Burning Glass (7 page)

We walked silently to the stables. I sat in the troika while he hitched up the three horses. The sun emerged above the rolling, snowy horizon as we set off on the last leg of our journey. Because we had traveled through a good portion of the nights, we would arrive earlier than I’d anticipated.

“We’ll reach Torchev by the afternoon,” Anton said.

Those were the last words he uttered until the massive walls of Riaznin’s capital towered over us, and the troika, with its three tired horses and two heart-heavy passengers, crossed into the city of the emperor.

A
S
I
BEHELD THE GREAT CITY, MY EYES WIDENED
LIKE A CHILD’S.
I hadn’t felt such wonder since the first time the Romska had performed their strange and mysterious dance around a campfire when I was a little girl.
How is it I have come to live among these people?
I’d asked myself then.
How will I be one of them?

The same questions overwhelmed me now as we passed a sleigh with a nobleman wearing a tall fox-fur hat and a silver embroidered cloak. A lady sat beside him, pearls dangling from her headdress and connected in deep scalloped rows beneath her chin. Beyond the couple, the magnificent palace glimmered in the late-afternoon sun. My belly ached for something more substantial to eat than the hard cheese and bread Anton had given me from his satchel. Perhaps it was my hunger that made the palace appear like an enormous confection.

The tall arched windows had a candied effect, their edges rimmed with multicolored tiles and brightly painted stonework.
An intricate network of engravings trimmed the various curving walls like icing on spiced cookies, and topping each tower were what looked like giant dollops of gold-plated cream.

Everything I’d ever seen in the vast countryside of Riaznin looked dim and dull in comparison. Several moments passed before I could tear my gaze away. Only then did I glimpse my closer surroundings and what lay beyond the beauty of the quaint shops, their carved wooden awnings, and the streets lined with cheerfully painted houses. Worse, I began to sense it. The ravenous craving of the barefoot boy dodging into a shabby alleyway. The resentment kindling within a sunken-cheeked man as he tossed the contents of his chamber pot outside and turned his glare on the palace. The weariness of a pregnant woman as she strung her dingy laundry on a line. The apprehension of the nobleman who had passed us in his sleigh, the way his eyes leveled on the road and angled away from the steely looks of the peasants.

The people seemed to multiply before us as we traveled deeper into the city. They packed the streets until anywhere I looked, in any given direction, there were hundreds of them. Some extended their palms begging for coins. Others held up their wares for purchase—lacquer art, bone carvings, furs pieced together from small animals. Beyond the people I saw, I felt thousands more, their pulsating desires and despairs.

But could I really feel them—all of them? Or did I only fear what would happen if I did?

Anton looked askance at me. “Are you all right?”

I’d shrunk down in my seat and gripped the edge with white knuckles. My body trembled. “There are too many.”

“Aren’t you accustomed to gathered people? The Romska must have taken you into cities.”

I shook my head, my nerves tingling with panic. “No, they kept me from them. Even the villages. They passed me to other caravans or hid me in the woods until they returned from their day’s work.” My experience proved the same at the convent. Unbidden, a memory seized me—being gagged to silence my screams as the sestras dragged me away in a fit of madness, yet another failed attempt of training my ability by testing me in a crowded marketplace.

“Why?” Anton frowned. Behind him, a mass of bodies wove past one another, their movement a constant, confusing swirl of colors. “What happens when you’re surrounded by so many?”

A burly man approached the troika and rattled off something about a fair price. He held a slab of meat near my face. I whimpered, smashing against Anton before the bloody flesh could touch me, before I felt the death of the elk or deer or whatever it was.

A baby cried. The sound cut through the shouts of the bartering and bustle all around me. I whimpered harder and dug my fingers through my hair, my body burrowing into Anton’s. My movement knocked the reins from his hands, but he caught them up again. Our troika trudged along, slowed by the throngs of people.

“I can’t do this,” I mumbled through chattering teeth. I
wasn’t cold—I couldn’t be—not with the warmth of pressed bodies and the thick, cloying air of the streets. But somewhere out there, someone was. Maybe many were.

A young woman, close to my age, leered at Anton from the opposite side of the sleigh. “It’s the prince!” She placed a hand on her chest. When he wouldn’t look at her, her gaze drifted to me, her thin brows lifting with question. Her aura darkened mine with a stain of jealousy. Something crashed in the square, followed by shouts and pounding fists.

