by Ada Harper
A pinch of air escaped between Sabine’s lips. “Oh here.” She grabbed Lyre’s ankles, and before she could protest, the Empress of the Quillian Empire was hauling her filthy feet into her lap. “All that genius, and the Cloud Vault didn’t teach you the dangers of frostbite?”
Lyre’s face froze mid-blink. It was the first time Sabine had mentioned it, Lyre’s real past, since the confession. She didn’t seem inclined to mention it again now, as her long fingers wrapped gingerly around Lyre’s muddy toes. Dirt flaked off, replaced by a warm press of skin.
“I’ll get you dirty.” It sounded stupid, even as it tumbled over Lyre’s lips.
Sabine leveled her a look reserved for particularly dimwitted diplomats. “I’m already dirty.” She turned her attention to gently brushing the worst clods off of Lyre’s heel, paying no attention to the small pile of rubbish gathering in the folds of her lap. “You don’t get to be Empress without accepting the necessity of a little dirt.”
She could barely hear it over the twinge of warmth resurfacing in her chest. She wanted it to be embarrassment. It wasn’t. It was hot and hurt and wanting. A little afraid.
“Negative nine degrees,” Lyre said. Sabine’s fingers had begun to rub into the soles of her feet now. Gods. “As long as you keep the ambient temperature near the skin above negative nine degrees then ice crystals can’t form in the tissue for long-term damage. Hypothermia is still a problem, though.”
“Negative nine degrees,” Sabine repeated. Her hand slid. Over the arch of Lyre’s foot. Over the arch to her toes, then curving, momentarily cupping her palm and flattening it over the top. Silk and silt between warm skin until she gripped her ankle. And tugged. “I will require you to be warmer than that.”
Lyre made a living of knowing what people would do. She knew the look in Sabine’s eyes, the curl like a live wire at the edge of her mouth. It just didn’t matter, not when it came to Sabine. Even when she saw it coming, Lyre’s stomach lurched and she half fell against Sabine’s chest, shooting out an arm at the last minute to keep from planting face-first into her shoulder.
It was the bathing room all over again. Sabine taking her anger out the only way she knew how, by toying with people. Keeping them off balance. The rising feeling drowned out the warmth of Sabine’s hand, the softness of her arm that came up to steady Lyre. Everything was drowned out by a teetering feeling. A knowledge that didn’t change. Numbers never added up just because you wanted them to. Believing they would was dangerous. “Sabs, not the time to torture me like this.”
“Torture.” The air between Sabine’s lips was a sigh, a turn. Like a key in the lock. She arched a brow. “Is that what I’m doing?”
“Teasing then.” Lyre fought to keep her voice even. The position was putting a strain in her legs, but she wouldn’t remove them from Sabine’s lap for all the gems in the north. She licked her lips. “Toying.”
“You are not a toy,” Sabine said. “And I think we’ve both run out of games.”
Her fingertips were on Lyre’s naked elbow. An ounce of pressure away from a lock hold. Lyre had taught her that, damn it. Lyre took a shaky breath. “Then what’s left, Empress?”
“Sabine.”
“Sabine,” Lyre corrected.
“Sabs.”
“Sabs.” The nickname felt love-worn and familiar on her lips. Dangerous. “Do you want me to call you Barnacle next?”
“No. You give nicknames to everyone. I get titles from everyone.” An undefinable longing flicked across her face, then was tucked away. “Neither of us are names very often. I like it when I’m a name to you.”
“Sabs,” Lyre said again, this time relaxing into it. Just a touch. Testing. “What are you doing?”
Sabine made an acknowledging sound. Her precise touch didn’t cease. Up her arm now, as if outlining her, then veering suddenly. Her palm stopped lightly over her chest, slightly left of center. A question.
Lyre hesitated. She couldn’t take this, not another coronation night. Not another deniable moment to be snatched from her the next day. “Different question. What do you want this to be?”
“True,” Sabine said immediately. It had a hunger-pang intensity to it. “I want it to be true. I always wanted it to be true.”
I never lied to you, Lyre couldn’t say. Not by my own code, at least. But her code, her intentions, didn’t matter. Not with how she felt Sabine’s fingertips tremble against her collar.
