Her eyes flashed across the terrace, Lux’s dark hair loose and wild around his shoulders this morning. “It’ll heal,” she insisted.
Come pack with me, Lunelle beamed, her voice tight from her room.
Be right there. Astra looked to the king, who sipped his morning tea gently. “My sister is searching for me. I’ll see you at the Lunar Gate?”
He smiled, but she could tell his mind was drifting toward Pluto already. She knew that gurgling gray inside of him well. She was no stranger to the distraction of a court’s weight.
Lunelle was much less pensive, much more frantic as Astra entered her room. Maidens flitted about, stuffing gowns and jewels into trunks while she tucked journals into her bag.
“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Lunelle said softly, mostly to herself.
“Of course,” Astra said, nodding. She stretched out over Lunelle’s luxurious bed, giving Lunelle’s tension places to hide within her limbs.
“I’ve been training my whole life for this,” Lunelle chirped, a shaky red rolling over her gut.
“And you’ll have Mother, for better or worse.”
“Right.”
“Right,” Astra assured her.
Lunelle stopped moving, her eyes welling. “Mother above, Astra. This is it, isn’t it? This will be the start of the next inter-court war. It will define my entire reign and I’m not even on the throne yet!”
“Lu.” Astra rolled off the bed and crossed the room, wrapping her hands around Lunelle’s shoulders. Her panic was so palpable it drained both of them into a tornado of violet fear and white-hot frayed nerves.
“Mother does not want a war. Mirquios does not want a war. Pluto certainly doesn’t want a war. The majority of the courts are on our side and will want to settle things peacefully. This is an exercise in diplomacy, nothing more.”
Hot tears danced at Lunelle’s lashes. “Do you really believe that?”
“Absolutely,” Astra lied. “Solaris has been silent for thirty years! Mother has spent my entire life preparing for her chance to shut Solan down.”
“You’re right,” Lunelle conceded. “Thank you.”
“You’ll return home to me in a week or two and we can forget this whole awful mess.”
Lunelle sighed. “Just in time to marry you off.”
Astra’s eye twitched. “Let’s take this hour by hour, shall we?”
Lunelle nodded, pulling from her sister’s grip and reaching for a few books from the nightstand to add to her bag. “I suppose you should go say your goodbyes to your betrothed.”
“I suppose I should,” Astra sighed. “I had Ameera slip a few satchels of tea into your bags, just in case Pluto is a desolate wasteland.”
Lunelle only gave a clipped giggle in response, her eyes tracing the lines of her sister’s back as she left her room, committing to memory the way she moved so confidently.
Astra dodged frantic maidens in the halls, wandering her way through the Andromeda wing where Mercurians dashed in and out of rooms.
She reconsidered saying goodbye now, the panicked plumes of reds, oranges, and violets pushing her back down the hallway.
Instead, she climbed the tower to the roost, reveling in the open air—thin and brisk at this elevation. Riverion sensed her right away. He poked his massive head up and over the stone wall separating him from the next dragon, snorting a smokey greeting laden with irritation.
“Hush, you,” Astra grumbled. “I know you’ve been well taken care of. I saw you circling for hours yesterday.”
Riverion ruffled a disagreement, but he still pushed his head into her hands. Astra slid into his pen, taking a seat against the stone and gliding her fingers over his cool scales. Emerald and blue hues poured over one another into an oceanic coat, hypnotizing under the faint slip of the waxing crescent in the early morning sky.
“With Mother away, we can take to the skies again, hmm?”
Riverion seemed pleased with this, releasing a long sigh as he looked toward the city below. She never dared to leave the palace when she was in Lunaria. It was far too much work to get her mother on board, but she enjoyed watching the citizens below bustle about their morning chores. She envied their blissful ignorance of what lurked outside their gates.
