A Liar’s
Dance
The Verdance parade breaks the spell over the two of us as it passes our hideaway behind the barrels. Lucien watches it, then reaches out for my hand and tugs me toward the dancing crowd and blaring music. The hunger in his eyes isn’t gone, but it’s hiding.
“Vetris doesn’t celebrate much anymore,” he says. “It’s all purges, not parades. Join me for this rare occasion, would you?”
I should pull away. I should stab my sword through his chest and take his heart while we’re still hidden. But the music, his face lit by the moonlight, that strange thrum in my locket beating relentlessly whenever it’s just him and me—I haven’t danced in three years. The drums call to me, beg me to revel with them like a girl without a care in the world. Just one dance won’t kill me. Just one moment of genuine happiness amid a storm of lies.
I let him lead me into the parade, his hand so warm and broad compared to my cold one.
Dancers in long white skirts line up behind the carts, whirling madly to the music. This celebration feels somehow older—a deeper tradition than the strict temples and blessing days of the New God. The dancers move out, letting parade-goers shuffle into their places and continue the dance. Lucien slides in, his movements perfectly in sync with the others, more lithe and graceful than anyone. When he reaches out to me as the music shifts, I swear I see his dark eyes grinning above his cowl.
“This is the partner sequence of the dance,” he calls. “If you’d do me the honor.”
“Y’shennria didn’t teach me this one,” I protest. He shakes his head.
“It’s simpler than anything in the court. Just follow my lead.”
“All right. But I’m warning you—I’m a terrible student. I ask all sorts of questions and make a thousand mistakes.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
“Both!”
His steps are light, the crowd moving in the same patterns, their arms raised and their knees bent. Their feet and his move so fast I can barely keep up, but I grasp the basics of it—a quick turn, a joining of hands of the partners, and then they rotate around each other. The world spins with Lucien’s face as the center point, his obsidian eyes practically sparkling out of his hood. This is the happiest I’ve ever seen him—all that wariness, all that bitter armor, cracked and discarded. It’s like he’s another person entirely out here, among his people, sharing in their traditions and their joy.
The end of the dance demands one of the couple hold the other around the waist from behind. It’s then I notice who our dancing neighbors are—young couples, old, but all of them glowing with affection for each other. Lucien snakes his arms around my waist, gingerly, careful not to tighten and truly embrace me. His heat looms behind me, tall and against my spine.
If I were a human girl, perhaps this wouldn’t be my first time feeling such a thing. But it is, and it’s terrible and terrifying and terrific all at once. The hunger keens for me to whirl around and sink my sword into him, but I can hardly hear it over the rushing of blood in my ears and the frantic beating of my heart locket.
And then, just like that, the dance is over. Lucien is the first to pull away, immediately, like he’s touched hot iron. He clears his throat brusquely as we move out of the parade to catch our breath, letting others dance into the center.
“I wasn’t expecting a cinfalla ending technique,” he grumbles. “I thought they stopped doing that years ago.”
“You’ve done this before, then?” I ask. “Sneak out to a Verdance parade and dance with the world’s most alluring woman?”
“Implying that’s you, of course,” he drawls.
“Who else?” I laugh. “The Crimson Lady doesn’t even come close—she’s got too many sharp angles and all red is a terrible makeup look.”
Behind the mask, his eyes narrow, but in a smiling way. Or at least I think they do. I could be seeing things, or wanting to see things. Both are equally dangerous and equally useless to the looming end point, the goal of all of this. That’s what this is, I remind myself. A goal—a means to an end. Not a dance, or a blazing night spent with a darkly handsome boy—but a plot. A ploy. A lie.
We breathe together until we even out, and then he speaks, watching the remnants of the parade pass us.
“When I was younger, Father would disguise me in peasant clothes and wear some himself. And then we’d venture to this parade and dance.”
I’m quiet. The dour, serious, witchdeath-bent King Sref, dancing? I can hardly imagine it.
“That was before Varia died,” Lucien continues. “After that…we stopped. But he was the one who taught me how to blend in with a crowd. He taught Varia, too.”
