Lyosha spoke in a voice not quite low enough, not quite practiced enough to reach only our ears. “You talked about this. You didn’t bother to ask.”
“This is a political endeavor—” Father began.
Lyosha’s voice rose. “I have my politics. I make my choices.” A small circle of space began to grow around us. “And if I can’t make my own choice, I’ll make no choice.”
“You are jeopardizing years of statecraft,” Father growled.
“The duchy doesn’t need outdated relics deciding statecraft,” Lyosha choked out. “And neither do I.” His words slid through the air like a red sword. The brideshow candidates stared. The tan, dark-haired girl in the emerald-and-gold riding suit no longer smiled. Lyosha’s anger crackled, so palpable I could almost see it. “This isn’t your brideshow.”
“This isn’t your duchy,” Father replied. He sounded almost contemplative. “And the more you try to take it, the more I think it never should be.”
The whole hall was silent for a breath, waiting for Lyosha’s lightning to finally ground.
“The brideshow’s off,” Lyosha called, his voice bouncing off the hard ice walls.
Noise rippled across the hall. Father grabbed for Lyosha’s arm, but Lyosha had spun on his heel and was already striding through the candidates, who scattered and regrouped like a herd of animals.
Father clapped his hands. In response, the guards around the hall slammed their halberds against the ground with a crack. In the silence that followed, he said in an impossibly calm voice, “The brideshow will resume tomorrow. Please enjoy yourselves.”
By the time he was finished, most of the foreign delegates had begun to shout.
“Excellent,” Velosha murmured beside me, and I shuddered. If Lyosha lost the title of heir-elect, she’d look to win it through a process of elimination—specifically, by eliminating her sibling rivals. Half the court ministers disappeared; the rest decided to settle the matter by arguing at the top of their lungs.
A hand gripped my elbow and yanked me sideways. Aino. She was supposed to stand at the edge of the hall as a lesser lady, but she’d squeezed her way over to me. “Come on,” she said, pulling me toward a side door. She elbowed past the minister of the people, and I tripped over the minister of trade’s robe. He stumbled past me, steadying himself by putting a hand on top of my head for balance. Had it been a normal night, I would have confronted him for his rudeness.
Aino dragged me past anxious servants to the corridor, barely letting me get my feet under me. The flickering lamps set into the walls caught the red in her auburn hair, and her knuckles were white around my arm. We hurried past officials and servants who rushed the other way, alarmed, no doubt, by the noise. “Slow down,” I protested, tripping over the heavy hem of my coat. Aino didn’t answer. “Aino!” She wrenched me around a corner, nearly dislocating my shoulder. The iron grips on the bottoms of my shoes dug into the ice.
She didn’t slow down until we reached the royal wing and passed beyond the guards there. We scurried down corridors carved with the scenes of my family—grand dukes battling with enemies, treating with the duchy Below, choosing brides from their own brideshows. Winter roses twined above us, their ice petals stretching into a two-thirds bloom.
Aino dug out a key and unlocked my door with trembling fingers. Then she shoved me inside.
The fire was out. The ice walls of my rooms glowed blue-white in moonlight that streamed through thin windowpanes. Aino dumped firewood into the metal basin that served as the fireplace, then started the fire with dry moss and a flint.
The fire basin sat on a thick stone shelf to protect the ice floor beneath, and white and blue tiles lined its chimney. A bearskin rug lay in front of the fire, and I sat in the oak chair there, shifting a blanket to one side. I slid my feet out of my wooden shoes and dug my socks into the rug. A tightness began to uncoil in me. No siblings to murder me, no Father or Mother to examine me, balancing my usefulness and irrelevance against my potential as a threat. I pulled diamond-studded pins from hair that had Mother’s paleness but not its curl.
My rooms always meant safety to me, but not to Aino. She locked the door, slid the bolt, and heaved a chair from next to the door until it blocked the handle. Then she went to lock the door to the servants’ corridor.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Making sure no one separates your head from your neck in whatever happens tonight.” Aino’s braid had come undone, and she pinned it back up with thin-lipped determination. “This is a coup, and Lyosha and your father are in the middle of it. You don’t have to be. How packed are you?”