“It felt true,” Lyre said, finally. And then, because her words just sat there, not being at all the certain and smug Lyreish words they should be, she added, “I felt true. I’m sorr—”
“Shut up.” And it was such a blunt, common, unSabine-like thing to say that Lyre did. She stilled as Sabine studied her face—for what, Lyre couldn’t possibly hope to guess at this point—but then her eyes weren’t enough. Sabine’s fingertips traced along her hairline, down her cheek, coming to rest lower. A spark crystallized in Sabine’s gaze. Her hand abruptly dropped. “Do you feel this?”
A finger thunked harshly against her breastbone, a staccato that was mostly hopeful, only an echo of the former anger. The pull in her chest vibrated in response and Lyre sucked in her breath. Sabine’s fingers stopped precisely over where she felt the bond. But asking that was impossible.
“Because I do,” Sabine was going on. She’d started out studying Lyre’s eyes, but now appeared to be increasingly addressing her lips. It didn’t matter. No matter where Sabine looked, her gaze was like a fevered touch. “I’ve felt it for a long time. And I knew you did—” She almost growled when Lyre opened her mouth. “I knew you did too.”
When, when? “Did you know—” Lyre’s voice came out, strained and terrified “—that night?”
There was only one night to mean. They’d been in each other’s orbit since they were teenagers and they only ever had one night. Lyre’s heart did a complicated kind of coin flip when Sabine shook her head. “Not then.”
Then why? Why’d you pull away? Lyre couldn’t ask it, and didn’t need to. Sabine’s fingers curled over her collarbone. “I didn’t understand it then, but I knew you were...holding back. Making it—making us—” Sabine stopped, eyes darkening as she raised her chin. “I didn’t feel the bond then, but even without it I would have wanted more. I wanted it to be more. Not just one night.”
Lyre opened her mouth to—gods, who knows. Lyre certainly didn’t. Say something, say anything. But Sabine got there first. She said, “But you never talked about it. And you were there, always going to be there, so I figured I could wait. And then...and then you left. So I had to be wrong. You rejected me and you left.”
Lyre was the all-knowing spy. Lyre was the competent, the confident, the cruel when she needed to. Lyre did what needed to be done. That was who the Liar was supposed to be, but oh gods, the tremble and trip in Sabine’s always-polished voice wrecked Lyre. She couldn’t survive it.
“I didn’t want to,” she whispered.
“So. Answer me,” Sabine repeated, drumming it with a tap of her fingers that echoed into Lyre’s bones. “I was content. To wait. To not ask for the one thing I couldn’t command. I never felt like I had to command anything of you, but then you left and—”
“I feel it.” Lyre’s eyes squeezed closed. It was tough to speak around the tremor in her throat but it beat the jagged sob locked up in her chest. “Since—since coronation night. But I—”
Fingers pinched the meat of her biceps. Lyre’s eyes flew open.
“Say it,” Sabine said, all Imperial authority and heartbreak. “I want to hear you say it.” Sabine’s mouth hung parted on the word. As if preparing to bite. The tip of her tongue guarded the edge of her teeth and it was a small opening. Near as a breath. And Lyre was tired of calculating the appropriate distance. No distance between her and Sabine would ever be appropriate. Ever be safe. Sabine was her liege. Sabine was the sun. Gravity
and heat all at once. A world apart, Sabine would still burn her up whole.
Calculations be damned. Lyre closed the last gap and caught Sabine’s lips. She wanted to be soft. She wanted to be soft and elegant and all the things Sabine deserved, but she was cold and she was bleeding and Sabine—oh Sabs, Sabs was home. Lyre caught her bottom lip, and Sabine met her bite for bite.
It wasn’t their first kiss. Or maybe it was. The Liar had been kissed, given kisses like coy coins for information. But Lyre...no one had ever kissed Lyre. Lyre the flotilla brat, Lyre the apprentice spy, Lyre the lovesick teenager, bond-addled fool. No one had been allowed to kiss Lyre at all, let alone like this, like they could rip away her every shadow, abrade away every old scar, just with the rasp of lips and teeth and breath.
