*
Kestrel stood next to Verex outside the closed ballroom doors, listening to the swell of the emperor’s voice. Kestrel couldn’t distinguish the words, but heard the sure rhythm. The emperor was a skilled public speaker.
Verex’s head was lowered, hands stuffed in his pockets. He was dressed in formal military style: all black, with gold piping that echoed the glittering horizontal line drawn above Kestrel’s brows. His belted, jeweled dagger matched hers. The emperor had finally given Kestrel the dagger he’d promised, and it was indeed fine—set with diamonds and exquisitely sharp. It was too heavy. It dragged at her hip.
She wished the emperor would stop talking. Her stomach dipped and rose with the sound of his voice. Her nails curled into her palms.
Verex scuffed his boot.
She ignored him. She touched a glass petal on her necklace. It felt frail.
The emperor’s voice stopped. The doors flung open.
It was like a hallucination: the crowd in a splash of colors, the heat, the applause, the fanfare.
Then the crash of sound faded, because the emperor was speaking again, and then he must have stopped speaking, because Kestrel heard the breathless silence that came just before Verex kissed her.
His lips were dry. Polite.
She had known it was coming, it was all planned, and she had done her best to be as far away from herself as possible when it happened. But her mind couldn’t stay asleep forever. It told her to stay put, don’t shrivel away, this is not so bad, the kiss is a thing, an empty thing, a scrap of blank paper. Yet Kestrel was awake, and she knew the taste of her own lies.
“I’m sorry,” Verex said quietly when he pulled away. And then they were dancing before everybody.
The kiss had numbed her. Verex’s words didn’t register at first. When they did, they seemed like her own words, like she’d been saying them to her old self, the one who had given up Arin. I’m sorry, she told herself. Forgive me, she’d said. Kestrel had thought she’d known what her choices had cost her, but when the prince had kissed her she sharply understood that she was going to pay for this for the rest of her life.
“Kestrel?”
“Sorry,” Kestrel repeated as they spun across the ballroom floor. The prince’s feet had no natural talent, but he was grimly capable, the way someone might be if his dancing master came to lessons armed with a switch.
“I’ve been unforgivable,” Verex said. “Is that why you look so miserable?”
Kestrel studied the piping on his jacket.
Verex said, “Maybe there’s one final reason you are determined to marry me.”
The violinists’ bows sank down across the strings.
“My father is holding something over you,” Verex said.
Kestrel glanced up, then away again. Verex drew their clasped hands to his chest. The crowd murmured and sighed.
He shrugged. “It’s how my father is. But what does he—?”
“Verex, am I so bad a choice for a wife?”
He smiled a little. The dance was ending. “Not so bad.”
“Let’s agree, then, to make the best of things,” Kestrel said.
Verex bowed, and before Kestrel could decide whether this was his yes or simply meant to mark the dance’s end, he passed her hand to a senator’s. Then there was another dance, and another senator, and she was whirled into the exchequer’s arms.
After that, faces and titles no longer held much meaning.
Finally, she stepped deliberately wrong so that someone trod on her toes. She soothed her partner’s horrified apologies, but begged for a rest and made certain she limped a little as she went to sit in the corner of gamers.
Kestrel chose a gilt chair set apart from the others, but it wouldn’t be long before someone pulled a chair near, and she would have to talk and smile even though the muscles in her cheeks felt as if someone had pinched them.
She needn’t have worried. All eyes were focused on the crown prince, who sat across a Borderlands table, facing a highly ranked lieutenant of the city guard.
The game was careening toward a humiliating end for the prince. The lieutenant had already captured many of Verex’s key game pieces, lining up the green figures in a row. Verex’s general was isolated from his troops and flanked by the lieutenant’s. The marble pieces tapped out their paths, knocked each other down.
Verex’s eyes lifted to meet hers across the room. He set a tentative finger on his green infantry.
It was just a game. What did it matter if Verex made the wrong move, and lost?
Yet Kestrel thought of Arin, who hadn’t answered the emperor’s summons, and wondered what he would lose because of it.
She thought of the possibility of peace with Verex.
She held the prince’s gaze and shook her head—the slightest of gestures, a mere tip of her chin.
He lifted his hand from the infantry and settled it on the cavalry.
Kestrel used two fingertips to brush invisible lint from her dress, flicking her hand forward, away from her body.
Verex moved the cavalry two paces forward.
So it went, the smugness draining from the lieutenant’s face as Verex’s army made significant advances and crucial kills. Verex looked to his father, who had appeared on the edges of the crowd. When the prince’s asking eyes turned again to Kestrel and she saw how hope made them luminous, she couldn’t look away. She offered her silent suggestions. He took them.
The green general toppled the red one.
The crowd roared for their prince. The emperor folded his arms and rocked on the balls of his feet, his expression amused, pinned to his son’s.
But not disapproving.
Kestrel heard Verex decline to play another game. Now that the spectacle was over, the crowd’s attention would soon turn to her. There was a Borderlands game at another nearby table between a senator’s daughter and Risha, the eastern princess who had been kidnapped as a small child and raised in the imperial palace as a pampered hostage. Kestrel had expected that Risha would be a good Borderlands player, but from everything Kestrel had seen, the princess possessed (or cultivated) a decided mediocrity at the game. There was no excitement to be had at that table. A bit farther over was a match between the Herrani minister—Tensen, she remembered his name—and a very minor Valorian baron who had probably condescended to play with Tensen only for the pleasure of beating him before a crowd. Many were watching, widening mirthful eyes when Tensen forgot how a gaming piece moved, or seemed to doze off between his turns. That farce might hold people’s interest, but not for long.
And then they would come for her.
Kestrel’s throat closed when she thought of faking joy at her engagement. Yet she would have to do it. She would have to dance all night long and into the gray hours of morning, until the last reveler had left the ballroom and her shoes were worn out and her heart was in shreds.
Kestrel stood. The emperor wasn’t watching her, at least not for now. His eyes were on his son. She threaded through the crowd, telling each person who stopped her that she had promised a dance to someone else. The ballroom was thick with people. Faces clustered around her like children’s puppets on sticks.
Somehow she dodged them, and slipped down a hallway where the air was cooler. No one lingered here. There was nothing to see, nothing to do. This area was used only in fine weather when the balconies lining the hallway were open to the palace gardens below. Each balcony was now curtained off from the hallway, and Kestrel knew that the glass shutters attached to each balustrade had been drawn and fastened for the winter. Despite every attempt to ward off the cold, it seeped beneath the velvet curtains. It lapped over Kestrel’s slippered feet.
With a quick glance behind to make certain that no one was near and no one saw her, she dove through a curtain and pulled it shut behind her.
The balcony was a box, its glass walls like black ice: sheer slices of the night outside. Light from the hallway lined the seam of the curtain and glowed at its hem, but Kestrel could barely see her own hands.
She touched a glass pane. These windows would be open on the night of her wedding. The trees below would be in bloom, the air fragrant with cere blossoms.
She would choke on it. Kestrel knew she would hate the scent of cere flowers all her life, as she ruled the empire, as she bore her husband’s children. As she aged and the ghosts of her choices haunted her.
There was a sudden sound. The slide of wooden curtain rings on the rod. Light brightened behind Kestrel.
Someone was coming through the velvet.
He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against the frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the level of his gray eyes, which were silver in the shadows.
He was here. He had come.
Arin.