“Did he teach your prodigious stealing skills?” I tease, trying to work some light into his dark memories. He shakes his head.
“I learned those on my own. Varia always talked about it. She read these novels about a thief who stole from the rich and gave to the poor.”
“The Midnight Gifter,” I blurt. “I read those, too.”
He looks surprised. “All of them?”
“All of them. They were my favorite. A little cheesy and over the top, but a good book series is always a little of both, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps.” Lucien goes quiet, and then, “I think she secretly wanted to abandon her title of Crown Princess and become the Midnight Gifter for the rest of her life. Or at least become someone who could help the common people without consequence. She hated not being able to do anything about our people’s suffering more than anyone.”
“And you?”
He scoffs. “Before she died, I couldn’t have cared less if some orphan I didn’t know died in the street from starvation. I was young and selfish.”
“You were a child—”
“Ignorance doesn’t excuse cruelty.” He cuts me off cleanly. “I had my toys, and my puddings, and my horses. I had no care for the outside world.”
“But then she died,” I say. Lucien nods.
“And when she did, I threw myself to the streets. But unlike before, when I’d get lost in the Verdance parade, Father never came to find me. He was too wrapped up in his own grief to care about me anymore. He hired Malachite, raised him to guard me, afraid he’d lose me to witches, too. But that was the extent of his attention. The more time I spent in the streets, the more I realized there were boys exactly like me who lost sisters every day, but to stupid things—not enough bread, not enough clothes, the common cold. Things that are preventable.
“So I started stealing. Well, it’d be more accurate to say I watched other children steal. And I copied them. And then I started copying the better ones. And then I became one of the better ones.” He pushes his sweat-dewed bangs out of his eyes. “What about you? How did you learn?”
There’s an urge in me to tell him the truth. But I shrug instead. “My story is much less tragic. There wasn’t anything to do where I grew up. Collecting beautiful things made me feel better about life. In short, I learned by being selfish.”
“Don’t we all,” he murmurs. After a moment he holds up a crystal hairpin that’s oddly familiar.
“Where did you get that?” I paw at it, but he holds it up high. I step in to him, desperately grasping for it, but he keeps it just out of my reach. I lean in closer, so close I can feel the heat radiating from his chest, his smooth neck.
“From the Welcoming.” He smirks down at me. “When I bumped into you.”
I jump for it, but he holds it higher, our chests colliding roughly on the way down. Blood rushes to my cheeks and I sputter. “How did you—in front of all those people?”
“I told you—I became one of the better thieves.”
“You’ve clearly never seen Lady Y’shennria angry,” I say. “Or you’d wet yourself. And then give that pin back right away.”
“Y’shennria has dozens. I’m giving this one to that girl,” he insists.
“The one you gave the golden watch to?”
“The one and the sam
e. She might look timid, but she knows how to haggle in Vetris’s black market. The gold she makes from my trinkets goes to keeping the younger orphans alive.”
“I was wondering why you had such a healthy urchin population in Vetris,” I muse. He extends his elbow to me like a nobleman might to a lady.
“One more walk about the city with me, then? I promise we’ll be home by curfew.”
I laugh. “You’re a liar. A very pretty liar, but a liar nonetheless.”
He rolls his eyes and begins to walk. For one lucid, moonlight-kissed moment, I stroll with Lucien arm in arm, flush with the dance and drunk on my own humanity, drunk on the illusion of freedom I have right now underneath this starry sky, surrounded by this labyrinthine city. The thought of taking his heart surfaces once, twice, but I fight it back down to the depths, refusing to let this moment be ruined. Just one moment of being human—is that too much to ask?
But that’s what I said to myself before the parade dance, too. I’m getting greedy. As I admire his hawkish profile, proud and severe, the hunger refuses to be ignored.
If he knew what you were, he’d split you apart with that white sword of his. Hunt you, like he hunts the other monsters.
I pull my arm from his suddenly. It’s true. The prince would kill me if he knew what I was. His sword gleams cold on his waist as he turns, brow furrowed.
“Is something wrong, Lady Zera?”
