I would have happily gone into the room and merged with the crowd as best I could. They all wore white, which was traditional for formal events in Sky. Only I wore a color. But I wouldn’t have been able to disappear in any case, because when I entered the room and stopped at the top of the stairs, a servant nearby—clad in a strange white formal livery that I’d never seen before—cleared his throat and bellowed, loudly enough to make me wince, “The Lady Yeine Arameri, chosen heir of Dekarta, benevolent guardian of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms! Our guest of honor!”
This obliged me to stop at the top of the steps, as every eye in the room turned to me.
I had never stood before such a horde in my life. Panic filled me for a moment, along with the utter conviction that they knew. How could they not? There was polite, restrained applause. I saw smiles on many faces, but no true friendliness. Interest, yes—the kind of interest one holds for a prize heifer that is soon to be slaughtered for the plates of the privileged. What will she taste like? I imagined in their gleaming, avid regard. If only we could have a bite.
My mouth went dry. My knees locked, which was the only thing that stopped me from turning on my uncomfortably high heels and running out of the room. That, and one other realization: that my parents had met at an Arameri ball. Perhaps in this very room. My mother had stood on the same steps and faced her own roomful of people who hated and feared her behind their smiles.
She would have smiled back at them.
So I fixed my eyes on a point just above the crowd. I smiled, and lifted my hand in a polite and regal wave, and hated them back. It made the fear recede, so that I could then descend the steps without tripping or worrying whether I looked graceful.
Halfway down I looked across the ballroom and saw Dekarta on a dais opposite the door. Somehow they had hauled his huge stone chair-not-throne from the audience chamber. He watched me from within its hard embrace with his colorless eyes.
I inclined my head. He blinked. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow.
The crowd opened and closed around me like lips.
I made my way through sycophants who attempted to curry favor by making small talk, and more honest folk who merely gave me cool or sardonic nods. Eventually I reached an area where the crowd thinned, which happened to be near a refreshment table. I got a glass of wine from the attendant, drained it, got another, and then spotted arched glass doors to one side. Praying they would open and were not merely decorative, I went to them and found that they led outside, to a wide patio where a few guests had already congregated to take in the magically warmed night air. Some whispered to one another as I went past, but most were too engrossed in secrets or seduction or any of the usual activities that take place in the shadowy corners of such events. I stopped at the railing only because it was there, and spent a while willing my hand to stop shaking so I could drink my wine.
A hand came around me from behind, covering my own and helping me steady the glass. I knew who it was even before I felt that familiar cool stillness against my back.
“They mean for this night to break you,” said the Nightlord. His breath stirred my hair, tickled my ear, and set my skin tingling with half a dozen delicious memories. I closed my eyes, grateful for the simplicity of desire.
“They’re succeeding,” I said.
“No. Kinneth made you stronger than that.” He took the glass from my hand and lifted it out of my sight, as if he meant to drink it himself. Then he returned the glass to me. What had been white wine—some incredibly light vintage that had hardly any color and tasted of flowers—was now a red so dark that it seemed black in the balcony light. Even when I raised the glass to the sky, the stars were only a faint glimmer through a lens of deepest burgundy. I sipped experimentally, and shivered as the taste moved over my tongue. Sweet, but with a hint of almost metallic bitterness, and a salty aftertaste like tears.
“And we have made you stronger,” said Nahadoth. He spoke into my hair; one of his arms slid around me from behind, pulling me against him. I could not help relaxing against him.
I turned in the half circle of his arm and stopped in surprise. The man who gazed down at me did not look like Nahadoth, not in any guise I’d ever seen. He looked human, Amn, and his hair was a rather dull blond nearly as short as mine. His face was handsome enough, but it was neither the face he wore to please me nor the face that Scimina had shaped. It was just a face. And he wore white. That, more than anything else, shocked me silent.
Nahadoth—because it was him, I felt that, no matter what he looked like—looked amused. “The Lord of Night is not welcome at any celebration of Itempas’s servants.”
“I just didn’t think…” I touched his sleeve. It was just cloth—something finely made, part of a jacket that looked vaguely military. I stroked it and was disappointed when it did not curl around my fingers in welcome.
“I made the substance of the universe. Did you think white thread would be a challenge?”
That startled me into a laugh, which startled me silent in the next instant. I had never heard him joke before. What did it mean?
He lifted a hand to my cheek, sobering. It struck me that though he was pretending to be human, he was nothing like his daytime self. Nothing about him was human beyond his appearance—not his movements, not the speed with which he shifted from one expression to another, especially not his eyes. A human mask simply wasn’t enough to conceal his true nature. It was so obvious to my eyes that I marveled the other people out on the balcony weren’t screaming and running, terrified to find the Nightlord so close.
“My children think I am going mad,” he said, stroking my face ever so gently. “Kurue tells me I risk all our hopes over you. She’s right.”
I frowned in confusion. “My life is still yours. I’ll abide by our agreement, even though I’ve lost the contest. You acted in good faith.”
He sighed, to my surprise leaning forward to rest his forehead against mine. “Even now you speak of your life as a commodity, sold for our ‘good faith.’ What we have done to you is obscene.”
I had no idea what to say to that; I was too stunned. It occurred to me, in a flash of insight, that this was what Kurue feared—Nahadoth’s fickle, impassioned sense of honor. He had gone to war to vent his grief over Enefa; he had kept himself and his children enslaved out of sheer stubbornness rather than forgive Itempas. He could have dealt with his brother differently, in ways that wouldn’t have risked the whole universe and destroyed so many lives. But that was the problem: when the Nightlord cared for something, his decisions became irrational, his actions extreme.
And he was beginning, against all reason, to care for me.
Flattering. Frightening. I could not guess what he might do in such a circumstance. But, more important, I realized what this meant in the short term. In only a few hours, I would die, and he would be left to mourn yet again.
How strange that this thought made my own heart ache, too.
I cupped the Nightlord’s face between my hands and sighed, closing my eyes so that I could feel the person beneath the mask. “I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. I had never meant to cause him pain.