by Natalie Mae
Human! she squeaks in her sweet voice. Play! Toy?
“You’re here, too!” I scoop her up, though my heart still twists. “Now it’s perfect.”
Jade, like most kittens, is not impressed with this or any displays of affection, and wiggles incessantly. No love. Play! Play!
“All right, all right,” I grumble, setting her down. I scoop a feathered cat toy from the floor and throw it to the other side of the room. Jade tears after it, as fast as an arrow.
Jet watches her go, the afternoon light deepening his coronation tunic to a river blue.
I trace the cactuses carved into the back of the couch. “What can I do to help?”
Jet sighs, and drops into a chair with oxhorns crossing its backrest. “Be an absolute pain in Kasta’s side from now until the day he dies?”
I nod. “I can do that.”
Jet chuckles and scrubs his hands down his face. “Gods, what an absolute mess.”
I drop my hand from the couch and sink onto one of its feather-stuffed cushions. Across the room, Jade throws the feathered toy in the air, catches it, and shreds it in a matter of seconds. “Would it make you feel better to imagine Kasta messing up this moon, losing the crown, and having to move into a tiny room, too?”
Jet scoffs. “Yes.”
“I mean, it could happen.” I raise a shoulder—and a shiver runs through me as a new idea takes hold. I thought the Mestrah had taken away my chance at making Kasta sorry . . . but now I’m wondering if he handed it right to me. “Maybe we could help it happen.”
Jet raises his head. “What do you mean?”
“Well, Kasta still has to cooperate with me to prove we can work together, or he could get demoted, too. I could push him toward that. Make ridiculous, peaceful suggestions that I know he’d never agree to, and tell the Mestrah he’s being difficult.”
Jet taps the arm of his chair. “I don’t know. That could also come off as you being difficult, and we don’t want it to backfire.” But I can tell by the spark in his eye that he likes this idea. “Though we might be able to get him on something else. If we can find plans he’s drawn to inflame the war, for example. Some kind of proof he’s dangerous as a ruler, or unstable.”
A promising angle, since we’re talking about the boy who once told me the last thing Orkena needed was mercy.
“All right,” I say, settling against the couch. “So maybe we start with why it took so long for Kasta to come back, and see if there’s anything to that? Do you think he was meeting with foreign leaders?”
Jet leans down to pick up the shredded toy Jade has dropped at his feet. “No, it would make no sense for him to do that without guards or without officially being named dōmmel. I’m still trying to figure out how he even survived so long on his own, especially considering his condition at the end of the race.” He bounces the toy on his knee, and Jade crouches, eyes wide. “The sacrificial knife has no power to heal. Of course, Kasta can claim whatever he wants, since he’s alive, but . . .” He chucks the toy and looks to me. “You knew Maia better. Do you think she would have taken him to a Healer? Maybe he bargained her freedom for his life?”
“She already had freedom,” I say, my heart twinging in hopes that’s still true. “We destroyed her binding collar as soon as we left Kasta. The army can’t control her anymore.”
“She wouldn’t have been free for long if she’d really killed a prince. The Wraithguard has been looking for her, and they would have hunted her until they found her. They’ll relax their efforts now that Kasta has returned.” He shrugs. “It would have been a good bargaining chip.”
I frown, wondering if it could be that simple. It still seems like it took a long time for Kasta to come home. And Maia had been so angry with him, doubly so after he’d sacrificed me. Would she really have just let him go? If freedom was all she wanted, she could have run after I was healed and left him there.
“Maybe,” I hedge. Across the room, Jade springs over the toy and sideways onto the bed, and for a moment I picture a different leopard in her place: Maia with her glittering fur and sleek muscles, half a smile on her feline lips.
“But why not just tell us that?” Jet muses. “Why this elaborate story about being abandoned in the desert?”
I don’t answer. An uncomfortable feeling is working up my neck, and the longer I watch Jade, the stronger it grows.