“I-I just remembered,” I say. “Who we are. You’re the Crown Prince, and I’m a lady. It isn’t right to act so close.”
Lucien’s face falls. “Act? Is that what you think this has been? I’m not acting.” His gaze turns searing. “Are you?”
Yes.
“No,” I start. “It’s just—”
He leans in, suddenly close. The smell of him—mixed with sweat and night air now—dizzies me, infects down to my marrow and sets it ablaze. He’s so human. So dark and svelte and lean, his lips incredibly close and incredibly alluring. A kiss. What would it feel like, to kiss a prince, a boy, a bird of prey? To be close to someone, gentle with someone, after three years of nothing but regret and pain?
“If I were to kiss you here and now,” he murmurs, voice rumbling in my chest, “it would not be an act.”
He presses into those last few inches of distance between us, and the hunger ambushes me from nowhere.
MINE! it screams, growing my teeth long and hazing my vision with red. MINE AT LAST!
With the fragments of clear sanity I have left, I thrust my arms forward, pushing him away. Lucien staggers back, and the heat between us goes instantly cold.
“I—” I swallow acid regret and relief all at once, thanking the gods for the mask that hides my face, my jagged teeth. “I can’t. It’s not right.”
Prince Lucien looks incredulous—not with me for pushing him away but with himself. He looks down at his hands as though he’s unsure whose they are. And then suddenly, before I can scrape up a joke to patch the wound, a shrill scream breaks the air. Lucien’s head snaps up to the source—a derelict house we’d been approaching.
“Not the market,” he whispers through clenched teeth, and dashes beneath the ruined wood of the doorframe. Flustered and worried, I follow. The whole house is charred black—a victim of a long-ago fire. The screaming emanates from beneath us somehow, and I’m baffled until Lucien yanks open a trapdoor I thought was a scorched pile of wood. He leaps down and I follow into a barely lit tunnel lined with brick. The screams get louder, joined by yelling and rough orders being shouted. The clank of armor.
It’s all so sudden and jarring—so surreal as Lucien draws his sword and I draw mine. We were at peace not a minute ago, weren’t we? Time stood still in Nightsinger’s forest, but here it leaps and bounds forward.
The tunnel opens up into a cavernous room, though it seems small, since the floor is choked with a mass of writhing, panicking people. Ramshackle stalls selling food and cloth are overturned, the crowd itself dressed in nothing more than rags—this must be the black market Lucien was talking about. Between the rags shines silvery lawguard armor as they beat down the crowd with oak batons. Children cry as mothers shield them, men forced to the ground and pinned by their arms, celeons with their furred hackles raised, daring the lawguards—some of them celeon themselves—to come close. And the smell of blood—blood on foreheads, blood dripping from broken noses. Blood in pools beneath motionless bodies. So much chaos and fear sends the hunger salivating within me.
And above it all, standing on a lip of brick flanked by lawguards and oil lamps, stands Archduke Gavik. He watches the chaos with his pitiless watery eyes, watches his lawguards drag off screaming, kicking people, his expression bloated with satisfaction.
“Bastard,” Prince Lucien hisses. “This way!” He calls out to the crowd, ushering some of them to the entrance we just came from. I’m frozen, and Lucien barks at me. “What are you doing? Help me get them out!”
The smell of human blood seeps into my nostrils, my teeth growing long. The crowd undulates, panic making their eyes wide like cattle doomed to the chopping block. Lucien slams a hand on my shoulder.
“Now, Lady Zera! Before more die!”
His warm touch chases the hunger away, releasing me from its grasp. There’s a fraction of a second in which I marvel at just how clear my head is—the hunger blown out like nothing more than leaves in a storm. The prince is right. These people are in danger, and five men are all I can bear on my conscience.
As soon as the hunger leaves, it surges back like a dark tide.
Selfish, the hunger cackles. Even saving these pitiful people is just for your own peace of mind.
I put my arms around an old woman clutching at her headscarf and lead her down the tunnel, her grandchildren sobbing on her heels.
So weak. Soft, weak bones, easy to rip apart. A simple meal.
