Chapter 10
THE BORDER
Ada
Getting out of the palace required lying to everyone I'd ever trusted.
I told my handmaidens I was feeling unwell — monthly troubles, which made them retreat so fast you'd think I'd announced a plague. I asked not to be disturbed. Then I waited until I heard them settle into the outer chamber before slipping into the servant's passage behind my wardrobe.
The passages ran through the palace like veins, connecting every wing, every floor, every hidden corner the nobles preferred to pretend didn't exist. I'd memorized them over the past weeks — partly for my meetings with Hakan, partly from some instinct I couldn't name.
A need to know escape routes, even in my own home.
I changed into the servant's clothes I'd taken from the laundry — rough gray fabric, patched at the elbows. Rubbed ash into my cheekbones to dull the golden glow that marked me as pure-blooded. Pulled a deep hood over my hair.
In the polished brass of a wall sconce, I barely recognized myself.
Good. That was the point.
Hakan was waiting at the eastern gate. He looked me over once — a quick sweep that was half assessment, half something hungrier — and his mouth twitched.
"Convincing. Keep your head down and don't speak unless you have to. Your accent would give you away."
"I can manage."
"Can you?" But he was smiling, and when I fell into step beside him, his hand found mine beneath our cloaks.
His fingers were warm. Steady. The same hands that had been between my thighs two hours ago in the music room, now guiding me through the streets like we were any ordinary couple heading home for dinner.
The absurdity of my life had stopped surprising me, but then we got to the border district and the transition was shocking.
Not the poverty — I'd glimpsed enough of that through palace windows, in the servants' quarters, in the careful way Hakan never talked about where he came from. I thought I understood what it looked like.
I didn't understand anything.
The streets were narrow and winding, the buildings leaning against each other as though too exhausted to stand alone.
The air was thick — forge smoke, tanning chemicals, something sour underneath that I didn't want to identify.
Every surface was stained with the kind of grime that spoke of years, of generations, of a place the Light Court's golden maintenance crews never reached because nobody important lived here.
But it was the people that stopped me.
I had never seen so many walking with their eyes cast down.
Not from respect — from fear. They moved quickly, shoulders hunched, flinching when white-robed Purity Inspectors passed.
Near a butcher's stall, I watched two Inspectors examine a young woman's papers while she shook so badly she could barely hold them out.
"How long since your last cleansing?" one asked, his voice pleasant.
"Three months, sir."
"That's quite a while. Perhaps we should schedule another assessment. Your taint levels might have risen."
"Please, sir, I can't afford —"
"The Light Court provides for those who demonstrate proper loyalty."
The woman's face crumpled. She had children — I could see it in the way her hand moved instinctively to her belly, protective, even as the rest of her caved inward.
Children who would now be examined and measured and found wanting, because in the Light Court, shadow-taint was inherited like eye color.
A curse passed down through blood, never to be escaped.
I started toward her. My light was already gathering beneath my skin — I could feel it, hot and righteous, the fury of Gün Ata's daughter confronted with the machine her father had built.
Hakan's grip tightened on my hand. "Don't."
"She's terrified —"
"She's alive. If you interfere, if anyone recognizes you, you make it worse. For her and everyone she knows."
I hated that he was right. Hated standing three feet from a woman whose life was being dismantled and doing nothing, because nothing was all I could safely do.
This was my father's realm. These were my father's laws.
I'd sat through Yara's purification. I'd watched Selim drag that girl to the front of his class and pour light into her until shadow rose beneath her skin like smoke. I'd stood at my window and listened to a man scream while the crowd cheered.
But those had been ceremonies. Spectacles. Things I could almost convince myself were exceptions — extreme measures taken in extreme circumstances, not the everyday machinery of a system designed to grind people into dust.
This was the machinery. This was what it looked like when nobody was watching.
"This way," Hakan said quietly, and I followed him down a side alley with the woman's face burning in my memory.
