Burning Glass (15 page)

I bit down on a smile.
Filching a pie?
Oh, Pia.

Walking outside, I found her just where the boy said I would. She sat on a low stool, all of her dark hair tied back in her kerchief as she hunched beside a large dairy cow and squeezed milk from her udders into a half-full tin pail.

“Excuse me.” I set my chin above the fence that separated me from the palace barnyard. “Have you seen the elusive pie thief?”

Pia squinted up at me. The morning sun made her eyes as warm as honey.

“She’s a little taller than I am,” I went on, “much more pretty, and in love with a boy named Yuri.”

Pia burst into a giggle, and then sighed, shaking her head. “It isn’t funny, Sonya. I stole the pie to share with you, but Cook caught me.” My shoulders fell as her aura did. She set her brow against the cow’s girth. “I’ve been demoted to dairymaid for a week. I’ll die if Yuri’s parents find out. It’s humiliating enough that
he
knows.”

I leaned into the fence. “What happened yesterday morning? Why were you late to work?”

She squeezed out three more sprays of milk. “I overslept.” With a little grin, she added, “Yuri had the night off, so we went walking by the river.”

I nodded, careful to keep my mouth shut as to why the emperor had sent Yuri and the other guards away. I didn’t want
Pia to know I had kissed Valko. So much for what I’d told her two nights ago:
Friends share secrets.

“Yuri said we can marry in two years if he saves enough money,” Pia continued, but her smile faded. “His parents won’t support us. They still hope he’ll change his mind and marry the nobleman’s daughter.”

“But he won’t, will he?” I asked, trusting I knew the answer as well as she did.

Pia dropped the cow’s udders and turned around on her stool to face me. Her lip quivered. “Two years is a lifetime, Sonya.”

I felt the aching of her heart, the coldness in her hands from milking cows on a frigid morning, the despair weighing her down at being held back from what she wanted most.

She sniffed and swiped a finger under her eye. “I’m sorry. What a thoughtless friend I am.” Sitting up straighter, Pia managed a smile. “I want to hear all about Anton’s visit to your rooms. That’s why I was bringing the pie.”

I tucked the library books to my chest. “First of all, I don’t wish to talk about the prince.”

“But—”

“He isn’t interested in me, Pia.” She frowned, but I continued, “Secondly, you don’t have to steal a pie to come visit me. I hope you know our friendship doesn’t require food. And thirdly, I hope you
do
pay a visit—whenever you can—because I have a proposition for you.” She arched a brow, and I lifted my stack of books on top of the fence. “I’m going to teach you how to read.”

Her eyes rounded, and the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen stretched across her face.

My gut twisted, marring the moment with guilt. “And before you go thinking I’m sweeter than frosted beignets, I should warn you, I have an ulterior motive.”

“What is it?” Her eyes narrowed mischievously. “My help with convincing the prince of Riaznin of your secret, burning affection for him?”

“No.” I gave what I hoped was the most definitive of eye rolls. “Your help as I practice my ability. If you haven’t noticed, I’m seriously lacking in training and would like to keep my head attached to my neck.”

“Your neck is rather ravishing. I’m sure the prince would agree.”

“Pia.”

She giggled. “I’ll come tonight.”

After we’d made all the arrangements for regular study, I wandered past the barnyard toward the stables. With the sun higher in the sky and no clouds in sight, the air was beginning to warm. The snow crunched beneath my feet, having melted to a reasonable depth. Perhaps spring
would
come. Riaznin’s winters were so long and harsh, a change in seasons often seemed impossible. For the moment, though, I believed in the best, and I had Pia to thank. The prospect of us helping each other made my worries over Valko and Anton shrink to a surmountable size, a much healthier way of dealing with my insecurities than the
torture session I’d had with the figurine of Feya last night.

As I walked inside the stables, my gaze fell to my feet as I kicked up straw. Raina was still penned up in her stall. When she saw me, she came to my open hand, even though I didn’t bear an apple. I petted her mane. “Don’t you ever get a chance to run?”

“Not very often, poor mare,” someone answered. I whirled around to find the emperor. He stood a pace behind me, as if he’d followed me inside.

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “What are you doing here?” He raised his brows, and I briefly closed my eyes and curtsied. “Forgive me, Your Imperial Majesty. You just surprised me.”

“I thought my aura might have alerted you.” He came to my side and reached up to stroke Raina himself.

I touched my cheeks, which were surely flushed, and shook my head. “At times, your aura is too similar to my own. It makes it hard to tell the difference.”

His lips curved. The emperor wasn’t dressed in a fine kaftan, just a gray wool coat to keep out the chill. “Then I’m not the only one who needed a little respite this morning?”

I smiled back at him. “No, you are not.”

We smoothed the mare down together in companionable silence. Then my heart leapt, my only warning before Valko removed his hand from the horse to touch my braid. His fingers gently traveled down it to the center of my back.

“I prefer your hair loose,” he said.

I inhaled a trembling breath. “Do you?”

