Chapter One
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The Offering
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They had taken her boots.
That was the detail Iris kept returning to — the small, stupid, humiliating fact that she was walking barefoot across silver-veined stone because somewhere outside the city, a fae guard had decided her mud-caked leather belonged nowhere near a queen’s hall. Her feet were bleeding. She was glad about it.
They had killed a man on the road on the fourth day. He had come out of a village to shout at them, a farrier in an apron with his hands still black. Not to fight. To shout. He had got perhaps six words out, and the outrider nearest him had leaned down from the saddle without stopping his horse and opened him from the collarbone to the hip.
It had made almost no sound. She had expected noise. There had been the wet parting of an apron and a man sitting down in the road, and the column had not slowed. Nobody said one word about it for the next two days.
She had been six feet away. There was still a spot of him on the back of her left hand that she had not been able to get off with spit, and she had stopped trying somewhere around the third night, and it was still there now, under the moon-white ceiling of a queen’s hall, dried to a small brown comma at the base of her thumb. She was leaving red smears on the moon-white floor and she was glad of that too.
“Keep your head down,” the woman in front of her whispered. A Varrin, older, with frost already in her hair. They had not been allowed names on the road. “Don’t look at them.”
Iris looked at them.
The corridor was lined with courtiers. She had seen fae raiders in her village, rough-cut things, weather-bitten and mean. These were pale as the inside of a shell, dressed in silvers and midnight blues, arranged along the walls like ornaments. They didn’t whisper or point. They watched with the serene patience of people who had nowhere better to be than a line of mortals being walked to judgment.
One of them, a male with a braid of hair so pale it was almost green, lifted a glass to his mouth without taking his eyes off her. Iris held his gaze until he smiled, and then she kept holding it, because when she was a child her mother had told her that a dog only bites a thing that moves, and Iris had decided somewhere between the borderland and this corridor that she was not going to move.
The chains at her wrists were silver. Of course they were silver. In the Moon Court even restraint was a kind of compliment, and she was expected, somehow, to feel flattered.
They passed under an arch carved with creatures she had never seen, things with too many teeth, twining around each other, and then the corridor opened, and the throne room swallowed her whole.
She had prepared herself for something ugly. A war hall. Iron. Trophies. She had not prepared herself for this.
The ceiling was gone. Not collapsed. Designed to be gone, open to a sky that should not have been night at this hour and was. A full moon hung directly overhead, low and huge and impossibly close, pouring its light into a hall built to catch and drink it. Pillars of white stone rose on either side, slender as a wrist, and between them hung curtains of something that looked like smoke and moved like water. The floor was a pale mosaic of silver and bone and a grey that was almost blue, arranged in a pattern she could not read from inside it but suspected, from the way her feet seemed to slide toward the center without her choosing, was a spiral.
At the end of it, on a dais, sat the queen.
Iris did not look at her yet. She wouldn’t give her that. She looked at the court.
They were ranked along the sides of the hall in an order she didn’t understand. Houses, she guessed. Each cluster held together by a color at the throat or a pin at the shoulder. The air smelled of night-blooming flowers and something animal, like a kennel kept very clean.
To the queen’s right stood a male in black.
She noticed him without meaning to. He was not the tallest in the room. He was not the most ornately dressed. His clothes were plain by this court’s standards, fitted, matte, unadorned. He was simply the first thing in the hall that looked, to her eye, like something she understood. Not fae-pretty. Not glass-carved. He had the alert stillness of a hunting dog that had heard something and decided not to say so yet.
Then the guard in front of her stopped walking, and she almost walked into his back, and she forgot about the male in black because the queen had risen from her throne.
“Oh,” the queen said. Softly. “Look at you all.”
She came down from the dais. Iris had not expected that. She had imagined a monarch who made you come to her, who made you crawl. This woman walked, unhurried, along the line of hostages with her hands clasped before her, and her voice was warm, and her face was kind, and Iris felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck rise one by one.
The queen stopped at the Varrin woman first.
“You’re freezing,” she said. She lifted her hand and laid it along the woman’s cheek, as a mother might. “They should have given you a cloak. Who brought them in?”
One of the guards spoke. Iris didn’t catch the answer. She was watching the Varrin woman, who had spent the entire forty-day march with her mouth locked shut, and who now, at the warmth of a stranger’s palm against her face, had begun, quietly, to weep.
“There,” the queen said. “There, it’s all right. You’re safe now. You are a guest of the Moon Court. No one will touch you. Do you understand?”
The Varrin woman nodded.
“Tell me your name.”
“Maenna,” the woman whispered.
“Maenna.” The queen made the name sound long-awaited. “Maenna, you are going to be placed with the kitchen stewards. They are kind. You will have a bed and broth and clean water for your feet. Can you manage that for me?”
Another nod. Another tear.
The queen moved on. She touched each hostage in turn: a hand on a shoulder, fingers tipping a chin up, a brief cupping of a jaw as if she were checking fruit for ripeness. To each she offered a soft word, a place, a promise. Maenna to the kitchens. The boy with the stammer to the stables. The old man with the bad hand to the scribes, because “you have clever eyes, don’t you.” One by one, they folded. Iris watched them fold and felt her ribs draw inward, because she understood, now, that she was in much worse trouble than she had been three minutes ago.
