Burning Glass (23 page)

My lungs constricted and made it difficult to breathe. I felt like he’d just struck me.

Floquart’s lip curled with hostility. He leaned forward nearer the emperor, his brows peaking at a severe angle. “I will not be satisfied unless
she
leaves”—his eyes threw daggers at me—“and you relinquish the position of sovereign Auraseer.”

Valko blanched. “Relinquish?” His squared shoulders drooped as some of the ice in his aura melted. “You understand she is my guard—my most important guard—not a mere fortune-teller.”

“You have enough guards in Torchev to stop the border wars. They are sufficient to defend one man.”

“Come, now, Floquart, you are taking this too far. Perhaps you are still tired from your journey. Why don’t you get some rest, and we can come to another agreement in the morning?”

“We cannot. This is my offer. If you are serious about your marriage proposal, the decision is simple.”

Valko stood as still as a statue. His brows drew so low they nearly touched his eyes. Everything twisted inside me—the emperor’s wrestling indecision and pride, Floquart’s stubbornness, and buried beneath them both, the glimmer of my own feelings.

I should want this. I should want Valko to give me up. My life wouldn’t balance on the curve of a saber. The empire
would no longer cage its Auraseers. Dasha and Tola could have a chance at a normal life.

So if I should want my freedom, what was this silent prayer behind my pressed lips, the plea that Valko would keep me in the palace? Did it have to do with Anton? If I left, I would certainly never see him again. Or was this about Valko? Did I wish to stay in order to comprehend how deeply his feelings ran for me? They were authentic enough when I sensed them in his aura, but they were also fleeting. I could not forget how little he noticed me in the days preparing for the emissary’s arrival and how he never came to my defense when Floquart accused me of harlotry.

If I left the palace, where would I go?

Valko drew in a long breath, while I held mine. His hand curled, then flexed. “I need her,” he said, and something like shame spooled inside me—inside
him
. “She stays.”

I exhaled with disbelief.

Floquart arched a thin brow. His eyes slitted like a cat’s. “Then this is my farewell.” He adjusted his cuff links. “I will be gone by first light, along with any hope you ever had of an alliance.” With the fierceness of a lion, he marched away, his coattails flapping.

Valko paced back and forth. He yanked his hair at the scalp as he watched the emissary go. I remembered the emperor’s finger on the map tracing the river of Shengli, his manic attention to detail in preparing to receive the Estens. I thought of the end of the border wars at the base of the Bayac Mountains. He’d
given all of them up. I couldn’t understand why.

Apparently, neither could he.

Once Floquart was out of sight, Valko slammed his hand against the wall. It echoed oddly from within the closed room behind him. “Dammit, Sonya!”

I flinched. His aura shifted so quickly I could scarcely prepare myself.

“Do you see what you’ve done?” He hit the wall again. This time something sounded from the room with such distinctness it couldn’t possibly be an echo.

I stood erect, determined not to cower before him. “Nothing I said to the emissary was unwarranted.”

Valko laughed and rubbed his eyes with his palms. “The
mere act
of you speaking to him was offensive. Have you no idea of your station?”

His rebuke burned inside me like acid. I tensed my body to ward off shaking. “
You
chose me over Estengarde! This isn’t my fault.”

“No?” he shouted. “Am I to blame?” The door behind him opened a crack, though I couldn’t see within. The darkness, which had been my constant companion all evening, seemed to swirl out from the crack in thick waves. “You glide into my life with your intensity, with that wildness you keep restrained. Yet when I taste it, it is so intoxicating I don’t know whether to nip at you or devour you whole!”

My jaw muscle locked. He blamed his desire on my reckless passion? Did he remember the truth of me was so devastating
it killed all but three people at the convent? “You would do well do keep your distance.”

His nostrils flared. He prowled around me like a panther. “You’re right. You’re a demon in a girl’s body! You’ve been sent here to destroy me, haven’t you?”

“You tell me.” By the gods, I couldn’t hold my savage tongue any more than he could. “From the looks of it, I seem to be succeeding.”

He grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me against the wall. My head followed like the lashing of a whip. Through my blackening vision, my gaze wavered to the slitted door. I could have called out for help, but a rush of boldness overtook me. I turned back to the emperor and gave him a vixen’s smile.

“It’s not too late to do away with you, you know?” Valko’s thumbs slid along my collarbone until they probed the base of my neck. He pinched my airway and sent blood throbbing through my head.

