THOUGH THE MASKENTANZ STRETCHES ON until the eastern sky is bleeding pastels and the moon is rapidly fading in the west, I spend the rest of it clinging to the edges of the room, hoping to avoid the Kaiser’s gaze. I’m not sure whether it’s the energy from the ball itself or the Kaiser’s threat hanging over my head, but sleep feels miles away, even when my body grows heavy and lethargic. When the last guests begin to file out through the main entrance, I reluctantly follow, ready to turn in for what I’m sure will be a restless couple of hours in bed, but when I reach the doors, Cress is waiting, holding two steaming mugs of spiced honey coffee.
Relief seeps through me at the sight of her, my friend, but it’s quickly quashed by the sharp memory of the poison hidden in my room and what I’m meant to do with it. My conversation with Blaise echoes in my mind, but I push it aside.
“The night is young,” she tells me with a grin, passing one mug to me.
I thank her and take a small sip. In the Astrean tradition, the coffee has been mixed with honey, cinnamon, and milk. It’s too sweet for most Kalovaxians, but it’s the way Crescentia always orders it. Not for the first time, I wonder whether it’s because she has a sweet tooth or because she understands how much the small gesture means to me.
The coffee tastes like my mother’s breath when she kissed me good morning, and the memory soothes me and breaks me all over again.
Crescentia links her arm with mine and steers me not through the crowded entrance hall, but through a smaller one that shoots off to the side. Having her so close and knowing what I’m expected to do feels like a splinter in my heart, sharp and nagging, no matter how I try to ignore it.
“I should go to bed, Cress,” I tell her. “I’m exhausted.”
“That’s what the coffee’s for,” she says cheerfully, squeezing my arm. “We hardly had a chance to talk the entire night, Thora.”
“I know. You were such a wonderful hostess and I didn’t want to steal you away. But we’ll talk tomorrow, I promise.”
Crescentia glances sideways at me as we walk, though she doesn’t let go of my arm.
“Are you angry with me?” she asks after a long moment of quiet. She sounds wounded and, despite myself, my heart lurches.
“No,” I say with a laugh. “Of course I’m not.”
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she insists. “This week. Tonight. Now, even.”
“I told you, I was sick.” The words sound hollow even to me.
“Just one hour, Thora. Please.”
She sounds so hurt that my soul cracks and I’m tempted to say yes. And why shouldn’t I say yes? What’s waiting for me back in my room? Another argument with Blaise and Artemisia, with Heron trying to play the mediator? And Blaise will want to talk about the Kaiser, what he saw, and I can’t do that. I shudder thinking of the Kaiser’s hand on me, his breath against my skin.
If Blaise asks me about it, I will fall apart and I will lose what little respect they have for me.
Crescentia is easier because being around her means becoming Thora, and Thora doesn’t think about things too much. Right now, Thora feels like a blessing.
“All right. I’ll stay up a little longer.” I hesitate for a breath. “I’ve missed you, Cress.”
She beams at me, almost glowing with her own light in the dim hallway. “I’ve missed you, too,” she says before pushing a door open with her shoulder.
I realize her intended destination just as the brisk early-morning air hits me. The gray garden. It could never be as beautiful as it was under my mother’s care, but in this light there’s something eerily lovely about it. It’s a ghost of a place, filled with ghosts of its own. Skeleton fingers of the bald tree branches stretch out high overhead, casting smoky shadows against the stone in the dawn light.
Next to me, Cress wrinkles her nose in distaste as she looks around at the garden. It isn’t her sort of place. She prefers color and music and crowds and life, but still, when her eyes find mine, she smiles. Another thing she does for me, because she knows what this place means to me. Because she also knows what it is to lose a mother.
The realization causes another stone of guilt to fall into my already heavy gut.
“It’s because of the luncheon, isn’t it?” she asks me. “I made you wear that hideous dress and then I acted so jealous when you spoke with the Prinz. I shouldn’t have acted that way. It was…unbecoming. I’m sorry.”
The apology takes me by surprise. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Cress apologize to anyone before, at least not genuinely. Not when it wasn’t simply a way to get what she wants. But there’s no mistaking the regret in her voice now. I smile and shake my head.
“Nothing you do could ever be unbecoming, Cress. I promise, I’m not angry with you.” She doesn’t look convinced, so I give her arm a squeeze and look her straight in the eye when I lie, hoping that will make it seem true. “I’m not interested in the Prinz. I promise you that.”
She bites her lip and looks down at her coffee. “Maybe not. But he likes you.”
I force a laugh, as if the idea were ridiculous. “As a friend,” I tell her, surprised by how smoothly the lie rolls off my tongue. I nearly believe it myself, even with the fresh memory of Søren’s mouth against mine. “Of course a boy considering marriage with a girl will seek out the friendship of her closest friend. When we talk, it’s always about you.”
She smiles slightly, her shoulders relaxing. “I do want to be a prinzessin,” she admits.
“You would make a good one,” I tell her, and I mean it. The Kaiserin’s words come back to me: all a prinzessin has to be is beautiful.
She’s quiet for a moment, crossing to sit down on the stone bench beneath the largest tree, motioning for me to join her. When I do, she takes a deep, wavering breath before she speaks. “When I am Kaiserin, Thora, you’ll never have to wear that horrible crown again,” she says quietly, staring straight ahead at the garden, now awash in pastel light from the rising sun.
