Janos Rivel
“Your husband is a damn monster,” he said, the winding sounds of his birth language flowing free after having to speak Micrean all night.
Janos imagined his mother, Pomena, rolling her eyes.
She sat atop that star, her tzef robes dripping over the edge.
Unbound red hair tumbled down her back and into the night around her.
She shook her head and gave him a long blink, her green eyes dazzling.
It filled Janos’s heart with pride to share those eyes.
A heart cracked open and leaking all over his chest.
“He let them burn the Haj-ka,” he said thickly, swallowing the clog that threatened to climb his throat.
Pomena’s face dropped. “I am now the owner of the very last one.” Janos’s father, Lukas the Lake King, had sent most of the state’s copies of their only history book to be burned on Turiel’s deathboat.
The very last one was now tucked into Janos’s bag, sitting on the couch in his living room.
Janos felt like a traitor, letting them burn those books. He should have swum over to the blazing boat and stolen them back, but he had been frozen in hatred for his father in that second. Now that he’d thawed, his stomach turned with regret.
“I swear,” he growled. “I’m going to kill that bastard.”
Pomena tiled her head down, as if to admonish him for speaking ill of his father. She was always eager to remind them, “We are family, and family loves deeper than they hate.”
Well, today Janos had dug his hatred of his father to hell. He doubted there’d be a spring of love to hit below it.
Pomena’s brow creased and Janos’s chest ached. He hated to worry her. He changed the subject. “I might be king in a few weeks. Or I might get skewered by some wild Jingim bastard and bleed out in a ditch.”
Pomena’s face dropped.
“Don’t look at me. She’s your sister.” He barely knew his Aunt Isobel. As a child, she’d lived mostly in his mother’s stories. After his mother died, she was a stranger with a familiar face in a castle miles away.
“Least she didn’t put that sorcery on me,” he said, pointing to his clean neck.
“She said she won’t, long as I behave, whatever that means.
” He leaned over his balcony and stretched, his hair falling from its bun.
No matter what anyone said, it was lighter than his mother’s.
“Your hair is just like hers!” they’d say with delight.
If they’d really loved her, they’d know that his mother’s hair was darker, silkier.
It had smelled like lake brine and smoke.
“I miss you,” Janos whispered, tearing his eyes from the mother that was not there. She was a pot of ashes under a portrait in his father’s study. She was silent halls and a lake with shores sadder these past fifteen years. She was the gray clouds that stood watch over Hark-sov.
A knock on the door snagged Janos from his mourning.
He sniffled and tried to cork his tears.
He took a deep breath and wrangled his hair back into its bun before stepping off his balcony and walking over to the door.
Before he opened it, he squared his shoulders and tipped his chin three ticks higher.
He couldn’t let it drop, not in the home of his people’s oppressors.
No Micrean deserved to look him in the eye.
Janos whipped his door open. His chin dropped. There was no way he could keep his gaze so high, not in the presence of the man on his doorstep. He must have stepped off a cloud, must have been some golden piece of art in a god’s garden that had escaped just to burn the air from Janos’s lungs.
Then Janos remembered the funeral. This man hadn’t stepped down from paradise—he’d clawed up from hell.
He was a Wraith, but he couldn’t be. His skin should be sallow.
His nails should curl into claws, and his fangs should tear his lip where they stabbed out of his mouth.
Instead, his skin glistened with a hint of sweat in the late-night balminess.
His hands hung at his sides, large and weathered.
His mouth… Salt and silver, his mouth. Pink and bow shaped and starting to pull into a frown.
“Your Highness, I’ll be standing watch by your bedchambers tonight,” the man said, raising a brow, probably at Janos’s unrestrained ogling. He had an accent like smoke curl off a cigar: warm, dark, addictive.
“Of course,” Janos replied, barely remembering to speak Micrean. He backed into the room and the man glided through the doorway, taking a place by the curtains that separated Janos’s sleeping chambers from his living space.
“I’ll be here until you dismiss me,” the man said with a small smile.
Janos moved to shut the door behind him before realizing he would be shutting himself in with a beast. A beast with fluttery lashes and wide shoulders leading down to narrow hips like an arrow he had no business following.
He decided he’d take his chances, then shut the door and locked it.
“Forgive me, but you look nothing like your cards,” he said. “Which Wraith are you?” He knew Wraiths mainly from the diviners in Hark-sov and their Wraith-ska, or Wraith cards, a bastard child of Lake divination tradition and Micrean Wraith legend.
