But when the answer was yes, when I did wish to lose myself, I paced nearer the emperor’s door. Would he open it? Could he sense the percussive beat of my heart, how thin my resistance to him was growing?
Valko wasn’t beastly like the Romska and peasants made him out to be. It was true he craved power, but he accepted what came with it—the tedious dinners with the nobles, the long hours grappling with his councilors over this law or that, the pamphlets that circulated the city, mocking him, drawing him as a snub-nosed baby wearing a crown too large for his head.
Though he was young, he seemed capable of his role as emperor. He understood the charm needed behind politics. How to sway disgruntled noblemen back into his graces. How to flatter the dukes’ wives with a secret smile they’d been craving. Soon it seemed there had never been an assassination attempt or an ill-fated dowager empress’s death. The whispers that Valko might be an imposter abated for a time, with the changing of the seasons. The emperor’s charisma could be thanked for the lifted mood in the palace. Life at court was a complicated game, and Valko knew how to play it. But that didn’t mean he was manipulative in all regards.
Often, when the weight of his crown became too heavy, when the nobles would inevitably return to their grumbling, he would find me at the stables grooming Raina. Sometimes the emperor wouldn’t touch me at all. Sometimes he would sit on the stool in the corner and share his pent-up frustrations. Must he entertain the nobles so frequently? Did Councilor Ilyin suspect he was merely “the changeling prince”? If Valko had grown up with his father, would Emperor Izia have taught him how to better manage everyone’s expectations?
One day Valko fell silent after airing all his grievances. I ran the brush once more across Raina’s back and glanced at the emperor. He leaned back against the planked wall, idly running a hay strand between his fingers as he watched me intently. When our eyes met, he smiled.
“You understand me, don’t you, Sonya?”
I set the brush down. “It is my duty to try.”
“No, not like that. I mean you understand how I’m feeling.”
“I feel everything you feel, My Lord Emperor.” Such as I did this very moment, when a little bud of sweet awe and curiosity bloomed inside me, outgrowing the dizzying passion I usually felt within the reaches of Valko’s aura.
His grinned deepened. “That isn’t what I meant, either.” Sitting upright, he detached himself from the wooden slats of the stall. “You understand me because you feel how I feel, even when I’m not here to influence you.”
I swallowed. Was he speaking of his attraction to me? Did he want me to admit mine?
His gray eyes sharpened, not in an unsettling way, but in the way eyes do when someone has made a great discovery. “You must wonder how your life would be different, Sonya, if your parents had raised you, too,” he said gently. “That is how you understand me . . . because we are alike.”
I blinked at him, my breath halted at how well he knew me. The sweetness inside me grew until it flowered across every last shadow of winter. I smiled at the emperor, forgetting the very reason I had been separated from my parents. “Yes, we are, Your Majesty.”
That night brought another reading lesson with Pia and another pitiful attempt at learning to regulate my ability and rein in my undisciplined mind. After we practiced her letters, she thumbed through illustrations of fairy stories while I struggled to name them based on her inward reactions. But I mistook her quickened pulse of fear for her breathless sense of heartbreak. That made me wrongly guess the story of the Snow Child who melted upon first discovering love was instead the tale of the Bone-Legged Woman who devoured wandering children.
No wonder I couldn’t decipher my own feelings.
After Pia left, I paced the long corridor outside my rooms and lingered a little longer near Valko’s bedroom door. I even brought my knuckles up, but in the end couldn’t make myself rap against the wood—not when the eyes of the supreme god, Zorog, stared back at me from the relief carving. He knew what I had done in Ormina, the blood of innocents I carried inside me like a stain. He knew it hadn’t been necessary to lock the Auraseers and sestras in the east wing. I’d wanted to. That’s why Valko believed the two of us were alike. Maybe that’s why I lost control and gave in to the auras of the peasants. Maybe I knew what might happen if they stormed the convent.
Had the darkest part of me wanted the Auraseers to die?
My shoulders curled over my chest. I felt hollow inside. A needling pain gnawed at my stomach, where it had been growing stronger day by day.