Matabar. Book II. Chapter 164. Border Watch (Patreon)

Night lay over Shamtur, black as a deep lake. Ardan stood on the balcony and watched it spread out over the city, all the way to the horizon.

The warm, still air was steeped in the smell of the stone city. The bricks, baked all day, now gave their heat back generously, breathing a dry, oven-like warmth into his face. Along with it came the faintly sour tang of coal smoke drifting over from the barracks kitchens and foundry yards. Then a trace of gun oil and powder fouling, which seemed to have seeped into the very walls. And underneath it all, a hint of damp earth and rusted iron, carried in from the distant fields and the trench line.

The fortress city slept below him in the scant light of a few scattered gas lamps. The lamps hissed, their yellowish light flickering inside the glass hoods and picking out patches of windowless brick wall. The narrow streets ran almost ruler-straight. Islands of lamplight glimmered along them, with inky blackness in between. Now and then he caught the night sounds of the sleeping garrison: a patrol’s measured footsteps ringing over the cobblestones, the distant clank of a switch being thrown on the tracks, a dog’s short bark that broke off at once, and the tolling of the tower clock, muffled by distance. The city didn’t truly sleep, though. It dozed with one eye open. The same way its soldiers dozed in the trenches, hands never leaving the stocks of their rifles.

Farther out, beyond the outskirts and the last squat houses, darkness ruled the fields, though not completely. At the very edge of the visible world, where the earth did its best to pass itself off as sky, dozens of searchlights blazed, their long white beams aimed north toward the border with Fatia. They swept slowly across no-man’s-land. The beams crossed and parted, revealing snarls of barbed wire and the silhouettes of watchtowers. And, truth be told, the cold, methodical crawl of that artificial light across the dead field left Ard a little uneasy.

A light breeze blew in from the north, carrying a faint, bitter smell from the other side. The smell of something burning, perhaps, or cold metal. A chill raised goosebumps on Ardan’s arms, though the night was still as warm as summer.

Perhaps he felt the chill because his inhuman eyes could see far more than an ordinary person could. He could make out not just the distant Imperial searchlights but the answering lights on the other side. On the Fatians’ side, the border looked exactly the same: one long, unbroken fort bristling with towers, ramparts, and gun emplacements, running the whole length of the demarcation line as far as the eye could see.

Two hostile fortresses stood frozen, face-to-face. Between them lay a narrow strip of land, divided by an invisible border, one that existed only on maps.

Ten kilometers. That was all that separated the Empire’s forward trenches from Fatia’s. And that whole strip, all that ground between the two snarling armies, was sown with row after row of barbed wire and packed so densely with mines that no living soul dared set foot there.

No-man’s-land.

A strip of land where nothing grew but rusted iron and death lurking underground.

Ardan took in the scene and found himself thinking how fragile peace seemed, with only ten kilometers of minefield separating it from war. One order, one shot, one mistake would be enough, and those ten kilometers would go up in a blaze whose glow could be seen hundreds of kilometers away. Yet here he stood on the balcony of the Governor-General’s estate, drawing in the cool night air as if everything were fine.

A strange place, Shamtur. Very strange.

Maybe it reminded him of the First Station in those last moments before the Ley-flare swallowed it.

“A beautiful night, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Ard? Just beautiful.”

The voice came from behind him, quiet, polite, and very familiar.

Ardan turned. A cat stood in the balcony doorway.

No ordinary cat. Poplar carried himself, as always, with impeccable posture. He sported a tiny, finely tailored uniform hung with tin medals that winked cheerfully in the moonlight. A miniature saber rested at his side, and unlike everything else about the outfit, it was entirely real.

Poplar regarded him with intelligent eyes, and somewhere in their depths lurked something very old and not at all feline.

After all, Poplar was half Vila, which meant half Fae, and half ordinary Forest Cat. Looking at him here on Fatia’s border, Ardi had a strange thought. Poplar, a half-blood Speaker in whom Fae blood mingled with ordinary animal blood, seemed, if anything, more at home on this borderland estate than Ardan himself.

