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“Neah!” Avra cried. “You have no idea what it is and what we’ve been through. No idea!”

“You’re a fool. Do you know what you’re risking?”

Neah continued berating Avra, but Rom’s attention was on Triphon, who already had his fingers on the metal cap.

Triphon opened the top, sniffed once, then brought the glass rim carefully to his lips and tipped the vial back.

Rom did nothing to stop him.

Neah’s face went white. “Triphon!”

Triphon lowered the vial. His single gulp had taken the blood down past the next measure—a fact Rom registered with some alarm. There had been only enough for five, but now fewer than two measures remained.

“Well, I can tell you it tastes terrible,” Triphon said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and resealing the vial.

“Have you gone mad? Now I’ll have to report you as well!”

Triphon shoved the vial back at Rom. “I’m doing my duty as one of the guard.”

“What duty? You’re in
training
.”

“To see if there’s a breath of truth to anything these two—”

He grunted and staggered backward, doubled over as though punched in the stomach—and then fell into an end table, knocking a lamp and a ceramic bowl to the floor with a crash.

Rom bounded forward and tried to catch him before he landed on the ceramic shards, but Triphon managed to recover enough to lurch toward the kitchen.

“Some—water—”

He collapsed under the archway between the two rooms.

For a moment they all stared at him, unmoving.

“You’ve killed him!” Neah cried.

“No—”

“You’ve lost your minds and killed Triphon!”

Neah spun and ran for the door, vellum flapping in her hand.

“Rom!” Avra shouted.

With a glance back at Triphon’s unmoving form, Rom thrust the vial at Avra and took off after Neah, out the door and down the stairs.

He could hear Avra’s feet racing behind him. Neah’s escape would be their undoing.

It was daylight. If Neah got out into the apartment complex’s communal yard, there would be no way to stop her without witnesses. All the apartments on this side of the building looked out on that same yard. Compliance would be on them in minutes.

He chased her, feet firing down the stairs like pistons. She was nearly three-quarters of the way down, five steps ahead of him, when he launched himself past her to the landing below. He whirled just as she crashed into him.

They tumbled to the ground floor in a tangle. The vellum came free from Neah’s hand and flew toward the gate on a stiff breeze.

Avra tore down the stairs and rushed past them both, nearly tripping over Rom’s foot as she ran for the vellum. She snatched it up before the wind could blow under the gate and into the yard.

“Get off!” Neah screeched. “Get—”

Rom clamped a hand over her mouth and rolled over so that he could get his feet under him. But she was twisting and flailing so hard that he couldn’t, screaming into his hand.

Avra strode back. “You’re going to have to knock her out,” she said.

“I can’t do that!”

Neah kneed him in the groin.

Killing her suddenly became a possibility.

Rom fell on top of her, bearing her to the concrete on
her
back this time. When he had recovered, he jerked her upright. Avra grabbed her by the ankles.

Panting with exertion, they hauled her up the stairs and back into her apartment. Avra closed and locked the door. Triphon’s long form remained unmoving in the kitchen entryway.

Neah began to twist and jerk with renewed urgency.

“We’ll have to tie her up.”

“You realize that you have to give her the blood now.”

Rom hadn’t thought that far ahead, but he saw her reasoning. It would be the only way to persuade her to help, if only for her self-interest. They certainly couldn’t leave her bound in her closet to starve to death.

Neah cried her objections into his hand.

“Hurry.”

Avra vanished into the kitchen with the vial of blood in hand.

Rom dragged Neah to the couch and pulled her down, back to him, on top of him. He swung a leg up, tried to capture both of hers, but only managed to trap one. He jerked his hand away just as she tried to bite him.

“Avra!”

“Hold on—”

“A little help?”

Neah screamed.

“And maybe a sock or two—the neighbors are going to hear!” He clamped his hand back down on her mouth.

Avra emerged from the kitchen with a cup and a funnel. She set the cup down on the sofa table and pushed the end of the funnel through his fingers. After a few tries and another scream from Neah, Avra got it into her mouth.

