Mirage (Mirage #1)(23)

I sank to my knees slowly, as I had done before Nadine not so long ago, and cast my gaze to the floor. I could feel his eyes on me.

“Your Eminence,” I breathed.

Silence.

I forced my hands to relax in my lap, though I heard the sound of the king turning back around to his advisor, whispering something. My life depended on the outcome of this meeting. My world had narrowed to this moment and all the steps leading up to it.

“Nadine,” he said after a moment. “Notify my servants. I go to Rif tomorrow, once this festival has ended.”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“And Maram?”

My head jerked up and I met his eyes. I felt nearly blasphemous looking at him. My face, I hoped, was blank. I willed my heart and my thoughts to calm. His eyes seemed to knife through all my pretending to see inside me. For a moment my mind was blank with fear that he’d seen through me.

I wrestled myself into calm, and forced myself to continue.

“Yes, Your Eminence?”

He held out a gloved hand. For a moment, I stared at it, uncomprehending. Nadine said nothing, but I could feel her behind me, berating me for my slowness and stupidity. I slid my hand into his and let him help me gracefully to my feet.

“What do you intend to do about securing your confirmation?” he asked me.

“Your Eminence?” I felt like a glitching holoreel.

He frowned, a fearsome, angry expression. He was so unlike my own father, who even in his angriest moments never frightened me.

“Last we spoke,” he said, “you agreed to produce a plan to handle the senate and confirm your status as heir. I ask so little of you already—”

Nadine, at last, coughed softly. “Your Eminence, we discussed the small matter of…” She never finished her sentence, and I was not foolish enough to turn my back on the king, but his expression smoothed as he understood. He turned a new gaze on me, critical and sharp, as if he meant to peel away all the layers of my self.

“Come here,” he said, his voice soft.

I stepped forward.

His gloves were soft against my chin. I did not know if it was the Vathek way to touch those below you, turning them this way and that to see if they met the measure they’d set. I felt like a bauble, constantly held up to the light to determine clarity. At last, he leaned back and rested his hands on the armrests of his chair. I hadn’t lowered my gaze and watched him almost as closely as he watched me.

“We are curious to see if you will survive the Ziyaana,” he said, whisper-soft. Then he raised a hand and waved me away.

I sank to my knees gracefully, my mind still, rose to my feet again, and walked away. But I could not resist a glance over my shoulder—he had turned his chair so that he was facing the wide picture window. The last I saw of him was his back and too-broad shoulders, outlined by the moonlight.

Nadine delivered me back to my table, whispering a few words of approval. Nerves still singing, I sat and watched the dancing couples as they stepped and spun. The night had taken on an otherworldly feel, and the lights seemed to reflect off the ice sculptures and windows in strange ways, making shapes on the floor out of shadow and iced flame.

I had succeeded in the impossible. Pride swelled inside me. I’d succeeded where everyone had expected failure. And my success meant that I would live. Long enough, I hoped, to escape. Long enough to find a way out of the Ziyaana, and to another life.

Return, oh mourner, return.





the ziyaana, andala





12

Maram was waiting for me in my chambers as soon as we returned to the Ziyaana. She stood in front of a window, haloed by the bright orb light.

The door creaked open and then shut before she turned around to look at me. It was still disorienting to see myself in another person. I had become so much like her, had learned to carry her expressions over mine like a second skin, that sometimes I forgot there was an original.

She sighed and sat on the pillowed bench behind her.

“Well,” she said. “You seem to have had a good time.”

“I danced,” I replied, voice flat. “It was enjoyable.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “So. Tell me how it went.”

I didn’t know what to tell her. No one, not even her father or fiancé, had been able to divine the difference between the two of us. Her father had been warned, and still failed to notice a double in his daughter’s place. Her peers had given me a wide berth, had spoken to Idris first before looking at me.

I wondered, for a moment, how such a life might feel. Isolated from everyone except the person you were meant to marry, and he a prisoner of the state in every way but name. Feared by your peers. Ignored by your father. Orphaned by your mother.

For a brief moment, I felt something like pity.

It died quickly.

“It was as you said,” I spoke finally. “Dazzling. Far more fun than I thought it would be.”

“Different from your small country parties, I gather?” she said, leaning back.

“We don’t dance with one another on Cadiz,” I said. “At least not in such close quarters.”

The dances on Cadiz had none of the manufactured polish of the waltz I’d shared with Idris. They weren’t about closeness or about looking close—they were about joy. They were about experiencing joy with your family and community. The waltz felt as if it were about secrets—Idris’s voice in my ear, his breath on my neck, his hair brushing my cheek.