“Beautiful,” Ardi agreed. “Though there isn’t much to look at.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Poplar padded gracefully along the balcony and sprang onto the broad stone parapet in one soft leap. “It has a certain austere poetry all its own. Human beings have a way of making something almost beautiful even out of war. Though… it’s a regrettable trait, when you think about it.”

“How are things, Mr. Poplar?” Ardan asked, hastily changing the subject.

“Busy, Mr. Ard. Always busy.” Poplar settled himself on the parapet, paws dangling over the garden. “And the Palace, I confess, has grown unbearably noisy of late. You can’t begin to imagine. Every day brings new faces. Ambassadors from all over the world, wheeler-dealers, leading industrialists. Not just our own people, mind you, but people from countries you’d never expect. Jostling, bowing, striking bargains. Lines begin forming in His Imperial Majesty’s antechamber at six in the morning, and sometimes they don’t thin out until midnight. Utter pandemonium.”

“And the Empress?” Ardi rested his elbows on the parapet beside Poplar.

“Her Imperial Majesty the Consort is hardly ever in the capital,” Poplar said with a mournful sigh. “Mrs. Okatana is forever on the road, crisscrossing the whole country. She’s opening educational institutions. Women’s universities, schools for girls, medical colleges. On an incredible scale, I must admit, and with enviable energy. Wherever she turns up, she’s laying the cornerstone of a university here, an infirmary with classrooms attached there. It’s good work, no two ways about it.”

With his slightly old-fashioned way of speaking, Poplar would surely have found common ground with Jacob Agrov, Ardan thought. May the Eternal Angels judge him fairly.

“You don’t sound terribly impressed,” Ardan observed.

“Oh, but I am, sir, I am!” Poplar twitched the tip of his tail. “I’m merely pondering the reasons, Mr. Ard. I may not be the most educated cat in the world, but… When those in power start doing something good on an incredible scale and with enviable haste, the reason, as a rule, has nothing to do with kindness. It has to do with calculation.”

“And what’s the calculation here?” Ardi asked, though he already had a fair idea where this was heading.

“A rather obvious one,” Poplar answered, and left it at that.

Ardan nodded and turned his eyes back to the distant searchlights. For a while he and Poplar said nothing, looking north to where two armies stood frozen on either side of a strip of mined ground. The soldiers peered across at the faces of men who might yet become their enemies.

Then Poplar spoke again. Very quietly this time, almost under his breath.

“Do you know, Mr. Ard,” Poplar said without taking his eyes off the border, “what would make a country suddenly need educated women who can do highly skilled work normally done by men? And women with medical training, too. In what I would call curious numbers, no less.”

Ardan said nothing.

He’d long since realized what Poplar was driving at. Hundreds of thousands of men might be sent to the front, perhaps even millions if the papers were to be believed. If that happened, someone would have to take their places at the machines, work in the offices, and drive the trains. And if this whole fortified frontier ever did go up in flames, the country would need a great, great many doctors and nurses.

Ardan was about to say something. He turned to Poplar, but the parapet was already empty. Poplar had vanished as soundlessly as he’d appeared, leaving nothing behind but a faint chill in the night air and another round of unpleasant thoughts.

And, of course, the letter from Anastasia that Poplar had brought.

Ardi stood there a little longer. Then he shook his head, trying to put it all out of his mind, and went back inside. The room was quiet, bathed in warm half-light.

Ard hadn’t been given a separate room in the guest wing this time, as he had on his last visit. He and Tess hadn’t been married then, and propriety demanded that the groom be kept well away from the bride. Now they were legally married, so Ardan was staying in Tess’s room. The very room where she’d grown up.

At first glance, it looked much the way Ardi would have pictured a young aristocrat’s bedroom. Furnished some ten years earlier, it had changed little since: pale wallpaper sprigged with tiny flowers, a carved vanity with a tarnished mirror, a narrow bookcase, lace curtains over a plain, deep-set window.

But her own touches showed through everywhere you looked. Old jazz concert posters she’d carefully preserved over the years hung on the walls. An imposing gramophone with an enormous brass horn rested in a corner, with records stacked high beside it. An old trumpet gleamed among the girlish trinkets on a shelf, and a scuffed music stand nestled by the window.