“Tip her head back more. Hurry.”

He did, the narrow end of the funnel firmly between two of his fingers. He could feel her biting down on it, trying to push it out with her tongue, but his fingers held it in place. Avra retrieved the measuring cup, filled halfway with a lighter red fluid.

“I mixed it with honey water,” Avra said.

She climbed onto the kicking Neah, dropped a knee in the middle of her chest, pinched her nose, and poured a small amount of the fluid into the funnel. Neah choked and sputtered. Avra leaned back a little and waited as some of the fluid spewed back up out of the funnel. The rest disappeared into Neah’s mouth. She watched her throat work, and then poured the rest of it in.

Neah coughed, whimpered once, and started to settle. When all the fluid had drained from the funnel, Avra pulled it out.

“I’m sorry, Neah. It’ll make sense, I promise.”

They waited until Neah stiffened with a cry and finally went still.

“She’s out?” Rom asked.

Avra climbed off. “She’s out.”

A few seconds later they stood over Neah’s limp form. She was breathing more rapidly than Triphon on the floor behind them, but within a few seconds, her quick pants began to subside.

“This isn’t quite how I thought this would go,” Rom admitted.

Neah’s braid had come nearly all the way loose. Pale strands of her hair were strewn across her face. Her teeth and the inside of her lips were lined in macabre red.

He’d never thought of Neah—hard-nosed and as Ordered as they came—as pretty before, but in that moment he realized that she was quite beautiful. In the silence of Neah’s apartment, he found himself wanting to lift her hand, to turn it over and marvel at the crook of her wrist.

A hand lit on hers, but it wasn’t his. Avra stroked the back of Neah’s hand, traced the line of the other woman’s fingers.

“I feel like my heart’s breaking for her. I don’t know why. Will she forgive us, do you think, for what we’ve done?”

“We’ll find out, I suppose,” he said.

He glanced around her apartment, really seeing it for the first time. It was all perfectly organized, from the placement of the pictures on her walls to the neat stack of books on her coffee table. Every color, every texture in her home spoke of calm. There were no bright tones, no alarming hues, no harsh surfaces. Everything in this apartment had been chosen with one specific purpose: to soothe one who lived rigidly within the confines of Order.

Order and fear.

“Now what?” Avra whispered.

He straightened. The room was draped in uncanny quiet.

“We wait.”

He reached out for her hand, led her away from the sleeping Neah, past the sprawling form of Triphon, and into the kitchen.

“What if Neah’s right, Rom? That all of this is criminal. How do we know if we’re doing the right thing?”

Something from his past clicked into place.

He said, in a low voice, “My father said something to me when I asked him a similar question once.”

“What was it?”

“He said that what we call love is the shadow of something lost.”

“How could he have known that?”

“Because he was a keeper. What the old man said was true. And what my father said about love is true. I didn’t know then, but I know now. I don’t know what the right thing is, but I do know that we’re closer to the truth than we were before.”

He thought if he stared into her dark eyes long enough, he might see through to her thoughts. That he might know them without asking. He was trying to search those depths when she stepped into him, sliding a hand behind his neck.

He wasn’t aware of his bending toward her, only that her breath was warm against his mouth. That her lips, when he kissed her, were immeasurably soft.

He wanted to taste her. To inhale her. The thought of kissing her—an act born of tenderness in the storeroom—sprang to full-fledged need. How had he never done this before today, how had it never occurred to him in all those years and days together?

He let go of her hand and slid both arms around her, kissing her deeply. She was sweet and salty and wet. Her small fingers tightened in the hair against his nape.

When she abruptly pulled away, he faltered. He could hear her breathing, heavier and more labored than before.

No, that was him.

“Rom?”

He looked at her mouth, the way her lips, still moist, moved when she said, “Triphon’s waking.”