Cruelty she could fight. Cruelty she had practice at.
This was something else. The queen reached her last.
Iris had been rehearsing this since the first night on the road, through bruises and cold and hunger and the sick smell of too many bodies in too small a wagon. She had planned her face. She had planned her spine. She had planned the precise angle of her chin.
None of it survived contact.
The queen was nothing like Iris had imagined. Terrible would have been easier. She had the beauty of an old, careful painting — hair the color of wheat gone to seed, eyes a grey so pale they were almost colorless, her mouth already curved in something that was not quite a smile but intended to be read as one. She looked at Iris, and Iris understood that she had been looked at before. That the queen had watched her all the way down the hall, past Maenna and the boy and the old man, and had saved her for last.
“And what is your name, little thing?”
Iris had promised herself she would refuse to speak. Instead she said, “Iris.”
“Iris.” A pause. “Iris what.”
“Valehart.”
The queen’s head tilted by a degree so small Iris was not sure she had imagined it. Something passed across her face. Not surprise, not quite. A cat pretending not to hear would have given more away.
“Valehart,” the queen said. “That is an old name.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
A smile. A real one, this time, or something that wanted to look real. “You have your mother’s mouth, I think.”
A cold thing moved up the back of Iris’s legs.
She had not told the queen her mother’s name. She had not told anyone here her mother’s name. She had barely thought it on the road, because to think of her mother was to think of the house in the borderland, and to think of the house was to think of her brother sitting on the top step of the porch with the one shoe that never fit right, and she could not afford that, not in chains, not in this hall, not with this woman’s hand now lifting toward her face.
Tov was the reason she had not let herself die on the road.
She held still when the queen touched her jaw. She was proud of that later. More than it deserved.
The queen’s hand was cool. The fingers were long. They considered. Iris felt each fingertip settle in turn, the thumb just under her chin, the palm not quite meeting her cheek. The pattern landed at once: every touch the queen had given tonight had been a measurement. A weighing. Maenna had wept into a scale.
“You are very brave,” the queen said softly. “Or very stupid. Sometimes it is difficult to tell them apart at your age.”
“Sometimes it is difficult at any age.”
She should not have said it. It came out anyway. She watched the queen’s eyes, which did not narrow, did not harden. If anything, they grew warmer.
“Oh,” the queen breathed. “Oh, I like you.”
And she stepped back, and turned, and said to the hall at large, in the same warm voice —
“Lord Vale. What do you think of our last little guest?”
Iris searched the dais for Lord Vale. She turned her head despite herself and saw the male in black again, the one she had noticed and then forgotten, standing at the right side of the empty dais. He had not moved. He had not, she realized, moved since she had entered the hall.
He was looking at her.
He had been looking at her the entire time. The court stared with interest; the queen measured. His look belonged to neither. She could not decide whether she was about to be killed.
His eyes were wrong. They had been a pale color when she glanced at him before: grey, she had thought, or the washed silver of river stone. They were not that now. Something underneath them had come up to the surface. Not gold. Gold would have been too warm. It was the color a coin turned when you held it too long in your hand. It was the color of the inside of a flame where the flame stopped being red.
His left hand, gloved, was closed into a fist at his side. As she watched, the leather of the glove made a small, audible sound. A creak. A protest.
The court stilled.
Her body knew first. The hair on her arms lifted before the rest of her caught up. The glass-pale courtiers were not breathing. The male with the braid had lowered his glass.
“Lord Vale?” the queen said again, gently. “I asked you a question.”
No answer came.
For a moment, Iris thought he might be unable to.
One of the courtiers near the dais, an older male with a silver chain across his chest, moved half a step forward. Lord Vale kept his gaze on Iris. But some part of him, some invisible part, must have turned, because the older male stopped moving very abruptly, and stepped back, and put his hand against the pillar beside him as if he needed to be holding on to something.
“Forgive him, Iris,” the queen said. Warmly. To her. “My Lord Vale has been on the border for three seasons. He is unaccustomed to court. Sometimes our dear Rhyon forgets his manners.”
Our dear Rhyon. The name landed like a thrown stone.
He dragged his gaze off her, slowly, and looked at the queen, and in that moment, in the one beat when his eyes were not on Iris, Iris felt how much of the air in the hall had been held. The court exhaled. Someone, somewhere behind her, made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“My queen,” he said.
His voice was low. Rougher than she would have expected from a male so still. It scraped somewhere in the middle register, rough without apology.
“What do you think of her?” the queen asked. Pleasantly. “My little Valehart. Our latest gift from the borderlands.”
He said nothing.
“Come now. You have opinions on everything. Share one.”
“She is —” He stopped. Iris watched his throat move. “— small.”
“She is.” The queen smiled. “She is also bleeding on my floor.”
Iris felt her face go hot.
“Someone,” the queen said, still gently, still warmly, to no one and to everyone, “forgot to give this child her boots back. Would you see to that, Lord Vale? You seem so attentive to her circumstances.”
A long beat.
“Yes.”