“Fairly packed.” My trunk sat in a corner of the room, stuffed with all the things I thought I’d need at the university—clothes, books, sketches of the biology of Above, a few plates with detail on flora from Below sent up as a sample and gift to Farhod. I was still working on copying his dissection report, a recent—and generous—gift from the duchy Below to expand our academic knowledge.
“Good. We’ll set out tonight, and we won’t come back until one of them is grand duke and one of them is dead.”
No one could boss me around like Aino could. She was more of a mother to me than Mother. She was shorter and slimmer than our family, with wide blue eyes that always looked alarmed and a nose made for poking into my business. She knew the intrigues of Lyosha and my parents before I did, and she made sure I was always well dressed for events of the court, well versed in what to say, and well protected from the worst of my family’s wrath. She tasted my coffee every morning and ran her fingers along the seams of my new clothes to check for razors my siblings might have slipped in. Worrying for my safety lined her mouth and forehead and streaked her hair with gray before its time. In recent weeks, she’d looked more and more worn out as she updated me on which minister backed which family member and how many siblings were trying to get involved in the imminent coup.
I didn’t pay much attention. I cared less for Lyosha’s political ambitions than I did for a vial of wolf urine. At least I could learn something interesting from wolf urine. And as long as my chief interests were the flora and fauna of Above and Below, I doubted any ministers or ambitious family members cared about me. All the same: “I can’t leave yet.” Even if I had no interest in the duchy, I had a duty. Our family was Kylma Above, and we had responsibilities to uphold. Father had stipulated that I could go south when the brideshow was over, not before. If I violated his order, he might find some way to prevent me from going at all.
I went over to my desk, skipping across the floor in my wool socks. “What are you doing?” Aino asked.
“I might as well get some work done.” I pulled a stack of papers from the middle drawer of the desk. I was copying and annotating Farhod’s technical drawings of a dissected citizen Below, and I had to finish the project before I went south. They’d be part of my university portfolio and application. Farhod had warned me that gaining admittance was hard, even for the daughter of a grand duke—but detailed dissection notes of a creature never seen before was sure to catch the attention of scholars and professors.
“You ought to rest.” Aino checked the door, then paced back to the fire, dispersing the logs with a poker. “We shouldn’t have lit this. What if someone realizes you’re here?”
I rolled my eyes as I lit the little candle under my frozen inkwell. Aino was back to her favorite hobby: fretting. “No one can see me, and no one’s going to care. Fetch my robe, won’t you?”
She stomped off, muttering about ungrateful brats and coups and heads. I was restless, too, and opened the window next to my desk, leaning out to let the cold air sting my cheeks.
The palace was quieter than usual. Maybe we really were on the cusp of a coup. Or maybe the brideshow was canceled, and nobody wanted to celebrate. From here, I could just see the bridal tower, and I wondered if the candidates had retreated to it. The girl in the riding suit didn’t seem like the type to retreat from anything.
A lone figure hurried across a decorative wall, and four stories beneath me lay the thick ice sheet that separated Above and Below. I wanted to crack that ice so badly that it split my heart to think about it. Beneath that ice swam undulating bodies with serpentine legs, vague shapes I could nearly recognize when I walked on the lake’s frozen surface. The duchy Below was our closest ally and our dearest friend. It was the only political matter I had any interest in. It was the greatest thing Father had denied me—and denied me, and denied me.
Aino draped my robe around my shoulders. “Shut the window,” she said, reaching past me to do it herself.
I pulled my head inside. “No one’s going to shoot me from the palace walls.”
“Honestly, Ekata. If there is one night my worrying might save your life, it’s tonight.” She cinched the robe around my waist. “You’ve never been the sweet, obedient type. Humor me.”
“I’ll keep the doors and windows locked.” I forced myself not to roll my eyes again. “But don’t call for a sled. And let me work for a few hours before bed. There’s nothing unsafe about sitting at my desk.”
“You can work for half an hour, then I’m dousing the fire. And if anyone knocks, say nothing. You’re not here.”
