Chapter Three
Kiara gaped at Winifred as they sat in her suite a few hours later, dressed down and cleaned up. Thanks to Winifred, the princes now had many little lights dancing around the air, giving the room an ethereal suffusion of color.
“They seriously thought you were like some spy? That's so stupid. Can't believe they didn't even let you keep the donuts.”
“What can I say? They're scared? It's a big plot with the palace. Not that the werewolves won't be able to cope, of course—I'm sure they'll be fine.” Winifred smiled at Kiara, all the while feeling like a filthy traitor.
Kiara was married to a werewolf. She'd be on the list of heathens with the Cult of the Sun as well.
Of course, Winifred knew that a long time ago. She just spent a lot of her spare moments avoiding thinking about the consequences.
Kiara's eyebrows scrunched. “I don't know, though. Ian seemed really worried, and I heard Mordred talking about it earlier with his father. They think the current tensions or whatever between Golubria and Kanthus are likely going to spark something. Ugh, Bethany's far better at explaining these things.”
Winifred took out a pack of cards before sorting out the highest symbols for Night Tree (a simple game of obtaining sets, except that they could bargain for each other's cards). “I'm sure it'll be fine. I think Ian wants me to listen in when I next go and talk to my mother. See if I can find out more.”
“Uh oh, you have a stalker werewolf. He didn't take off his mask, did he?”
“No!” Winifred flushed furiously. “And I'm happy to keep things as they are, thank you very much. We didn't exactly meet in great circumstances. He did slam me against the ground, lock me up and threaten torture!”
“Ah, but he apologized afterwards.”
“Sure, that makes it all better,” Winifred said, rolling her eyes. “If only you could forgive anything in the world you did wrong by apologizing.”
If only that were true.
The guilt eating at Winifred, she dealt out the cards, fingers trembling slightly, and attempted to focus on the game. Kiara liked to talk a lot, so Winifred generally tuned out most of the chatter, occasionally adding a “Right. Hmm,” or “Okay, then.”
After a few games, they ate the new donuts before retiring to bed. All the while, Winifred held onto her secret, even though it burned her up inside, making her struggle to sleep. All she wanted to do was to blurt out a warning to Kiara, to Mordred, to everyone in her life who had made her realize there was more than Golubria, her mother, and a cult that thirsted for the death of Kanthus' nobility.
She managed sleep eventually, but the stress followed into her dreams. Abstract images of Kiara, standing in front of a burning palace, as the Cult of the Sun raised their banners in the gardens. She saw a werewolf being dragged to a pyre, and realized with a jolt that it was Ian, though the mask was a part of his face. He gave Winifred a baleful stare.
You did this.
As Winifred watched, her mother patted her on the back, congratulating her for a job well done. The fires lingered on Winifred's mind as she woke up, focusing on the soft lights weaving around her. The lights she created. A talent gone to waste.
Once, I wanted to be an artisan. I wanted to help infuse all the new crops planted, make the rivers glow, people's hair shine, and create a zoo of living light, dreaming up fantastical things and letting them roam. She'd made countless sketches of what her zoo would look like. She imagined all her jobs being in the same compound, so people could ask for hair alterations, give her pictures of things that didn't exist for her to create an illusion of, and animate one of the hardest natural resources—running water. You needed to fix the light to distant points, rather than to the individual particles, otherwise if you made a molecule glow, it would vanish almost instantly due to the downward shift of water.
Air, of course, was the hardest, because it was always vanishing and reappearing, shifted by the wind or by smoke. You could bind air to air, but it would soon dwindle apart.
Winifred remembered presenting her ideas to her mother. Mother was rich. She could afford it. And Winifred remembered the exact response, from the way Susan's lips had parted in a condescending smile, and the way she barely even glanced at the drawing and written ideas.
“Oh, that's nice, dear. But it's not very practical, is it?”
There, the dream died in front her mother. But Winifred kept her favorite drawing. It was now tucked in the breast pocket of her best coat.
They talked about a certain rite of passage in Golubria. They called it the flux, because it was difficult to know sometimes what you wanted to do, who you wanted to be.
Winifred highly doubted people often had this conflict. And the second either side found out, she'd lose them forever. Maybe even be executed as a criminal. Being slammed against the ground, chained up—that was the fate that awaited her.