And the piano, of course, which Ardan kept trying not to bump into.

The heat in Shamtur was nearly as fierce as on the coast of the Azure Sea, and Ardan amused himself for a while wondering why. Most likely, it all came down to the way the city was built: packed tight, hemmed in, nothing but brick. It drank in the heat of the summer sun all day. All night it gave that heat back slowly, turning the narrow streets and even the stone houses into a slowly cooling oven.

That was why Tess lay asleep on the bed now with only a thin silk sheet for a blanket.

Ardan stepped closer, then stopped to gaze at his wife.

Moonlight sifted through the lace curtains and spilled down over her in soft, silvery bands. It slid slowly across her smooth skin, which in that ghostly glow took on the sheen of mother-of-pearl. The room was quiet, so quiet that Ardi could hear her breathing. Steady and deep, catching faintly at the very end of each exhale in a soft, drowsy half-sigh. The thin sheet traced the graceful lines of her petite body, rising and falling in time with that breath, and the silk shimmered, catching the light whenever she moved.

Her red hair spread across the pillow like a fan of fire, and in the still, warm air of the bedroom Ardan could pick out its scent. The faintest hint of lavender soap, of sun-warmed skin, and of spring flowers, of course.

A few strands had fallen across her face. They trembled slightly with her breathing, tickling her cheek. Tess looked so vulnerable in her sleep, so beautiful, that Ard’s chest ached a little with tenderness and that quiet, domestic happiness he still couldn’t get used to. Even after a year and a half together.

He eased himself onto the edge of the bed, trying not to disturb her. The mattress betrayed him anyway, dipping with a creak of springs.

Tess stirred, frowned in her sleep, then cracked one eye open.

“Ardi?” she mumbled, her tongue thick with sleep. “What’s wrong? What time is it?”

“It’s the middle of the night,” he said quietly. He brushed a strand of hair from her face. “Go back to sleep. I just can’t drift off. It’s stuffy. I’ll take a short walk in the garden, get some air.”

“Mm.” Tess squeezed her eyes shut and nuzzled her cheek against the pillow. “Don’t be long. And don’t go getting into any trouble.”

Ardan smiled. “What kind of trouble could I get into in your parents’ garden in the middle of the night?”

“With you? Any kind,” Tess countered sleepily.

She propped herself up on one elbow, pecked him on the cheek, then rolled onto her other side. She pulled the silk sheet higher and sank back into sleep almost at once. Ardi watched her for another minute or so, then quietly got up. This time, though, the mattress showed him mercy.

He pulled on his pants and a light shirt, then drew the door shut behind him as he stepped out into the hallway.

Not until he was out in the dim hall did he realize, with a flicker of surprise, that his hand was clenched around his staff, and his grimoire was swinging at his belt. Ardi couldn’t help a wry smile.

Ardi smirked despite himself.

“Angels flay you, where is your fucking staff? Shit on the Face of Light! What kind of mage walks around without a staff?”

Funny how two and a half years was all it had taken for Lieutenant Kornosskiy’s bark to take on a whole new meaning. Ardan did more than remember to bring his staff along: he’d picked up a habit all war mages shared. Now, even at the estate of the Governor-General of Shamtur, he didn’t go anywhere without his faithful friend. A friend still in need of repairs, especially after what had happened in Delpas.

“Sorry.” He smiled, glancing at the crack snaking along the shaft. “When we get back, I’ll buy you the finest resin I can find on Sleepless Street.”

Ardan set off down the corridor, lit only by a few dim wall lamps. The carpet runner underfoot swallowed his footsteps, but here and there, where it stopped, the old floorboards answered with a creak so faint he barely heard it.

The corridor smelled the way every old, well-lived-in house smells: of waxed floors and dry wood, of lamp oil going cold, and of the faint smoke of fires long since burned down in the fireplaces. Somewhere deep in the house, a grandfather clock kept up its steady tick.