“Good.” The queen turned back to Iris. She had that smile again, the one that was not quite a smile. “Iris Valehart. You are, by law and by treaty, the Moon Court’s ward until such time as I determine otherwise. Do you understand what that means?”
“No.”
“It means you belong to me.”
She said it like a kindness.
“But I have so many things already,” she went on, “and I am a generous queen, and I would hate to see a girl your age misplaced in the wrong hands. So. A gift.”
Her hand lifted, and Iris, who was still standing in the middle of the spiral, turned before she knew she was turning.
The queen was gesturing toward the male in black.
“Lord Vale,” she said, “will see to your keeping. He is the most competent male in my court, and the most attentive, and he will be responsible for you as he is responsible for anything of mine. Won’t you, Rhyon?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
“Say it properly, my love.”
A longer pause.
“She is my charge,” he said. “By your will.”
“By my gift.”
“By your gift.”
The queen smiled. She turned and climbed back to her throne, and as she passed Iris without another glance, and the conversation showed itself for what it had been: it had never included Iris at all.
The walk out of the throne room survived only in fragments.
Later she would try to reconstruct it: which door, which corridor, which of the pale stone staircases. The pieces would refuse to align. What she remembered was this: the feeling of someone’s eyes on the back of her neck for a long time after she had turned and been led away, and then, at a certain point, the absence of that feeling, which was somehow worse.
A servant, silver-liveried, silent, walked her up stairs and down a colonnade and through two sets of silver-latched doors. The palace was cold. Not the damp cold of her grandmother’s root cellar, which she knew and could negotiate. A dry, mineral cold, as if the stone itself had been bled of warmth and was drinking hers to compensate.
The servant stopped at a door near the end of a long, narrow gallery. She opened it without a word and stood aside. Iris looked into the room.
It was too nice.
That was her first thought, and it was a stupid thought, and she had it anyway. Too nice. Too carefully prepared. A bed hung with pale curtains, a fire already set and burning, a washstand with a pitcher of water steaming faintly, a tray of food on a low table, a folded robe across the foot of the bed. Someone had lit candles. Someone had known she was coming and had cared enough to light candles.
“Your keeper will come when he chooses,” the servant said, without looking at her. “Do not leave this wing. If you need anything, pull the cord by the bed.” A pause. “It would be best not to need anything.”
The door closed.
Iris stood in the middle of the room in her bloody feet and the silver chains no one had removed. Every part of this, the fire, the robe, the soft pillow visible through parted curtains, had been arranged by someone who knew her measurements, her cold, her exhaustion, her hunger. She sat down on the floor.
She would not use the bed or wear the robe. She sat on the very fine rug, on her bleeding feet, and tried to think. A queen had called her Valehart and made it sound like a word with history. A male in black had looked at her like a door he had stood before for a hundred years. She was not going to weep like Maenna. She sat. She thought.
She did not weep.
After a while she got up, because the floor was harder than she had expected, and crossed to the washstand, and scrubbed the blood off her feet with a cloth that smelled of something green and sweet. The robe stayed folded. She ate nothing from the tray, which was a small, childish refusal, and she knew it was childish, and she was not yet ready to be sensible. She sat on the rug in front of the fire with her arms around her knees and she watched the flames eat through an unfamiliar kind of wood, something that burned blue at the edges, and she told herself, deliberately, in her mother’s voice: You are not dead. That is a start.
The footsteps came later.
She heard them from a long way off: boots on stone, unhurried, approaching down the long gallery outside. She knew them before she knew how she knew them. Her whole body knew, in the strange, prickling way her body had known when he had looked at her in the throne room. The cadence of the tread.
The steps stopped outside her door.
They did not move on.
She waited for the knock. She had already decided what she was going to say when he opened the door. She had three options lined up and was picking between them.
He did not knock.
He did not open the door.
He simply stood on the other side of the wood. After a long moment she heard the breath he had been holding leave him. Leather creaked. He had not left.
She crossed the rug. She put her hand against the inside of the door.
The wood was cool. Thick.
She thought about speaking through it. Why did you look at me like that? What am I to you, Lord Vale? She stayed silent.
She stood with her palm against the wood and listened. On the other side she heard him do the same. Later, she would swear to it. The faintest shift of cloth. The low, steady rhythm of a man breathing a hand’s width from her on the other side of a closed door.
She stayed there a long time.
She waited without knowing why. She had the unwelcome sense that he did not know either. Two strangers had been put on opposite sides of a door by someone who had called it a gift. Neither knew what they had been given, or what it would cost.
The fire in the hearth fell in on itself with a soft collapse.
On the other side of the wood, he breathed. She lowered her hand.
She walked back to the rug. She sat down, not on the bed, not in the robe, and she wrapped her arms around her knees again, and she watched the blue-edged fire until, finally, she slept. If he left, he did it silently.
She never did, that first night. In the morning, when she woke stiff and cold on the rug, the gallery outside would be empty, and the candles would have been replaced, and there would be fresh water in the pitcher, and the only proof she had that he had stood there at all would be a single dark mark on the pale stone of the threshold: a bootprint pressed long and deep into the stone by someone who had stood in that one place for a very, very long time.
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