Once, she thought she could endure it. But she had allowed herself to grow complacent, and love where she worked and the people she worked with.
She dreaded that conflict. Dreaded seeing the betrayal sink in their eyes.
Just a little longer. Then I'll make my choice. Then, hopefully, no one will care who I was.
Winifred snorted to herself as she looked in the mirror.
No one would care because they'd be dead.
Now she needed to go and attend to Kiara. Kiara had other servants now, because Winifred spent some time training Kiara and Yelena on lightweaving. They had official tutors as well, but they preferred going to Winifred, who understood it on an instinctual level. She never went through the same training that people in civilized nations like Fjordan and Kanthus did. It just made sense to her.
Winifred chose to wear this dawnnight a black shirt with two pockets and buttons, and a brown leather outer layer with a thin, fur, armless coat over the long-sleeved leather. She wore tight leather with a knee-length skirt, and boots that widened at the opening, which helped to conceal her bracelet. Fashionable, slightly less like the normal servant attire—but she did have permission to wear whatever she wanted. Satisfied with her appearance, she threaded some light into her clothes and boots. Not always a popular move to do since it bumped up the value of clothing if they were enchanted, but whatever, right?
Winifred strode out of her little rooms attached to Kiara's quarters through a thin hallway, and rapped on the side door which led to Kiara's living room.
No answer. She went in anyway. If Kiara was having some fun times with Mordred on the sofa, oh well. Let the embarrassment come. The brightly glowing room greeted her, but there was no Kiara.
A relief, then.
However, slightly less of a relief was the fact that there happened to be a masked man in the kitchen, currently examining a cupboard. He wore the imperial robes of a detective, with a black tailcoat, long pinstripe pants, boots, and extra padding in his shoulders. The wolf mask had clasps on the back of his scalp, presumably to make it harder to remove by accident.
“Ian?” Winifred squinted, wondering what in the endless dark he was doing in Kiara's suite. And why Kiara hadn't chased him out yet.
The werewolf spun around, iron mask staring passively at her. “Hello,” he said in a manner that suggested he wasn't doing anything wrong. “Don't mind me. Just examining what Fjordan princesses prefer to eat. It could help in investigations in the future. Fjordans like spiced meats, did you know that? They also have a strange kind of pastry concoction which tastes very good with cream.”
“What are you doing in Kiara's rooms? Won't Mordred have your head for this?”
“They're out at the moment. I requested procuring your services, and they agreed. Kiara seemed to think it terribly exciting that I wanted to talk to you.”
Winifred barely controlled the blush that wanted to spread across her face. “I bet she jumped at the chance to leave me alone with you.”
“Yes. She likes to pulverize the 'stubborn' button into nothingness. Not always an admirable trait.” Ian sounded rather absent as he began to pull out a few packages of dried meat from the cupboards.
“Why are you here?”
“Why do you think? For you. I would have come and knocked earlier, but I became distracted.” He brought one of the sausages close to his mask. Could he even smell it like that?
Wait. Yes. He had smelled where she came from, after all. Right before their unpleasant introduction. “And why do you need me?”
“Simple. I'd like to ask you to spy for me. When you next go to see this mother of yours, I need all the information possible that you can glean. My agents are already working overtime, securing any potential choke points, questioning some of the staff to see if any of them are compromised. We don't know who might have been hired to carry out the assassination attempt, but we'll be damned if we don't try to find out.”
“Ah,” Winifred said. She didn't actually know either. But she did know some of the potential invasion points. She'd heard talk about elite assassins, “ironic justice” and even the talk of a traitor. But that was all she heard her mother say.
I'm sure it won't hurt if I tell him one of the entry points, then warn my mother that it's known.
“That does remind me, I did hear something about tunnels. Something that the patrols use?”
“Yes. We're aware of that one. It seems the most obvious way to invade the palace. We're also aware of the fact there may be disguises utilized. The servants generally don't question a masked individual, which will cause some issues. Everyone's just too respectful of us.” Ian placed the meat back and scratched the back of his head. “But thank you for telling me. It might be a relief, actually, if that's the only way they're thinking of getting in...”
