“Is there anything else I can bring for you, Your Highness?”
“No, that will be all. But send the other one up in twenty minutes to prepare my mourning dress.”
“Of course, Your Highness,” she answered, although they both knew there was no other one. Every servant in the palace was the other one. It didn’t matter to Levana who the girl sent up, so long as whoever it was could properly stitch her into the sleek gray gown the seamstress had delivered the day before. Levana didn’t want to bother with glamouring her dress today in addition to her face, not with so many other thoughts in her head.
With another curtsy, the servant ducked out of the room, leaving Levana to stare down at her breakfast tray. Only now did she realize how very un-hungry she was. There was an ache in her stomach, perhaps left over from the horrible dream. Or she supposed it could have been sadness, but that was doubtful.
She felt no great loss at the death of her parents, who had been gone now for half the long day. Eight artificial nights. Their deaths were terribly gory. They were assassinated by a shell who used his invincibility against the Lunar gift to sneak into the palace. The man had shot two royal guards in the head before making his way to her parents’ bedroom on the third floor, killing three more guards, and slitting her mother’s throat so deeply the knife severed part of her spine. He had then gone down the hallway to where her father was lying with one of his mistresses and stabbed him sixteen times in the chest.
The mistress was still screaming, blood spurts across her face, when two royal guards found them.
The shell murderer was still stabbing.
Levana had not seen the bodies, but she had seen the bedrooms the next morning, and her first thought was that all that blood would make for a very pretty rouge on her lips.
She knew it was not the proper thing to think, but she also did not think her parents would have thought anything better had it been her murdered instead of them.
Levana had managed to eat three-quarters of a pastry and five small berries when her bedroom door opened again. She was immediately angry at the intrusion—the servant was early. Only on the heels of her annoyance did she check that her glamour was still in place. This, she knew, was the wrong order of concern.
But it was her sister, not one of the faceless servants, who swept into her bedroom. “Channary!” Levana barked, pushing the tray away from her. The tea slopped over the sides of the cup, pooling in the saucer beneath. “I have not given you permission to enter.”
“Then perhaps you should lock your door,” said Channary, sliding like an eel across the carpet. “There are murderers about, you know.”
She said it with a smile, wholly unconcerned. And why shouldn’t she be? The murderer had been promptly executed when the guards found him, bloodied knife still in hand.
Not that Levana didn’t think there could be more shells out there, angry enough and crazy enough to attempt another attack. Channary was a fool if she thought otherwise.
Which was part of the problem. Channary was simply a fool.
She was a beautiful fool, though, which was the worst kind. Her sister had lovely tanned skin and dark chestnut hair and eyes that tilted up just right at the corners so that she looked like she was smiling even when she wasn’t. Levana was convinced that her sister’s beauty was glamour-made, certain that no one as horrible on the inside could be so lovely on the outside, but Channary would never confess one way or the other. If there was a chink in her illusion of beauty, Levana had yet to find it. The stupid girl wasn’t even bothered by mirrors.
Channary was already dressed for the funeral, though the dull gray color of the fabric was the only indication that it was made for mourning. The netted skirt jutted out nearly perpendicular to her thighs, like a dancer’s costume, and the body-hugging top was inset with thousands of silver sparkles. Her arms were painted with wide gray stripes spiraling up each limb, then coming together to form a heart on her chest. Inside the heart, someone had scrawled, You will be missed.
Altogether, the look made Levana want to gag.
“What do you want?” asked Levana, swinging her legs out from beneath the blankets.
“To see that you won’t be embarrassing me by your appearance today.” Reaching forward, Channary tugged at the flesh beneath Levana’s eye, an experiment to see if the embedded gemstone would hold. Flinching, Levana knocked her hand away.
Channary smirked. “Thoughtful touch.”