Grayside: The First Resonance

The bells started as I turned into the south wing. Nine strokes, then a pause long enough to count the dead, then nine more. I stopped under the broken window at the end of the corridor and waited for them to finish, and the draft came through the empty frame and found the back of my neck. I let it. It was easier to be cold for a reason.

My grandfather had died a little after four that morning.

He kept a switch of green hazel in the corner of his study, cut fresh every spring, and for eighteen years he used it on me once a day. Some days I’d earned it. Most days I hadn’t, and he told me that was the point. A boy who is struck daily becomes accustomed to remaining motionless. I could stand still by the time I was seven. By twelve, I could thank him for it in a voice that didn’t shake, and he would nod and set the switch back in its corner, and we’d go on with my lessons in the old tongue as if the room hadn’t been full of its sound a minute before.

The wasting came for him two summers ago. It took the meat off his arms first, and I learned to read his decline in the blows. A little lighter in the autumn. Lighter again by the spring. Last night he sent the physicians out, called me to the bed, and hit me across the face with the back of his hand, and there was nothing in it. A moth could have landed harder. He looked at his hand for a long time afterward, and I think that was when we both knew.

Then he caught my wrist and pushed something cold into my palm. A ball of black glass, heavier than it looked, with a single thread of gold running through its center.

“It’ll learn your blood,” he said. His voice had gone to paper. “Lose it, and you’ll feel it go.”

He started coughing then, and didn’t stop for a long while. When I finally took my arm back, there was blood dried in a brown crust along my cuff.

I hadn’t changed my shirt. I’d like to say it was grief that kept me in it. Mostly I wanted something on me that proved I had been there when he went, and my father had not.

The sphere sat in the inside pocket of my coat, warm against my ribs, as if it had a pulse of its own. I didn’t take it out to look at it. I knew better than to take anything out in this palace.

Halfway down the corridor, two workmen stood on ladders at the chapel door with pry bars, working my grandfather’s crest off the lintel. The bells were still going. A third man waited at the foot of the ladders beside a crate of new plaques, the Sinclaire tower recast in brass and enameled a red so dark it was nearly brown. I could smell the fresh lacquer on them from ten feet off, linseed and turpentine and something underneath that caught in the throat. Nobody casts forty brass plaques between four in the morning and the second bell. My father had ordered them months ago and had them waiting in a storeroom, the way another man might keep a good bottle back for a wedding.

The workmen saw me and stopped.

“Go on,” I said.

They went on. The old oak gave with a long wet crack, and the crest came down in two pieces.

Past the chapel, a boy with a bucket and a wide brush was painting over the walnut paneling. My grandfather had never let anyone touch that wood. It was gouged all along one stretch at the height of a child’s shoulder, where I had fought my reflection with a practice sword at nine and lost, and he’d kept it that way on purpose so I’d walk past it every day and remember. The boy was laying the new lacquer on thick. The gouges filled and went smooth and glossy and red-black, and in a few strokes it was as if I had never been nine at all.

My father tried to cover that same wood once before, when I was ten. He hung a length of red velvet over the marks while the old man was away at the coast. My grandfather came home, tore it down with his own hands, and had me beaten in front of my father for letting it happen. That night my father came to my room and beat me again for letting it be torn down. I remember lying on my stomach afterward, realizing there was no answer that would have spared me, and feeling almost calm about it. It was the first useful thing either of them ever taught me.

The boy with the brush didn’t look up. He’d been given his orders before dawn, before anyone outside the sickroom knew there was anything to order.

At the turn of the hall, my grandfather’s portrait lay face down across a pair of sawhorses with its frame half pried off. Somebody had set a paint bucket on the back of the canvas. That painting had hung over the south stair for forty years. They had turned it to the wall before his body finished cooling, and I found I was trying to work out whether my father had given the order before or after the physicians left the room. Before, I decided. It was always before, with him.

When I was seven, I asked him why the east nursery stayed locked. He took my right hand and broke three of the bones in it against the edge of his desk, one at a time, and had the physician tell the court I’d fallen from a horse. I’d never been allowed near the stables. Nobody at court asked about that either.