I drew in a ragged breath. Deep inside me someone screamed, someone pleaded for something I no longer had ears to hear. I cared more for the ultimate suffering the emperor tempted me with, my final amends to the Auraseers at the convent. To Yuliya. Perhaps death was what I had wanted all along. The necessary sacrifice for redemption. I set my jaw. “Do it, Valko. End my suffering.”

The door opened wider on silent hinges. Anton emerged on the threshold. The shadowy figures of other people in the room stood far behind him. In the prince’s hand was a dagger.

Valko still thought we were alone. With his back to his brother, his lips stretched over his teeth. His hands clawed up to my face. “You are mine!” He shook me. “No one commands you to leave me. Not Floquart. Most certainly not you.” In another abrupt mood change, he yanked me forward until my mouth crashed on his.

The darkness overtook me completely. Had it sourced from me all along? I kissed him back, fangs and forked tongue like the serpent I was. Nothing resembling love or tenderness emitted from either of us.

When Valko’s lips traveled to my neck, my gaze fell on Anton. I saw him dimly, like peering at someone past a sheet of rain. His aura couldn’t reach me, not in the state I was in, but his eyes held everything I couldn’t feel. Sorrow. Pain. Not the pain Valko infected me with—the pain I welcomed—but a lonely variety. A mourning pain, like I was lost, and there was nothing he could do to recover me.

Was I lost? Was I the mirror I’d pledged I wasn’t? Did I only reflect the madness of the world?

My hands trembled as I fought to raise them. I set them on Valko’s chest. I pushed him away. I wasn’t lost. “Stop.”

His eyes narrowed, his face flushed with passion. “You can’t have it both ways, Sonya. Not anymore. You can’t be the doe
and
the demon. I know you now.”

My teeth rattled as I struggled against his emotions. “You don’t know me at all.”

“Don’t tell me what I know!” He slammed me back again.
I winced where the wall connected with the lump at the back of my skull. Anton’s dagger lifted. The blade caught the candlelight. I shook my head infinitesimally. I couldn’t let him get involved. Valko would have his brother executed if the prince tried and failed to kill him. And even if Anton aimed true, I wasn’t sure I could allow the emperor to die. Not even now. “You will respect me!” Valko shouted.

Find a space within yourself and cling to it.

This
was that space—the small part of me that pulled away from the emperor, that defied him. He grabbed my wrists, one after the other, and pinned them against the wall. My head pulsed from being hit twice. My belly rumbled from starvation. My legs shook, ready to give way.

The space in me wasn’t great enough. Not against him.

A sob racked through my labored breathing, the weak fight in me to hold myself together. I needed emotional release. Every Auraseer had a form. Yuliya’s blood. Tola’s tears. Dasha’s hair. Nadia had the bite from staining her skin. Izolda, no doubt, welcomed the sting of splinters beneath her nails. Every release had one thing in common: pain.

My heartbeat thrashed through my ears as I fought to channel myself into a tiny space of control. Tremors racked my body in resistance, but I forced my suffering to intensify. I focused on every part of me that hurt. I needed pain to ground me for now, and in desperation, I sought it. I clung to it.

The throbbing of my head. Valko’s iron grip on my wrists. The stabbing ache from my wound. The cramped knots in my
starved stomach. The fire lining my throat from being half strangled.

I whimpered. I didn’t want to feel more. I didn’t know if this was helping at all. Pain would give me emotional distance from Valko, but it wouldn’t free me from his physical abuse.

“Do you respect yourself?” I asked the emperor in a fragile, broken voice. I faltered between succumbing to the beast in him and my inward chanting of
I’m not enough. Nothing’s enough.

Valko’s mouth hovered near mine. His aura growled with hunger, with the dominion he sought to prove over me. “Of course I do.”

My breath came in short gasps. My heart hammered. “You were once a child like me, torn from your parents, from everything you knew. Abandoned when you needed love. You still need it.” His eyes rose from my lips to meet my beseeching gaze. “But not like this,” I said. “This isn’t love.”

I’d said the wrong thing. One of his hands released mine, only to rear back, preparing to strike me. Anton’s grip flexed on his dagger. He was close enough to reach us by one leaping bound.
No.
I couldn’t let him kill his brother. I couldn’t let him suffer the damnation of murder I knew only too well.

“What would the boy you once were think of you now, in this very moment?”

A spasm ran through Valko’s brow. His raised hand froze, but he didn’t lower it.