H
ere are
the eyes that have captivated the world,” the maidservant Nuala said, setting down black eyeliner. She laid it atop the astronomical chart she had insisted Feyn relinquish at least long enough for her to be made up.

Feyn turned on the stool to look into her vanity mirror. Nuala’s round face appeared over her shoulder against the backdrop of silk draperies. “You see, my lady, you are beautiful.”

Beauty
, Feyn thought idly. Such a strange concept. A matter of desirable features—in this case the light gray eyes and pale skin of royalty. The coveted evidence of humanity’s evolution, proof they had become something great.

And she must be greater than them all. Not because she personally wished it, but because in four days she would accept the mantle of sovereignty from the hands of the Sovereign, her father.

In the mirror, Feyn’s eyes lifted to Nuala’s face. She was too round, too broad across the forehead, too short to be considered beautiful by the masses. But Feyn found her pleasing. The sight of the maid could often quell her anxiety. Was that not beauty? Nuala didn’t possess the paleness of eye or the translucent skin of the Brahmin, although like many she highlighted her veins by tracing them with blue powder on her forearms. Did her opaque skin make her less evolved? Less beautiful?

It didn’t matter. Nuala was one of the wisest people Feyn knew, and this was the primary reason she’d selected Nuala as her maidservant years earlier.

Feyn reached up to rub her neck. Nuala gently pushed her hand away and began to knead the muscle for her.

Feyn sighed and closed her eyes.

“I wonder sometimes, Nuala…I was born closest to the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month in all the eligible birth cycles during Father’s reign. So I am elect. But if my parents had copulated a day later or a month before, would I even exist? I certainly wouldn’t be the next Sovereign.”

“The Maker makes no mistakes.”

Feyn opened her eyes and looked down at the black liner on her vanity table, at the rouge and powder, the brushes and the hair combs, all the implements of Nuala’s craft.

“I am the artist and you are my perfect clay,” Nuala liked to say.

Clay. It was more true than the woman knew.
We are all molded into something. I only wonder how much the Maker truly has a hand in any of it.
It was a blasphemous thought, one she’d never dare voice. But the thought had woken her many nights, sending her to stare at the thunderclouds from her balcony.

To even think such things was so unbefitting a future Sovereign that she could confide in no one. And so the solitude, too, had become as familiar to her as the late nights gazing out at the rain.

She must learn to put idle ponderings aside, at least for now. Whether being chosen was the will of the Maker or the error of mankind, it made no difference. She would soon be Sovereign, and that would be her course for the next forty years.

She gave a little laugh. It was mirthless, the vestige of a baser life, a conversational nicety with a soothing sound.

“I’ll be sixty-five by the time we sit like this again, before this mirror, and talk of life without the office. Do you realize that, Nuala? And there will be lines by then—here, beneath my eyes, and here.” She touched the corner of her mouth.

“You will be beautiful beyond the age of one hundred, lady. And you’ll live to a hundred and thirty.”

“Hmmm,” Feyn said, sitting back. If her father was any example, Sovereigns aged far faster than their constituents. Feyn sighed and got up.

She wore her customary black leggings and snug-sleeved tunic and would have thrown on a simple overcoat were it not a public day for her—her last until her inauguration. Tomorrow she would leave for Palatia, her family’s country estate, to spend the prescribed days of solitude before her inaugural entry into the city. They would be her last private days for forty years.

When Nuala went into the adjacent closet to choose a gown for her mistress, Feyn made her way into the front room of her quarters to pick at the breakfast tray on the table there. The food was cold. She pulled at a few green leaves and left most of the meat on the plate. The kitchen had begun to undercook it of late.

Nuala came into the room carrying a cobalt gown trimmed in silver. The blue was the color of the sky on a bright day, Nuala had proclaimed, the day the tailor had first shown them the bolt of fabric.

“My lady?”