I’ve killed my father a great many times since then. Never outside my head, and never with anything showing on my face, but I have done it in great detail. Most often I use the silver letter opener he keeps squared to the edge of his blotter. Sometimes I use the east stair, the fourth step from the top, where the stone has worn into a lip he never looks down to see. Once, when I was fourteen and had a fever, I spent a whole night poisoning him with his favorite brandy.

I woke up disappointed.

At the far end of the corridor there was shouting. Two Wardens came around the corner dragging a man between them, some cousin from a thin branch of the family whose name I had never troubled to learn. Both Wardens wore new armbands, the same red as the plaques. The cousin had wet himself. I smelled him before I heard him, and when I heard him it was a high, wet whimper that set my teeth on edge.

“Highness,” said the taller Warden.

I nodded.

When my grandfather’s Wardens took someone, that person usually came back, eventually, missing a finger or an ear or a few years. What my father’s Wardens did I could only guess at, though I had a good idea. I had been the one they practiced on.

“Hiding a charm, Highness. Sewn into his collar. Regent’s orders.”

Regent. The old man had been dead for mere hours, and it was already stitched onto their sleeves.

The cousin lifted his face. His jaw was going, and whatever he meant to say came out in pieces.

I could have stopped it. One word from me in this corridor would have been repeated in my father’s study before I reached the next landing, and I would have paid for it as I always did, in some room with the door shut. I thought about the lacquer going onto the paneling behind me. I thought about how the old man would have looked at me if I let them take the boy, and how my father would have looked at me if I didn’t.

“Downstairs,” I said.

They took him. His heels left two long streaks across the marble.

I knew what a decent man would have felt. I tried to find it and came up with lamb, of all things. My father liked his lamb rare. He sent it back to the kitchen if it didn’t bleed on the plate.

A steward caught me at the foot of the east stair. His livery was new too. The tailor's chalk marks still showed along the seams. “The Regent asks for you on the east balcony, Highness.”

Of course he did. It was his first morning, and he’d want someone to watch him enjoy it.

I went up slowly. I took each stair one at a time and made myself breathe between them. Through the tall windows on the landing, I could see down into the lower city, where the red-armbanded people were already moving in pairs from door to door, papers in hand. The proclamation hadn’t been read. The council hadn’t met. None of that had ever mattered to my father. He did what he had decided to do, and afterward he let people argue about whether he’d been allowed.

He was waiting at the top. His head showed first in the opening, the silver hair combed flat, and then the rest of him, gloved and buttoned and very pleased. He’d tell anyone who asked that he felt nothing this morning. He’d never been able to hide it from me. Whatever he felt showed first in the small muscle at the hinge of his jaw, and it was jumping.

“A corpse would have climbed faster,” he said.

“Forgive me, Father.”

“The bells ring for the proclamation in a quarter of an hour. You’re not in position.”

He was irritated, and underneath it he was delighted, like a boy on the morning of a fair. I let my face stay as it was. He’d be busy for years now, remaking everything in his colors, and I’d have years to wear at him. Small things. A late arrival. A wrong glove. A reply that came half a beat too slowly. Nothing he could punish without looking petty in front of the court, and my father would sooner lose an arm than look petty. I had enough patience for every one of them. And at the end of all that patience there was the letter opener.

I took the envelope from my coat and held it out. “Grandfather left a letter.”

He didn’t stop moving. He took it without looking at me, broke the seal with his thumb, ran his eyes down the first few lines as he turned back to the balustrade, and then opened his fingers and let it drop. It landed on the flagstones between us, face up. He didn’t tell anyone to burn it. He didn’t tell anyone to keep it. He forgot it the moment it left his hand.

A steward bent and picked it up.

“The chest is in the audience chamber,” my father said. “The Wardens have their lists. The proclamation goes out on the last bell, and the collections start before the council’s poured its first glass.” He drew his gloves tighter, one finger at a time. “By tomorrow it’s done. By the end of the month nobody in this city will be able to tell you what he looked like.”

None of it was new. The chest, the lists, the armbands, the plaques, the painting on its face in the south hall. He’d had all of it drawn up and paid for and waiting, for however many years it took one old heart to stop.

