State of Sorrow (Untitled #1)(3)

Cerena lunged for the boy, but Harun twisted, hoping to break Mael’s fall with his own body. As Cerena crashed into her husband’s back, Harun let go of his son.

Mael made no sound as he tumbled into the aventurine waters of the Archior.

Guard after guard vaulted over the sides after him; the first lady had to be restrained to prevent her from doing the same. Harun turned wide, disbelieving eyes on the retreating backs of Melisia and Caspar, hurrying away from him as though his calamity was contagious.

Harun hauled himself to his feet, stood like the eye of a storm as chaos exploded around him: Rhannish and Rhyllians moving and calling and crying. He was frozen, a statue, his gaze dull and unseeing.

“Your Excellency?” The blond Rhyllian man, the same one who’d summoned the vines, was there, watching him.

Harun turned slowly, as though every inch must be paid for, felt, and borne like a great weight.

“How?” Harun’s voice was soft.

“I’m sorry?” The man spoke in lightly accented Rhannish. “I don’t think I understand you.”

“How did they cross it? One of your so-called abilities, the ability to cleave to stone? Tell me.”

The Rhyllian looked at the collapsed figure of the first lady, the wailing retinue on her side of the river. Below, in the Archior, men were drowning, begging for help that would not come.

Harun, though, was staring at him, his face slack, his hands spread wide.

“Gum,” the man said finally. “Not an ability. Just tree sap, on their shoes. It makes them sticky. Gives traction.”

Harun nodded. When he descended the bridge, he did so with no problem at all.


The first lady’s scream when she was told the body of her son had not been recovered shattered the mirrors in the Great Hall of the Summer Palace, the glass cascading to the floor and lying there, reflecting sunlight all around the room. Harun killed the messenger himself, stabbing him in the throat and then cutting out the tongue that had carried the news.

The windows of the Summer Palace were covered, and the surviving mirrors turned to the wall. Through the palace’s grief they all clung to one thought: Mael’s baby brother. All hopes rested on the new child, a new Ventaxis son.

She was born a month too soon. And she was born a girl.

Cerena went into labour the night of Mael’s disappearance, and it became obvious the baby wouldn’t come easily. She laboured a whole day and night, before the midwife finally confirmed the baby was breech and needed to be turned. She tried, and then a nurse tried, but it was no good. The baby wouldn’t turn.

Cerena was finally rushed by carriage to a small hospital in the North Marches, swearing she was being torn in two. The Dowager First Lady remained by her side, telling her to breathe, commanding her to live. Harun remained at the Summer Palace.

Despite the best efforts of the midwife and nurses at the hospital, the child came out feet first, the cord around her neck, grey-skinned from the lack of oxygen. As Cerena collapsed back against the bed, a battalion of nurses trying to comfort her, the midwife cut the cord but made no move to loosen its death grip on the child’s throat, frozen by the terror of what it might mean for her if the baby died.

The lifeless infant was snatched by the Dowager First Lady and hurried away from the careless midwife and heartbroken mother. The midwife did her best to make Cerena comfortable, but the blood wouldn’t stop coming, no matter what she did. It seemed that poor Harun was to lose his entire family in just a few short days.

Then the Dowager First Lady appeared in the doorway, holding the babe. Still a little grey, still scrawny, still small. But unmistakably fighting to survive, thin legs kicking frantically.

The same could not be said for the first lady. Too many heartbreaks, too many disappointments. As she lay there, the stink of death in the air, the Dowager First Lady asked her what she would name the baby.

“Sorrow,” she’d said. “For that is all she brings us.”





PART ONE

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today,

I wish, I wish he’d go away…

—William Hughes Mearns, “Antigonish”





Sorrow

The headache blossomed like a flower inside Sorrow’s skull, the agony unfurling petal by petal, until it was everything. She sucked in a deep breath and found the cause of the pain: the thick, sickly reek of Lamentia, creeping in through the open doors.

She turned from the man standing before her and scoured the dim room, watching for ribbons of telltale smoke drifting across it. But there was nothing, no sign of the drug, and a glance at the others there, all politely waiting for their turn to talk to her, showed no one else seemed to have noticed it. She gave a tentative sniff and instantly the skin along her shoulders prickled, her whole body flooding with heat as her head gave a violent throb.

“Miss Ventaxis?” The man, a steward from the West Marches, was staring at Sorrow. “Is everything all right?”

All Sorrow could do was blink, clenching her jaw tightly and praying the nausea died away before she disgraced herself.

“Miss Ventaxis? You really don’t look well.”

“Can’t you…?” Sorrow spoke through gritted teeth. “Can you smell … anything?”