Hakan's mother lived in a narrow, crooked building squeezed between a tanner's workshop and what smelled like a dye house. The stairs creaked beneath us, and Hakan knocked in a pattern — two quick, one slow, two quick — that spoke of a childhood spent behind locked doors.
An amber eye examined us through the gap. Then the door swung wide.
Elif was stunning. Not pretty — stunning, in the way of ancient queens and women who'd survived things that would have broken lesser people.
High cheekbones, full lips, thick dark hair streaked with silver that somehow made her look more striking rather than less.
Something in how she held herself spoke of ages survived.
I understood immediately why Hakan had never tried to describe her. How could words capture this?
"You must be Ada." Her voice was low, touched with an accent I couldn't place. Her eyes swept over me — the servant's clothes, the ash-dulled cheeks, the way I clung to her son's hand — and whatever she saw made her expression tighten. "You look... different than I expected."
"Mother." Warning in Hakan's voice.
"Come in. Quickly, before someone sees."
The apartment was tiny but clean. No mirrors — I noticed that immediately. Not a single reflective surface anywhere. The walls were bare where mirrors should have hung, the faint rectangles of lighter paint marking their absence like scars.
I filed it away. Added it to the growing list of things about Hakan's family that didn't add up.
"So this is the famous princess."
The voice came from behind a small table, and when I turned, I found myself face to face with Milan—Hakan’s father.
I'd known of him for as long as I'd known Hakan — the wanderer who'd raised him since before he could hold a sword, who drifted in and out of their lives but always came back, who Hakan spoke about with a quiet reverence he gave no one else.
I'd seen him around over the years, caught glimpses of the easy smile and the stories that made Elif laugh, but we'd never actually spoken.
And hearing about Milan was one thing — meeting him was something else entirely.
He was handsome — older, grey at his temples, laugh lines around warm grey eyes — and he radiated the kind of easy, uncomplicated warmth that made you feel safe within seconds.
I could see Hakan in him, not in the features but in the way he carried himself — that same loose-limbed confidence, the same sharp attention hiding behind an easy smile.
He ignored my outstretched hand and pulled me into a brief embrace.
"I've heard so much about you from this one" — he jerked his thumb at Hakan — "that I feel I already know you. Welcome to our strange little family."
I found myself smiling despite my nerves. "I hope I'm not intruding —"
"Intruding? We've been waiting weeks for Hakan to work up the courage to bring you." He shot Hakan a look of fond exasperation. "The whole realm knows Ada. What we couldn't get out of him was whether you actually liked him back."
"She's here, isn't she."
"Could have fooled me. All those sighs and longing looks." Milan winked at me. "He's very secretive, you know. Getting information out of him is like pulling teeth."
"I'm aware," I said, glancing at Hakan, whose ears had gone red. "He's not exactly forthcoming about his feelings."
"Genetic flaw. His mother's the same way." Milan moved back to the table, pulling out a chair for me. "Sit. Elif made enough food to feed an army. She's been stress-cooking since dawn."
The food was delicious — simple, hearty, nothing like the elaborate dishes served at palace dinners.
Roasted lamb with pomegranate sauce. Fresh bread that was still warm.
For a while, the conversation flowed easily.
Milan asked about my studies, my plans, my life at court — and unlike the courtiers who asked those same questions as a prelude to political maneuvring, he seemed genuinely interested in the answers.
I noticed things, though. I always noticed things — it was the curse of being raised in the Light Court, where survival depended on reading what people didn't say.
I noticed things between them — the way Milan anticipated Elif's movements, pouring her wine before her glass was empty, passing the bread before she reached for it.
The ease of two people who'd shared a life for a very long time.
But also the distance. They sat close but didn't touch.
Milan's eyes lingered on Elif when she wasn't looking — soft with a devotion that seemed old and worn and not quite returned, like something he'd been carrying so long it had shaped him around it.
He loved her. That much was obvious. Whether she loved him the same way — the way a woman loves the father of her child, the man who'd stayed — I couldn't tell. Something in the space between them felt unfinished. An old negotiation neither of them had quite resolved.