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Chapter 10
In the Ven’s courtyard, a short Wardana with the demeanor of a boulder barks orders at a handful of trainees as they pull spears from their gauntlets. “No! Pull it even and steady! Steady! Too fast—you see that weak spot? Try and stick a beast with that, and it’ll snap in your face.”
Dalca made it look easy, but most of the trainees pull lumpy spears that alternate between the thickness of my wrist and pinky finger. How effortless it’d looked from afar—when I watched the Wardana from Amma’s, I’d imagined their spears appeared out of thin air.
She scowls at them, her hundreds of tiny braids flying as she stalks back and forth. She catches sight of me, and her frown deepens.
“You! Who are you? Where’s your gauntlet?”
I raise my hands in surrender. “I’m Casvian Haveli’s apprentice.”
She grimaces. “Carry on, then.”
Her distaste gives me an idea. I glance at where the tip of the golden palace peeks over the edge of the Ven’s wall. “He asked me to go to him in the first—but he didn’t tell me how to get up there.”
She rolls her eyes. “Typical. Show the guards at the gate your trainee transit pass. They’re used to it.”
I thank her. With a thudding heart, I make my way to the golden gates that lead to the second. They’re much closer to the Ven than the black gates; somehow that makes the Ven feel like it belongs to the high ringers. I’m waved through the second’s gates with a warning to be out by sundown; only those who live there are allowed after nightfall.
I’ve no time to linger and take in the splendor of the second, where live those born to power, a place that everyone dreams of one day calling home, of earning a ring by valiant heroism or brilliant ikonomancy. I catch a few glimpses of obscene luxury: their streetlamps are crafted in the shape of birds, casting multihued ikonlight, and every house I pass is an exercise in wasteful ikonomancy, with balcony railings wrought in looping warming ikons, windowpanes decorated with ikons to repel rain and dust, ikons carved onto front steps so that a visitor will set off a chime inside.
The first ring doesn’t rise up from the dead center of the second; it’s offset, close to the golden road, so that it only takes me three quarters of an hour to make it to the palace gates. The guards mark my name—I tell themVesper Maran, Amma’s surname—on a sheet of paper and wave me through without so much as a second glance.
The palace stands before me in all its golden splendor. It’s like a lick of fire rendered in faceted gemstone, a grand peaked dome surrounded by lesser domes, a curving outer wall rippling with the curves of dozens of balconies, each set with ornate windows that glint in the light of the sun.
I walk with arms tight at my sides, afraid to touch anything. I tense up whenever I pass someone, knowing they must be able to tell that I don’t belong.
My feet carry me forward through the main entrance, into an atrium. An attendant in a white uniform steps up to my side. I tell herthe same cover story—I’m looking for Casvian Haveli—and she bids me to follow her. I bite my cheek. I have to find my chance to slip away.
She takes me into a corridor that runs the perimeter of the palace. We pass a balcony to the left that opens out over the city, and a smaller one to the right that looks out over a stretch of tall green hedges. The palace is set in rings, just like the city. I must be in the outer ring, but the Regia and her family would live deeper inside.
The attendant leads me into a hallway where a line of apprentices and assistants stand primly, facing a pair of heavy doors. They look at me with a mix of curiosity and distaste. “New one?” a bare-shouldered girl asks. Her beauty strikes me—it’s not the beauty of symmetry, but that of status: shining unbound hair and skin that glows from living under the sun. Between the luxe clothes and the haughty look—so like Casvian’s—it takes no real intelligence to peg her as a second-ringer.
I nod.
“You’ll want to wait here, in case your master needs anything.”
Grimacing at the wordmaster, I spare a glance down the hall. “We don’t go inside?”
She laughs. “You don’t want to be inside. Not when the Wardana and Regia’s Guard meet. You’ll hear enough of the yelling from out here.”
I can’t wait around and waste this chance to find how Dalca enters the old city. Whatever it is—a door, a tunnel, a strange stairwell—that’s how I’ll get to Pa. The palace is Dalca’s domain; if I were him, this is where I’d hide my way into the old city.
But the palace is a large place, and I’ve no idea where to start. I consider prying a little information out of the apprentice who spoke to me, but her attention is fixed further down the hall.
All the apprentices quiet as six figures approach. Uniformed insleek black leather edged in gold, each of them built like Wardana fighters. The Regia’s Guard.
They’re the Regia’s trusted protectors and sometime advisors, but, unlike the Wardana, they never leave the high rings. From the adoration on the apprentices’ faces, it’s clear that they’re well respected. But I always figured it was a job for folks who weren’t brave enough to fight the Storm.
Their leader has pale hair and a familiar scowl. My back hits the stone wall before my mind registers that his hair is jaw-length and gray-streaked white instead of long and mirrorlike, and his face is hard instead of pointy. The resemblance is strong; it’s like seeing what Casvian would look like if he spent the next two decades lifting weights.
The Regia’s Guard disappear behind the door, and in seconds the apprentices are back to chatting. I slink away, making it a few steps deeper into the palace, before a call comes from the mouth of a balcony. “There he is!”
They all go to see, and I follow them out onto the balcony. Hundreds, thousands of rooftops cascade down the rings, a semicircle of the ones nearest us glinting in the sunlight. I grip the stone railing, fighting vertigo. The people of the second are half as tall as my thumb, and the people of the third no larger than ants. The fifth is just a murky shadow at the base of the colossal darkness of the stormwall. How devastatingly high the Storm stretches—even the palace reaches only a third of its height.
But that’s not why she called.
A lone Wardana flies through the air, thousand-and-one-feather cloak spread like wings. I don’t have to wonder who it is, because I can see the answer in the faces of the girls staring up at him. They look with hope and ambition in their eyes, hands smoothing down locks of hairthat might have escaped careful styling, angling themselves at the edge of the balcony, hoping to catch the attention of the prince so that he might one day make them Regia’s consort.