I shook my head and tucked my chin to hide a smile. “All right.”
I didn’t hide it well enough. “Don’t treat this like a joke, my lady,” Aino snapped. She only used my lady when she was really cross. “I’m concerned about your life, and all you can think of is livers and cross sections.” She curled her lip at the sheet on my desk, on which Minister Farhod had painstakingly drawn a number of internal organs in a hand so fine they still seemed to glisten.
I licked the nib of my pen. “Aino, relax,” I said. “The kitchen boy’s more politically involved than I am. Whatever occurs tonight, it’s hardly going to concern us.”
As it happened, I was wrong.
CHAPTER TWO
My dreams were cold and lightless. Frost bloomed at the edges of my mind, turning into petals as delicate as spun sugar. The dark squeezed my lungs, my ribs. A presence loomed above me, but when I twisted to see it, my movements were unhurried, pressing through air as thick as honey. I knew, suddenly, that something was going to happen, something I didn’t want—but I couldn’t stop it. Far beneath me came a tapping, the crystalline sound of a pick on ice.
A hand gripped my shoulder. I opened my mouth to scream. The dark pushed into my lungs, filling me, drowning me—
I wrenched my eyes open. I lay in my bed, covered in the down quilt Aino had given me for my last birthday. I’d kicked the bearskin overlay to the floor sometime in the night. The fire burned low in its grate, but orange flickered around the edges of a charred log.
Aino leaned over me, her fingers digging into my skin. I tried to swallow my leaping heart and pushed myself up. My nightgown was damp, my skin slick. My eyes felt raw and scraped, and when I reached up, I touched wet cheeks. The faint smell of sweat and roses lingered in the air. I grimaced, but at the sight of Aino’s face, I forgot my own disgusting state. Her eyes were wide, and her face even paler than when she’d hurried me out of the Great Hall earlier tonight.
“It’s just a bad dream,” I told her.
“No. Something’s happening.” She let go, leaving me anchorless. For a moment, terror seized me, as if the dark could leap out of my nightmare and swallow me again.
I slid to the edge of the bed and stuck my feet into my slippers. “What do you mean?” As my dream receded, my mind started putting together the puzzle pieces, slotting them in place like muscles that made up the working limb in a technical drawing: shouts from the corridor. Panicked tones. Slamming doors and rushing feet. The royal wing was normally silent in the middle of the night. Servants slipped like ghosts from place to place, wary of waking their masters. No one charged through it as if the whole palace were melting.
I grabbed my robe and followed Aino into my antechamber. Moonlight tangled in the corners, catching in the whorls and crevices of the winter roses. The shouting drew closer, then receded, like a wave. I strained to make out voices I recognized. Though they pricked at the corners of my mind, I could match none to a name. I hated going to court, and even when my parents made me attend official functions, I could always stand at the back, wondering about ursine skulls and the toe-fins of Below.
“Check every room!” someone shouted from the end of the hall. Doors banged as they were flung open up and down the corridor. Soon enough, they’d get to me.
Aino’s blue eyes filled with fear. She grabbed my wrist. “Come,” she whispered, tugging me toward the door on the other side of the antechamber, the one that led to the service corridor.
“Where?” I asked.
“We have to leave.”
I swallowed. If we left the palace now, where would we go?
“Any luck?” said a voice from right outside my door. This time, I did recognize the voice. Farhod, minister of alchemy. Provider of biology books and technical drawings. Overseer of wolf-urine experiments.
Someone hammered on the door. Aino and I jumped. My heart slammed against my ribs. Calm, I begged it silently. It wouldn’t obey.
“My lady?” Farhod shouted. A moment later, the silver bell at the top of my door rang.
Aino shook her head and backed toward the servants’ door at the rear of the antechamber, pulling on my arm.
“Lady Ekata!” The door rattled. I twisted out of Aino’s grip. It was only Farhod, and he’d helped me all my life. He was going to get me into the university. If we were in danger, maybe he was, too. I couldn’t abandon him.
“I’m here,” I called back. Aino glared at me. “It’s Farhod,” I whispered.
