“I—I’m not—” he finally managed.
“Of course not,” his mother said drily. She bent over and kissed his forehead on her way out of the room. “I’m just glad that Simon’s injury keeps him from following you.”
Assassin
That night, for the first time since Rionin had declared he would marry Lily, Petunia dreamed she was back in the Palace Under Stone. She didn’t know why they weren’t returning there every night, but knowing Rionin, it was probably just another way to toy with them.
In this dream she was not in the ballroom, however, but in a room that contained furniture made from worn ebony, upholstered with faded violet silk. It was a bedroom, but not one she had been in before. Before, when she and her sisters had been trapped there overnight, they had all slept in one long room furnished with six narrow beds.
She looked around, almost idly, glad that she wasn’t being forced to dance in her dreams, or being pestered by the princes and court of the Kingdom Under Stone. The dressing table had an onyx box of face powder and a set of silver-backed brushes, the silver tarnished black. She fiddled with one of the brushes, wondering whose room it was. One of the strange court ladies? It didn’t seem much used.
“Do you like it?”
Petunia dropped the brush with a clatter and wheeled around, nearly falling over the stool as well. Kestilan stood in the doorway, his face so blank that if she hadn’t recognized his voice, Petunia wouldn’t have known who had spoken.
“It’s the same as every other room here,” she said, desperately seeking for her composure. “Black, purple, blue, silver, black, purple, blue, silver. An entire palace of bruises and darkness and nothingness, night after night, always the same.”
Kestilan looked at her, one eyebrow just slightly arched. “Why would my father have wanted to be reminded of what he had lost?”
“What he had lost?” She gave him a baffled look. “What had he lost?”
“The sun,” Kestilan said.
There was silence for a moment.
Then Kestilan went on, “Even I, who have never seen it, feel diminished when you come to us, reeking of upper world as you do, clad in colors that hurt our eyes with envy.”
Petunia blinked. Rose had once accused the princes of being fools, but they weren’t, she had later said. They had played at being dull because their father had wanted no rivals, and he saw his sons as easily replaced as well. What Kestilan had said made terrible sense. Gold, brocade, bright colors all belonged to the sun, to flowers and things that could not be replicated here below, where even the trees were made of silver and bore no fruit.
“I don’t remember everything being so tatty,” Petunia said, and now she was covering up the sudden pang of sympathy she had just felt for the late and previously unlamented King Under Stone. She fingered the silver inlay on the edge of the dressing table. It was tarnished, and there was a bit missing at the corner.
“My brother’s power is not as great as our father’s,” Kestilan said. “But that is easily remedied.”
“Is it?” She tried not to look too interested, but rubbed her fingers on her skirt as though the table had dirtied them.
“Yes,” Kestilan said with the same rather studied indifference that Petunia was trying for. “He will give Jonquil and some of your other sisters to members of the court, since we are lessened in numbers. That will elevate the courtiers, and bring more power to Rionin when we dance.”
“If we let you,” Petunia said.
Kestilan laughed. “I have always loved how you all pretend to have any choice in the matter.” He came toward her, and she did her best not to back away. He was tall, as tall as Prince Grigori, and he loomed over her, making her bend back over the dressing table a little. She put her hands behind her. “As if you were not born for this very purpose,” he hissed in her ear. “To marry us, and bear our sons.”
Petunia struck Kestilan across the face as hard as she could with the grimy silver hairbrush. When he howled and grabbed his cheek, she skipped around him and out the door of the room, though she did not know where she was going. She ran down the hall with him in pursuit, dark blood—darker than human blood—coming from his nose.
“This will be our room, Petunia,” he shouted after her. “When we are wed.”
Petunia ignored him, running even faster as ahead she saw the front hall of the palace. The front doors were open wide, and she ran out and down the steps to the black lake. There was no way across: the water of the lake burned the skin and the boats were gone. Across the water, she could see the silver trees moving in a breeze that no one could feel.
The trees had grown from a blessed silver cross their mother had once dropped on her way to the Midnight Ball, and their wood had proved to be deadly to Under Stone and his sons. Now Petunia wished she could get to the little wood, not to escape, but so she could gather some of the branches of those trees. She imagined whittling daggers or arrows from them, weapons that could be used to attack Rionin and Kestilan and the others.
She felt in her pockets for the little scissors she carried to snip yarn with, and remembered that this was just a dream. And even if she could get across the water and break off some of the branches, she wouldn’t wake up in the morning with the silver in her hands.
“Come here,” Kestilan ordered, crunching across the coarse black sand of the shore.
The sand, too, was more than it appeared: Galen had brought a handful out with him during their escape from the first King Under Stone, and it had turned out to be tiny black diamonds. Galen later had them set into a bracelet for Rose. Petunia bent and gathered up a handful, rubbing the sharp little jewels between her palms.
“What are you doing?” Kestilan’s nose still bled, and he was flushed to an almost normal human ruddiness with his anger.
“This is just a dream,” Petunia said. “So this won’t hurt.”
She cast the diamonds into his eyes.
As he howled and clawed at his face. Petunia reached into the sash of her gown. It was just a dream, so the rules of the real world didn’t apply. She normally didn’t walk around with a pistol stuck into her sash like a pirate in a romance, but in a dream she could do as she liked. She drew the pistol she found there, cocked it, and fired, shooting the ground an inch from Kestilan’s right boot.
“Don’t worry, it’s just a dream,” she told him, her voice sounding strange and faraway.
“Have you gone mad?”
Servants and courtiers came running at the sound of the shot, and Petunia brandished the pistol at them, causing them to draw back. Among the crowd she saw Blathen and Telinros, and she aimed at the latter. He was Pansy’s partner at the Midnight Balls.
“If you can do what you like to us in our dreams, then we should have the same freedom,” she said as she drew back the hammer and heard the bullet click into place. Telinros put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Coward,” she muttered.
“Petunia,” said the King Under Stone, arriving at last, the servant who had summoned him cringing at his heels. “Let us not be foolish.”
“I am not being foolish,” Petunia said, and now she aimed at the king. The pistol shook only slightly. “I am merely taking my cue from you, Your Majesty, and doing what I like with these dreams. A pity this isn’t a real pistol, and that I am not really here. You are not immune to bullets, as I recall from the last time we met in the flesh.”
“That has changed now that I am king,” Rionin said with cold pride. “Though my brothers have not that advantage.”
“Good to know,” Petunia said. She readied her finger on the trigger.
“But Petunia,” Rionin said with a smile. “When next we meet in the flesh, and that moment is rapidly approaching, you will not have a pistol. You will have nothing but what we give you.”