It's not, Winifred thought gloomily. But she also knew her mother withheld the best methods. Just in case Winifred ever got discovered and was forced to reveal information. She prepared me for moments like this. And she deliberately left me blank of the full plan. Maybe her mother didn't trust Winifred completely. But then, why give her such a gaspingly expensive gift?
“Do you think the Cult of the Sun has any basis?” Ian said suddenly, jerking Winifred out of her gloom.
“I imagine all religions have a basis,” Winifred said. “But people can get carried away. That's what I think happened with the cult. They believe we're in the end times, and barely managing to hold on before one night, everything will just end. So they try to seek a way to return the sun. Somehow. Part of the logic is that killing night-horde-based creatures might do it.”
“Do they know about new research into what happened to the sun?” Ian now wove his way over to her, the lights billowing around him. “The older princess, Bethany, was involved in a rather, uh, groundbreaking discovery in the swamps. And by that, I mean they fell through the ground and found ancient catacombs. Night horde creatures worshipping something. Believed to be the one who took the sun.”
“We actually do have something on that,” Winifred said, silently cursing herself for the we. Would that seem suspicious? “Though the cult refers to it as a ‘false god’. No one seems to know exactly what happened, though, do they?”
“Nope.” Ian now began scratching his chin under the mask, making Winifred uncomfortable. If he took it off... “But obviously it has to do with the types of magic that do exist in the world. A powerful lightweaving. Your princess has access to a type of lightweaving we didn't think possible. So why not something else we don't think possible?”
Winifred shrugged. “Sure.”
“Speaking of impossible...” Now Ian leaned forward in interest. “I'm curious to know how powerful your lightweaving is. People talk about you. They say you can weave water and air, and create thousands of light attachments at once.”
“I'm not that good. Not enough light in my body to do thousands at once.” Winifred grinned nonetheless, flattered that her reputation was getting out anyway. And having a werewolf's attention on her... sure had a way of making her heart flutter. Best not to let the attention get too much to her head. Except... now she just had to show off. She raised her hands dramatically and began slowly infusing extra colors into the room. More than that—she infused colors to form miniature werewolves, which ran rapidly through the air. Five of them, then ten, then fifteen. Harder to do than the fishes, because it required a bigger stretch of imagination. For good measure, she attached wings to some of the werewolves, which looked bizarre, until she fed one of the images for it to become larger than life.
“Amazing,” Ian whispered, entranced by the large, shimmering silver and red werewolf, which stood there, sniffing, wings undulating and curling back. “What talent.”
“It's always been something I've wanted to do,” Winifred admitted, not sure why she was telling him this. “I wanted to use my lightweavings to make wonders that no one had ever seen before.” She could feel the accumulated energy from the bracelet beckoning for her to use it, but she held it all back. Might be better for an emergency. “To infuse crops, make water glimmer, create illusions and light shows, like fireworks and animations of animals, both real and fantastical. I'd get all the best lightweavers to help me, and people would come from all over the world to see what we created.” Damn, she was gushing now, overexcited about explaining her dream.
Ian, even though she couldn't see his face behind that mask, seemed every bit as excited as she was.
“I did a drawing when I was little. Here.” Winifred reached for her breast pocket, where she'd tucked her drawing as a lucky talisman, and hesitated.
Showing someone this was like revealing to them the most intimate part of her. Even her mother didn't know that Winifred still carried it around. It was Winifred's secret. Winifred's treasure. The deepest part of her hidden in plain sight.
She hesitated a moment longer, then took it out. Nervous. The paper had deep lines etched into it, and she infused it to make it glow brighter. Unfolding it carefully, she showed him the rather worn illustration of a huge complex, complete with her hairdresser salon, the fantastical animals, the shining pools and a later addition—crystal caves.
Ian examined but didn't touch the drawing, perhaps recognizing this as something important to her.
If only I could see what kind of expression he has behind that mask. She instantly berated herself for the desire. No. She couldn't. No matter how tempted she felt.
“You kept this with you all that time?” She could hear a smile in his gruff voice. “Well, since you're a trade-daughter, you must have had enough to start doing something like this.”
Sadness washed into Winifred. “Maybe.” She folded the paper up and tucked it back in. “My mother thought it a silly thing that a silly child wanted. She had other plans for me. I remember...” now Winifred's voice cracked, “I remember being heartbroken when I was told it couldn't happen. People want their heirs to obey their transcendant will.”