The Orman estate was as austere inside as it was outside. No marble staircases here, no gilded stucco moldings, none of the heavy crystal chandeliers that adorned aristocratic mansions in the capital or the interiors of the New City’s outrageously expensive skyscrapers. Reish Orman really did dislike ostentation, and he certainly didn’t tolerate it in his own home.

Plain wooden panels lined the walls, but they were very well cared for and smooth to the touch. The runners on the floor were sturdy, if modest. And by way of ornament there was little more than a few old military engravings and, barely visible in the gloom, family portraits in unassuming frames.

Ardi liked the simplicity, truth be told. He felt freer here than he did at estates like the one he’d once burst into alongside Peter Oglanov. Or maybe it came down to this: the Orman family home simply didn’t remind Ard of Saimon Davos and Irigov.

Before long, Ard descended the wide wooden staircase, crossed the dark sitting room, and passed a row of locked doors. He slipped out through a side exit.

Straight into the darkened garden.

It was unexpectedly large and well tended, closer to a small park, really, than to the little plot you’d expect to find beside a house.

Gravel paths wandered off between clipped shrubs and old, spreading trees. Somewhere a fountain burbled, unseen in the dark. The air was heavy with the scent of night-blooming flowers and damp earth. The stone walls still gave back the warmth of the day.

For all the sternness of its master and of the city itself, the garden had been tended with love. Even by moonlight the flowerbeds were a riot of color, the hedges were trimmed in clean lines, and gravel paths wound deeper in, toward shaded nooks and gazebos. Tess hadn’t been exaggerating in the least when she’d told him that in this stone fortress of a city, the garden was a refuge for the Orman family, a pocket of peace amid the endless wait for war.

Ardan drifted along the path, breathing in the cool night air, and bit by bit the heavy thoughts Poplar’s words had stirred in him began to recede. Here, among the flowers and the whisper of leaves, war, Congress, and all the rest of it felt far away and almost unreal.

And then he noticed he wasn’t alone.

The gazebo stood a little way off the main path, twined with some local climbing vine, and in its shadow a slender figure glimmered white on a bench. The light caught her platinum-blond hair, nearly silver in the dark, and Ardi had no trouble recognizing his classmate. Polina Erkerovsky.

Ardan decided to leave her be and walk on past. He didn’t have the slightest desire to make conversation with her in the middle of the night. Besides, from what he knew of Polina, she wasn’t exactly longing for his company either.

He had almost passed the gazebo when a voice reached him from behind, steady and faintly mocking.

“That’s not very polite, Mr. Egobar,” Polina said without turning. “Walking right past someone you know without so much as a hello. Don’t they teach you any manners at all in that Black House of yours?”

Ardi sighed. There was no getting out of it.

He turned back, walked up to the gazebo, and lowered himself onto the bench across from her, propping his staff against the wooden lattice.

“Good evening, Miss Erkerovsky,” Ard said evenly. “Satisfied?”

“Quite,” Polina said.

For a while, neither spoke. Somewhere deep in the garden, a fountain murmured. Night cicadas sang, and moonlight glinted on the sandy paths. Ardan wasn’t in any hurry to start a conversation. Neither, it seemed, was Polina.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked at last.

Ardi slowly arched an eyebrow and gave her a long, eloquent look.

“I see.” One corner of her mouth twitched, just barely. “Me neither.”

Only then did Ardan notice the letter in her hands.

The small sheet, covered in neat feminine handwriting, trembled faintly in her fingers. Several fresh blotches darkened the page where tears had fallen and blurred the ink. Ardi looked more closely at her face. Even her makeup, always flawless, was slightly smudged at the corners of her eyes.

She’d been crying. And not long ago, either. Maybe only a couple of minutes before he showed up.

Polina caught him looking and made no move to hide the letter.

“Good news.” Her voice was icy, almost lifeless. “Happy news, you might say. So don’t go getting any foolish notions into that matabar head of yours. These are tears of joy.”

Ardan offered no reply. What had happened at the museum that winter had taught him to tell when her emotions were real and when she was pretending, though her performance was sometimes very convincing.

