AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I couldn’t have been older than eight or nine when I ran away from the orphanage. The streets were dangerous, but I needed to know: what else from my dreams was out there?
I learned how to speak Yuenen like a hawker, how to speak Auvenese like a liar, how to be clever and observant and better than everyone else.
I had to, if I was going to hold anything that I could call mine.
So I know—I know what the smart thing to do is, but forgive me if I want to throw Cyrus to the mob anyway. It might not be wise or even all that satisfying, but the boy sitting across from me just had to bebornto have everything, and he will never do enough to deserve it.
The carriage slows to a crawl, nudging through crowds that won’t stop, though we have the right of way. The tall red sign of the Sweet Celestial Inn rises above the apartment blocks to mark the border of the Moon District.
As I take a deep breath, my squabbling pride simmersdown, quieter and quieter until it’s drowned out by the squeak of wheels turning over cobblestone. I open the carriage door and grab Cyrus’s forearm, careful to not graze his hands with my own.
He flinches at my bare touch. “What are you—”
“They’ll catch us if we stay here.” I clutch the carriage frame and spin on him. “We can lose them on the streets. Let’s go.”
Cast in dappled shadow, the prince’s features don’t seem as severe. Or maybe I just caught him in a genuine moment of surprise. “I don’t know this area.”
“I do.”
He doesn’t move.
“Or I can leave you here. It’s your choice.”
A heartbeat. Cyrus steps out, eying me with more confusion than mistrust. He tells the driver, “Go back to the palace. Lead them away.”
Then he follows me into the marketplace.
I don’twantto be dragging the prince around, but there’s a satisfaction nonetheless, to roaming a place where I’m more comfortable than he is. There’s little here that I can’t get at more upscale Yuenen establishments in other districts, but I miss this atmosphere. Food vendors fill this avenue of the Moon District. The air is thick with smoke and grease, and we can hardly move without elbowing into some skewer or hot stove. Everyone around us shoves us onward; they don’t care about who we are, prince or Seer or not—they have their own destinations to get to. The court thinks this slice of the Sun Capital is nothing but clutter and chaos, butthey don’t see how it’s like the rapids of a river: chaotic but flowing, efficient in its own way.
We weave our way to an emptier edge of the marketplace. I grab a straw hat and a costume banyan jacket off a woman selling wares from a blanket, tossing her more silvers than they’re worth. Cyrus declines the hat and pulls the banyan on. It’s tight around his shoulders and doesn’t wrap him neatly, but it covers his pitiful shirt. Continuing on, feet light as a pickpocket’s, I guide us out of the marketplace through a side alley.
A butcher and a medicine shop have taken up the shuttered spaces that used to be here. The walls are painted over with a wash of white. Cyrus stops, craning his head up, then around. He won’t find the exact memory he’s looking for, but he recognizes the place well enough.
The street where I saved his life, seven years ago.
“You remember,” I say.
He’s silent.
Only a few more blocks divide us from the river. From there, we can follow the shores north to the Palace District without attracting much attention. I haul my skirts up as the streets turn muddy. We walk single file down a sliver of sidewalk keeping us above sewer water.
“Watch out,” he says.
Cyrus throws an arm around me, pressing me to the wall. A wide handcart hauling dirt scrapes past us.
When the cart is gone, he doesn’t move.
I’ve felt his gaze bearing on me since we left the carriage, and I meet it at last. His eyes are green as emeralds and justas bright and heavy, the jewels of an already handsome face. Even in a banyan that was likely made from bedding scraps, Cyrus looks like the hero of a storybook. That’s the most unfair thing about him of all.
“Why are you helping me?” he asks. The question is quiet and curious.
Because I need you to trust me. Because I need to feed you lies from your father. Because it might be the last nice thing I do for you before you die.
I can only offer him a different truth, in the place of the ones I can’t give him: “Because you will always have everything, and I will always be the one to compromise.”
The faintest surprise furrows his brow. He searches my expression, but I don’t wonder what he’s thinking until his eyes linger on my lips for a beat too long. Somewhere in him is the boy who gave me the other half of my name.Lune. Violet Lune, Violet of the Moon.Such a pretty thing to gift me, before he knew any better. After I became his father’s liar, we did nothing but argue.
But feuding has its own kind of intimacy.
