Our brief stalemate dissolves to fury. I know enough. “You’re wrong, Ambassador. I’ve seen your letter and we’ll never do what you ask. You can tell that to Seath. You can tell him I said it myself!”
Havis seizes my arm, and the thought of screaming comes to mind, but the cold alarm in his gaze silences me. “Don’t you dare say his name aloud,” he hisses. “You don’t talk about that man, not here! Not after the dark events of today.”
“Do we have trouble with the Nahir? Tell me. I demand to—”
“Hush!” His grip tightens, pinching skin. “After what’s happened in Savient, I don’t think my letter much matters anymore. Nothing can stop what will happen next. Though if you’re so insistent on meddling where you shouldn’t, ask your mother yourself. Are you brave enough for that?” Sudden, twisted pleasure appears on his face. “Yes, you should ask her everything that burns inside you, Princess. Ask her about me. About the wedding in Resya she’s already spoken of. She wishes it when you’re of age. Seventeen, isn’t that right? At the end of the summer?”
“She doesn’t!”
He brings his face too close to mine. “The truth is, Aurelia, I’m on your side. I’m headed back to Resya for a month, but when the Safire arrive, remember—”
“You’re lying! Mother doesn’t want me to marry you. You’ve nothing you could ever offer us.” I pull out of his grip desperately, panicked. “You humiliate yourself here. I’ll have a duke, a prince even, and everyone knows this except you!”
For one horrid moment, I’m sure he’ll spit at me or kiss me, but instead he says, “Too bad I’m only an ambassador, isn’t that it? We sit round tables and talk, and what good does that ever do?”
“I’m asking my mother for the truth,” I declare, spinning from him, “and then I’ll tell her to send you back where you came from.”
“She won’t.”
“Wait and see.”
“She’s not your father, and in days like these, that’s a very good thing.”
I stop.
“Boreas Isendare was a romantic,” Havis says. “He couldn’t see things as they were, only as he wished. He never deserved such a woman as Sinora Lehzar.”
His words sear me with the sharpest sense of loss and sorrow. For a moment, I think I’ll surrender to misery right there, in front of Havis. But I rally whatever part of my mother is in my blood. I turn to face him. “Don’t you ever mention my father’s name again, Ambassador.”
A shameful tear still warms my eye.
I don’t wait long enough for him to see it.
9
ATHAN
Valon, Savient
On the third afternoon after Mother’s death, I sit alone folding bits of paper. It’s a stupid game. Make some little shape—a plane, an animal, whatever—then try to repeat the whole thing with eyes closed. A pointless challenge for my brain. A way to pass time. I’ve already emptied and smashed enough brandy bottles, and Cyar’s forbidden me from drinking any more. He says I’ll become Arrin.
Mangled papers surround me when Kalt appears in the doorway.
“Pull yourself together,” he orders. “Father’s got something to say.”
I stand, unsteady. “To me?”
“Don’t be a selfish ass. It’s bigger than that. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” I stare at him and his bland face. Nothing visible, no grief. That same stupid, monotonous voice. He takes a long breath. “Just come. It’s not my order.”
Of course it isn’t. It never is. It’s always going to be Father saying and us doing and never mind how we feel about it. And now that Mother’s gone, there’s no one left to question his sanity in our defense. No one left to plead our case after too much wine and promise things that can’t be.
She’s gone.
It’s gone.
We’re all gone, burned up with the dreams and the hope and the rest of it.
I crush a paper plane between my hands and follow after Kalt.
* * *
Father’s council room—windowless and encircled by heavy oaken walls, like a buried ship—is a place I’ve never been allowed before. The carpet is stitched with the Safire crest, large beneath our feet, and a square fireplace sits cold and grey, its mantel bearing framed portraits of Arrin and Kalt in uniform. They look like strangers in photograph, stiff and serious. Vacant.
Father stands at the long table, hunched over it in the low lights, while six top officers in Safire uniform sit waiting, clearly on edge. Silence with Father is always terrifying. Maybe especially for these men, since they’re not even blood, and if he needs to pull his pistol on someone—which I know he’s done before, on the frontlines—it’s more likely to be them than Arrin.
Probably.
Arrin is opposite us, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed and face perturbed. His left hand ticks away like it’s on a trigger.
“Keep your mouth shut,” Kalt mutters to me.
I don’t think I’m the one who needs that warning.
When Father clears his throat, everyone straightens, Malek and Evertal the quickest. “The murderer who committed this heinous act has been waiting a long time to pounce,” he says. “I swear to God and each of you here today that when I’ve finished with her, she will wish for hell.” He raises his eyes, darkened by exhaustion and fury. “Sinora Lehzar is the devil I will crush. She is a viper. A liar. A cheat. She’s everything despised in the North, a false queen, and I won’t stop until she burns before the world.”
Of course.
Blood and fireworks. The woman he hates.
A queen?
Arrin’s still ticking.
“It’s early,” Malek says carefully. “More investigation might be needed.”
“More investigation?” Father snarls. “It was an assassination in broad daylight, practically on the anniversary of Boreas’s death! She never made her shots in the dark. She was brash. By God, I gave her that first rifle! She always said—” He stops abruptly. His gaze sharp, reckless. “That wretched woman has burned a long time for her revenge, but this won’t end here. I will destroy her.”
The Admiral pauses. “Yes, but Sinora would have targeted you, not Sapphie.”
Father laughs, a cracked sound. “She said she’d never kill me, only bury my heart. One of her damn Rummayan proverbs. Well she hasn’t buried mine yet, and I’ll have hers between my fist.”
“Of course,” Malek says, wisely retreating.
“The traitorous bitch deserves to hang,” Evertal offers, “for more crimes than this.”
Something unsettling lurches me back into the present, out of the fog of grief in my head. Father’s hatred of Sinora Lehzar has always been a whispered fact. An indistinct rage that stretches back long before I was ever born. A name never spoken—unless you want a nose shattered, or a bullet in the brain.
But no one ever mentioned she was a queen.
That sounds infinitely more complicated.
Arrin shakes his head. “Suspicion around our small table doesn’t equal tangible proof. Without actual evidence against Lehzar, we can’t make a move. It’s stupid to even think of it.”
No one breathes. Now is about the moment when a pistol might appear. If it’s going to happen, this would be it, and everyone at the table looks terrified except for Arrin.
Father glares at him. “Evidence? She’s from the dirt, and that’s where I’ll put her again.”
“She’s a goddamn queen of the North, Father.”
Father gives a derisive snort. “Far from it.”
Beside me, Kalt looks impassive to the dangerous revenge brewing in front of us, nodding along with everything Father says. Evertal, too. Her lips hold a wicked smile. So Arrin’s our only hope for reason? That’s alarming. If we go after a ruling royal, and we fail, it will be Savient burning instead of Sinora Lehzar. She has a crown.
How does only Arrin see this?
“We should trust Father’s judgment,” Kalt puts in. He addresses Father. “I’d support a strike against her, sir.”
Arrin rolls his eyes. “Of course you would.”
“We’re bringing justice to our murdered mother,” Kalt says sharply. “Why are you being difficult?”
He’s not being difficult, I want to snap. For the first time in his life, he’s being smarter than anyone in this damn room.