“A childhood friend of mine is getting married,” Polina continued, studying the sheet. “Ludmila. We grew up together. Only an hour and a half’s drive apart…”

Ardan nearly choked. He simply couldn’t get used to the idea that living an hour and a half’s drive apart counted as growing up together. He’d seen the same skewed notion of normal in Boris and Bazhen, who’d grown up in anything but ordinary circumstances.

“And now she’s the happy bride-to-be.” Polina kept crumpling the paper and smoothing it out again. “The groom is perfectly respectable. Owns several confectionery factories. And a lord, naturally. Can you imagine?”

She smiled crookedly and paused for a moment.

“Now Ludmila will never want for sweets. To the end of her days. What luck.”

A cricket clicked farther off in the garden, then struck up its monotonous song. Warm night air stirred the branches above the gazebo and carried the thick, honeyed scent of night-blooming flowers down to them.

Ardan said nothing. He had a rough idea of what kind of conversation this was, but that didn’t mean he’d learned how to take part in one yet.

People…

“Congratulations,” he said cautiously at last.

“Nothing to celebrate,” Polina snapped. For the first time since they’d begun talking, a hard, even angry note entered her voice. “Ludmila didn’t want this. Didn’t want it at all. But who would bother asking her what she thought?” She crumpled the edge of the letter again. “Her family’s big in farming. Grain, livestock, land. And a few odds and ends besides. I don’t remember… So a lord with factories makes a solid business partner. A very profitable deal. And one that’ll pay off for years to come. And tell me, cowboy, what seals a deal like that better than a good marriage? What could possibly be more binding than tossing in what Ludmila’s got in her panties along with the marriage contract?”

Ardan gazed at the stars. The cool, damp air settled on his skin. From beyond the fence came the measured tread of a patrol on the cobblestones, barely audible, there for a moment and then gone.

Boris’s words flickered through his mind: from the outset, Iolai hadn’t stood the slightest chance of getting anything more from Polina than friendship. But truth be told, none of that was Ard’s business.

So he just sat beside her in silence, watched the stars, and breathed the cool night air, giving Polina room to talk if she wanted to.

Polina wiped awkwardly at the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing what was left of her makeup. Then she turned away, toward the north, where, beyond the rooftops of the city, the searchlights burned along the border.

“You know,” she went on, quieter now, “once I graduate from the University, I’m never going back to the capital. I’m staying here. In Shamtur.”

“Here?” Ardan turned toward her.

“Here.” Polina nodded. “After my mandatory service, I’ll stay on in the Army. I’d thought about heading west, somewhere warmer. I can’t stand the cold, honestly. But… I’d rather stay here.” She smiled with a trace of bitterness. “And then, by the time I’m fifty or so, I’ll have turned into a cantankerous, gray-haired old witch. With a dried-up… soul. Once I’m mean enough, I’ll go teach Military art at some academy, or, if they discharge me, I’ll head way the hell up north. To one of the new cities. By then there’s bound to be an institute there with a Star Faculty. I’ll drive my students crazy, run them until they drop, and make their lives miserable in a hundred petty ways. A wonderful career, don’t you think?”

Ardan thought about it for a moment.

“Not a bad plan,” he said at last, with no idea what he was actually supposed to say. Or whether he should say anything at all.

Polina sat in silence a moment longer, staring blindly at the letter in her hands. Then she leaned down and laid the sheet on the ground.

“How does the saying go, cowboy?” she said, that same bitter smile still on her lips. “Out of sight, out of mind?”

She rapped her staff against the ground, and a familiar seal took shape in the air beneath her boots. A small tongue of flame leaped from the staff’s head and fell onto the letter. The paper caught fire at once. For a heartbeat, the hot orange glow picked her face out of the darkness: cheekbones gone sharp, a wet glint in the corners of her eyes, lips pressed into a hard line. Fire raced across the sheet, curling it into a thin black scroll and devouring the neat lines of writing and the tear-blurred ink. A wisp of smoke drifted into the cool night air, carrying the faintly bitter scent of burned paper. A few moments more and nothing was left of the letter but a handful of gray ash. The wind snatched it up and carried it off into the dark.

