Chapter Six
The first thing she noticed about death was how bright everything was.
The ceiling above her was white. The blanket wrapped around her body was white.
The light pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows was white.
It was blinding and disorienting, enough so that she didn’t stop to consider that death would have been much, much darker.
Perhaps I’m dreaming. But even her dreams were dark, filled with the emotions of the muki she dispatched, always craving and grieving and desperate, so much so that she had begun to wonder if those were her emotions as well.
Somewhere in the near distance, a door opened, a soft click followed by a low creaking. Solana kept her eyes up, searching for the crack in that pristine white ceiling. Anything to tell her she was dreaming.
“Miss Grey?” a voice said. “Are you feeling better?”
It had been a long time since she had heard her surname, given to all who were fatherless. But she had heard it recently. She just couldn’t place when. It was a reminder that she belonged to no one.
It was then that Solana knew this was no dream, for in her dreams, she belonged to the dark. It cradled her, called to her.
Ususi.
With a sigh, she turned her head to find the voice.
A woman stood at her bedside wearing a light blue dress covered by a white apron, a white bonnet on her head, leaving nothing but the light brown, unmarred skin of her hands and face visible.
Everything about her was pristine and in perfect condition.
But it was the way the woman’s wide brown eyes implored so genuinely that caught Solana most off guard.
The last pair of eyes she had seen had been a gray so deep they had seemed poured straight from the darkest storms in the sky. They had watched her with cold calculation, and then with pity.
I’ve been looking for you.
Memories came flooding in. Solana sat up in a rush. The room spun, but she swung her legs off the side of the bed and planted her feet firmly on the ground. The woman stepped back and watched her carefully from an arm’s length away while Solana took in the once-familiar room.
The castle infirmary was long and rectangular, filled with narrow beds lining one wall and several tall windows along the other. It was so bright she had to squint, but the view beyond was something she didn’t need to see to describe.
A garden with bushes filled with flowers of every color.
Trees, both short and tall, that provided the perfect shade for picnicking.
Manicured paths meant for walking, bordered by hiding spots galore.
Beyond was the castle wall that hemmed and protected them from the outside world.
The world she lived in. A world that felt very far away.
The infirmary was empty save for her and the nurse.
The sick house in the callejon was never empty.
Not when she went for the first time at seven with a broken arm she had acquired from falling off a stone ledge.
Certainly not when she went for the last time at thirteen, when she was half dead and delirious with the fever that forced her and her mother out of their home after dark.
Lucia had carried Solana on her back as they ran quietly through the streets of the callejon.
The muki had come out of nowhere. In Solana’s fever-addled mind, it had been as tall as the building behind it, with claws as long as her arm and teeth as sharp as a knife.
Lucia had turned and run for their lives, and it was only days later, after Solana’s fever had abated and her mother had fallen into a deep hallucination, that Solana remembered the muki had taken a swipe at them.
The wound festered and the poison spread, and Lucia never recovered.
Just a scratch from teeth or talons, indeed.
Solana had been forced to drag her mother’s desiccated body to the street and set it on fire. And then she’d waited, and waited, and waited for her to return. Not all of the dead did, but Solana found it hard to reconcile with the truth that perhaps her mother hadn’t wanted to badly enough.
Sometimes, it felt as though she was still waiting.
“Miss Grey? Are you feeling all right?” the woman asked again, watching her expectantly.
Solana pushed memories of before back into the recesses of her mind and glanced down at her body.
The tunic she was wearing had been replaced, and her feet were bare, but everything else was the same.
There was dried blood crusted to her pants.
She pushed her finger through a gash and inspected the skin underneath.
Whole and unblemished. Not even a scar to wear like a badge of honor for the suffering she had endured.
With shaky hands, Solana reached up and pushed her hair behind her ears. Her curls tangled around her fingers, the edges of them crisp with what she could only assume was buckets of dried sweat.