“You have lost much tonight,” I rushed on. “Estengarde.
Shengli. You let them go because of me, and you question it. But if the only reason you saved me”—
if I could call this saved
—“was so I could tell you, you
don’t need
to stretch from sea to sea to achieve greatness,
you
are enough—
Riaznin
is enough—then that would be well worth the price.”

I sensed my words pricking his defenses, but his rage still boiled beneath his skin. If I didn’t take care, his mood would snap again and Anton’s dagger would fly.

I needed to do something more—not seek my own emotional release, but seek the emperor’s. If the space within me wasn’t large enough to push him away, perhaps it was large enough to pull him in. If I let myself become one with his aura, could I do more? Could I inhabit his limbs, his heart, his mind? Could I finally persuade him?

Valko’s breath was hot. His knee dug into my leg and forced me flush against the wall. “You can’t tell me what I need.”

By some miracle, I felt the sudden shift in his emotion the moment before his hand came smarting down. I dove for that space inside myself, and I thrust it open. Valko permeated my aura, every quality that composed who I was—my gifts of character, the energy of my spirit, the defining fibers of my body. The serpent slithered away. It didn’t belong to the emperor. He had his own brand of darkness.

Like medicine, I sent myself back to him, back through the flowing channel between us. I felt Sestra Mirna’s long-suffering care for Yuliya in the infirmary. The hands of the Romska when they stroked my hair and tried to soothe my mad spells away.
Tosya’s smile that helped me know my life wasn’t as bad as it often seemed.

My head didn’t whip to the side because Valko never struck me. His hand halted near my cheek. He swallowed, his chin quavering. “They think me incapable,” he abruptly confessed.

In my periphery, I saw Anton’s eyes widen. Had his brother truly admitted to weakness? “Who?” I asked gently.

“My councilors . . . Anton.” Valko gave a sorry laugh. “The populace of my empire.” His hand fell to his side, and he released my arms from the wall. “They think I died as a child, and they’re now ruled by an imposter. Don’t you see?” His eyes glistened with tears. “I have to show them my power, that I’m even mightier than my father.” His voice cracked. He sounded anything but mighty.

Holding his aura with my empathy, I replied, “I know what it is to feel incapable. I understand you.” I ignored my still-burning wrists and took his hand, cupping it in both of my own. “Let me be your balm, Valko. That is better than your mistress.” I kissed his hand, hoping to show him the sweetness of some other kind of companionship. “Let me be your seer. Let me reveal what you can become.”

He looked at me like I’d transformed into a living beacon. All his remaining pride shattered. He crumpled in my arms and wept like a boy. I felt the release of his emotions, like everything he had ever suffered culminated in this moment. Despite the monster he had been tonight, my heart broke for him. I cradled his head and let his sorrow escape through me.

As I met Anton’s gaze, Valko’s tears fell from my eyes. The prince sheathed his dagger. He no longer stared at me like I was lost. Because I wasn’t, I had found myself. And that finding had more implications than either of us could understand at that moment.

I didn’t sever my connection to Valko, but beyond it I sensed Anton’s aura. Within it, I confirmed that the embers in the prince’s gaze reflected hope.

A shiver ran up my spine. I didn’t know if I could bear such hope. The weight of it fell heavier than the burden of the emperor’s mourning. With such hope, I could one day forgive myself, wash the blood from Feya’s statue clean.

As Anton stepped silently back and closed the door, I still felt his faith in me like a mantle I could never remove. I shut my eyes and more tears slipped down my cheeks. I hid my face against Valko and from the dream of a purer form of redemption.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
I
TOOK A CANDLE AND WALKED
PAST THE
red door, the lavender door, and set my key to the lock of the evergreen door. The train of my nightgown swept a path through the dusty floorboards, a path I recarved every evening before I went to sleep in the bed of the tapestry room.

My legs were a bit steadier than earlier. Pia had brought me a pastry and a cup of blessedly nondiuretic tea. She seemed keen to talk about her dance with Yuri, but I made for a poor listener. Keeping Valko in check had stripped me of all my energy. The emperor and I had never returned to the ballroom. After he’d wept in my arms, he pressed a platonic kiss on my hand and walked me to my rooms before retiring to his own—alone—no mistress in tow. I’d touched two hands to my head, then my heart, giving the goddess Feya my thanks for escaping that role. She was gradually becoming more to me than the chalice of Yuliya’s death.

A flicker of energy returned to me as I turned the lock of the evergreen door, as I came even closer to Anton’s room. I searched myself for any lingering darkness, any murderous thoughts. I felt none, only a mingling of anticipation and hope. I opened the door.

