Lychandra’s eyes sagged and she whispered to her husband. His name turned into a cough and she gagged, turning her head to vomit. Mathiros flinched; the liquid that soaked the side of the bed was watery, clotted with blood dark as soil or tea dregs. Her organs were failing, and no skill or magic could undo the damage now.
The king knotted his fist in the gauzy curtains as if he meant to rip them from the bed. “Kiril, please!”
Kiril closed his eyes. Mathiros hadn’t pleaded with him, with anyone, since he was a child. He’d never been able to say no to the boy.
The queen hitched and shuddered, twisting stained linen. Isyllt gasped—she felt it too, the icy presence filling the room. The black diamond rings they both wore began to spark and glow. Kiril’s vision darkened. Mathiros screamed his wife’s name.
Kiril reached, scraping himself raw, and threw every bit of strength against the shadow. For an instant it balked, mantling over the room. He couldn’t breathe, could feel nothing but that black chill.
The ice inside his chest broke and stabbed him through the heart.
His legs folded. The shadow crested over him, crashed
down. Mathiros screamed. Isyllt screamed. The floor rushed up to meet him. Old debts come due at last.
The shadow retreated; it would take Kiril with it, and at last he might rest. Isyllt’s face lingered behind his eyes—no surprise that death would wear her countenance. But she called his name, invoked it, held him inside his pain-riddled flesh. Over the roar in his ears he heard his king’s wailing grief. He might only have imagined Erishal’s mocking laughter.
Darkness stole over him, dark and blessed silence.
The bells tolled an hour before dusk, slow and solemn and irrevocable.
In her chambers in the Gallery of Pearls, Savedra Severos sank onto the edge of the bed and pressed her face into her hands. Her eyes ached, though she had no tears—it wasn’t her grief, but the weight of it still crushed her. It would crush the whole palace; the queen was well loved.
Had been.
“I should go to him.” Her voice snagged and broke halfway. Maybe it was her grief after all. Lychandra had always been kind to her son’s impolitic mistress, more than Savedra could have hoped for. “If he’ll see me.”
She had been the prince’s lover for six months, formally installed in the Gallery for three, but it still felt unreal that she might walk the palace corridors and visit Nikos whenever she wished. Even now. Especially now.
It was almost a relief, if only to leave her room. The windows were shuttered and draped and warded, the air close and cloying with smoke and incense. With no sunlight for days, too many candles had smudged the ceiling and curtains and left the taste of wax and char on her
tongue with every breath. The ashes of prayers streaked her shrine, but no saint had answered, not Sarai or Alia or even owl-winged Erishal. Or rather, Erishal had answered, but not as Savedra had begged.
“He’ll see you,” her mother said, sipping her tea. No amount of death or chaos could shake Nadesda Severos’ flawless deportment. It made her seem colder than she was, but it was reassuring. A familiar comfort. “He needs you now more than ever.”
Savedra frowned, letting her hands fall. Her hair hung in kinks and tangles around her face and she didn’t need a mirror to know how bruised her eyes must be, how dull her complexion. Nothing she could do for it now—it was madness to uncover the mirror with so many demons about, and she’d sent her maids away days ago.
That her parents had stayed in the city, let alone come to visit her in the palace, was testament to either pride or love. Or both, she conceded. There was room for both. And ambition, of course—that the Severoi stayed when other great houses fled the Octagon Court would be marked. Especially now, as the city’s horror became the kingdom’s grief.
“This is an important time for you and the prince,” her father said, leaning over Nadesda’s chair. “With Lychandra gone, it will be you he turns to more and more.”
Ambition again. Her fists clenched in her already-wrinkled muslin gown. She’d been grateful, at first, that her parents hadn’t repudiated her when she became Nikos’s mistress. It might have been easier if they had.
She touched the pearls at her throat—the mark of her station. Her fingers tensed against the cool slickness and for an instant she thought of ripping them away, scattering
them across the room. “I’ll never be queen, Father, not for all your scheming.” Her voice was calm when she would rather scream; her mother’s child, after all. “Can’t you at least feign a little sorrow? Or tact?”
