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For a few days, I wouldn’t have to wonder if I’d make the same choice again, if I had to do it over.
Empyrea save me, what an idiot I was. What a starsforsaken fool.
It was hard, keeping myself apart from the people I loved, but it was easier than watching them hurt because of my presence in their lives.
I found Conrad sleeping, snoring softly, in the large, well-appointed chamber that Lord Fredrick and his wife, Elisa, had so generously relinquished for him when he came to Greythorne.
Cocooned in a pile of pillowy blankets, Conrad was dozing with both small hands around the puzzle box I’d commissioned from Hicks. I’d filled the box with sugar-dusted cinnamon drops, knowing Conrad would love both the puzzle and the prize. And indeed, he now slept with it tucked under his chin, as if it were a plush toy and not an oddly angled box with two pointed ends. I moved it over to the other side of him—even in his sleep, his grip on the thing was firm—and could hear something sliding around inside. It was heavier than candy; he must have solved the puzzle, eaten the candy, and refilled the box with some other childhood toy.
I touched his hair lightly, glad to see him holding on to a little piece of whimsy, and only slightly jealous of his peaceful slumber. I hadn’t had a full night’s rest since Achleva; my sleep was plagued with troubling dreams.
The dreams varied in subject and duration but were all exactly the same in their sharpness—so close to resembling reality, I often didn’t realize the difference until I woke. Mostly, the dreams were just short revisitations to simple moments from my childhood, like getting scolded by Onal for knocking a portrait off the wall in the Hall of Kings, or watching Mother softly hum while she composed a letter at her desk.
Other times, though, the dreams took decidedly darker turns. In one, I found myself standing outside an unfamiliar cottage, listening to screams coming from inside. I’d scramble from one opening to another—door, window, cellar entrance, window—but they were all sealed shut. My body was too tangible to pass through the walls but too insubstantial to turn a knob or pick a lock. I could do nothing but listen and wait. Eventually, the screams would subside into an awful silence, and I would bolt awake, ears ringing.
The Screaming Dream, terrible as it was, was one of the easier ones. The Bleeding Dream, the Drowning Dream, and the Nothing Dream were all much, much worse. I sometimes woke from those drenched in sweat, or coughing up imaginary water, or unable to move my arms or legs for endless, agonizing minutes after becoming fully conscious.
Conrad sighed sweetly and deeply, shifting around in his blankets before settling back into deep, rhythmic breathing, one cheek rosy from being pressed against the pillow.
He’d been through so much, grown up so fast . . . and he was carrying the burden of new responsibility with an admirable degree of dignity and grace. But he was still only an eight-year-old child, one whose world had been upended in just a few short months. He’d lost his home, his surrogate sister, his mother . . .
One or the other.
My head snapped up at the sound. There was a mirror hanging on the far wall of the bedchamber in a heavy silver-gilt frame that was higher than the four-poster bed was tall. In it, Conrad looked exactly the same, but I was changed once more.
&
nbsp; My dark-haired reflection spoke again, in a soft, papery whisper.
At the red moonrise, she rasped, one of two dies. The firebird boy or the girl with star-eyes. If it is he, the crone will be free. If it is her, the crone is no more. One or the other. One or the other. Daughter of the sister, or son of the brother. At the red moonrise, one of two dies.
I stumbled out of Conrad’s room and headlong into Kellan, who’d come up the stairs after me. “Aurelia,” he began in surprise, glancing at the guards posted on either side of the door, “are you all right? Is Conrad—?”
“Conrad’s fine,” I managed to choke out. “It’s just . . . just . . . some dust in the air, caught in my throat.”
I hurried down the hall and around the corner with the guards’ eyes on me, Kellan on my heels. I barely made it out of their line of sight before I was on my knees, my spluttering coughs turning into great heaves.
“Aurelia?” Kellan pulled me to my feet as doors down the hall began to open and curious faces of the coronation guests began to peer out, courtiers mostly: Lord Gaskin, Marquess Hallett, Lady Parik. “You’re not well. Come on. This way.” As he passed, he announced to the watchers, “Go back to sleep, all. Nothing to worry about.”
He took me to his own room and laid me down on his bed while he went to fetch Onal. My coughs had subsided, but I felt weak and wrung out, shaking like a skeletal leaf in a bitter breeze, breaths coming quick and shallow, scraping past my raw throat.
I glimpsed myself in the mirror at the end of Kellan’s bed. My doppelganger was gone, and the only face looking back at me was my own. Not that it was a comfort; I looked wretched. Waiflike. Wasted. Wild. A creature of tangled hair and dark-circled eyes. And despite the chilling sombersweet-induced apparition, the most troubling thing I’d seen all day was my own unrecognizable reflection.
Zan wouldn’t want this life for you.
But it didn’t matter what Zan would have wanted. Because Zan was dead and gone, and he’d taken the Aurelia I used to be with him.
* * *
I woke before sunrise to find Onal sitting on the side of Kellan’s bed.
“I was told that you weren’t feeling well.” She had a satchel slung over her bony shoulder from which she began pulling an eclectic mix of tonic bottles, setting them one by one on the table directly across from where my head lay on the pillow so that I could see exactly what she was doing. I was well-versed in her concoctions, and of this assortment, each new option was more rancid than the last. She watched my face as she lined them all up, gauging my revulsion. If you’re not sick enough to want the remedy, she used to say, you’re not sick at all. This was her way of threatening me back to health.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Kellan said you retched all over the hall. That doesn’t sound like ‘fine.’” She paused. “Are you using magic again?”
“I didn’t use magic, Onal. Not last night nor any other time since Stiria, four months ago.” I took a deep breath. “It wasn’t magic . . . just a bad reaction to sombersweet wine. Whoever said those hallucinations were pleasant was almost certainly lying.”