I kept quiet. I’d sat at the bedside while my grandfather dictated every word of that letter. It asked my father not to strip the magic out of Grayside. It told him the city would tear itself in half if he tried. And at the bottom, in a hand that wandered off the line, the old man had made me write one more sentence and read it back to him twice.

Tell my son he is making the wrong mistake.

My father hadn’t gotten that far down the page. He never got to the bottom of anything anyone else had written. He’d decided what he was going to do before the ink was dry on his father’s death, and a warning was only noise between him and the doing of it.

If the old man had understood his son at all, he’d have ordered the purge himself, and my father would have spent his whole reign undoing it out of spite. But that was the thing about Sevran that my grandfather never let himself see. My father didn’t want the old king’s throne. He wanted the old king gone, every trace, every plaque and portrait and gouge in the wall, as if he’d never lived and never been anyone’s father.

“It’s time,” my father said, and there was a lift in his voice I’d never once heard him use for me.

I stood behind his right shoulder with my hands folded at my back and my grandfather’s blood under my sleeve, and I thought about the iron coffin waiting in the audience chamber, and how many planks it would take to build a second one the same size. There’d be enough oak off the chapel door.

The old man had died trying to finish the law that would have kept the magic safe. His body quit before the ink did. So I stood where I was told to stand, kept my face the way my father liked it, and counted. Every day between this one and the one when the crown came to me. Every day until I could pull down what he was about to build and put him under it.

I followed him down the grand stair and through a gallery of bowed heads into the audience chamber. It was already too warm, too crowded, thick with black wool and the sweet, heavy smell of too many people who’d dressed in a hurry and doused themselves in scent to cover it. Half the council had red ribbons pinned to their lapels. The other half were looking at the first half and doing arithmetic.

The throne had a new banner over it, red on black. There was no gold anywhere. At the foot of the dais sat an iron coffin with my grandfather inside it, or what the wasting had left of him.

Nobody looked at the coffin. They looked at my father, and then at me.

He didn’t offer a word of condolence.

“For centuries this city has lived on the mercy of magic,” he said. “My father believed it could be kept on a leash. He was wrong.” He let the silence run long enough for anyone to object. Nobody did. “As of this hour, every personal artifact of enchantment will be surrendered to the Crown. There will be no exceptions. Anyone who resists is an enemy of the state.”

There was no vote. He said it, and it became true.

His Warden, a man from the western provinces with scars down his face like the lines on a map, pulled the silk off a chest carved with runes all over.

A noblewoman went first. She was shaking, and she kept saying her locket was only sentimental, that it had been her mother’s. The Warden dropped it in. Every one of us felt it go. Something tore loose under the floor, and I felt it come up through the soles of my boots and into my back teeth.

The sphere jerked in my pocket.

It pulled toward the chest like a hound to a scent, dragging the lining of my coat with it. I brought my forearm in against my side and pinned it there and didn’t let anything move in my face. Rings went in. A knife with a bone handle. A child’s pendant. Every one of them sent another shudder through the room, and every shudder yanked harder at my pocket, and the thing got hotter and hotter until I could feel it burning through the wool and the linen and into my skin.

If my father saw it, he’d drop me in the chest after it. I had no doubt about that. He’d call it a painful necessity and have the court mourning me by supper and the plaques changed by the end of the week.

A page boy tried to keep a crystal charm closed in his fist. The Warden peeled his fingers back one by one while the boy screamed. My father watched without any change in his face.

I watched without any change in mine. It was my nature. A habit bore into me over countless thrashings against my back. Some of the scars still claim their victory across my skin.

Resisting the urge to yawn, I scan the room.

Then I saw her.

She stood half behind one of the far columns, where the torchlight gave up before it reached the wall, and she belonged to no one in the room. No council black, no mourning ribbon, no crest at her throat. Dark trousers, a dark coat, boots made for running instead of bowing. Her hair was cropped so close there was nothing left for a hand to catch.

Everyone else watched the coffin. She watched me. To be exact, she watched the arm I had clamped against my side, the one holding my coat shut over the sphere.

Her gaze found mine, and she smiled. It wasn’t polite or nervous. It was the expression of someone who had been anticipating telling a joke all morning, and I had unwittingly walked into it.