Ardan watched it all, genuinely surprised.

“Wait.” He cleared his throat. “You’re allowed to use magic here?”

Now it was Polina’s turn to be surprised. She turned to him and raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean, ‘allowed’?” she asked. “I’m a guest here. Same as you. So… why would I need anyone’s permission to do anything?”

“Adelaide told me,” Ardi said slowly, “that security’s been tightened, so none of the guests have access to the estate’s stationary shields. And no one’s allowed to use magic on the estate itself or anywhere nearby.”

Just to be sure, Ardan turned his attention inward again. He reached for his Stars, and it was just as he’d said. The estate’s stationary shields really did have his power locked down tight. He could feel their unseen presence wrapped around his Stars. If he tried to manifest even the simplest seal now, the estate would answer instantly with the whole staggering array of less-than-peaceful responses encoded in its stationary seal.

He couldn’t use magic here. Not without consequences, anyway.

And yet Polina had just burned the letter, utterly untroubled.

Erkerovsky looked at him for a few moments, and then, out of nowhere, she laughed. A quiet laugh, but so full of vicious mockery that it made Ardi uneasy.

“Oh, so that’s how it is,” she drawled. “No, Mr. Egobar, I haven’t heard of any such restrictions. I use my magic here as freely as I please.” She tipped her head to one side. “It seems dear Mrs. Orman has decided not to let a single opportunity slip by. Not even the pettiest one. Anything to remind you, one more time, exactly where she thinks you belong.”

Ardan sighed and spread his hands.

What could he say? Petty, from a mage’s point of view. To someone outside the Star community, probably quite ingenious. But however he looked at it, she was within her rights. It was her and Reish’s home, after all, not his.

He was only a guest here.

“So how does it feel?” Polina asked, watching his face with interest. “Knowing your own wife’s mother is jerking you around over something so trivial?”

“Doesn’t bother me,” Ardi said with a shrug. “If it makes her feel better, she can jerk me around all she likes.”

“Remarkable humility.” Polina tilted her head to one side and studied him as though he were some curious exhibit. “Most men in your position would be seething with resentment by now.”

“What good would that do?” Ard countered calmly. “I’ve only got a little under two weeks left to put up with it. I’ll survive Adelaide somehow.”

Polina looked at him with that same venomous curiosity.

“It’s not exactly proper to speak of the aristocracy in that tone,” she observed. “Let alone your own wife’s mother.”

“I married Tess,” Ardi reminded her. “Not Adelaide. I respect Mrs. Orman. I truly do. But if she wants nothing to do with me, that’s entirely her right. Unfortunately, I can’t change how she feels.”

Polina raised an eyebrow. That clearly wasn’t the answer she’d expected.

“Then why didn’t you send Tess alone?” she asked. “And before you start spouting all that nonsense about steppe honor, in our circles that sort of thing is perfectly ordinary. When two families are cool toward each other, husbands and wives visit their relatives separately. No one would’ve said a word.”

Ardan shrugged again.

“I already told you, I can put up with it,” Ardi said. “For Tess’s sake. It’s no trouble for me.”

Polina lingered over the words, as if tasting them.

“Put up with it…” she echoed.

She turned away to look at the letter, now burned to ash. A strange, crooked smile came to her lips.

“Well,” she said, “if you can put up with it, then I suppose I can too. Put up with a stepmother who’s younger than I am.”

Ardan studied her. In the past fifteen minutes, they’d talked more than they had in the previous two years as classmates at the Grand.

“That bothers you?” Ardi asked, surprised. “Olesya, I mean.”

“Shouldn’t it?”

“It’s just… you don’t strike me as someone who’d care about this.”

“Well… it seems you do earn your salary at the Black House, Ard. I really couldn’t care less.” Polina shook her head. Oddly enough, she sounded sincere. “I know my father loved my mother. Still does. But he needs heirs. Sons, I mean. And all he’s got is me.” With a sweep of her hand, she pushed her hair out of her face. “I always knew he’d marry again sooner or later. I’ve known it since I was a little girl. So none of this comes as a surprise. And Olesya… she’s not such a bad match. Quiet, kind, and unspoiled by aristocratic society. So who knows. Maybe she and I will even end up friends.”