“They call me the King of Ravens,” the man said, his eyes cut to slits. After a few seconds of barely leashed curiosity, he asked, “What am I on your cards?”
“Guidance and wisdom,” Janos said. Wraith-ska were a collection of seven cards, each with the face of a Wraith. Before any large event, it was customary to have a medicine woman inhale a bowl of hash and pull three cards from a shuffled deck to warn one of one’s future.
The man scoffed and pointed to himself. “Me? Hmm. Not the worst I’ve been said to represent.”
Janos snorted at him. Despite his better judgment, he found his bag and pulled out a small wooden box. “Would you like to ask a question?” he asked. When the Wraith’s eyes doubled in size, he added, “Or can Wraiths see the future?”
The tension left the man’s shoulders as he laughed. “We like to make predictions, but no clairvoyance, no.” His smile was full, his canines pointier than a human’s. Janos found it charming. Threatening, but set inside the lightest of smiles.
The Wraith’s eyes found the box, then flitted back up to Janos. He must have tried to talk himself out of it, and by the way he bit his lip, it must not have worked. “And yes, I would like to ask myself a question.”
Janos nodded over to a small coffee table in the middle of his room and the Wraith gingerly followed him to kneel on the opposite side.
Just to have a man this beautiful so close made Janos’s chest tight.
He usually leashed his preferences when he was home.
Between the fifteen-year-olds paraded before him to choose from every year and the filthy Wail soldiers, he was starved for choice, but the Wraith in front of him had a face so perfect that every feature felt handpicked to make Janos stutter.
Janos looked down at his cards before he got stranded in his thoughts.
His mother had taught him to read, though he was no medicine woman.
Still, he touched his forehead to the box before offering it to the Wraith across from him.
Just before those golden fingertips touched the wood, Janos snatched the box back.
“You have to introduce yourself first,” he said. “So the spirits know who they’re looking for in the library of fate.”
The Wraith’s smile took a curious tilt and Janos’s stomach knotted. This was the first time he’d ever done this with a Micrean—or, well, with someone not from Kak-sov. He was so used to being looked at sideways for the wooden totems he wore, or for the nightly prayers he whispered.
The Wraith watched the box, and Janos, like both were a precious discovery. “Hello, cards,” he said. “My name is Urias.” He introduced himself so earnestly that Janos had to grin. He handed Urias the box.
“You can take them out, but don’t let the cards touch the table,” Janos said, getting up to retrieve the carafe of wine that had been left in his room.
Divination without thinning of the consciousness was useless; the spirits couldn’t tap a well-guarded mind.
But Janos didn’t bring hash. A dry red wine would have to do.
He poured two glasses and set them down on the coffee table.
“Drink this and then shuffle the cards with a clear mind,” he instructed. “You can close your eyes if you need to.”
Urias obeyed to the letter, never scoffing or rolling his eyes, and Janos chafed against his respect. He sipped his wine, just watching Urias. The Wraith’s shoulders never dropped fully, and his throat bobbed with a gulp. Something told Janos that Urias’s mind wasn’t so easily cleared.
“Stop when it feels like something is grabbing your arms and forcing you to,” he said.
Urias’s eyes darted behind their lids, and Janos almost worried that Urias was stuck in a spiritual trance before his hands halted mid-shuffle. The Wraith blinked like he was waking from a nightmare and took a heavy breath.
“Okay. What now?” Urias asked.
“Lay the three cards on the bottom face down.”
Urias did as Janos said. Janos took a gulp of wine and felt it settle deep in his chest, somewhere inside of him where the spirits still lived.
He held his hand over the cards until he felt a pinprick in the middle of his palm over the card on the right.
He flipped it over first, then the left, and finally the middle one.
The Bull, the Three-Faced Beast, and the King o’ Ravens.
He winced.
“Please tell me these aren’t as bad as they look,” Urias said, dropping his face into his hands, a tiny, scared smile peeking out from between his parted fingers. “At least I pulled myself?”
Janos didn’t answer immediately. They were, indeed, as bad as they looked.
“Well, I’ve seen worse spreads,” he lied eventually, then licked his lips. “Would you call yourself a stubborn person?”
Urias’s smile dropped. He sat up straighter. “Sometimes. What do the cards say about it?”