Night Shine Read online

  Kirin thanked her, when they were alone, for being willing to play the game. And he confided to her that his father suspected more had happened during the summer, that Kirin was hiding secrets. They could not slip in the slightest, even around his family. Especially around his family.

  But it was her pleasure to behave like a dangerous pet on the prince’s leash, she said, distracting the court from the weirder questions of the summer and gaps in the prince’s story. She liked the game, liked knowing it was a game.

  It made her smiles dark, Kirin said, and he liked that.

  Between them they developed a signal: if Kirin wore a single red earring, he felt like a man today; two, he was shifting in and out of man uncomfortably; three he felt good in between; four, he was a woman; five, he hated his body. If there were six or more earrings curling up his ear, he was wild. Depending, Shine secretly called him Kirin Bright Smile and Kirin Full of Potential, Neither Kirin, the Prince Who Is Also a Maiden, Kirin Consumed, and Kirin the Wild. He was always Kirin, somehow.

  Shine had never felt more a part of him, and free to enjoy it. That was the consequence of choice, she thought, even if her old self hadn’t realized choice was missing.

  The prince was the only person never to mistakenly call her by her old name.

  That is, other than Sky, who did not have the opportunity, because Shine rarely saw him. When she did, he was firmly on duty guarding Kirin’s back and made no time to chat.

  The great demon, it turned out, was unwilling to teach her its way of giving and taking and giving and taking. You are annoying enough, it said.

  And the dragon-lily spirit never warmed to her, though she brought it pieces of her breakfast every day. She told it a story that once upon a time a tiny flower spirit had learned to make a family of flowers until it became a great spirit, and then when its volcano died, it became a great demon, eventually being reborn in a tiny garden guarded by a mighty, curious dragon lily. So maybe there was an impressive future ahead of it.

  The dragon-lily spirit dived into the pond, then peeked only its eyes up to stare at her with extreme suspicion.

  Day and night, Shine thought of the sorceress. If someone flashed past in a vivid emerald necklace or wearing ivory combs, Shine saw her evergreen eye and her bone-white eye. She lay in her abandoned bathroom, wrapped in soft new blankets, and whispered stories of her day as if she related them to the sorceress. Sometimes the great demon was listening, and Shine rolled over, pressed a hand to the wall, and told it what she’d learned about reborn hearts and demons falling in love. She played games with it, childish games she invented, and remembered her sorceress saying, My demon played too.

  She knew the sorceress needed her, but Shine had to stay just a little bit longer. It would all work out. They would all be fine. Her, the sorceress, Kirin, and Sky.

  The sorceress would make it, she’d promised.

  She saw the sorceress again at the end of her first week in the palace, in a room Shine had never found when she was at the mountain herself. Blue crystals glowed along the ceiling of the cavern, lighting up rows of flowers growing in boxes. The flowers were strangely shaped, made of feathers or scales, scarlet maple leaves, slithering tongues, and worst of all, tiny blinking eyes. The air smelled sweet and sour, oddly pleasant. The sorceress tended a long box of drooping daisies with petals the color of salmon meat and tiny stamen singing a sad song. With delicate silver scissors, the sorceress trimmed red from the edges of the petals.

  “What is it?” Shine asked.

  The sorceress did not lose her concentration. “Fellwort, and it makes a tincture to keep me awake.”

  “You look like you need sleep.” Shine disliked the heavy darkness under the sorceress’s eyes, which made them seem huger, more monstrous. The monstrousness didn’t bother her: it was the unintentional nature of it. As if the sorceress couldn’t help appearing exhausted.

  The sorceress hissed suddenly as she trimmed too much from a pink petal. She set the scissors down, and Shine saw a faint trembling in her hands.

  “Sorceress,” Shine said, ducking under the row of flower boxes. She stood with stinky dirt on her knees but took the sorceress’s hands in her own. “Rest.”

  “I am fine, Night Shine.”  The sorceress regarded Shine coolly, and her eyes again seemed bright, awake.

  Shine tried out a smile, and the sorceress returned it slightly.