Polina rose from the bench and smoothed her dress, then cast one last look at the little pile of ash beside the path.

“Thank you for speaking with me, Mr. Egobar.” She spoke in her usual cool, even tone, as if the whole conversation had never happened. She paused, then added with the ghost of a smirk, “And this gazebo does seem to draw people with letters. Good night.”

Lady Erkerovsky walked away down the path without waiting for an answer. Soon her platinum hair dissolved into the darkness of the garden.

Ardan was left alone.

He sat there a while longer, savoring the quiet, and then he opened the envelope.

Dear Ard,

If this letter finds you in good health and in something resembling peace, take it as a sign that, for once, the stars have aligned in your favor. After all, judging by the newspapers, peace anywhere in your vicinity is as rare as it is short-lived. But let’s not get into that, or I’ll start lecturing you, and I promised myself this letter would be free of lectures.

Life here goes on as usual, though “usual” may be too serene a word for the past few weeks. Father has started in on the old subject again. Several times now, he’s gently suggested, as if in passing, that I spend an evening at a reception with one suitable young man or another. He doesn’t push; he has too much tact and self-control for that. But his hints grow more transparent every time, and they all amount to the same thing: sooner or later the Emperor’s daughter will have to get engaged to someone, and the sooner she does, the more respectable it will look.

You can imagine my unbounded enthusiasm and optimism as I listened to all this. I told him that if he really meant to insist, I’d put on a fairy-tale play for him, only this time in real life, impossible trials and all. I’d demand that the suitor beat me in a magical duel first. And if that still didn’t deter the suitor, I’d come up with an even more impossible condition. Because I refuse to meekly parade myself like a prize cow at a fair, Ard. And I’m certainly in no hurry to be treated like a broodmare and have my pedigree checked before I’m bred. I won’t let anyone decide my fate as though I were a line item in the state ledger.

I am not the Crown’s property. And I am not the Empire’s hostage.

I have to admit that our conversation turned into a minor quarrel. In the heat of it, I said things I shouldn’t have. I hurled the words at him: I’d renounce my right to the throne if he tried to force me into an engagement. And that, Ard, is when something happened that I won’t soon forget. Something flickered in my father’s eyes, eyes that have always been so calm and so unreadable. Something utterly unlike him.

Something like hurt.

Real, raw, human hurt.

And I can’t even begin to tell you how ashamed I felt. I rushed to apologize at once. Eternal Angels, I probably came across as equal parts incoherent and pitiful. But he simply pretended nothing had happened, though I’d seen it clearly enough.

What’s more, he apologized first.

Unprompted.

And he said he’d keep his earlier promise: he wouldn’t say a word to me about suitors until it was decided whether or not I’d be admitted to the Grand.

I suppose I don’t need to tell you that after that conversation, I tripled the time I devoted to studying Star Magic. If I’m to bargain my way to freedom by getting into the Grand, then I won’t give the exams the slightest chance to wreck my plans.

One more thing, though you may laugh at me for it: sometimes I’m terribly jealous of your brother. He has friends. Real, flesh-and-blood friends who are always getting into one ridiculous scrape or another with him, and afterward he describes it all to me in such detail that I end up laughing out loud over his letter… completely alone, like a madwoman.

Speaking of Erti, what do you make of his wanting to enroll in the glider school? The one that’s supposed to open in Delpas this fall. He’s talked my ear off about his dream of taking to the sky. He sounds more excited about it than he has about anything in six months. You’re his older brother, so you know better than I do, but I think it’s a wonderful idea. Still, I’d like your opinion before I go on encouraging him in my letters.

I don’t know why, but the thought of Erti pursuing a military career won’t leave me alone.

Take care of yourself, Ard.

Really. Not your usual idea of taking care of yourself.

And give Tess a hug from me!

Your faithful friend,

Anastasia.”

Ardan slowly lowered the letter and lifted his gaze to the night sky.