Feyn slid her arm into the sleeves, shrugging the heavy garment onto her shoulders. The business of fastening it took several minutes, with Nuala securing each of the small buttons up the front before coming around to smooth her hands down the back. The bell sleeves revealed the tight undersleeve of the black tunic. Feyn felt no inclination to reveal the smooth skin of her forearms; the coveted translucence of her skin was evident enough in her neck and face.

Nuala sniffed in the direction of the table.

“Undercooked again. I’ll say something to the cook. This is your brother’s doing. He’s decided he can hardly stand cooked meat. I saw a whole rabbit prepared for him just the other day and it bled so much when he cut into it that I wondered if the heart had fully stopped beating.”

“Royals do tend to like their meat rare,” Feyn said.

“I heard that another dead woman was taken from his chamber this morning.”

The revelation sent prickles down the back of Feyn’s neck. She didn’t know what to make of these recent rumors. But to Nuala, she said, “Death is everywhere. It is with us, and that’s simply the fact. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.”

Nuala shifted her eyes but held her tongue. Feyn couldn’t blame the woman.
Everywhere
or not, no one wanted to view the specter of death. Not even one as orderly and wise as Nuala.

A low voice spoke from across the chamber. “What do you care what they carry from my chambers, maid?”

The women turned toward the sound together. Saric stood next to the silk drape that shielded the drafty back stair, dressed in an overcoat so rich it put the curtain to shame.

“Brother,” Feyn said as Nuala backed a step away.

Saric had stood behind the drape in silence for several minutes after descending the stair. He’d done so on several occasions these last few days, but this was the first time he’d made his presence known.

He dismissed the ever-present maidservant with a nod and watched her take leave of her mistress. The she-dog would ordinarily be far too common and uninteresting for his tastes, but as of late he wondered what it might be like to take her too-round body.

When she had gone, he returned his gaze to his sister. Had he ever really seen the pale of those eyes until lately? He could smell the heavy scent of her perfume. More than that, he could
smell
the skin of her neck and face and the blue veins running with her life.

Though in this last week he had seen himself more beautiful, more singular in all the world, he felt positively earthen beside Feyn.

He wouldn’t have it any different.

Saric stepped forward, eyes on her. “Hello, Feyn.”

“Is there something wrong with my door?”

“I’m your brother, not your servant. Can’t I come as I please? You never minded when we were younger.”

“My half brother,” she corrected. “And that was a long time ago.”

She walked to the floor chest where she kept her jewelry. She had so much of it, and even more of late. He’d seen the accessories come in with the other gifts, heard the way the servants scuttled around them, fearfully handling the tribute of nations. Yet he knew without looking that she would choose from that considerable treasure the same simple rings she favored every day: a moonstone and a large aquamarine given to her by their father at the announcement of her inauguration nine years ago.

He strode to the small table and examined the remains of her meal, which only disgusted him. “Forgive me.” He helped himself to the cup of water on her table, ignoring the meat, which smelled like a corpse. He nudged the tray aside; a stack of charts lay on the table beneath it.

“So many stars, so many figures. How do you keep so much in your head, sister? I’ll never understand you mathematicians.”

“What’s this about a dead woman in your chambers?”

He dropped the cup back on the table, sloshing water onto the stack of charts. “A woman they ran some experiments on. Can I help it if they practically killed her by the time I got to her? I try to content myself with their castoffs but find myself traumatized by morning.”

She hesitated as if considering whether to voice her disapproval of his activities again. But she resisted.

“By
they
, I assume you mean the alchemists,” she said.

“I do.” He drew in a steadying breath and approached her.

“There are proper concubines, Saric. Make use of them.”

“Yes, sister. But here now, let me help you. You should wear the favors of your constituents.” He opened the doors of the jewelry chest and slid out one of the drawers. It was full of jewels of every kind. He pushed the drawer back in and pulled out another. She stood watching him rather than the chest.

“I mean it, Saric. It isn’t fitting.”

“Fine.” He stirred through the assortment of baubles, each of them valued at several years’ worth of any ordinary citizen’s wages.

“Once is terrible enough, but twice in the same week? Where do these women come from? Are they ill and dying? How do you stand it—how can Portia?”