Heat punched through my coat. I tightened my arm. Her smile got wider.

A second later, the scarred Warden noticed her. His hand dropped to his baton, and he started across the floor.

“She’s with me," I informed. My voice traveled further than I intended. All chatter ceased around us. The Warden paused, prompting half the council to do the same, and my father shifted his gaze from the coffin to me.

That was unwise. I’d crossed Sevran before, in private, in small ways I could deny afterward. Never in front of an audience. And never for a woman whose name was unfamiliar to me.

The Warden glanced at her, then at me, wearing a look that promised we would discuss this again later, somewhere private and preferably behind a locked door. His eyes flicked toward my father.

Sevran’s displeasure showed in the slight pull at the corner of his mouth.

He had an audience. That mattered more than whatever punishment he intended for me later.

After a beat, he gave one curt nod, the sort meant to suggest this had been his decision all along.

The Warden relented.

His hand left her arm; she straightened her dress.

That caught me almost as much as everything else.

The dress itself was wrong for the room. Soft gray-green, simple, casual, without a mourning ribbon anywhere on it. No black. No red. No crest. No attempt to pretend she belonged among the councilors gathered around my grandfather’s coffin.

And still, somehow, she looked less like an impostor than half the pretenders surrounding us.

Anyone sensible would have disappeared the instant the attention shifted away.

Not her.

She smoothed the place where the Warden had gripped her, adjusted one sleeve, and crossed the throne room toward me.

Calm.

As if the detention had postponed her progress.

I watched her approach.

That was my second mistake.

She stopped beside me, close enough that the sleeve of her dress brushed my coat. Rain and woodsmoke lingered on her skin, mingling with a sharp, green bitterness—maybe crushed leaves—that pierced the incense wafting around the coffin.

She was nearly a head shorter than me.

Her expression suggested she considered that my problem.

A thin white scar split her lower lip.

I looked at it too long.

She noticed.

“Careful, Prince.”

Her voice came out rough and quiet, intended solely for me.

“With what?”

“That.” Her eyes dipped to my mouth, then lower, to my chest, my arm, the pocket beneath it. “Staring.”

“I wasn’t staring.”

“No?” She leaned in. “Then you always look at women like you’re deciding whether to arrest them?”

“Sometimes.”

“And the other times?”

“I decide whether they’re worth the paperwork.”

Her mouth twitched. “Am I?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“That makes two of us.”

She looked me over without the slightest effort to hide it, from boots to trousers to coat to the bloodstained cuff, and back up again, taking her time with it. I knew what she was doing. I thought I knew.

“You’re holding it too tight,” she whispered.

Everything in me went still. “What?”

“The thing under your coat.” My hand closed harder, and she clicked her tongue. “There. You did it again.”

“That concerns you?”

“It concerns whatever you’re hiding.”

She came a fraction closer and brought her hand up between us, and I caught her wrist.

Her brows went up. “Touchy.”

“You were reaching inside my coat.”

“I was reaching for your lapel.”

“You missed.”

“I haven’t missed anything yet.”

I should have called the Warden back. Instead, I kept hold of her. Her pulse ran under my thumb, quick and steady, with no fear in it anywhere. That interested me more than it should have.

She glanced down at my hand, then up at me. “Are you planning to keep that?”

“Your wrist?”

“Unless princes have gotten stranger since the last one I met.”

“You’ve met a great many princes?”

“Enough to know they’re usually better behaved.”

I almost smiled, and she caught it. “There you are.”

“What?”

“I was starting to wonder if you could do anything besides brood at the furniture.”

“My grandfather is dead.”

Something changed in her face for the space of a heartbeat. The mischief didn’t leave, but something quieter moved underneath it. Her eyes went to the brown crust at the edge of my cuff, then to the coffin, then back to me.

“That his?”

No one had asked. No one in that whole room had noticed.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.” She sounded as if she meant it. Then the corner of her mouth lifted. “Mostly.”

A laugh tried to climb out of me, here, of all places, with the old man ten feet away in his iron box. I strangled it before it could embarrass us both. She saw that too.

“You should do that more,” she said.

“Attend funerals?”

“Almost laugh.”