“There’s no law against bargaining with Shifters,” Jet mutters. “But if he was recovering in a village, it should have only taken a week or two at most to come home . . .”
Jade bites into a pillow and looks wildly toward us, spotted tail thrashing. A tent and a pale light potion converge on my vision: Kasta’s downcast face, his confessing to having hunted a Shifter years before. His lingering anger at Maia, the girl who got in his way.
And there she was again at the end of the Crossing, standing between him and his magic.
“Jet,” I whisper. I don’t want to say what I’m thinking. Because that will make it real, and for so many reasons, I don’t want it to be real. “How does the Shifter curse pass from one person to another?”
Jet freezes, and in his face is a horrible kind of confirmation, so that even before he answers, I’m starting to shake.
“Rie,” he says. “I’m such an idiot. Of course. When the curse passes to a new host, it heals them, once and completely, to ensure the curse lives on.”
“She could have left him in the caves,” I say, grasping for any other explanation, for a way that this is wrong. “Maybe she did. Maybe someone else found him, and there was another way out . . .” There wasn’t. I was trapped in those caves, I know there wasn’t, but I can’t stop. “Because it makes no sense why she’d take him somewhere else unless she wanted him dead, right? If she left him, the Crossing Healers would have helped him.” My nails dig into my arms. “But they didn’t. But he’s not dead.”
Jet says nothing, and my vision blurs. Because I’m realizing that I’ve just talked myself in a circle.
“And if you had magic for the first time . . .” Realization creeps up my neck like cold water. “You would need time to learn how to master it, right? You wouldn’t want to return to the palace too soon. Especially if getting caught using that magic would put you in chains.”
I close my eyes. Something dark and sinewy stirs in my chest, a feeling more suffocating than anger.
“Tell me there’s no way I’m right,” I whisper as Jet’s weight sinks the cushion beside me. “Tell me she’s still alive.”
Jet’s hand is warm on my back. “I’m sorry. I know she meant something to you.”
“It’s not fair,” I growl, shoving to my feet. “Maia was finally free. She was going to start over—” I see her shy smile when she called me her friend; I see her in leopard form, snarling as she leapt between me and Sakira. “She shouldn’t have come back for me.”
“Don’t you dare blame yourself for this,” Jet says, standing in turn. “If she’s gone, there’s only one person at fault.”
“Damn him.” I pace to the other side of the couch, fury flashing through my ribs. “That’s how he survived the desert, too. Maia had a falcon pelt. He wouldn’t even have needed to trap one. Gods, Maia.” I pull my hair. “Please tell me this is something we can use. This is the highest form of sacrilege, right? More than illegal? Eternal damnation? Against everything a crown prince is supposed to stand for?”
Jet nods. “Most adamantly so. Gods, I—” He shakes his head, bewildered. “There really isn’t anything he won’t do now, is there? If he could kill her.”
“So we take this to the Mestrah.” My blood is lightning. “Tell him our theory, and Kasta loses far more than the crown.”
“Yes . . . and no.” Jet starts for the study, beckoning me to follow. “It won’t be as easy as that. His gods’ mark is still real, and trust me, from my years of rivalry with Kasta, an
accusation isn’t going to be enough. The Mestrah knows how much you loathe him, and we can’t risk our claim being dismissed as slander. We need to do this carefully, and we need to find proof even my father can’t overlook.”
I follow him into the study. This room hasn’t changed as dramatically as the bedroom, but it still looks more barren than before. The same amber-brown maps cover the walls, and the same red slab desk sits at one end with its four wooden gods holding up the surface. But the quills and sword sculptures that once circled the top have gone, replaced by a collection of metal measuring tools and blank scrolls.
Jet fingers through a row of jewel-colored tomes set into the wall and selects a blue one with a spine as wide as my hand. “We need something indisputable that we can bring to my father,” he says, flipping through the handwritten pages. “Something Kasta can’t deny or attribute to the gods. Can you think of anything from your time with Maia?”