Ian sucked in his breath. “Is that why you came to Kanthus?”
“Something like that,” Winifred said. It held both lie and truth. “Kanthians are very appreciative of art. More than Golubria. So you won't see zoos and light shows over there. Everything's for practicality and profit.”
“Of course,” Ian said. “Everything's a profit for a Golubrian. Even a life.”
True, but the way he snarled life irritated Winifred. Sure, they might do some unethical things, but that didn't mean being a Golubrian instantly meant you were an unethical person. They were no better or worse than anyone else on the planet. Even if they did have a slightly obsessive religion.
“Do you ever wonder what it means to be a werewolf?” Ian tapped his mask, apparently oblivious to the irritation welling inside her.
“Sometimes.”
“The Kanthians place us on pedestals, and worship us as gods. A few of us revel in that role, but many of us are uncomfortable with it. We are taught that if we don't reinforce the system, it will break Kanthian society as a whole. They rely on us to be their ‘gods’. To patrol the borders, to keep the peace as we've been doing for centuries. But some of us just want peaceful lives. Without all that responsibility.”
“Hmm?” Winifred said, unsure what to make of the confession. She'd always assumed that the werewolves were resolute in their duties. She never considered the possibility that they hated them.
“It's why the Highborn who don't have the ability to morph into a werewolf are considered the luckiest. They get all the pomp and none of the responsibility that comes with the job. We have to walk around with masks. The law for us to marry if we reveal our face is a way to make it far easier to control us. To make sure we don't step out of line.”
The way he spoke... Winifred suddenly understood. She'd been sitting with her fingers clutching her skirt, listening, trying to draw out what he wanted to say. “What dream did you have shattered?”
Ian laughed hollowly behind his mask. His strong fingers threaded together, weaving the webs of his thoughts. “Clever girl. Mine was a simple one. To not transform, and live a quiet life where I don't have to risk my life almost every night. I can't have that. I want to run away, actually, but each time, I stop. Since what I do is important. And since I've been a consultant for the police department, I've helped them sniff out a few murderers.”
Shit, Winifred thought, since his confession reminded her just how... normal he seemed. Not a monster, but a person struggling because of who he was. Just like Winifred. If she hadn't been born to a trade-leader, she might have been given the freedom to work her dream.
As it was, however, like him, the dream needed to die. At least for now, until she found a way to live it again.
Except... once the Kanthians were deposed, if the plot even worked... what would it mean?
Just thinking about the faces of her friends, of the potential friendships looming in the future, turned to dust—it terrified her. All of those people who didn't deserve what was coming.
And her mother, convinced, always convinced, she was doing the right thing. The other Golubrians saying they would liberate Kanthus from the night hordes. Completely ignoring the evidence at hand.
The words didn't squeeze out of her throat and make themselves known. Ian was only just beginning to trust her. Having him turn from revealing his secrets to snarling at her—she never wanted to be put in that position.
Maybe I should just run away. Run away, and leave everything behind, and start afresh. With my lightweaving, I bet I could get a job pretty fast wherever I went.
Yes. That did seem like a tempting idea. Run away from her mother, run from Kiara, and never look back. Free forever. Her heart ached for this, craved it. Maybe Ian's did the same thing. And like her, he couldn't, because at the end of the night, they had commitments.
Ian got up from the sofa. “It was nice talking to you. I don't get that many chances to be open—especially after a rough first date.” Winifred knew he was joking, but still couldn't control the furious blush spreading across her cheeks. He really shouldn't joke like that. She was eighteen—hormones all over the place.
And it might be incredibly awkward if he did start showing an interest in her. Her mother would probably kill her if she knew. But knew what?
They weren't doing anything more than talking, anyway. Nothing wrong with that. Everyone liked to stand around and talk. She kept feeding herself the excuses, even as Ian patted her on the shoulder.
“Will you promise to help us? Not this night, since it might be suspicious to your Golubrians. But soon.”
Winifred still felt the pressure of his hand on her shoulder for several moments after he took it away.
“Sure. Sure, I'll help.”
And massively regret the decision. I'm already struggling as it is.
She watched him go, insides squirming with guilt. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
Once they found out...
It would all be over.