“When revolutions happen, you don’t truly know anyone,” Aino warned me.
There were only two people I knew I could trust in Kylma Above, and Farhod was one of them. But for Aino’s sake, I settled for opening the door just a crack, dislodging a stray winter rose leaf that had grown over the door in the night. “What’s going on?” The blue-white walls of the corridor of the royal wing, carved with the eagle-and-rose insignia of our family, crowded with shapes and shadows that renewed my fear. Though I saw plenty of ministers’ robes, no guards accompanied them.
I doubted any minister who wanted to kill me would stoop to doing so personally.
Farhod’s dark eyes filled with a strange relief, almost as though he wanted to cry. He looked at me as though he hadn’t expected to see me alive. “May I come in?”
“No,” Aino groaned from behind me.
“Yes.” I stepped aside. Farhod hurried through the gap in the door. As I moved to close it, a hand caught the edge, and Prime Minister Eirhan slipped in behind Farhod.
His oiled black hair hung loose around his shoulders, rather than in its customary horsetail. Deep bags under his eyes suggested that he hadn’t slept since the brideshow—though beneath his embroidered blue coat I caught a flash of dressing gown, and his feet were bare. Only a minister in a great hurry would wander our ice palace in bare feet. I couldn’t blame him for stepping straight onto the bearskin rug in front of the dying fire. All the same, I would have preferred he’d chosen a different fire in a different wing entirely. Even worse, Urso, a tundra mouse of a man and the minister of trade, ducked through the door without looking at me. I shoved it closed before anyone else could slip through.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. Farhod I could understand. He was someone I cared about and who cared about me. But the others—Eirhan hadn’t deigned to look at me since I’d shown up to Lyosha’s heir ceremony three months ago in a dress covered in Experiment Gone Wrong. I barely remembered Minister Urso’s name, and he had no reason to remember mine. Now he stood in my antechamber, pulling his gray-brown hair into a knot at the base of his neck with thick, trembling fingers, and I could see sweat stains on the inside collar of his robe.
People were machines, I reminded myself. They were complicated puzzles, but any puzzle could be sol
ved. “Has someone sent for me?” Maybe Lyosha had finally killed Father. The alternative, of course, was that I had to be taken care of.
Farhod’s brown skin was impossibly pale, even accounting for the moonlight that turned the palace and all within it to blue and bone. His hand clenched around the straps of his large leather examination bag. I’d hauled that bag for him countless times, walking the mountains that surrounded Kylma Above as we looked for signs of bears and wolves and reindeer. All the same, I leaned back when he opened it.
When he straightened, he held nothing more sinister than a bone depressor. “Might I beg the favor of confirming my—Your Grace’s health?”
“What?” Your Grace was the term used to refer to Father and Mother. Maybe Lyosha, if he’d managed that coup.
Farhod came forward and pressed a thumb to my wrist to check my pulse. It spiked as the bell rang again.
“Don’t,” Aino said, but Prime Minister Eirhan had already left the rug. He flung the door wide, and more figures came in. Aino hurried over to the fireplace under the pretext of stoking it. I knew better. She gripped the fire poker like a sword. I prayed she wouldn’t have to use it.
“Go away,” I told them, but it was too late. The crowd swelled, ogling me as Farhod pushed my tongue down and checked the back of my throat. I gripped his shoulder as he examined my ear. “Make them go away.” I hated how my voice trembled. If this was how I died, I didn’t want everyone to see how afraid I was.
“Please put more wood on the fire. Her Grace has a long night ahead of her,” Eirhan said.
“Why are you calling me that?” Eirhan knew the proper titles for every single person in this palace. He probably had some archaic, official names for insignificant ducal daughters. He would never call me Her Grace by accident.
But the alternative was equally impossible.
Farhod tapped the back of my left calf. “Will Your Grace lift your foot?”
“Stop calling me that.” Panic threatened to wash up from my belly and out of me. I should have done as Aino said. I shouldn’t have opened the door. We should have fled out the back stairs, taken a sled and some dogs, and driven until the duchy was far behind us. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood.
The Winter Duke Page 2