Her words take me by surprise. Ever since the incident with the war paint, she’s never mentioned the ash crown, or even looked at it. I thought she’d grown used to it, stopped seeing it altogether. Again, I’ve underestimated her.
“Cress,” I start, but she interrupts me, turning to face me fully and taking my hands in hers and smiling.
“When I’m Kaiserin, I’ll change everything, Thora,” she says, voice growing stronger. “It isn’t fair, the way he treats you. I’m sure the Prinz thinks so, too. It breaks my heart, you know.” She gives me a smile so sad that for a moment I forget that I’m the one she’s pitying and not the other way around. “I’ll marry the Prinz and then I’ll take care of you. I’ll find a handsome husband for you and we’ll raise our children together, like we always wanted. They’ll be the best of friends, I know it. Just like us. Heart’s sisters.”
A lump hardens in my throat. I know that if I put my life in Crescentia’s hands, she would shape it into something pretty for me, something simple and easy. But I also know that’s a childish hope for sheltered girls with the world at their feet. Even before the siege, my mother impressed upon me the difficulties of ruling, how a queen’s life was never hers—it was her people’s. And my people are hungry and beaten and waiting for someone to save them.
“Heart’s sisters,” I repeat, feeling the weight of that vow. It isn’t something made lightly; it’s a promise to not just love another person but trust them. I thought I didn’t trust anyone, that I wasn’t capable of it anymore, but I do trust Cress and I always have and in almost ten years of friendship she has never once made me regret that. She is my heart’s sister.
My Shadows are watching, I know. I can make out the outlines of their figures in the second-story windows, peering down at us. But they won’t be able to hear anything.
“Cress,” I say, tentatively.
She must hear the hitch in my voice, because she stiffens, turning toward me, fair eyebrows arched over a bemused smile. My heart hammers in my chest. Words surge forward, and part of me knows I should hold them back, but Cress has never been anything but honest with me. We are heart’s sisters, she said it herself. She has to love me enough to put me first.
“We could change things. Not just for me, but for the rest of them as well.”
Her brow furrows. “The rest of who?” she asks. An uncertain smile tugs at her lips, like she thinks I’m telling a joke she doesn’t understand yet.
I want to turn back, to pull the words from the air between us and pretend they were never said, but it’s too late for that. And yes, Cress is the daughter of the Theyn and that makes her a perfect target, but it could make her an even more invaluable asset. Could I bring her in? I think of how I changed my Shadows’ minds about Vecturia. I can sell this to them as well. I can save her.
“The Astreans,” I tell her slowly, watching her expression. “The slaves.”
Her smile lingers for a moment, a ghost of its former self, before fading to nothing.
“There is no changing that,” she says, her voice low.
It’s a warning. I ignore it. I reach out with my free hand to take hers. She doesn’t pull away, but her hand stays limp in mine.
“But we could,” I say, desperation creeping in. “The Kaiser is a cruel man. You know this.”
“He is the Kaiser, he can be as cruel as he likes,” she replies. She glances around, as if there’s someone listening nearby. When her eyes find mine again, she looks at me like I’m a stranger, someone to be wary of. In all our years of friendship, she’s never looked at me that way.
I’m dimly aware of how tightly I’m clutching her hand, but she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t try to pull away. “If you could be Kaiserin. If…if you could marry Søren. You could change things. The people would love you, they would rally to you over the Kaiser, you could take the country from him easily.”
“That’s treason,” she hisses. “Stop it, Thora.”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell her my name is not Thora, but before I can speak, something over Cress’s shoulder catches my gaze in one of the high windows that borders the garden to the west. I see a pale figure in a gray dress. I see yellow hair trailing behind her like the tail of a comet as she falls. I hear a scream that echoes in my bones and ends with a sickening thud on the other side of the garden, a hundred feet away.
Both of our mugs fall from our hands and break on the stones before Crescentia and I run toward it, but I know when we get there it will be too late. There is no surviving a fall like that.
The blood is the first thing I see. It pools out around her body—so much, so quickly. It’s the only color I can see against the gray of her dress, the gray of the stones, the colorless pallor of her skin. Her body is broken, limbs twisted at unnatural angles, like a marionette whose strings have been cut.
In my gut, I know who it is, but when her face comes into focus, shock still shakes me to my core. I’m so lost in it that I almost don’t hear Crescentia’s panicked cries next to me. I almost don’t feel her clutching my arm in shock and fear, our previous discussion forgotten, as if I can protect her from the Kaiserin’s corpse.
I untangle myself from Cress and inch closer to the body, stepping around the blood. I crouch down and press my hand to the Kaiserin’s cheek. Even in life her skin was cold, but it seems different now that she’s truly dead. Her eyes stare off at nothing and I close them, even though I’m sure they’ll follow me into my nightmares.
In the end, though, it’s her mouth that unravels me. Her dry lips are still caked in ash from when she kissed my forehead with something resembling love, and she’s smiling more broadly than I ever saw her when she was alive. She has the same smile as Søren.
“Thora.” Crescentia shakes my shoulder. “Look up.”
In the window the Kaiserin fell from, a figure watches us. It’s too dark to make out his face, but his golden crown glints in the early-morning sunlight.