  She asked after the rest of the garden, and the sorceress walked her along the rows, pointing out natural flowers and magically sourced, adding details about their care and uses. Shine slipped her hand into the sorceress’s, and the sorceress stroked her thumb down Shine’s but did not speak of it.

  The bluish crystal light cast even, shallow shadows, and Shine listened for the heartbeat of the Fifth Mountain. She could not hear it, perhaps because this was a long-distance spell. She stopped and said, “Kirin needs me.”

  “So do I,” the sorceress said.

  But she seemed all right, and strong, and Shine said, “I’ll be here soon.”

  “Good,” the sorceress said, and Shine disliked even more than the shadows under her eyes how light and uncaring the sorceress’s tone was. As if there was no trust, as if the sorceress did not believe Shine would return.

  “I promise,” Shine said, even as she woke up again in the palace.

  Every day Shine was given new clothing to make her beautiful, and her hair re-dyed black, her face powdered as pale as Kirin’s. She learned to like the taste of lip paint, which was good because she did not learn how to avoid eating it off or stop smearing it on the rim of her glass. Whisper was allowed to dress her, and it was considered an honor. She never tried to put Shine in anything stiff with hidden architecture, for Whisper understood without asking that Shine wouldn’t tolerate bindings or corsets or shoulder wings or starched layers like rose petals.

  Her only real frustration was the restricting net. She couldn’t even practice siphoning enough power to fill a cup of tea! But Shine knew after the investiture ritual she’d tear through the sigils and join the sorceress. There on the Fifth Mountain she would gain skills and eventually thread power from the wind to fuel her transformations, or heal great injuries, or maybe move the course of a river. She had her entire life to learn. Maybe she would live for hundreds of years!

  When Shine imagined her future, it cycled like seasons: winter with the sorceress, summer with Kirin, sometimes changing it up, staying or going for longer, and even traveling to the farther corners of the empire, or making herself into a shark and swimming across the sea. She was a demon reborn; she could do it! She would bless the empire, and Kirin, and make sure he was happy and healthy, and his eventual First Consort, and Second, and children. Shine could see the future of the empire itself spool out if she tried.

  She would have the sorceress with her for it.

  That felt right. The missing thing inside her could be filled up by the sorceress. Somehow. Like a puzzle box, Shine would simply have to keep reworking herself until they fit.

  Once the Selegan River spirit had told her dragons were possibility and potential, and Shine finally understood what that felt like. In her was the potential of all the world.

  Two nights before the full moon and the investiture ritual, Shine held the pear in her hand.

  It was almost gone.

  One good bite or two small ones. She considered waiting but wanted the sorceress to know when to expect her. So Shine carefully bit into the pear, enjoying the flavor as always, and once the taste had vanished down her gullet, she opened her eyes into the library of the Fifth Mountain again. She said immediately, “The pear is nearly finished, so I may not have much time. I’ll leave the palace in three days. Expect me in a little less than a month. I can travel more quickly than a human girl now.”

  The sorceress looked up from her work, tired, but she smiled, and her evergreen eye and her bone-white eye both gleamed. Little spiking feathers darkened her cheeks, and her teeth were sharp. “That pleas
es me, Night Shine. Will you marry me when you arrive?”

  Shine laughed and said, “Probably not yet! But you will have every day to change my mind.”

  When Shine woke up, she carefully wrapped the final small bite of pear in a cloth of fuchsia silk and kept it with her always. Just in case.

  FORTY-THREE

  THE MORNING BEFORE KIRIN’S investiture ritual, Shine was awakened from a dream of the mirror lake and the sorceress by a sound at the boarded-over, rusty, unused door of the abandoned bathhouse. She thought at first that the great demon was laughing in a hollow-walls sort of way.

  But the noise stopped and then started again, in a distinctly knocking-for-entry pattern.

  Shine sat up, rubbed her hands down her face, and walked around piles of broken tiles and the laundry line tied between pillars on which she’d hung her new clothes. She put her hand on the dusty old door and called, “Hello?”