At some point, Lyre had fully claimed Sabine’s lap, tangling their legs to better get an angle of attack. There was a disgruntled snuff and rustle of leaves as Goji had been displaced away. The cold of the engine core had narrowed down to a single incendiary point of lips and hands. Sabine wasted no time finding the buttons at the top of Lyre’s shirt and then her lips found her neck, her collarbone, and the swell of her breasts. When Sabine nosed the cloth down and her lips grazed an exposed nipple, Lyre breathed stars into her lungs.
“Sabs.” Lyre wasn’t making sense. But tears were pricking her eyes and gods, she wanted this. If only just this, here. She gave in and laced her fingers in that silky black-brown hair. Always straightened, and pinned, and hemmed in to fit beneath a crown, but here...here it was gloriously tangled and wavy and real under her fingertips. “I want... I just want...”
Sabine made a pleased hum, which did things to Lyre’s lit-up nerve endings which she was determined to reciprocate. The plans for which were just forming in Lyre’s mind when Sabine’s fingers found the bottom of her shirt and slid up.
“Lady’s tits.” Lyre jolted and made a hissing sound. “You’re freezing!”
“Of course. We’re in a freezer...” The way Sabine blinked at her, bright eyes a liquid bronze and molten. She licked her lips, and Lyre was nearly distracted all over again. “So warm me up.”
Another order. Lyre’s brain spun off into a thousand delightful ways she could fulfill that request. “You have no idea how much I’d like to do that.” Unfortunately, the most effective was the least sexy. She sighed and adjusted her shirt back over her breasts. “I’ll make a fire.”
The luscious part of lips, which moments before Lyre had been quite thrilled to explore, disappeared as Sabine pressed her lips together and let out a sigh. Not the royal “we are displeased” sigh. The “I can’t believe you’re being this dense on purpose” sigh. But she straightened her clothes and wrapped her arms around her knees as Lyre gathered enough of the damned frosty moss that looked dry enough to serve as kindling.
It took a few moments. The moss wasn’t quite as good as peat, and Lyre had no means to press and dry the ends, form blocks, and definitely did not have the patience to catch it all properly alight. It would raise the ambient temperature of the core, but there was more than enough moss to compensate. Worth it if it could create a small bubble of warmth that kept them from freezing to death.
Lyre stopped to add more fuel once before Sabine spoke. “You didn’t say it. Just now.” Her voice was softer, less sure now. “I know you say you’ll never lie to me so if this is your way of avoiding—”
“We share a bond. You’re my mate. The only mate I’ll ever have.” Lyre said the words to the fire, letting the flames lick up the danger of the words. The only thing more painful than Sabine’s trust was her doubt. Lyre cleared her throat. “We’re connected. How else do you think I always knew when your hide was in trouble over the years?”
“That...that long?” Sabine’s voice wavered. “You said you were just that good a spy.”
Something almost but not quite a laugh cracked between Lyre’s clenched jaw. “There you go, caught me in my first lie.”
“That wasn’t a lie. You are a good spy,” Sabine insisted. “You’re a good person.”
“Now that is a lie.”
“Not to me.” A barb of determination formed in her voice, like bone pressed against skin. It finally made Lyre look up and face the narrow focus of fire in Sabine’s eyes. “And you always said it’s the sovereign that makes things true.”
“We were talking about corrupt tyrants in that context,” Lyre pointed out.
“Irrelevant. For my country, I made myself a legend. But for you...” A tremble worked its way down Sabine’s jaw. A decision made. “For you I’d make myself a monster.”
“No.” Anything but entertaining the possibility of that. Lyre rarely indulged in impulse, but this was the night for it. She grabbed Sabine’s arm. “That’s why I had to leave in the first place.”
“You thought I couldn’t handle learning about another betrayal.”
The flinch, with that word, was buried deep but still felt. Sabine might be, irrationally, trying to forgive Lyre’s past but that didn’t mean she’d diminish what it was. Right. “Yes,” Lyre said levelly. “But more importantly I knew what would happen when someone other than you learned it. The nobles. The senate. I’d be the end. Even the military might worship Galen as an ultimate altus hero but...you’d be the fool empress who’d been puppeted by yet another foreign power.”