At the same time, from across the tapestry room, the midnight-blue door opened. Anton stood at the threshold, backlit by the glow of candles spilling out from his bedchamber. He had removed his kaftan, but otherwise was dressed in the shirt and trousers he’d worn to the ball. His hair was beautifully soft, fallen to his cheekbones in a way that reminded me of how the wind had moved through it when he’d driven the troika.

“You didn’t knock.” Unlike the teasing cleverness of a court lady, I blurted it out, then wanted to kick myself for doing so, in case he thought he was unwelcome. I couldn’t think straight. I was too distracted by the feeling in my aura. Not dark. Most definitely not dark.

“Forgive me.” Anton’s gaze briefly lowered to my nightdress, as if realizing the impropriety with which we always seemed to meet. But it wasn’t enough to keep him away. He took another step into the tapestry room. “I need to know if you’re all right.”

I gripped my candle with both hands. I couldn’t divert my eyes from his, not when they held mine so fervently.

“Now you look at me,” I said, attempting to lift my voice with a laugh, but my words rang with the disappointment I’d felt at the ball.

Anton moved even closer, tentatively, like he was
approaching a wounded animal. “How is your head?”

I shrugged a shoulder. I didn’t wish to reveal that it throbbed whenever I moved too quickly. When Lenka had earlier undressed me, I’d had to hold the frame of the box bed for balance.

My breath caught as the prince’s hand moved under mine to raise my candle to my face. His skin was warm, his pressure gentle but unyielding. He studied my eyes for several moments, examining me like he was a physician. It took all my willpower not to drop my gaze to his lips. What was the matter with me? Hadn’t I kissed enough Ozerov men for the night?

Finally satisfied that my eyes were working properly, Anton reached for my head, then paused. “May I?”

My heart was a symphony of percussion, but I nodded. His hands carefully turned my head and skimmed over the sore lump. “Are you dizzy at all?” he asked.

“No.”
Yes.
I couldn’t be sure if my light-headedness came from my injury or Anton’s touch, his nearness. With my head twisted to the side, all I needed to do was lean into him and my cheek would rest against his shoulder. I forced myself back a smidgen and rotated to meet his gaze. At the movement, his hands slid around to hold my face. We stared at each other. How aptly I’d once called his eyes a simmered-butter brown. “I’m all right,” I said, but my knees rattled.

He caught me as I swayed and did more—he lifted me in his arms and carried me back through the evergreen door, the lavender door, and the red door to my chambers. When I saw
the box bed, the lovely spell I’d fallen under dissipated.

“I don’t sleep here,” I confessed. “Not since the night you told me I could stay in the tapestry room.”

He regarded me, first with a subtly arched brow of surprise, and then his aura warmed with a glow of pleasure and radiated through my limbs and up to my face. Without a word, he turned around and carried me back through the red door, the lavender door, the evergreen door.

“This is ridiculous,” I protested, sure I was blushing. “I’m able to walk.”

“Hush, Sonya.” He drew back the covers and laid me down on my side, mindful of the lump on my head. Despite my declaration of strength, I weakly lolled onto the pillows. In truth, I couldn’t be sure if I was all right, if this was the culmination of my injury, too little food, and sheer exhaustion, or too much prince of Riaznin for my own well-being. “You’ve had a long night,” Anton said.

I noted how he kept every touch minimal and essential, even while he’d carried me and tucked the covers across my lap. How I wished he would lie beside me and let me drift to sleep cocooned in his warmth. I’d given Valko all the comfort I had to offer. Now I needed it from someone else.

“I’m not as simple as you think I am,” I said.

He froze in the act of standing up from my bed. “Pardon?”

“I didn’t forget about Morva’s Eve. And I know who you met with tonight. Count Rostav. Feliks. Yuri. Were you in Pia’s room? Did Yuri steal her key, or did she allow all of you entrance?”

The prince contemplated me, then set my candle on the bedside table. The soft light cast a reddish hue to the stubble on his chin. “Pia wasn’t involved.”

“But you don’t deny it was her room?”

He sighed and avoided my question by saying, “I don’t think you’re simple, Sonya.” With a humorless laugh, he dragged his hand through his hair. “Don’t you see what precautions I take around you? It’s because you . . . well, you’re complicated.”