I remember Maia’s inhuman strength, and that she could run for hours without tiring. Neither of which we can force Kasta to prove before an audience. Obviously changing into an animal is the biggest one—also impossible to prove without Kasta’s cooperation. And then my blood sparks, remembering how I got to know Maia at all.
“I could hear her thoughts,” I say. “Even if she wasn’t in animal form. We could talk to the palace Whisperers and have them confirm they can hear his thoughts, too, and that should definitely be enough to convict him!”
Jet slams the book. “Well, that was easy. I forgot who I was talking to.” He snickers—and goes still. “Except . . . wait. You can hear his thoughts?”
I chew my cheek, recognizing the immediate problem with this. “Ah—no. Actually, that’s really weird, now that I think about it.”
Jet reopens the tome with a sigh. “Actually, that makes sense. He has Influence now, remember? So you can’t use any kind of mental magic against him.”
My blood jerks. Fara has never referred to our magic as anything but a basic magic. “Whisperer magic is a mental magic?”
Jet shrugs. “One that happens between humans and animals, yes.”
“And yet when it’s only between humans, it’s considered one of the most powerful abilities in the world.”
“I’m just realizing that.”
I blink. “I’ve been living my life in a feed room, Jet.”
A trace of my favorite smile pulls his lips. “And what are you going to do about that, dōmmel?”
Heat pricks my neck. The world that I began weaving in my mind with Fara, one where these similarities between us and the elite powers are all brought to light, stitches tighter in my mind. “I’m going to fix it.”
I expect Jet to beam at this, but oddly his smile flickers, and something anxious brushes my skin.
“Good,” he says.
He pages through the text to the center. I watch him a moment, contemplating whether to ask what’s wrong, but even though I didn’t mean to use my new magic, I’m not sure he’d appreciate my knowing what he’s feeling when he’s clearly not ready to share. And so I set my mind back to the task at hand. To Maia, and what made her unique. The way she moved is hardly evidence, and while her vivid yellow eyes were compelling, that must have been how she was born, because I didn’t notice a difference in Kasta’s at all. Maybe when she slept, or what she ate—
Oh gods, what she ate.
“I’m pretty sure his eating someone else could not be passed off as divine,” I say.
Jet gags. “Ugh. I forgot about that. No, that’s definitely not natural in any sense.” He taps the book. “That’s hard to prove, though . . . he can still eat regular food, it just won’t nourish him. But we could watch if he sneaks out at strange hours to hunt. It’s a start.” He turns the page, where a skeletal drawing of a Shifter changing into a jackal sends scorpions down my spine. “Here we are. Shifter signs: loss of appetite, irritability, insomnia . . .”
His finger trails over the ink, but the longer he stays quiet, the more anxious I become. Because the entire point of Shifters, of course, is that they’re able to hide in plain sight. They’re just themselves, until they’re not, and Kasta has already proven he’s very good at hiding what he is.
“‘Laws,’” Jet reads. “‘A Shifter shall be inducted into the army, for they should not be killed’ . . . ‘removal of the tongue’ . . . oh.”
Something heavy threads this new silence, and I peer at the page. “What does it say?”
“I’ve just been reminded of one very bad thing, and introduced to one that’s even worse.” His brown eyes meet mine. “You remember why we cut out Shifters’ tongues?”
A memory of Maia opening her mouth flashes over my vision, and I shudder. “Because they can mimic voices?”
“Right. Which means don’t speak to anyone about important matters if you can’t see them. Even me or Hen . . . especially me or Hen.”
“All right.” I shudder at the idea of following Jet’s voice down a dark hallway, only to find Kasta waiting at the end.
“The second one is very bad. I don’t actually want to tell you.”
I close my eyes. “What is it?”
Jet points to a block of writing outlined in red. “This law says that all Shifters must be persecuted, even if they’re royalty, except that a Mestrah may take on the curse themselves without penalty, per the gods’ guidance.”