“I’m fine,” she finally answered. It was partially true—physically she seemed fine. Nothing throbbed or ached or burned. But she was ragged with something she couldn’t quite name. A sort of terror that buzzed below the surface of her awareness. “Why am I here?”
The woman folded her hands in front of her apron and offered Solana a pleasant smile, as if relieved that Solana could speak after all. “Well, you were in quite a state when they brought you in three days ago. Our healer has been working very hard to restore you to full health.”
Our healer. She remembered the way Reyes’s gift had coursed through her, how his hands had both hurt and healed. Two sides of the same coin, like the one she had almost gotten her hands on. Solana couldn’t help but laugh, the sound jarringly sharp in the peacefully quiet room.
Almost was a stretch. She had been played, falling right into the trap of the king’s Masters, and now she was paying the price for it. They had brought her back from the brink of death only to serve it to her on a silver platter.
“I suppose they want me coherent for the sentencing. How magnanimous of them.”
The woman’s brow furrowed. “The sentencing?” she asked, her fingers fiddling with a simple silver ring on her pinky. “The king means to thank you.”
Perhaps Solana wasn’t as coherent as she thought. “To thank me,” she repeated.
“Oh, yes.” She clapped her hands over her chest. “You have been the topic of every conversation these last three days. I would’ve thought it all rumor if I hadn’t seen the state they brought you in with my own eyes.
You are very lucky that our healer is so talented.
” As she spoke, she turned and fretted with the linens on the bed next to her, straightening the already straightened blanket.
Fluffing the already fluffed pillow. “Having to kill to survive! How devastating.”
Solana watched, her mouth open and her mind flitting from word to word.
“King Killian has requested your presence in the throne room as soon as you’ve woken. They’ll all be waiting for you, so we should get you dressed.”
I’ve been looking for you, Reyes had said. Solana had thought it was because of her profession, as Reyes called it, but was it possible the king knew who she really was?
The only way to find out was to see for herself. She cleared her throat and stood, suppressing a chill as she planted her bare feet on the cold, gleaming floors.
“Well, we shouldn’t keep them waiting, then, should we?”
There had never been cause for Solana to wear a dress like she was wearing, a soft velvet gown the color of the sky before dawn with silver embroidery along the neckline and hem.
It complemented her olive complexion and umber eyes and hugged her body as if it were made for her.
She wanted to hate it but found that she could not.
Not when it gave her memories she had long since forgotten, of her mother’s skirts underneath her cheek, her mother’s fingers in her hair as she hummed a sweet lullaby.
“I’m sure the king has arranged for a custom wardrobe to be prepared. This one is the best we could do on such short notice,” the woman told her while she straightened the hem that brushed the floor. It seemed to be something she was very fond of doing.
Solana imagined there was little else to do in an empty sick house.
The woman moved on to rearranging Solana’s hair, and Solana took the opportunity to swipe a hairpin from the dressing table and slip it under the sleeve of her gown.
It poked her forearm as she stood in front of the standing mirror and actively avoided her own reflection.
In this dress, cleaned up, with her hair pulled back, she looked so much like her mother it hurt.
Fortunately, the woman quickly swept her away and down the halls of the castle as if she were herding an unruly cat. Solana didn’t tell her that she could likely navigate these walls better than she could. It was a secret she kept up her sleeve, just like the pin.
If she ever got the chance, she planned to shove it into Reyes’s eye.
They passed artwork depicting moments in history she vaguely remembered learning about as a child. Pottery from places no one born on Supay had seen propped on pedestals and lit from above. Plush carpeting that quieted their steps as they half ran to their destination.
The woman gave a quick curtsy before depositing Solana in front of a set of double doors and then scurrying off.
There were no guards or Masters to be seen.
For all they knew, she could have turned and run for her life.
Perhaps pillage the castle while she was at it, murder a couple of people for good measure.
In fact, she was offended at how little care they seemed to be taking in her presence.
Didn’t they know just how disreputable she was? A murderer, some would say. A fiend who preferred the company of demons to humans.