“Mm-hmm. The way you wore it the first time I saw you.” He pulled out the string tying the ends of my hair together. “The way you wore it when you kissed me.”

Hands shaking, I stroked Raina’s mane again.

The emperor slowly unwove my braid. His touch was feather soft, but it made my blood flame with entrancing heat. “Why did you leave the other night?” he asked.

I removed my hand from the mare and clutched the gate rail. “I cannot compromise my duty to you.”

“I don’t believe that’s true.” He fanned my hair across my back. “I’m never more safe than I am when you are with me. Why did you leave, Sonya?” he asked again, combing his fingers through the waves of my hair.

My eyelids fluttered as his aura grew bolder, as mine grew bolder with it. I kept my grip anchored to the gate rail. My chest rose and fell as I struggled to keep my lungs filled with air. “I can’t . . . abandon myself. Bad things happen when I let go like that.” Hazily, my gaze lingered on the black ribbon around my wrist.

Valko swept my hair to the side and brought his lips to my ear. The warmth scuttled a chill across my shoulders. “Maybe bad things happen because you don’t let go often enough.” He lowered his mouth to my neck and pressed a long and warm kiss there. Just as my knees began to give way, just as I was on the verge of surrendering myself to the dark recklessness inside me, the emperor spun to leave. “If you like the mare, she’s yours,” he said lightly.

I wobbled on my feet, shocked from his sudden departure and his stunning gift. “But . . .” I fought to think through my muddled senses. “I cannot ride her anywhere.”

He grinned and tossed me a final look. A spark of cunning lit his eyes, like he was well aware of the dizzying effect he had over me. “No,” he replied. “But you’ll have the pleasure of knowing she belongs to you.”

A
S THE WEEKS PASSED,
I
BECAME MORE VIGILANT
ABOUT MY
role as sovereign Auraseer. I practiced reporting my daily findings to Pia in case Valko might ask me, but often all I came up with were things like “Cook is upset with the emperor, maybe for his request of venison a third night when the hunters have yet to bring back any deer” or “The hunters are irritated, probably because they must journey to farther and higher country to fetch the emperor his favorite-of-the-moment meat.”

Nothing earthshaking. Nothing seriously threatening. I didn’t want to admit to Pia that what I noticed most were the shimmering threads of blue in Valko’s gray eyes, or the way I felt important when he sought out my gaze from among a room of first-ranking nobles.

I kept the key to the hidden door Anton had given me under a loose floor plank in my bedchamber. I waited for the night I should use it, the night I needed to disappear if Valko’s
attentions became unwelcome. The difficulty was determining if they were.

His apathy had vanished, and in its place grew something bold and vibrant. The emperor’s new emotions were a more powerful distraction from my crimes at the convent than anything had yet proven to be. They also made the palace brimming with nobles and servants tolerable. Valko’s aura was the most powerful of them all. If mine wasn’t already harmonized to it, I found myself searching out its melody, the way it sang inside me with desire and abandon, and then matched myself to its orchestration—for as long as I dared. Only then could I go night after night without touching the statue of Feya or resisting clawing my own trenches in the box bed.

If council meetings grew too long and dreary, the emperor would summon me to sit closer to him. Under the cover of the satin tablecloth, his hand would find mine and trace abstract patterns along my palm. My breath would seize, my heart hammer as it struggled against opening to him. It seemed every time he touched me, his aura came with the force of a raging storm. He’d let go before I could separate my feelings from his, before I made up my mind if his small acts of tenderness were unwanted—even long after his aura was absent and I returned to my bedchamber to stare at the knot marking the loose plank.

I wandered the palace corridors at night contemplating the same questions.
Can I lose myself? Do I ever dare lose myself again?

When the answer was no, when the image of Yuliya’s dead
face plagued me, I found myself outside Anton’s door, searching for the song of his aura, the mystery of its subtler strains. I imagined him breathing deeply as he cleared his mind and body of emotion, like he had done when he’d prevented me from sensing his feelings upon our last encounter.

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.

Pulling my hand from Valko’s door, I spun away to return to my chambers. I sought my penance with Feya and only slowed my steps to meet her as I passed Anton’s room and felt his shuttered energy within. Just as I didn’t knock on Valko’s door, I didn’t knock on his brother’s. The emperor would have answered, would have spoken to me, but never the prince.

One rainy day on the cusp of spring, I stared at the stained-glass window in the council chamber and watched the water flow around the leaded joints of the panes. I determined to keep my face blank and not sigh at the sensation of Valko’s smallest finger circling my knee beneath the table. The emperor was more keen on me than he’d been in a few days—his emotions a heady rush swirling inside me. They begged for me to throw myself at him, despite our audience of stern men. Thankfully, Anton wasn’t here to see me so delightfully frazzled. No doubt any fragment of his regard for me would vanish. I’d fall even farther from his high standard.

“What do you think of my proposal, Sonya?” Valko asked. The rain drizzled down the panes of the Ozerov coat of arms. I shuttered my thoughts of the prince away.