My stomach twists. “So if we don’t prove Kasta is a Shifter before he’s crowned . . . we can’t stop him?”
“Right, because we won’t be able to prove when he made the change. He could claim he went hunting after the coronation, as directed by the gods.”
I press my fingers between my eyes. I was really certain things couldn’t get worse than discovering Kasta is now literally a monster, but here we are. Now, on top of my schooling and the war and the Mestrah’s tests and learning an entirely new type of magic, I have one moon to reveal Kasta as a Shifter before he becomes one of the deadliest powers in the world. And I become trapped permanently beside him, wondering when he’ll turn me into his next meal.
The world tilts, and I grip the table. “And we need indisputable proof?”
Jet starts in with reassurances, that we’ll find something, that Kasta is bound to mess up, but I’ve stopped listening. On the page opposite the laws, a sketch of Shifter armor gleams, runic symbols glowing on its beetle shell surface. Beside it dangles the binding collar that commands the Shifter, a copy of the necklace Kasta wore to keep Maia under control during the Crossing.
I run my finger over the square runes. “What about this?”
Jet looks over. “What about it?”
“Could we make one for him? We could literally make him Shift in front of the Mestrah.”
The concern on Jet’s face is not the reaction I was expecting. “It’s highly illegal to create a controlling necklace without proof. This technology will work on anyone, Shifter or not. If we go this far, and we’re wrong, there will be very serious consequences. Of which losing your crown would be the least.”
He’s watching me like this should bother me, too. But the part of me that might once have cared, that would have been horrified at the suggestion, feels distant and numb. “So we test it before we bring him to your father. Make him Shift for us first. But you know it’s going to work, and I don’t see how we can risk doing anything else. He can’t be Mestrah. He’ll shove us further into this war, and he’ll sacrifice whatever and whoever he needs to to win. We don’t have time to wait for him to mess up.”
Jet exhales through his nose. “And if he’s not a Shifter?”
A vicious kind of heat slithers through me. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but in Kasta’s case, it feels justified. “Then I use the necklace to make him renounce his claim to the throne, and he moves somewhere far away. No one ever finds out what we did, and he’s gone.”
Jet looks between me and the drawing, his gaze dropping once to the scar on my chest. A thousand unreadable thoughts flash across his face, and again comes that breath of anxiousness, like static zipping over my arms.
He’s not smiling when he says, “All right.”
VII
I want to visit the palace Runemasters right away, because that’s where Jet says the process for creating a necklace starts. But Jet wants to consult Marcus before we do something this serious, which reminds me I still need to ask Marcus and Melia if they’ll be my advisors. The excitement of seeing them again is almost enough to brighten my mood. When we last parted, they’d just helped me locate Fara and Mora in Kystlin, but saying goodbye felt like leaving one family for another.
Except the moment Jet and I start down the columned hallway to find them, three people converge on us. The first is the Royal Materialist, Hen’s new employer and the woman who gave me her lotus boots what feels like a million years ago before the Crossing. She doesn’t recognize me, but before I can mention that we’ve already met, she’s taken measurements of my waist, neck, arms, and legs, and promised she’ll be back by morning with a new wardrobe. The second person is a young handmaiden who says I’m to come with her to tour the palace and meet the tutors, priests, and other staff I’ll be seeing often, and the last is a steely eyed advisor, who has come for Jet—the Mestrah needs him. Jet and I share an exasperated glance, he promises he’ll be back with Melia and Marcus as soon as he can, and we go our separate ways.
The tour, and meeting the staff, takes the rest of the day.
By the time I return to my suite, my feet ache, a hundred new names and faces cram my head, and I hold a scroll of my upcoming schedule—which I reminded the handmaiden I can’t read—that I’m afraid to open, because it looks thick enough to unroll over half my considerably long room. The way the day has been going, I’m not even surprised when Jet arrives minutes later with the news that Marcus and Melia have also been called away to new duties, and that we have to wait until tomorrow to see them.