Up ahead, past a large fountain, a market stall had careened over and blocked the road. Two men threw punches at each other. More joined them, yelling and taking sides. Their fury scraped beneath my skin and itched for release.

“Stop that,” Anton said to me, voice strained, lips tight.

I realized my fingernails dug into his leg above his knee. I jerked back my shaking hand. “I’m sorry.”

The eyes of the thin-browed girl popped wider. “She must be the new Auraseer.” The girl pointed at me. Her dark jealousy broke apart into a shower of awe. It prickled a buzz of energy across my skin. “The prince has brought the new Auraseer!”

One by one, the heads in the square turned to me. Even the fistfight broke apart.

Their wonder combined with the pinprick energy of the girl, until together it felt like a thousand knives nicking at my skin. Each cut sliced deeper.

Tears slid down my cheeks. Too many expectations. Too many people to disappoint. Too many teeming emotions begging
to be defined. I felt like a glass figurine skittering to the edge of a mantel in an earthquake. Any more of this and I would fall, break into a million pieces. “Make them stop,” I pleaded as I hung onto Anton, my words jumbled and scarcely audible. “I can’t . . . I can’t do this.” With the road blocked, who knew how long we might be trapped here?

Tendrils of his anxious concern reached me. I felt them in the warmth of his skin past his shirtsleeve. But the auras of the people swiftly crowded them out. “Don’t look at them.” He flicked the reins in an effort to budge the horses along.

I squeezed my eyes closed, but the multitude swarmed inside me, bees in a hive far too small. “That doesn’t help.” My control was slipping away, just as it had on the night the mob of peasants amassed at the convent’s gate.

“Think of something—anything else.”

I pictured the Ilvinov Sea. I would stare at it from the bell tower of the convent. I pretended the murmurs in Torchev were the roaring of the ocean, the rise and fall of white-capped waves.
Auraseer,
the water called to me.
Just a girl. Too young a girl.
The depths churned with feelings, dark and curious, bitter and dangerous. Rising into an enormous swell, the water slapped down, pushing me under. Tossing me. Thrashing me. I couldn’t breathe.

“Sonya, open your eyes.” Anton’s hand slid across my lower back and held me like an anchor. “Look at me now.”

My nose pressed into his cape. My body seized like a madwoman’s. I peered up at him.

“Think of me.” He set his jaw, striving to radiate a show of powerful calmness. It wasn’t authentic. He was worried. I sensed it from our close contact. He didn’t believe I could endure this.
I
didn’t believe I could.

“You’re not enough,” I said.

“I
am
enough. Stay with me.” His strong grip nudged me closer, and his fingers spread, fitting between the bones of my rib cage. “Look at me. Focus only on me.”

My head throbbed. I couldn’t concentrate. Behind Anton, flocks of strangers stared and pointed. The road grew more crowded as the steady influx of people were bottlenecked in. Anton shook me, drawing me back to him. “What do you see when you look at me?”

“Well . . .
you
,” I replied in exasperation.

“What about me? What color are my eyes?”

My vision dotted with stars. I wasn’t breathing properly. “Brown.”

“What kind of brown?”

I wanted into curl into a ball and make myself disappear, hide from the city dwellers of Torchev, from their brazen curiosity, their shameless amazement, their confounding presumptions of me. Instead, I clung to the intense challenge of Anton’s gaze. In the broad daylight, with no moon to soften the edges of him, with no trees to cast him under their mottling shade, I saw the prince with new clarity. “Butter,” I said.

“Butter?”

“Butter,” I repeated.

“Butter is not brown.”

“It is when it simmers in a pot and smells dark and nutty.”

One of his eyebrows lifted in submission. “Very well. And what of my nose?”

“This is foolish.” I sneaked a glance behind him at the people.

“You think my nose is foolish?”

“No!” I whirled back to him. “No, of course not.”

“I was told I have my grandfather’s nose.”

“Did your grandfather have a small mole on the bridge, nearly touching his right eye?”

“He did not.”

“Then you have been lied to, Prince Anton.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Tell me about my hair.”

My heart pounded. How many people were watching us? How many knew I could see into them? “I’ve never met a boy so vain.”

“My hair, Sonya,” he said, keeping me on task.

I swallowed. “I like it windblown. No doubt you will have it slicked to perfection once we reach the palace.”

