House Of Moonfang

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 wasn’t fit for a queen’s hall. Her feet were bleeding. She was glad about it. 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. Fae — she had seen fae before, raiders in her village, but those had been rough-cut things, weather-bitten and mean. These were something else. Pale as the inside of a shell, dressed in silvers and midnight blues, and arranged along the walls like a collection. Like ornaments someone had thought to place at intervals. They didn’t whisper. They didn’t point. They simply watched with the serene, interested patience of people who had nowhere better to be and nothing more pressing to witness 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 sixteen winters ago 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 didn’t recognize — 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 down into the hall as if the whole palace had been 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 — 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 already assembled, ranked along the sides of the hall in an order she didn’t understand. Houses, she guessed — each cluster held together by something in common, a color at the throat, a pin at the shoulder. The air smelled of night-blooming flowers and something underneath, something animal, like a kennel kept very clean. Her stomach turned.

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 stood the way a hunting dog stood when it 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 jaw set like a nail, 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 said it as if she had been waiting all her life to learn it. “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 a fruit for ripeness — and to each of them 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 something in her chest begin to curl in on itself, 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 small, specific angle of her chin.

None of it survived contact.

The queen was not what she had imagined. She was not terrible. That was the terrible part. She was beautiful in the way an old, careful painting was beautiful — her hair the color of wheat gone to seed, her 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 been going to refuse to speak. She had promised herself. She opened her mouth to refuse, and 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. The way a cat’s ear will flick toward a sound it is pretending not to have heard.

“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 didn’t 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.

She did not flinch 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 did not rest — they considered. Iris felt each fingertip settle in turn, the thumb just under her chin, the palm not quite meeting her cheek, and she understood suddenly that every touch the queen had given tonight had been this — 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 — which, if anything, 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 did not know which of them was Lord Vale. She turned her head — she couldn’t help it — and she 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, she understood with a lurch, been looking at her the entire time.

It was not the look the others had given her in the corridor. It was not the measuring look the queen had given her. It was not any look Iris had ever been given by anyone, at any time in her life, and she could not decide, in the first half-second of absorbing it, whether she was about to be killed.

His eyes were wrong. That was the first thing she noticed. They had been a pale color when she glanced at him before — grey, she’d thought, or the washed silver of river stone — and 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 had gone very still.

She did not know enough to know that this was strange. She only knew it the way a dog knew it. The way the hair on your arm knew it before the rest of you caught up. The glass-pale courtiers along the walls were not breathing. Or they were breathing and she couldn’t hear it. The male with the braid, the one who had smiled at her in the corridor, had lowered his glass.

“Lord Vale?” the queen said again, gently. “I asked you a question.”

He did not answer her.

He did not, Iris understood, seem able to.

One of the courtiers near the dais — an older male with a silver chain across his chest — moved slightly, as if to step forward, as if to intervene in something. Lord Vale’s gaze did not leave 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.

His jaw moved. He dragged his gaze off her, slowly, as if it cost him, 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 small 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 and did not apologize for scraping.

“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. Something moved in his jaw.

“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 she did not look at her again, and that was how Iris understood the conversation had never included her at all.

She did not remember the walk out of the throne room clearly.

Later she would try to reconstruct it — which door, which corridor, which of the pale stone staircases — and 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 her silver chains, which no one, she noticed belatedly, had removed, and she understood that she had been handled. Every part of this — the warmth of the fire, the choice of the robe, the specific softness of the pillow visible through the parted curtains — had been arranged by someone who knew her measurements, her cold, her exhaustion, her hunger. Someone who had anticipated her.

She sat down on the floor.

She was not going to use the bed. That was the first decision. She was not going to wear the robe. That was the second. She was going to sit on this very fine rug, on her bleeding feet, and she was going to think, because she had walked into a room where a queen had touched her face and called her Valehart as if it meant something, and a male in black had looked at her as if she were a door he’d been standing in front of for a hundred years, and she was not — 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’d expected, and crossed to the washstand, and scrubbed the blood off her feet with a cloth that smelled of something green and sweet. She did not put on the robe. 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. Something in the sound 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 there, on the other side of the wood, and after a long moment she heard him exhale — one slow breath, as if he had been holding it. She heard the faint creak of leather. She heard nothing else after that, but she knew, with a certainty she did not examine, that 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, for one second, about speaking. About saying something through it. About asking him what was that. Why did you look at me like that. What am I to you, Lord Vale, that you cannot even say my name without the court holding its breath?

She did not speak.

She stood with her palm against the wood, and she listened, and on the other side — she could swear this, later, she would swear it — she heard him do the same. 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 did not know what she was waiting for. She had the peculiar and unwelcome sense that he didn’t either. That two strangers had been put on opposite sides of a door by someone who had called it a gift, and that neither of them knew yet what they had been given, or what it was going to 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.

She did not hear him leave.

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 — the shape of a bootprint, pressed long and deep, as if someone had stood in that one place for a very, very long time.