clinging to my skin. No guards waited here.
A waiting room for only the Left Hand of Our Queen.
“And so we are four again.” Ruby beckoned me forward, a bright slice of light cutting across the shadow of his outstretched hands, and pulled me into a tight, uncomfortable hug.
“No hard feelings?” I asked.
Emerald laughed. “He’s too fickle for feelings.”
“Your probation was the most interesting thing to happen to me in ages. But no more back talk.” He let me go and patted my cheek. “Come. I cannot call you Opal until after the ceremony, and I’m not calling you Twenty-Three one more time. Such a mouthful.”
“How do you feel?” Amethyst asked softly. “Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not.” There were no words to explain the settled feeling of accomplishment and anticipation coursing through my veins.
“Good.” Ruby grinned, his ears shifting with the hidden expression. “You are to be our Opal, and we are to be your new family.”
Family. I’d never even tried to form a new one, but if I was to kill beside these three and trust them, I’d have to think of them as more than accomplices. A bond as deep as the blood we’d spilled.
“Ignore him. Poetry runs in his blood, and I’ve never been able to drain enough of it to spare us.” Emerald pulled a thin, wide box from the folds of her green skirts and opened the lid. A bone-white mask with vertical slits for eyes and a crooked smile stared back at me. “Our previous Opal’s mask will serve you until yours is made. What would you like it to be?”
“Nothing.” A new life, a clean slate. I could be anyone and everyone. “Solid white, no eyes and no mouth.”
Amethyst nodded. “The crafter
will meet with you tomorrow.”
I stroked the black ribbons dangling from the mask. Amethyst’s hands moved to my old one and eased it from my head, revealing my face.
Sallot Leon’s face.
“Now we know you.” Amethyst studied my face and tucked my old mask in her pocket.
Each of them reached behind their heads and undid their own masks. The metal fell away, and Amethyst’s smiling face met me first. She was pale, golden tan beneath the purple, face unused to the sun, a few splotches marring her skin where the color had been sapped from it. Easy amber eyes crinkled when she laughed.
“And you know us.” Ruby grinned, and it was like his voice—crooked and sharp. His chestnut hair came to an even peak above deep-set gray eyes darkened by faded runes, and freckles dotted his long crooked nose.
“So.” Emerald lowered her mask last, metal giving way to gems. Three deep scars cut through the right side of her face and down her cheek, wrinkling when she smiled. A delicate green glass orb with an emerald at its center sat in place of her right eye, and runes, small and dark as night, lined her upturned lids. “Don’t make us regret it.”
“I won’t.” I shook my head, fingers painfully tight around Opal’s mask—my mask—and pressed my lips together. My eyes burned.
Ruby winked. “I cried too.”
That threw me over the edge. Amethyst wiped the tears from my cheeks as Emerald straightened my hair and settled my mask into place. Ruby turned to the great doors before us.
“You have the coin?” he asked and waited for me to nod. “When the doors open, walk straight to Our Queen and kneel. She’ll direct you from there.”
Silver stars sparkling in a cloud of onyx storm clouds dripping raindrop sapphires shivered as the doors creaked open.
“It will be fine.” Amethyst squeezed my arm. “You’ll sit next to me at dinner, with Emerald on your other side. Always be in the order of the rings.”
The doors opened. I rolled my shoulders back and lifted my chin, letting out a breath. I was Sallot Leon, Twenty-Three, Opal. I was chosen for my skill, and I’d no need to fear the high court. They’d every reason to fear me.
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