Page 6 of Down Comes the Night

Wren wanted to mourn the lost moment, but the painful reminder of the queen bled her dry of any emotion but fear. She gathered up a fistful of grass and twisted it, desperate to ground herself in something solid. “You can’t.”

“I have to. My duty is to the queen above all else.”

“But what’s going to happen to us when she finds out? What about your promotion?” Una had been angling for the promotion to lieutenant colonel for months. A mistake like this would cost them both dearly. Una could face a reduction in rank—and Wren could be stripped of hers entirely.

Traced by the bruise-purple glow of dusk, Una’s expression was unreadable. “I don’t know.”

They sat in silence and watched the sun thin into a brilliant orange ribbon behind the mountains. On a night like this, not even Una’s warmth beside Wren felt much like comfort.

CHAPTER TWO

As they waited for their appointment with the queen, Wren’s every nerve unbraided to the rhythm oftick, tick, tick. Hung from the sheer stone walls of the North Tower were hundreds of clocks. Carved and painted cuckoo clocks, clocks on glass mosaics, clocks with swinging pendulums and clocks with churning gears, clocks in glass cases, clocks wrought from metal. Far too many clocks for any one person to have and stay sane. It was said Isabel commissioned them to surround herself with things that ran smoothly, things that were easily fixed, unlike nations.

The hall of the North Tower stood empty, save for Wren and Una. Ribbed vaults laced the ceiling like a corset, and stained-glass panels loomed above them, caged by their leaded frames. Wren hated this place. Its echoing vastness, how the dust swirling through the fragmented light looked like wraiths in the darkest edges of her vision. It held nothing but books and icons and the suffocating gloom of her aunt’s presence. The only thing bright and alive herewas Una, limned in multicolored sunlight as it streamed through the glass.

Any other day, Wren’s breath might have caught at how easily Una could be memorialized here, another stained-glass warrior queen. Beautiful and fierce. But today, it filled her with dread, not wonder. She could only think about how Unabelongedhere and she did not.

“You’re staring,” Una said.

“Just wondering if you have any grand plans to get us both out of this unscathed.” It sounded more hopeful and pathetic than Wren intended.

When Una met her gaze, it was steady as stone. “I’ll try.”

Althoughtrywas far from reassuring, it was all Wren could ask for.

A cacophonous sound rent open the silence as every clock struck ten. As the chime of the largest clock echoed through the hall and vibrated in Wren’s skull, Isabel’s straight-backed attendant materialized in the threshold of a stairwell. “Her Majesty will see you now.”

They followed the lacy train of the attendant’s skirt up a spiraling staircase and into a stone antechamber. At one end loomed a massive set of doors carved with the royal seal: a full moon flanked by a waxing and waning crescent. That symbol alone was enough to send Wren’s heart skittering off course.

Breathe.Wren squeezed her hands to flush blood into her deadened fingers.Breathe.

She still hadn’t found her nerve when Una pushed open the doors to the queen’s office. Cold air billowed into the hall and settled heavy on Wren’s shoulders. In five shaky strides, she crossed the antechamber and entered the room, where the middle-aged queen sat behind a mahogany writing desk. Rigid and imperious as a stone-carved icon, Isabel did not deign to lift her head as Wren took her place beside Una.

Wren never failed to be struck by the queen’s beauty, too sharp to look at straight on. No one would guess they were related, whichwas how Isabel preferred it. With her auburn hair and hazel eyes, Wren’s royal blood had been effectively diluted by her father’s common genes. Isabel, meanwhile, was a Southerland through and through: pale white skin, hair the color of a summer wine, eyes that gleamed like quartz. Myth had it that Danubian queens’ blood flowed right from the Goddess’s veins into theirs. Wren believed it. As beautiful and withholding as the moon, Isabel could be nothing less than the Goddess made mortal.

She was reading the notebook Una had confiscated from the boy. During the carriage ride to Knockaine, Wren had pored over it so many times, she’d burned Byers’s name behind her eyelids. It made his absence—and her failure—seem more real. She couldn’t bear losing anyone else. And Danu couldn’t afford to lose any more soldiers. During the last years of the war, the military had been decimated. Only the greenest, youngest recruits—and those like Una, already war heroes at eighteen—remained.

If war broke out, what would happen to the rest of them?

Isabel scanned the rows of names as if each were another wrong to add to her carefully tallied scale. The queen ruled with cold, impersonal order, an endless stream of paperwork and reports and written law. After she signed the armistice, she shut down the royal palace and secluded herself within the North Tower. It rose far above the smog and squalor of Knockaine—far above the lives of the people she swore to serve. Her opponents called her the Paper Queen, too embittered to deal with anyone except in writing.

To her country, Isabel was something of a joke. A failure. It was, after all, the birthright of the Danubian queens to reclaim the land Vesria had stolen.

Three hundred years ago, Vesrian raiders had poured into the River Muri, wreathed in black smoke and carrying the banner of their death god. His people, eager to please him, built their empire on conquest. In the turn of a moon, they took Danu. Tore down the temples of the Goddess, ripped the royal family from the palace. Occupation lasted for nearly a decade, until the exiledQueen Maeve rallied her armies and drove the Vesrians back over the mountains.

Whatever is done unto you,she’d said, a decree from the Goddess herself,let it be repaid thrice over.Blood for blood, sorrow for sorrow. And so she burned all the Vesrians’ shrines. Banned their language. Forced everyone within Danu’s newly established borders to convert or face execution.

Although war had ravaged their nations in fits and starts ever since, Vesria still held a quarter of what was once Danu’s land. Parliament, fearful for the nation’s draining coffers and declining birth rate, had forced Isabel to broker the armistice last year. But popular sentiment held that she was a weak queen, ready to abandon their land and strand generations of Danu-Vesrians who deserved to come home. If it would keep her from being remembered as a failure, Isabel would never rest until she’d exacted her threefold vengeance.

“Wren,” Isabel said flatly. Then, with tenderness, “Una.”

How many times had Wren longed to hear Isabel say her name like that? By now, swallowing her jealousy was automatic. Nothing she did would earn her aunt’s affection. Isabel loved Una for her devotion and her ruthlessness about as much as she hated Wren for being a stain on the Southerland line. Once, Wren had dreamed of making her into the mother she’d never had. She wasn’t so naïve anymore. Now, Isabel’s approval mattered only insofar as it guaranteed the security of her position.

It didn’t mean the rejection didn’t still sting.

“So you let the boy escape.” Isabel’s voice was as quavering and soft as a wind chime. Wren had to lean in to hear and hang on her every word.

Una rested a fist over her heart in grim salute. “It was my fault, Your Majesty. I underestimated our target.”