Chapter 5
SHE ABOVE, ME BELOW
ASTROPHEL
‘I’LL SEE SHE gets your gifts, my lord.’ The liegemaid bobs a limp curtsy, a signal I should leave.
I straighten my cuffs, taking my time about it, ensuring all seven silver buttons line up, lance-straight.
I will not leave. Not on the orders of a peakscrub.
My gaze sweeps over Elvi’s shoulder. There’s not a taper lit in the antechamber; within all is silent as a sepulchre.
I’m surprised Leilani didn’t hang mourning weeds over her door and have done with it.
‘Abed, you say? At this hour?’
Elvi nods, eyes fixed on the casket grasped too tight in her hands.
I’d hoped for a glimpse of the Princess. Ours might not be a love match, but I’m still expected to consummate it, and the last time I saw my betrothed unveiled, she’d not yet seen her ninth sunring.
Elvi toes the door shut, a flush blooming fast in her cheeks, so desperate is she to shoo me from Leilani’s chambers, to pretend her mistress hasn’t just refused to receive her binding gifts, to receive me, as tradition dictates.
Leilani always did fancy herself so high above me.
It was a fool’s hope she’d admit me tonight, a fool’s hope I’d get to watch her open the casket.
What was I expecting? Wonder at the splendour of the diadem?
Gratitude for the fretful hours I spent perfecting the design to ensure it didn’t clash with her ill-favoured colouring?
I was right to worry. Leilani received my second gift as a woman grown, with as little grace as she did the first, as a chit.
I turn with the click of the door. Duty discharged. Gift bestowed. It matters not if she likes it, only that it makes the right impression. By the Throne, I’ve thrown enough sickles at it.
I pause as Elvi’s sharp vowels rise through the door, stirring memories long buried of the mother I scarcely remember.
It was a condition of my being elevated ward-of-the-court that she relinquish any claim on me.
Too oft in that liegemaid’s company and those peakish vowels, their familiar jagged rhythms, might prove catching.
I’ve worked too hard to fall at this final fence.
The maid’s voice comes again, sharper still.
Answered this time by Leilani’s soft, plaintive murmurs.
Strangled sobs soon seep through the door.
Their wretchedness drags me back to my earliest memories of the palace.
My boyhood chamber was directly beneath Leilani’s.
It felt deliberate; she above, me below – lest I forget, for one second, my place here, the precariousness of it.
For though the Princess was Branded, still she was pure-blooded.
She woke often in the night, assaulted by nightmares or visions – I never knew which.
Though muffled by the ceiling, it was impossible to sleep through her keening wails.
The terror that trembled within her cries haunts me even now.
Many were the nights I too sobbed myself to sleep in those first moons.
I missed my mother, the home I’d known. But I was careful to smother my cries.
I knew better than to draw further shame upon myself.
Another whimper pierces the door. Another.
Anger edges out any lingering sympathy. This then is her reaction to the prospect of our binding? Conceited prig. I start down the corridor to my audience with the King. I’ve no wish to be caught loitering outside her chambers like some lovesick whelp begging for scraps.
Never again.
I soon reach the central staircase which will lead me to the Orbium. I’ve only been back in Meissa two moonscycles, but already the palace is familiar again, though smaller than I’d embellished it in my memory.
My future-betrothed formed part of the receiving party that greeted me when I first arrived at the palace as a boy, waiting at the foot of this very staircase.
Whispers had reached even the drab backwater where I was raised of the tainted heir.
I’d envisioned some foul beast and was eager for a peek at her strange hair, her eyes, her marking.
Instead, a small girl in full mourning, clad, like her parents, in the deep blue of the firmament to which her brother had so lately been commended.
She alone wore a full veil. I couldn’t glean a glimpse of her.
She was silent that first meeting, shrank behind her mother’s skirts, a limp rag doll clutched to her chest. Hardly the fearsome monster of my imaginings.
My own mother bade me show kindness to the Princess before I left her care, for the girl was a child alone, as I was soon to be.
She fancied we might keep company together.
It was a comfort to her. But Leilani stayed largely in her rooms, escorted by her liegemaid, the palace guards, or the cielsylph that shadowed her every move on the rare occasions she left them.