“I was never the Syn’s puppet.” Earnest anger. Good. She should be.
“No, they just murdered your citizens and nearly swept the throne out from under you. Never mind they took your eye.”
It was the last line that did it. The cold affront that wiped away the residual warmth in Sabine’s eyes. “I am enough. I decided what the world would see of me. The Syn took nothing from me.” Lyre had expected a rebuke and drawing away, distancing. Regretting their closeness. But instead, Sabine leaned in and caught Lyre’s chin with soft fingers. And pinned her with an exposed kind of honesty. “I see you, Lyre. I’m not going to stop seeing you. So stop hiding.”
It was a quiet blow. There was no reason why Lyre’s heart began to rummage against her ribs. No reason her breath caught. No reason she reached for words and, for once in her life, found gaping emotion instead. There was no reason and every reason. And the every reason was glaring at her. Every reason.
“Knock, knock.”
Sabine and Lyre turned. Above the tiny lick of flames warming their corner, Alais waited as calm as a shadow. Kitra would, no doubt, be waiting outside like a good guard. If Lyre had heard the approach of footsteps outside the core and failed to note them, she was going to refuse to show any sign of it.
Sabine, however, could show enough irritation for them both. It seemed her default method of interacting with the Lady Alais. “Lady Alais, did you lose your way? It took you long enough to join us.”
“Did it? What a relief. I would have guessed I didn’t take long enough.” Blue eyes swept over this disheveled campfire with a dazzling smile, barely diminished by the streak of grime on her pearly skin and the way plant matter had stained the legs of her white dress pants a permanent sickly mint. It didn’t quite distract from the bloody sop tied around Alais’s right arm or the familiar way she favored a knee as she joined them.
“Busted leg giving you trouble now?” Lyre asked, diverting Sabine away from her target.
“Acts up with heat and humidity, so this is wonderful.” Alais made a show of leaning against a moss-covered wall, ignoring how the sweat in her hair began to frost up. “You wouldn’t think the altitude of a literal floating city would allow it but there are no limits to evil genius it seems.”
“Sylvere appears desperate, not evil,” Lyre said. It was an important distinction. Desperate, you could reason with. Stupid, you could manipulate. Evil, you just had to hope you could take them down from outside the blast zone.
Alais’s smile took on a sharp note. “Tell that to my sweet cousin.”
&nb
sp; “Whatever Sylvere is,” Sabine said, always the peacemaker when she wanted to be, “we shall deal with him from the far stronger vantage of Ameranthe. Kitra?”
The knightsguard appeared to be in surprisingly better shape than Alais, if only physically. A bone-gnawed look haunted his eyes, and his brow was dipped low. Even more serious than before, if that seemed possible. Everyone carried their battle scars differently. Lyre momentarily marveled that Kitra carried his scars in his eyes. Slap a knightsguard veil on and you could never tell. Perhaps the kid would make it out of this yet.
“We’re not far from the shuttle, ma’am. I’m certain we can call for rescue as soon as we clear the flotilla.”
“Assuming Cian didn’t trick or turn on us,” Alais mused.
“He didn’t.” The sharpness in Kitra’s denial startled everyone. Lyre raised a brow, but the quiet knightsguard refused to quail under the scrutiny. He raised his chin toward Alais. The friendly, sunshine demeanor was all gone. “Cian wouldn’t. I was there with him. He gave himself up for us.”
“Yeah, kiddo, but pain can be a great persuader,” Lyre said with a muster of gentleness.
Alais was less so. “And it may be a clever gentleman like Cian had plenty reasons to—”
“Cian wouldn’t,” Kitra insisted fiercely. “You weren’t there. He—Don’t talk about what you don’t know.”
Or perhaps Kitra would become an ex-knightsguard. Lyre watched Sabine carefully, but a contemplative look softened her features. “The prime minister may have been many things, but he never struck me as a fool. He would know information is the only thing Sylvere might want from him. We must proceed on the assumption Kitra is right.”
“I withdraw my complaint,” Alais said gracefully. Her eyes stayed on the knightsguard’s shoulders as he turned to lead the way. There was a new light of mild intrigue in them. Hells. That promised ulcers for Lyre later. If there was a later.