Sevastian’s lean brown face creased in a frown. A familiar expression—she’d have the same lines on her brow in ten years. Or sooner. Her mother’s smooth olive skin and silken hair were not to be hers.
“I don’t have to feign sorrow, Vedra,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Lychandra was a good woman, a good queen. She’ll be missed. Saints know she made Mathiros bearable. But sorrow doesn’t negate practicality. You may not be queen, but consort isn’t beyond your reach. There’s precedent enough for that.”
Savedra pried her fingers from the pearls and touched instead the telltale bulge above them. The joke of her birth, that kept the rank of queen forever from her as surely as politics did. If only that were as easy to rip away as a necklace. “There will be a queen. The betrothal is already set and Lychandra’s death won’t dissolve it. And even if this foreign princess doesn’t make Nikos set me aside, I’ll still be nothing more than another pearl. Sorrow doesn’t negate practicality.”
Nadesda raised a hand when her husband would have spoken. “Enough. This is a time for tact as well as sorrow. Vastian, leave us. I’ll help Vedra dress.” Her teacup didn’t clink against the saucer, but her veils spoke in a dry rasp of lace and netting as she rose.
Her father gave them both a sardonic little bow and retreated to the antechamber. Savedra found a comb on her dresser while her mother opened the wardrobe to inspect her gowns. Sandalwood teeth caught in snarls and
she fought the urge to tear them free. The sharp pain in her scalp grounded her.
“Why do you bother, Mother? I won’t be queen, and I’ll give you no Severos heir or cat’s paw bastard. Why keep including me in your schemes?”
Nadesda pulled out Savedra’s white mourning dress—a year out of style—and turned, sinking onto the bed next to her daughter. She wore eucalyptus oil to keep insects away, and the sharp minty smell clashed with the more familiar perfume clinging in the folds of her skirts.
“My love for you has nothing to do with the children you can’t bear, or the marriages you might make.” Her manicured hand closed over Savedra’s and she smiled. “I’ve always been grateful to have a daughter, even if it took us a few years to discover it.” The smile fell away. “But my love and loyalty to the house demand I take all of those things into account. As a mother I want you to be happy with your prince, but as archa I have other well-beings to consider too.”
Savedra continued combing for a moment, then gave up and twisted her hair into a thick knot at her nape. No one whose opinion she valued would care what she looked like right now. “Just remember, schemes that hurt Nikos will hurt me as well.”
“None of us can stop the world from hurting those we love. The best we can do is be there to ease the pain.” Her mother draped the white silk across Savedra’s lap and went to the bathroom; water gurgled, and she returned with a damp cloth. “So wash your face and go to your prince. You could have made worse choices, even if he is an Alexios.”
Savedra couldn’t help but smile at the approbation—the strongest an archa of House Severos might ever grant
their ancient rival. “Mother, can’t you leave us out of your machinations?”
Nadesda rarely frowned, but her beautiful face stilled with sadness. “Even if I could, others won’t. I can only promise to spare you any suffering that I can, and to keep you innocent of anything that might compromise you.”
Savedra wanted to argue. Wanted to scream. But she was too tired, too empty. More than anything she simply wanted to go to Nikos. Her hands tightened on the washcloth till water dripped onto the dress in her lap. She’d need a new one made, anyway. The palace would be awash in white for a year.
“Thank you,” she said at last. Then she began to scrub away the clinging smoke, and the ghosts of tears she hadn’t yet shed.
499 AUC
I
n the Sepulcher, death smelled like roses.
Sachets of petals and braziers of incense lined the marble halls and scented oil lamps burned throughout the long vault, twining ribbons of rose and jasmine and myrrh through the chill air. Meant to drown the smell of blood and rot that crept from the corpse-racks in the walls, but death couldn’t be undone so easily. The raw copper scent of recent violence teased past the sweetness, creeping into Isyllt Iskaldur’s sinuses as she studied the dead woman on the slab.