“Proposal, My Lord?” Did the emperor speak of his marriage offer to Madame Delphine Valois? I often forgot he was marrying at all. I didn’t want to think of him kissing another woman the way he’d kissed me. Still, I knew he was impatient for the Esten emissary to arrive with news of Delphine’s acceptance or denial.

Valko’s fingernail slid over my knee and sent a pleasured chill up my spine. I fisted my hands to ward off a flush to my cheeks. I couldn’t allow him to get to me like this, not when he would soon have a bride. “My expansion into Shengli,” he clarified with a smile. His gaze pierced mine and searched for what I was feeling, thinking.

“Oh, yes, of course.” I collected my thoughts, surprised that he had asked for my opinion on the matter. He’d
never
asked for my opinion in this setting. No one had. But I did have my own feelings regarding the continuing border wars with Estengarde and the ones resurfacing with Shengli after decades of peace. And now, with the strength of the emperor’s forthcoming marriage alliance, he wanted to lay siege against Shengli and annex it into our empire. As there was no daunting mountain range between us, Shengli was easier to invade than Estengarde and had more plentiful resources of gems and timber. But the Shenglin army, a lethal force of mastered discipline and skill, posed its own formidable barrier between us.

Valko’s councilors had spent an hour debating the wisdom of his latest scheme for bringing more wealth into Riaznin—or, as they put it, “spreading our culture to the east to protect ourselves from threat”—and now they awaited my answer with bored tolerance etched across their faces. Within them, however, I felt their resentment of me. As I studied the councilors and felt their anger twist my stomach, but not jab it with hot knives, I determined they were not dangerous. And after many long weeks of silence in council meetings, I decided to speak up.

“I think it is a false notion that acquiring
more
will bring about prosperity,” I began. “I’ve seen happiness abound in humble circumstances where people don’t live in domination under one another.” I alluded to the Romska, but the emperor didn’t know that part of my history. “Riaznin is capable of greatness without plundering it from another country, especially one with an unbroken history of being able to defend itself against our empire—indeed, it has often sought to conquer
us.
Why should we take the risk? I believe we have the competence to bolster ourselves from within.”

The rain softened on the windowpanes. No one said a word for several moments. I swallowed the ticking of my heart and absorbed the auras in the room. Some were caught on bitter humor—jeers they didn’t vocalize in the off chance the emperor might be pleased with my remark. For the smile on his face, he might have been. But the edges of his curved lips tightened, and his spidery fingers froze on my leg. A different energy—deep
and familiar and flowing with admiration—made me turn in my chair.

Anton stood quietly, just inside the entrance of the room, his eyes trapped on mine.

Valko followed my gaze and stiffened upon finding his brother. The prince looked away from me too late. He cleared his throat and bowed to Valko. “I have a letter for you, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“Not now.” Valko whirled back to his councilors. “That is all for today,” he told them. “You are dismissed.” They stood, gathering papers, and shot him curious glances. I moved to stand. “Not you, Sonya.” He examined a fresh stain of ink on his cuff.

I bit my lip and eased back down, unable to resist another look at Anton. As the councilors swept past him to exit the room, the prince twisted the letter and watched the emperor and me, his mouth contorting with a frown. A feeling of deep displeasure strung taut between the two brothers. Every muscle in my body cramped.

Valko rose after everyone left—everyone but Anton. He gripped the prince’s arm, ushered him out the door, shut it hard, and closed me in with him. Taking a steadying breath, the emperor rolled out a kink from his neck. Pain knotted on my own. With false calmness, he returned to me, hands clasped behind his back. “Stand up,” he said.

I did as he commanded, my knees wobbling while storm clouds brewed in my gut. Valko was furious, but for the moment he kept it at bay. Feya willing, he wouldn’t unleash it.

“How long have you been at court, Sonya?”

“Three months.”

“And how long have I been emperor? No”—he held up a finger—“how long have I been educated to rule Riaznin?”

My voice quavered. “Your whole life, My Lord.”

With a deep inhale, he nodded. “My whole life. And before I was born, Sonya, did the gods foresee my destiny as ruler? Did they bring it to pass—bring
me
into being—so I could wear this crown, in this very hour of need, for my empire?”

The storm clouds grew darker, more ominous. “You asked for my opinion, My Lord.”

The lightning struck. His face went crimson. A vein pulsed at his temple. “I had supposed the opinion of
my
Auraseer,
my
gifted protector, would support me!” I shrank back, fearing he would strike my face. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve planned this? And yet on a moment’s whim, you prattle off some thoughtless remark to shame me in front of my councilors!” He swept his kaftan back and placed his hands on his hips. “Do you have nothing to say?”

My body shook as I resisted the urge to hit him. I scrambled to throw up battlements against his fury before it consumed me, before I lost my own temper. He wanted an apology, but I couldn’t give him one, despite Tola, despite Dasha, despite the price of my own life. Some madness held me resolute. Deep in my bones, I knew the opinion I’d uttered was my right to give—and at his request. What I’d felt in Anton’s aura confirmed the justice of it. The emperor would not strip me of that moment
when I, for once, felt important and worthy of goodness.