“Speaking of reaching the palace, at the snail’s pace we’re traveling, I don’t believe I’ll have enough body parts left for you to discuss.” Something glinted in his eye. “You’re right. There are far too many people.”

“Yes . . .” What was he thinking? “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” If only my ability allowed me to read his thoughts. I used to pretend I had a gift for that type of divining
with some of the Romska caravans—it helped me earn my keep and complemented the trade of their fortune-tellers—but the truth was I was as blind to mind reading then as I was now. But what did it matter? I found myself fascinated with the mystery of Anton, with the perfect shape of his mouth, with the thinness of his upper lip, which had once made him look so stern. Somehow, despite the masses surrounding us, my sights and senses had entirely trapped on him. I released a marveled breath. How had he done it? How had I?

“Do you promise you will stay in the troika while I do something?” he asked.

My nerves flashed with anxiety. “Are you leaving me?”

“No, Sonya.” His hand squeezed my side, then carefully drew away. “I’m going to get us to the palace even faster. Would you like that?”

I nodded, though I felt unsure. My thoughts were tangled.

“Then stay thinking on me a moment longer.”

He waited, his gaze intent until I nodded again.

He brought us to a full stop before the fountain of the square, then rose and jumped out of the sleigh. I watched him in earnest as he began to unharness one of the horses with practiced hands. My emotions were better grounded, but I was frayed and exhausted. I might lose power over myself if I wasn’t careful.

“Feliks!” Anton called out. A young man with a trimmed beard and red cap emerged from the crowd. “Watch these horses and troika and bring them back to the palace when you’re able.”

Feliks nodded without question or exchange of money. His piercing blue eyes slid to me as he assisted the prince. Once the single horse was unharnessed, Feliks took the bridle of one of the others and whispered something to Anton. “Later,” was the prince’s muttered reply.

In any other circumstance, I would pause to puzzle over Feliks, how Anton knew him, how he knew he would be there, and why he trusted him with two expensive horses and a troika that belonged to the crown. But with too many emotions battling for ground within me, my questions surrounding the man quickly fled my thoughts.

That is until Anton passed him the folded slip of paper from his pocket—the letter I’d tried to read. Anton tried to be covert about the switch, but I caught a flash of white in Feliks’s palm after he shook the prince’s hand in farewell. I remembered another man then. The man hidden by the cottage door where Anton had stopped on our journey to Torchev. The man with the amethyst ring. The man who had given Anton the letter he’d just passed to Feliks.

“Sonya.” The prince rounded the sleigh and held out his hand. “Are you ready?”

A flare of panic lit inside me. I looked at the people crowded behind him. If I stepped outside the troika and any nearer to them, I would only sense their auras that much stronger.

“It’s all right,” Anton assured me.

I took a deep breath and reached for the pillow slip that held my sole belonging.

“Feliks will bring that,” he said.

I shot a wary glance at the prince’s acquaintance. “I can’t . . . I have something too valuable.”

Considering my earnest plea, Anton nodded. He grabbed his satchel from the floor of the sleigh and emptied out the food. “Put it inside.”

Quickly, I wrapped the pillow slip’s excess linen around the figurine of Feya within. Once I placed it in Anton’s satchel, he tucked his mother’s blanket on top, then closed the flap and slung the satchel over his shoulder. He reached for me. I stood and the prince placed both hands on my waist to help me down to the street. A sense of calm descended upon me at his touch. I latched on to it. Now wasn’t the time to quell my curiosity over his friend or his ally—whoever Feliks was—not when the collective feelings of several hundred people fought to stake their claim inside me.

“Make way!” Anton said, using the full force of his rich timbre. The people did as he commanded. As they murmured among themselves, I fastened my gaze on the prince’s booted heels and struggled to block out the whispered rumors, the quiet hostility of the people, and their astonishment over the new sovereign Auraseer.

Anton lifted me on the horse’s bare back, and then, using the edge of the sleigh as a springboard, he hoisted himself up to sit behind me.

He folded his hands over mine, already woven though the mare’s white mane, and guided the horse to the nearest alley at
the perimeter of the square. His commanding voice once again parted the crowd. Passing through the alley was a more difficult squeeze. Our knees bumped along the outer walls of the neighboring shops, but at length we made it through to a backstreet. Here the people were in more manageable numbers. I seized on to the hope that we would soon be free of this area altogether.