Blue-tinged lips parted slightly, expressionless in death, but the slash across her throat grinned, baring red meat and pale flashes of bone. Barely enough blood in her to settle—some clotted like rust in brass-blonde hair, pasted damp-frizzed tendrils to her cheeks. Lines down her ribs showed where corset stays had pressed into flesh.
Her clothing, cut away by competent, uncaring attendants, was shelved in an oubliette of an evidence room upstairs.
Isyllt crossed her arms beneath her breasts and shivered in her long black coat. “Where did you find her?” Her breath trailed away in a shimmering plume; spells of cold etched the stones.
“In the Garden,” Khelséa Shar said, “in an alley just after dusk.” The police inspector lounged against the wall between corpse-drawers, a short, dark woman in the garish orange coat of the Vigiles Urbani. Frescoed vines and leaves swirled behind her—the builders had tried to make the room cheery, but no amount of paint or plaster could disguise the death that steeped these stones. “She was cold and stiff when we got there.”
Isyllt frowned at the dead woman, brushed a finger against a lock of yellow hair. A prostitute, then, most likely. A foreigner too, from the coloring—Vallish like Isyllt, perhaps, or Rosian. Refugees from Ashke Ros crowded tenements and shantytowns in the inner city, and more and more turned to the Garden for work.
Isyllt pressed gently on the woman’s jaw and it opened to reveal nearly a full set of tea-stained teeth. Her elbows were still stiff, knees immobile. Rigor had only just begun to fade. “A day dead?”
“That’s our guess. It was raining when we found her, and she was soaked, but there were hardly any insects. The alley is visible from the street—she couldn’t have lain there all day.”
“So dumped. Why call me?” The Garden was the Vigils’ jurisdiction, unless the Crown was somehow involved, or the crime was beyond the city police. And while pride insisted that the Vigils’ necromancers weren’t as well trained
as the Arcanostoi or Crown Investigators, Isyllt knew they were perfectly competent. She bent over the white stone table, examining the wound. The knife had nicked bone. The killer was strong and sure-handed—left-handed. “What can I tell you about this that you don’t already know?”
“Look at her thighs.”
The woman’s legs tapered from flaring hips to gently muscled calves and delicate ankles. No spider veins or calluses on her feet—chipped gold paint decorated her toenails. Flesh once soft and supple felt closer to wax under Isyllt’s careful fingers. Death whispered over her hand, lapped catlike at her skin. The cabochon black diamond on her right hand flickered fitfully, ghostlight sparking in its crystalline depths.
She ran a gentle hand between the woman’s thighs, tracing the same path as a dozen customers, a dozen lovers. But this time there was no response, no passion real or feigned. Only stiffening muscles and cold flesh.
No wounds, no bruises. No sign of rape. No violation but that of the blade.
“What am I—” She paused. On the inside of the left leg, near the crease of the groin, she touched a narrow ridge of scar tissue. More than one. She pressed against stiff flesh to get a better look. Old marks, healed and scarred long ago. Teeth marks. She found the same marks on the other leg, some only recently scabbed.
Very sharp teeth. Isyllt knew what such bites felt like.
“Do you think this had anything to do with her death?” She kept looking, but found no fresh wounds.
“Maybe.” Khelséa reached into an inside pocket of her coat and pulled out a folded piece of silk. “But this is why I called you.”
Isyllt stretched across the dead woman and took the cloth; something small and hard was hidden in its folds. She recognized the shape of a ring before she finished unwrapping it.
A heavy band of gold, skillfully wrought, set with a sapphire the size of a woman’s thumbnail. A rampant griffin etched the stone, tiny but detailed. A master’s work. A royal work.
“Where was this?” A knot colder than the room drew tight in her stomach.
“Sewn inside her camisole, clumsy new stitches. Her purse was missing.”
A royal signet in a dead whore’s clothes. Isyllt blew a sharp breath through her nose. “How many know?”
“Only me and my autopsist.” Khelséa snorted. “You think I’d wave something like this in front of the constables?”
Isyllt stared at the ring. A woman’s ring, but no woman alive had the right to wear it. She looked down at the body. A sliver of blue iris showed beneath half-closed lids, already milky. “What was her name?”