Flight school? Erti dreamed of flying?

And Ardi was only now finding out. From a letter written by the Emperor’s daughter. Not from his own brother, not from his mother, but from Anastasia, who lived in the Palace of the Kings of the Past, thousands of kilometers from Delpas. Which meant she knew more about Erti’s dream than Erti’s own older brother did.

Now it was Ard’s turn to be ashamed. Perhaps just as ashamed as Anastasia had been, judging by her letter.

He’d only just made up with his brother. And now he found he’d missed something important yet again, something Erti lived for, a passion that burned in him. Meanwhile, Ard had been busy with investigations and factories blowing up and hadn’t even known his brother dreamed of flying.

Older brother… in name and nothing more…

Ardi folded the letter and tucked it into his pocket. He sat in the dark gazebo for a long while, gazing up at the stars and thinking of his little brother, who dreamed of the sky.

***

Noon came clear and hot. A party of five strolled at an easy pace along Shamtur’s shopping street, drifting from one flower shop to the next.

The occasion, of course, was the upcoming wedding. Olesya wanted to choose the flowers for the celebration herself. She wouldn’t trust either her mother or the Overseers with something so important, so the whole family had been mobilized for this weighty undertaking.

Olesya herself led the way, tall and serious, casting a critical eye over the bouquets in the shop windows. Lada, Alaris’s wife, bustled along beside her, forever offering a suggestion here and a word of advice there. She knew far more about such matters than young Olesya did and patiently explained which flowers would hold up longest and which would have wilted by the evening of the wedding.

Ardan, Alaris, and Tess hung back a little, leaving the women to choose in peace.

“Remember Zorin?” Alaris asked his sister, warming to his story. “The one who was courting Colonel Stakh’s daughter? Well, he got married. Last fall. And they’re already expecting their first child, so I hear.”

“No way.” Tess flung up both hands. “Are you serious? That Zorin? The one who was scared to even talk to her?”

“The very same,” Alaris said with a smirk. “And Milena, you remember her? Chubby little thing, always scrapping with the boys when we were kids. Well. Instead of getting married, she broke off her engagement to that quartermaster and left for the Metropolis. To apply to a university math program, if you can imagine.”

Alaris and Tess eagerly compared notes on their mutual acquaintances: who’d married whom, who’d gone where, who’d had children. Ardan listened with half an ear. None of those names meant anything to him, so he mostly looked around, taking in the street.

Not that there was much to see. The same view he’d had from the car window the day before. Everywhere he looked, uniforms. Officers arm in arm with ladies, soldiers loitering outside the shops, patrols posted at intersections. The occasional civilian vanished instantly into that sea of uniforms. Ardi was getting used to it: in Shamtur, anyone without epaulets was the exception rather than the rule.

When Olesya disappeared into yet another shop, Lada and Tess in tow, to scrutinize some special white lilies, Alaris hung back outside. He turned to Ardan, his expression grave.

“Ard,” he said quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Ardi raised an eyebrow.

“What makes you think something’s wrong?”

“Because this isn’t my first day in uniform, Ard,” Alaris said in an even voice. “Maybe I’m not an Investigator like you. But I don’t wear a commander’s insignia just for show. I’ve got several battalions of riflemen under my command. So I know perfectly well what a man looks like when he’s on edge. And all day you’ve been acting like you’re on the lookout for something. So I’ll ask you again. What’s wrong, Ard?”

Ardan said nothing for several seconds, looking at his brother-in-law.

Then he shifted his gaze to the road. A little way down, he spotted a car just pulling away from the curb across the street. It was utterly unremarkable, with a standard dark paint job. Only one thing about it stood out: the curtains drawn over its rear windows.

It eased smoothly away from the curb, in no hurry at all, then rolled along in the same direction as their little party, keeping a respectful distance.

None of that would have been strange, except that Ardi had already spotted it outside the last shop. And the one before that. The same car every time: occasionally it vanished from sight, but after a little while it always turned up again.

“I think,” Ardan said slowly, his eyes never leaving the car as it drove away, “that someone’s following us.”