I frowned, my finger trailing along the weave of my blanket. What did he mean by that? I wished to the gods I could sense where his aura differentiated from my own. Was any of my attraction to him reciprocal? Is that what he meant when he said,
You’re reflecting something that is not your own
? Did he think his feelings for me were one-sided, or did he have no feelings for me at all? I supposed it didn’t matter. Even if he did bear any desire for me, he would never act on it. I knew that much about the reserved prince. If he would never give me a dance, he would never give me a kiss. Why would he when every time he turned around, I was caught up in some mad embrace with his brother? “You think I’m weak,” I said.

Anton leaned closer. A spark of anger creased his brow. “Why would you say that?”

“You always discover me in Valko’s clutches. You see, again and again, what he does to me, what I allow him to do. You said he would make mincemeat of me.” I shook my head, wanting to bury myself in my covers. “You were right.”

“Stop!” Something deeper than anger emanated from him
now, something I couldn’t name, but riveted me to his gaze. “Please don’t tell me what I think or what I feel about you.” With a growl of frustration, he added, “Don’t you see yourself at all? Do you know what you did tonight?”

“I made the emperor lose his alliance with Estengarde.”

“Riaznin doesn’t need Estengarde. And that wasn’t your doing.”

“I nearly committed to becoming the emperor’s mistress.”

“But you didn’t.”

I shrugged. “I evaded him for the time being.”

“You evaded him when he was in such a rage as I’d never before seen. You evaded him when your life was in danger. When I was ready to kill my brother myself,
you
evaded him.
You
did that, Sonya.” Anton hands fisted into the mattress at my side. “Explain to me how you did that.”

“I . . .” My heart thundered. I couldn’t make sense of all the mixed signals the prince gave me. He looked upset, but the heat behind his anger was
supportive
, not derogatory. Nothing like the kisses Valko lavished upon me after slamming my head into the wall. “I opened myself to him,” I admitted. “Completely. I found a . . .
connection
, and I used it to persuade him to relent.”

Anton nodded. Behind his eyes was a millstone grinding a thousand thoughts together. “Could you do it again?”

I thought of the desperation it took to bring me that far, the weight of the emperor’s emotions when they fully overtook me, the relief when I’d curbed him, when I’d saved my own life, when I’d saved
his
from the threat of his brother. “I’m not certain.”

Anton gripped me by the shoulders. It wasn’t the first time an Ozerov had me pinned tonight, but unlike earlier, I felt anything but trapped. “You listen to me, Sonya. You are not weak. You’re the strongest person I know. So very few are willing to stand up to Valko—and they don’t have to wrestle with the intoxication of his aura like you do. Your strength is genuine. It is priceless. And I’m willing to wager the fate of Riaznin that you can prove your strength again.”

I blinked, feeling the mantle of his hope settle over me with a power I could feast on, though it was terrifying. “What do you mean?” What was he asking me to do?

“I believe you’re more than an ordinary Auraseer. You’re
meant
for something more.”

I searched Anton’s emotions, so tangled in my own.
“What?”
The word came out as a desperate plea. I yearned to know the secret, what it was I could become. I longed to be something other than the bringer of death and pain to all those I loved.

A grin touched his lips. “I have something for you.”

Perplexed, I watched him rise and go through the midnight-blue door to his room and then return with a book. As he moved nearer, it caught the candlelight. It was the book with the pale-blue binding. The book he’d turned over the last time I’d glimpsed it so I couldn’t see the title. But now he placed it in my hands as if he was passing over a treasure. I glanced at the cover:
Lament of the Gods,
by Tosya Pashkov.

“Tosya?” I asked in bewilderment. “Tosya of the Romska?” Tosya who was like a brother to me?

“Tosya the poet.” Anton nodded, confirming they were one and the same.

“You know him?” I asked as he walked back to his room. I couldn’t put my lanky, freethinking friend and the somber prince together in the same space. And when had Tosya started writing poetry? As far as I knew, he’d only composed songs.

“Read the book, Sonya.” Anton retreated farther. “And do not let a soul find you with it.”

I set it down and clenched my jaws in annoyance. “You still haven’t told me what you were doing tonight.”

“Read.”

“I felt a darkness. Were you aware that someone plotted to kill the emperor?”

Anton halted at his midnight-blue door. A fragment of surprise cut past the shared aura between us, followed by a grim acceptance that made me exhale with him. He nodded slowly. “Assassination isn’t the solution. We’ll make them see that.”

“We?”

“Read. The. Book.”

A spark of candlelight twinkled in his eye as he closed the door. I was left, once again, with too many questions and not enough answers.

I thumbed the edge of Tosya’s book with a sigh, then brought it closer as I cracked open the spine.