There were precious few opportunities to speak to her, and I was soon too busy to pay her absence much mind.
For the King took me under his wing. Showed me the palace, the city, presented me with clothes finer than any I’d ever seen, my own horse.
He rarely spoke of his daughter, and his clipped responses to my questions about her soon gave me to know he had no strong desire to discuss her.
But not so the Queen. Despite her frailty, she visited my chamber nightly before I retired.
Often, she would read to me. Missing my own mother, I was grateful for the surrogate warmth she offered, though the wheezing and the wasting were a painful reminder of my father’s passing.
My hatred of the sand-rats burnt brightest in those late hours.
While she thumbed through her Book of Starlore, the Queen would often reference her daughter.
I learnt which stories were the Princess’ favourites, that – like me – she did not care for the legend of the night-birds, one of a host of shadow creatures the Dusk Sister sent from the Cradleworld to find and slay the Dawn Sister in a fit of jealous madness.
The King engaged a tutor to attend me while he was occupied with matters of state, instructed him to prepare me for my studies at the Asteum.
But I resented the tutor’s stifling presence, his condescension at the gaps in my education, and contrived where possible to give him the slip.
To ride out on Silvermist. I was not yet comfortable in the world of palaces and courtiers.
Fresh air felt familiar. Safe. And I was permitted to ride unaccompanied so long as I kept to the palace gardens.
During these rides, I learnt Leilani was also permitted short turns about the gardens on her pony in the early afternoon.
It was the only time she was without a trailing liegemaid or host of Watchers.
But she was never truly alone. Orthriel stayed close to their charge, even if the cielsylph wasn’t always visible to my mortal eyes.
I followed her on one such outing, keeping my distance at first, observing her through the hedge-maze.
She stopped by the great fountain close to the Rotunda.
After lashing her pony to a tree, she began to fill a drinking-skin with water.
She slipped a glass vial from her cloak pocket, added its contents to the skin.
Darting looks left and right, she knelt and slowly lifted her veil.
A tightening plucked at my ribs as she peeled back the gauze, baring her face an inch at a time.
My breath came sharp. She looked up. Mercifully the hedge concealed me.
But it wasn’t so much the shock of her lilac eyes, the flecks of colour marring the white of her hair, that drew the sound from me, as the ordinariness of her.
She was just a girl. Delicate featured, pretty – save for her downturned lips.
She bunched her sleeves, poured the contents of the waterskin into cupped hands, began to lather them, to scrub at her forearm, her movements frenzied.
I dismounted, inched closer. A strong stench of something caustic hit the back of my throat through the frost-rimed leaves.
Whatever she’d mixed with the water was causing her skin to blister.
She bit hard at the cushion of her lower lip, tears spilling down her cheeks.
Cries tore from her, pitiful as those I heard echoing through the ceiling night after night.
But she only scrubbed harder. It was then I realised what she was attempting.
‘Princess, stop,’ I said, surprising myself by emerging from the maze.
She stilled. Lifted her gaze to me. Her eyes more vivid at close range, captivating in their strangeness.
‘How dare you creep up on me unannounced,’ she stammered, dropping her hands, lifting her chin.
Without thinking, I reached out and cradled her injured arm. Her fingers stiffened. Blood wept silver down her arm where the scrubbing had opened sores. I remembered rumours that touching a Branded was bad luck and released her, eyes still fixed on the rivulets of silver tracking to her elbow.
Tears sprung anew into her eyes, but they glittered now. Fierce. Formidable.
I stepped back, attempted a clumsy bow. ‘You’re hurt. Let me escort you to the healers.’
The stories I’d heard about the Starborn echoed loud in my ears.
She might unleash starshine, knock me to the ground.
But the fear in my heart, then, was nothing to what it became when Orthriel manifested a moment later, ordering me to leave the Princess alone, claiming she was their concern and none of mine.
I’d clean forgotten about the cielsylph.
I stammered some sort of apology and hastened back to my horse.
I didn’t see Leilani again for a moonsquarter. I heard her though, and her cries took on a new desperate edge in those sleepless hours. For I knew only too keenly what it was to wish oneself clean of a tainted bloodline.