Arin recognized the man who’d entered the room—he’d visited with Daleina before the trials and had examined her broken leg. She smiled at him with relief. “Healer Hamon! Very good to see you.”
He wrinkled his nose for a brief second—he must have gotten a whiff of all the dueling scents—and then smoothed his face into a pleasant smile. “I see the courtiers have welcomed you.”
Laughing, she held out her arms, the sleeves draping in voluminous waves, and turned in a circle. “They’ve made me presentable.”
He kept his smile on. “Well then. We shouldn’t let their hard work go to waste. Let’s present you.” With a bow to the caretakers, he guided Arin out of the room and into a hallway with polished black walls that wound to the left and then rose up in a series of white steps. Hamon’s hand was on the small of her back, and at first Arin thought he was guiding her, as if she weren’t capable of responding to simple left-right commands, but then she realized he was, in a way, claiming her as his approved guest. The courtiers and guards they passed looked at her, looked at Hamon, and moved to the side, allowing them to pass without challenge.
“All of these people—they’re to protect Daleina?”
“She’s the most important person in Aratay,” Hamon said, his voice low but calm and pleasant as always, “especially while we have no heirs. No one wants to take a chance with her, when it comes to her protection.”
She couldn’t imagine living surrounded by this many guards, to have this many people aware of your every movement, to be essentially imprisoned inside this palace. She wondered if Daleina saw it this way, as a pretty cage. Maybe she does. Daleina had never viewed being queen as a pleasure, merely as her duty. Arin felt a tiny stab of guilt and quickly buried it. The pleadings of a little girl could not be blamed for a lifetime of choices. Daleina had chosen to stay at the academy, to train with her champion, to take the trials, to claim the crown. Thinking of the Coronation Massacre, Arin felt her throat dry. “It is safe here, isn’t it?”
Hamon swung open a door without answering, and Arin blinked as sunlight flooded into her. She raised one fabric-draped arm to block the bright light and peered into the room.
The Queen’s Chamber was the most beautiful room she’d seen so far. Everything was ivory and gold and gleamed in the sunlight that poured in from the balcony. Stepping forward, she saw that the trees outside had been grown bowed to leave a gap for the light. She also saw a silhouette of a woman—the queen, her sister—standing on the balcony.
Behind her, Hamon said, “I will be available to you when you have questions.”
She turned to ask what he meant—when she had questions? What kind of questions did he expect her to have?—but he was already closing the solid, carved doors.
“Daleina?”
She expected Daleina to smother her in a hug like she usually did, as if she were still a little kid whom she could pick up and swing around, but her sister stayed on the balcony, motionless, looking out over the trees. She could have been a statue. Arin approached her slowly, aware of the carpet compressing beneath the thin soles of her fancy shoes and of the swoosh of her satiny dress behind her. She felt like a cat who had been dressed up and wanted to claw at the fabric until she felt like herself again. Stepping onto the balcony, Arin stood beside her sister. “So . . . what are we looking at?”
“Anything but you,” Daleina said. “If I look at you, I’ll cry.”
“My eyebrows aren’t that bad.”
Her sister’s lips quirked and then wobbled. Arin watched her take a deep breath in and realized that Daleina wasn’t joking—something was very, very wrong. “It was Hamon’s idea to bring you, though he claims I was the one who named you,” Daleina said. “I don’t remember. I was half asleep at the time. Maybe I did, but I shouldn’t have. You should be home.”
“Not exactly the welcome I expected. You sure know how to make me feel wanted.” She tried to keep her voice light.
“I should have told them to send you home. Made up an excuse that wouldn’t hurt your feelings, but once Hamon said you were here . . . Forgive my selfishness.”
“Of course. And I also forgive your crypticness.” Arin laid a hand on Daleina’s arm. Come on, talk to me. Look at me! “Do you want to talk about what’s going on, or would you rather skirt around it until you feel ready? I could tell you about Daddy’s ridiculous new project. He wants to build a birdhouse that’s a replica of the library in the Southern Citadel, complete with bird-size fake books on the shelves. He’d been trying to convince Mother to whittle the books for him for the past two weeks. He thinks there might be a market with extremely wealthy collectors.”
“People collect birdhouses?”
“Oh yes, Daddy has been gossiping with some of the other woodsmen—he wouldn’t call it gossiping, of course. ‘Sharing trade information.’ Gossiping, I say. Anyway, apparently there’s a man on the forest floor who carves life-size statues of bears and raccoons with hollowed-out stomachs to use as cupboards, bookshelves, or baby cribs. Daddy has decided his niche will be bird—”
“I’m dying, Arin.”
Arin quit talking. Daleina’s words fell into her like stones into a pond, and Arin felt them ripple out from her gut, sweeping through her veins, making her feel as if she’d been submerged. “What do you mean?” she asked carefully.
“I have the False Death.”
No.
No, she couldn’t.
Not Daleina.
“But you’re so young!”
“It’s not unheard-of.”
“It’s rare enough. And we’ve never had a single case of it in our family. It’s inherited, isn’t it? How could you have it? On Daddy’s side, Grandma died of ridiculous old age, and Grandpa fell and broke his neck. On Mother’s . . . I don’t remember, but not the False Death. I think there was some kind of sickness . . . Your healers must be wrong. Besides, you don’t look sick.” In fact, she looked lovely, her gold and red and orange hair shining like a tree in autumn. Gold flecks had been painted around her eyes, which made her eyes pop even more. Daleina had always had intense eyes. She’d always been intense about everything. Dying certainly wasn’t making her any less intense. “They’re wrong.”
“Hamon is one of the best. The other palace healers are in awe of him.”
“That’s nice, but he’s wrong.”
Daleina looked at her, for the first time since Arin had come onto the balcony, and Arin felt the full weight of those very intense eyes. “You are less comforting than you’re supposed to be.”
“I’m not letting you die.”
“You don’t exactly get a say in this.”
“You’re going to fight this.”
Daleina looked away. “It’s inside me. I can’t throw a knife at it.”