She can’t ascend the ladder—too slow, too frail, people pushing over her in their frenzy to get out. I wait for a break in the crowd and wrap her arms around my neck, ascending the ladder with her clinging to my back, desperately fighting the hunger’s desire to consume her. I pass her thin frame off to a young girl with startlingly blue eyes and a long robe.
When I jump down again and make it back through the tunnel, the lawguards are frozen in a perfect circle around Prince Lucien, who’s torn his cowl off, revealing his face and long dark braid. Gavik’s laughter rings through the cavern, the crowd’s moans and cries muffled by its sheer volume.
“And what do you think you’re doing here, Your Highness?” Gavik asks.
“Leave these people alone, Gavik,” Lucien grits, his white sword drawn and ready to strike whichever lawguard lashes out first. “They’ve done nothing.”
“Nothing but steal and murder,” Gavik insists. “Some of them are witches, Your Highness. Surely you want to see these monsters brought to justice?”
“How do you know they’re witches?” he snaps.
“The Crimson Lady, of course.” Gavik smiles with all his teeth. “Or do you not believe in the veracity of the polymaths’ efforts?”
“What I believe means nothing.” Lucien’s voice is an oil fire—ever burning, ever growing. “These people are trying to survive.”
“By selling stolen things in this dilapidated little black market!” Gavik tuts. “I’m doing this for the good of Vetris, Your Highness. They’re criminals and witches besides. You’d do well to remember that, before I’m forced to throw you in the dungeons with them for dissenting.”
“I’m your Crown Prince.” Lucien narrows his eyes. Gavik laughs.
“If you defend a thief, that’s forgivable, but defend a witch or Heartless—Crown Prince or not—and you’re a traitor to the New God.” The archduke inspects his nails lightly. “Punishable by the temple’s laws.”
“How many of them are witches?” Lucien presses, stalwart amid the bald-faced threat. “What did your red tower tell you?”
“Oh, I can’t remember.” Gavik thinks. “Seven? Eight?
Perhaps ten. It seems my men have killed”—he takes a moment to count the still bodies—“thirteen here, but then again, three of those were thieves, suckling like leeches on the underbelly of Vetris.”
“Look around you—these are starving people, people whose livelihoods were ruined by my father’s poor economic choices! If anyone should be punished, it’s him.”
Gavik laughs again. “Are you suggesting I jail your own father? I knew you were rebellious and stubborn, my prince, but I had no idea you were treasonous as well. You’re almost starting to sound like Princess Varia—foolish little thing that she was.”
Lucien flinches, balling his swordless fist, and I press down the seed of rage that sprouts in me. How dare Gavik talk about Varia like that in front of him? I won’t let Lucien’s pain go to waste—I motion as many people as I can toward the exit while Gavik and Lucien talk. And then suddenly, Gavik’s voice booms.
“Lady Zera! I’d recognize that bosom anywhere. Wave that little hand of yours one more time toward that tunnel and I’ll have my men shoot it off.”
“Lady Zera,” Lucien barks, without turning to look at me. “Leave, now.”
“And abandon you to face this rancid dog’s anus alone?” I scoff. “Not a chance in the afterlife.”
“Rancid dog’s anus,” Gavik muses. “You’re more creative than any Bride we’ve had thus far, I’ll give you that. But I’m quite serious about the shooting.”
I swallow my grim laugh. “You don’t know me at all, Archduke, if you think the threat of a lost hand will frighten me.”
Lucien starts for me, stopped only by the lawguards’ swords pointed at him. “Lady Zera, no—”
“Then allow me to test your resolve,” Gavik says coolly, and at a flick of his fingers a lawguard archer at his side takes aim with his crossbow and fires faster than I can move. The bolt sears like iron, cracking the bones of my left wrist and leaving behind a bloody, tangled hole of flesh and nerves. The pain is so thunderous and instant it knocks the wind from me, serrated daggers sawing at my skin each time I try to breathe in. A scream runs through the crowd too close to me, my blood splattering on horrified faces. I tear at my midnight shawl with my teeth and wrap the cloth around the hole.