  Sky’s muffled voice answered, “Night Shine.”

  For a moment she didn’t answer, she was so surprised.

  “Shine?” Sky called again, soft and urgent.

  “Yes, Sky. I’m here. The door—how did you know?” Did everyone in the palace know she was slipping out of her guest chambers to sneak here to sleep every night?

  “Can I come in?”

  Shine slid her hand down the old wood. “I can’t open it. Is everything all right?”

  “Are you?”

  Why would he be worried about her now? she wondered, irritated. She wanted to send him away, because he’d pretended for weeks they’d never been friends. But she wanted to know why more. “Go to the Lily Garden. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Now, Shine.”

  Shine didn’t answer but took care of her morning ablutions and dressed in a tunic and trousers and thin slippers good for climbing the smoke ways. She tucked the final bite of the pear into her sleeve, climbed into the ceiling, and quickly headed toward the Lily Garden.

  The Day the Sky Opened already waited. He stood stiffly in the pale sunlight, at the edge of the heavy shadow cast by the garden wall. His blue-black hair ruffled in a slight wind, and his hands clasped together behind his back, holding something small.

  Nerves fluttered Shine’s stomach as she stepped out under the trellis of sunset lilies. Their vivid orange and pink flowers were furled closed for a few more hours. Her slippers crushed slightly on the thin gravel, and when she stepped on weeds, she smelled sweet perfume.

  Sky turned at her footsteps. His whole handsome face was furrowed and frowning.

  “What?” she asked, slowing her pace. “What is it?”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine, Sky. Why do you care suddenly?”

  He went still, then sighed. “I care about you. That has never stopped, Shine. Even if you can’t believe it after today.”

  Shine scowled, suddenly very hot. The binding net itched, and she angrily scratched at her forearm. She marched to the pond and stared at the messy array of dragon lilies.

  “I wanted to give you this. I found it and thought…” He offered the thing he’d been holding, his movements stilted. Where was his warrior grace?

  “You’re scaring me,” she said.

  Sky’s frown, if anything, deepened.

  Shine reached him and took the ivory ball he offered. It was warm from his hands, carved with vines and flowers and tiny elephants. Dark white and yellowing, like the sorceress’s eye when she was tired. The nerves in Shine’s stomach sharpened. “Sky.”

  “I found it in the city, and I thought it might remind you of… her.”

  “Sky.” Shine looked up, clenching her fingers tightly around the ball. “I am going to the Fifth Mountain after Kirin’s ritual tomorrow night. I am going to learn magic from her. I don’t need to remember anything.”

  The bodyguard stared down at her, his expression slowly falling out of hard concern into raw surprise.

  “Sky!” She threw the ball and heard it crack against the garden wall, then pushed both hands on his chest, shoving with all her might. “Sky, tell me!”

  He did not budge but gripped her wrists. “I thought you knew. I thought he would have…”

  Shine’s heart heaved, and sweat broke across her face and down her chest, her back, everywhere. Like she was melting into tiny streams of lava. She had to grit her teeth to control the binding, the need to drag at the bodyguard’s life. “Sky.”

  “I’m sorry.” He started to say her old name, but stopped. “I thought you knew. I would have made him tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” she whispered.

  “The morning we left the army, when we went south, Kirin sent the entire Silver Rain crescent to the Fifth Mountain. They have twelve witches with them, and—and he told them to bargain with the other Living Mountains—the two who took you—to join them. They attack the mountain today. This afternoon. The empress approved of his plan when he told her. Said it showed strong initiative.”

  Shaking her head, she jerked away from Sky. “No. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t!”

  Sky simply looked at her, because obviously Kirin would do exactly that.

  And keep it from her.

  And pretend everything was fine. Pretend he loved her.

  Shine ran, tripping on the uneven gravel and star-lily vines.

  She burst into the fifth circle corridor, startling two passing servants, who widened their peacock-painted eyes. Disregarding them, she slammed her palms against the wall. “Moon, where is the prince? Tell me where Kirin is.”