“I’ll put it on my schedule.”

“Busy man?”

“Very.”

“Princes always are. All that standing around while other people do things.”

That time I smiled. It didn’t get far, but she saw it, and she looked so pleased with herself that it irritated me more than anything else she’d said.

“What’s your name?”

“You don’t need it.”

“I disagree.”

“Do you disagree with everyone?”

“Usually.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“For them.”

She looked down at my hand, still wrapped around her wrist. “Are you going to let go of me?”

“Are you going to tell me your name?”

“No.”

“Then we’ve reached an impasse.”

She rose onto her toes until her lips were a breath from my ear, and every muscle down my back locked tight.

“If you keep holding me like this, Prince, people are going to talk.”

I lowered my voice to match. “They already are.”

“Good.”

That one word landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there.

She shifted in my grip. Her free hand came up and spread flat against the front of my coat, over my heart and over the sphere, and heat flashed through the cloth between us. Her eyes snapped to mine, and for a second the amusement was gone. She felt it. So did I. Then her fingers spread wider across my chest.

“Well,” she said.

“Well, what?”

“You are nervous.”

“I’m not.”

“Your heart disagrees.”

“You’ve known me thirty seconds and you think you have me figured out.”

“Thirty seconds is plenty, if someone’s interesting.”

“And am I?”

She tilted her head. “You vouched for a stranger in front of your father. Either you’re interesting, or you’re a fool.”

“Which do you think?”

“I’m still deciding.”

Her thumb moved once against my coat, and the sphere went cold. My eyes dropped to her hand.

That was my mistake.

She came in closer. “You don’t lie well, Prince.”

I looked up at her again. “I’ve lied to my father every day for eighteen years.”

“Maybe he wants to believe you.”

“And you don’t?”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

That should have been absurd. Everyone wanted something from me. A post, a pardon, money, a word in my father’s ear. When he was alive, a good deal of the court had wanted my grandfather’s favor through me. Even the ones who hated me usually wanted something out of the hating. But she said it standing inside my reach with her palm over my heart, and for half a second I believed her.

“Everyone wants something,” I said.

She thought about that, and then she smiled. “Sounds lonely.”

I hated how fast that found somewhere to land. My fingers loosened on her wrist, and she slipped free. Not away. Only free.

“You have a name,” I said.

“I do.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“Very much.”

“At my expense.”

“Mostly.”

There it was again, that laugh I couldn’t quite let out. She stepped back, and my body noticed the missing warmth before my mind caught up.

“If I have you taken downstairs,” I said, “they’ll get your name out of you eventually.”

Her face lit with delight. “Is that how you usually flirt?”

“I wasn’t flirting.”

“Pity.” She gave me one long look, head to boots. “You weren’t terrible at it.”

She turned and took three steps before I heard myself say, “You still haven’t answered me.”

She glanced back over her shoulder. The scar made her smile crooked, and it suited her.

“You want my name?”

“Yes.”

“Earn it.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

“I’m sure a prince can think of something.”

She walked on, and I watched the crush of council black close around her. Then her head appeared again between two sets of shoulders.

“Oh, Prince?”

“What?”

Her eyes dropped to my coat and came back up, bright as a blade.

“Try not to lose anything else today.”

Then she was through the side doors and gone.

I stood there longer than I should have. I could still feel the flat of her hand against my chest, the beat of her pulse under my thumb, her breath at my ear. Something about the weight of my coat was wrong. I slid my hand inside.

My fingers closed on silk.

I drew it out. A red mourning ribbon, folded small and neat as a love letter. One of my father’s.

The sphere was gone.

She’d taken it while I held her wrist. While she teased me and let me believe I was the one deciding how close she stood. She’d kept one hand flat on my heart to hold my eyes, and with the other she’d lifted my grandfather’s last gift and left me a ribbon she’d plucked off one of my father’s councilors on her way across the room. I hadn’t felt a thing.

Eighteen years of learning to feel every blow before it landed. Years of reading hands and shoulders and the small changes in a voice. And a stranger had robbed me in my grandfather’s throne room, over his coffin, while she flirted with me.

I looked down at the ribbon.

Try not to lose anything else today.