I cup my hands over my face and exhale, inhale, exhale again. Just keep breathing. No matter what happens, no matter who turns on me, no matter what pompous swine thinks he has power over me, I am still me. I will always be me.
Who is that, though? Apparently it’s this girl in the ruby gown and smudged face powder, getting examined by Cordell’s upper class. Someone who can treat the king of Cordell with as much revulsion as he treats me. A lady. That can’t be right.
It’s definitely not someone important to Mather or Sir. Definitely not someone who will have any standing in the new Winter, no matter what Noam thinks. Just someone who gets bounced around in whatever position needs to be filled, used and used like a candle on a moonless night until I burn away into a puddle of compliance and obedience.
I wanted to be a soldier. Someone who would earn standing in Winter. Someone Sir would look at with pride. Someone Mather would look at and—
No.
This is who Sir wants me to be. He’s made it startlingly clear that if he had his way—and look, he’s finally having his way—I’d never be a soldier. And Mather can just leap off Bithai’s four-story palace and land on a golden tree.
A hand cups my elbow and I jump back when I look into Mather’s eyes. He scoops me into his arms, arranging us into a proper dancing pose as if he can sense how dangerously close I am to hitting him. “I just want to talk,” he pleads as we move through the sea of bodies to the music.
“Well, I don’t,” I retort, and pull out of his arms. People eye us as they swirl past, but I refuse to start dancing with Mather again despite the way he holds his arms out, his face pinched and his eyes glassy.
He brushes the emotion off his face, one solid sweep of nothing. Hiding it, pushing it away, pretending it doesn’t mean anything to him when it should mean everything.
I shake my head. I will not cry. I will not show emotion either. “I thought you said you knew,” I start, the words grating against my throat. “That you knew how it felt, to be deemed worthless for reasons beyond your control. Yet here I am, a pawn in a marriage arrangement, because you and Sir deemed me worthless for anything else. Thank you, Mather. Thank you for finally showing me my place.”
Mather gasps, running a hand through the strands of hair that have fallen free of the ribbon holding the rest back. He shakes his head but doesn’t say anything. Either he can’t or he doesn’t, and the tears threatening to spill out of my eyes finally do. I wipe at them furiously, and just as I start to slide into the crowd, Theron appears.
He looks as bedraggled as I feel, only he’s spent the last few minutes dancing as well as being his father’s plaything. His eyes shoot to Mather before he looks back at me and lifts an eyebrow.
I stop myself from looking at Mather. This is my place now. This is where I belong.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Theron. The loud music drowns out my voice, making it look like I’m just mouthing the words into the air.
Theron’s lips tilt in a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “So am I,” he says, and holds out his hand.
I feel when Mather leaves, taking the heavy air of tension with him. My eyes latch onto him when he joins Sir outside the crowd of dancers, and a lump rolls around in my throat and beats down on my heart when he looks back at me. His eyes flick to Theron, back to me, and he pushes Sir out of the way to head for the staircase. Sir grabs his arm and barks something at him, and Mather responds by barking right back.
Then he leaves, vanishing up the stairs and down the hall.
Sir turns away, finds Alysson, and leaves too.
“Lady Meira?” Theron forces a smile, his hand still extended. Something about it feels permanent, like taking it means everyone else I care about will disappear.
They already have. And all I have now, all I’ll ever have, is standing in front of me with a lopsided half smile and narrow eyes from his own stress.
I shake my head. “Just Meira,” I say as I take Theron’s hand and let him pull me into him. My cheek barely reaches his face, my temple stopping just beside the stubble on his chin. A delicate scent of lavender and something like worn book pages emanates from him. We sway back and forth, gentle and steady though the music that pulses from the orchestra is still fast and strong. As if we’re saying, We make the music here. Not you.
“Just Meira,” Theron echoes. He adjusts his arms around my back and looks across the distance between us, then nods decisively. “We’ll be all right. Together.”
I can’t say anything. I turn my face to the side and close my eyes, fighting against the coolness that swarms me with his words. Together. The two of us, just us, while everything around us is swept away.
“Don’t you want more than this?” I breathe, finally looking up at him.
His eyes are soft, relaxed, but my question makes his softness tense. His lips pull apart and the answer that comes sounds so much like the thoughts whirring through my head that, for a moment, I think maybe I said it.
“Every day of my life.”
CHAPTER 12
IT TAKES BOTH Rose and Mona to get me out of the dress. And when they finally do, instead of meekly accepting another nightgown and crawling into bed, I demand they return my stolen clothes and kidnapped chakram. After a few good minutes of them telling me that’s not what ladies wear and me telling them I’m their future queen so they’d better obey me—it took me several tries before I could say it without crying—they relent and retrieve my things.
“We cleaned them, at least,” Rose says, and hands me my shirt. It does look white now, not brown and crunchy.
“And I had one of the guards tend to this.” Mona lifts my chakram. “It’s sharpened.”
Mona is my favorite.
They leave and I tug on my much more comfortable clothes. That stupid blue stone is in my pocket before I can analyze why I still want it after everything Mather did, why I feel better with it in my possession than leaving it behind. I loop my chakram into its usual place of honor between my shoulder blades and race from the hallway door to the balcony. Moments before my feet leave the bedroom floor, I grab one of the white curtains and propel myself out onto the balcony railing. The speed I picked up from the sprint shoots me out into the air and I bet my life quite literally on the chance that the curtain won’t rip in two.
Somewhere between my being fully airborne and breaking my leg on the ground below, the curtain catches and holds, swinging me back in toward the palace. The familiar surge of adrenaline rushes into me, the same freeing burst I felt on the mission in Lynia. A pure rush that makes me see more clearly, makes my head lighter. I release the curtain and grab for a ledge just above my balcony. It would have been possible to climb out of my room without the curtain theatrics, but not nearly as fun.
Once I’m there, a few easy jumps and pulls get me to the roof. It’s made of the same curved tiles as the rest of Bithai’s roofs, but instead of a steep slope to the ground, it’s flat and walkable. Good for lookouts in times of war—and for a restless future queen who feels like exploring her new home.
My nose curls involuntarily at the word. This isn’t my home. I’ve never even been to my real home, and now here I am with a replacement I never asked for. I should feel grateful, lucky even—most Winterians call a Spring work camp their replacement home. But I can’t feel anything more than frustration.
I start running on the shingles. The palace is huge, wings shooting off at every crossing, occasional domes of glass hinting at skylights. But it’s the tower jutting out of the northernmost wing of the palace that calls my name.
It’s empty and a little dusty, its disuse proof that Bithai hasn’t seen a war in years. I pull myself over the railing and kick aside an overturned table. Finally one place Noam doesn’t keep pristine.
I can see why they built the tower here. It’s open on every side, giving a complete view of the city and the kingdom beyond. To the east, most of Bithai sleeps under a clear sky and a half-moon. To the west, farmlands roll off into the horizon, green and dark in the absence of city light. To the south . . .
I dig my fingers into the railing. To the south are the Seasons. Spring, with its brutality and blood, and Winter, with its snow and ice and coldness that never ends, with its queen who haunts my dreams through images of the refugees and baby Mather.
Mather.
I feel liable to explode, everything in me hot and heavy and choking off air. I hate him for caring, for making me think he liked me too, for giving me a flash of hope as small as a stone and a kiss on my jaw when both of us knew we could never, ever be more than what we are.
“You shouldn’t blame him.”