  The demon rolled over, or sighed, and the wall shuddered under her hands. Dust drifted down onto her hair.

  with his father in the second circle, the demon murmured.

  Shine ran, up through the palace, using the wide corridors and dashing across courtyards instead of sneaking, ignoring upset servants and shocked lords and ladies, until she reached the second circle. She stopped, chest heaving, and jerked open a lattice to crawl into the wall. She tore off her slippers and dropped them. This was the only way into the private residence of the First Consort without fighting her way past Warriors of the Last Means or secretaries or who knows!

  Thin smoke pricked her eyes as she climbed into the rafters of the second circle, careful and silent. Her whole body felt tightly wound. A harp string vibrating too high to be heard.

  The sounds of the palace tried to soothe her: they were so normal. Soft chatter, softer footfalls, sometimes the clack of armor or a burst of laughter. The trickle of water as she crossed behind the half roof of the Second Consort’s fish garden. She smelled bread and sweet breakfast meats. Thin chocolate smells, and then she popped open an old smoke shutter and reached through into the dim rafters of Sun-Bright’s room.

  Kirin’s voice drifted up. “… you’ll see.”

  First Consort Sun-Bright’s voice answered after a slight pause. “Everyone will, Kirin. If it comes down to it. Everyone will see.”

  “That’s what it takes to prove I’m better for—everything I’ve done.”

  “Perhaps, son.”

  “They’re only rumors,” Kirin insisted.

  Shine crouched against a narrow ceiling beam, separated from the prince and consort by a thin decorative lattice hung with lights. Maybe Kirin would say something to exonerate himself of Sky’s accusation. Oh, she hoped so.

  “Rumors are an important thread in the weave of the empire,” the First Consort said.

  “Do you trust me?” Kirin asked lightly, and Shine almost snorted. Her heart thumped faster and faster. Kirin always had more than one plan. She’d forgotten—or stopped thinking it could hurt her.

  Sun-Bright said, “I know you, and that is both reassuring and decidedly not.”

  “Father.”

  “You will succeed—that I trust—though between now and the moment of triumph I will suffer through extreme heartburn.”

  Shine bit her lip. Maybe Sky was wrong. Maybe Kirin had not set the army after the sorceress. Surely he would be more concerned now, busie
r, or checking in with army witches who could communicate through their aether-ways and spirit familiars.

  “Drink less tea until the ritual,” Kirin teased. The prince sounded amused. He sounded relaxed. Like he’d already won.

  A commotion below had Shine spreading her stomach flat against the beam. At the door, someone knocked. Then a voice she didn’t know said, “The prince’s man is here, and says it’s urgent.”

  “Sky?” Kirin asked.

  At the affirmative, Kirin told them to show him in.

  First Consort Sun-Bright said, “Trouble? We shouldn’t have news from the army witches until later.”

  Shine clenched her jaw and pressed her forehead to the ceiling beam, hard enough to make her entire skull hurt. It was true.

  “I don’t know what it could be,” Kirin answered.

  The door slid open and Sky said, tightly, “My lord consort, my prince.”

  “Warrior,” Sun-Bright acknowledged. They were shadowy blobs below her, cut into pieces by the lattice.

  “Is she here?” Sky said.

  “Shine?” Kirin sounded sharp. “Why?”

  Sky hesitated, then with careful control said, “I told her about the army. I assumed you had done so yourself.”

  Sun-Bright said, a frown clear in his tone, “She didn’t know?”

  Ice blossomed inside Shine. No lava, no rageful volcano, just ice crystals growing over her bones like frost kissed to a glass window.

  Kirin said, “She would have tried to stop it.”

  At least he did not try to excuse himself. Betrayal was so cold.

  “Kirin, that was a mistake,” Sky said, too familiar with the prince.

  “Prince,” the consort corrected Sky, and then asked his son, “Will this be a problem for us? Will she act foolishly?”

  “Where is she?” Kirin asked.

  Shine wrapped her hand around a branch of the decorative lattice and tore it up with all her strength. Through the hole she heard cries of alarm, and her name, because Kirin knew. He always knew.