He could smell the fear on her. It was as heady as her perfume.

“Yes,” he said. “They are ill. Here.” He lifted out a pair of large diamond-and-sapphire earrings and held them out to her.

She turned away. “They’re garish.”

“They’re the best stones in the lot, and they still do you no justice.”

She flicked a glance to him.

Her eyes were like the sun and ice at once. He felt his breathing thicken.

“What is it about you, brother? You look different. Are you sweating? You seem unwell these days.”

“I’m not unwell.” His gaze fell to her lips. “I am very well. In fact, I’m more full of life than I have ever been.” He found himself wanting to touch her cheek and was fascinated by his own restraint. He reached for her hand instead.

This was the hand that had gathered Vorrin’s just yesterday, that had held it as she touched her lips to his palm. He turned her hand over, traced her palm with his thumb, briefly considering doing the same. But she was not his Sovereign yet.

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “At any rate, it can’t be good for you—”

“Do you remember when I used to come down in the middle of the night?” He looked into her eyes, and she shifted her gaze away.

“Of course.”

“You used to let me lie beside you and tell me there were no such thing as monsters, that the shadows did not move.”

“I remember. What do you want, Saric?”

There was no tenderness in her voice. Not even pity. She was capable of neither.

“You saved me from a thousand terrors every one of those nights,” he said. “But now perhaps I’ll be able to repay you. By helping to quell your fears before you become Sovereign. Or in the very least by giving you a gift that will allow you to mitigate those fears.”

She gave a short laugh. She had mastered the sound, even if she knew nothing of the emotion that caused it. “What you speak of isn’t possible.”

He turned her hand over, stroked a line upon her palm lightly with his finger. “But what if it were? Possible, I mean.”

“Saric, I’ve never known you to be given to dreaming.”

“Only of monsters and shadows.” He forced a smile, irritated by her response. He released her hand, reached for the earrings in her open drawer, and held them up. “May I?”

She turned so that he could slide the small hook through her earlobe, indulging him with the same forbearance that she indulged Nuala, he thought. Perhaps less.

“Beautiful,” he said. “The other?”

She let him affix the second earring. The prong pricked his finger.

“I see great fears on the horizon,” he said.

“Then your fears run away with you again, as they did when you were a child.”

“And would you champion me again, as you did then?”

“You have Portia for that.”

“Yes, I have Portia,” he murmured. He stepped back and rubbed dry the bead of blood between his finger and thumb. “Still, you must admit it’s an irresistible thought.”

“Please, Saric. I’m not one of your concubines to bring you comfort. I’m your sister.”

“Half sister,” he corrected. “As you pointed out. You know as well as I that I could legally marry you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Sovereigns don’t marry.”

He was surprised by his sudden urge to strike her as he might strike Portia for speaking in such a tone.

Saric sighed. “So you will be. Sovereign. In four days all the world will bow to you, as will I.” He dipped his head.

“Yes, well, I’m not Sovereign yet.”

“No, but in my eyes, you’ve always been Sovereign, Feyn. We both know that. I’ve always stood by your side.”

She hesitated but then nodded. “Yes, you have.”

“Which is why I’d like to ask you one small favor.” He let it stand.

“I’m not sure I’m in any position to grant favors.”

“But you
will
be. And I’ll still be your flesh and blood. Surely you can’t deny that much.”

She studied him. “I don’t deny it.”

“So you could grant me a favor when you become Sovereign. A trifle that would forever indebt me to you beyond my loyalty, which you know you already have.”

“What trifle?” she asked.

So then, here it was.

“Let me serve you as your senate leader.”

For a moment she didn’t move. Then, a smile. And he thought he might have won her confidence in the matter.

“Wait.” He laid a finger against her warm lips. “I will give you something in return.”

Still smiling, Feyn brushed his hand away and pulled her hand back. “You will, will you? And what’s that?”

“I will show you that the monsters are real.”