“Ah,” she sighed. “Of course.” She nudged the door with her shoulder, slipping into the low-lit room, happy to see Lura waiting for her on a plush settee at the end of the bed.
“Goodnight, Lunelle,” Mirquios said from the hall.
“Goodnight,” she mumbled, already feeling a wave of nausea overtake her without the eyes of every ruler across the Inner Courts suppressing it. Lura wrapped an arm around her shoulder, squeezing her gently before untangling her hair from its braid, humming a song she used to sing when they were much younger girls.
It did little to soothe the well of panic opening within her chest.
ChapterFour
Lunelle hardly rested that night.
Between the anxiety keeping her ear tuned to the hall, and the humbling after-effects of Yallara’s tea, there was no amount of sleep that could have made climbing out of bed the next morning pleasant.
But duty waited for no hangover, and she was up and being laced into one of her more attractive Summer gowns before the room even came into focus.
The palace halls were still oddly stilted with an icy silence—no one knew what to say in the wake of such a shocking occurrence. She’d half expected the courtiers to stick to their assigned wings for the day, but the Sun had drawn them out of the halls and into the gardens and groves.
To Lunelle’s dismay, her mother had not forgotten about Arcas’s promise to give her a tour of the grove. They were both restless as they searched for small talk along the twisted trees.
Dense greenery punctuated by crimson bulbs loomed over them, the tangled mass of fruit blocking out the Summer Sun. Lunelle pulled nervously at the edge of her sleeve as soft cream linen dragged across the rippling grass.
“They do not produce fruit for the first century,” Arcas murmured, turning his chin up to the nearest branch. He reached his spindly cerulean knuckles out and brushed the soft underside of an unfurling leaf with a tenderness that surprised her. Everything about him was sharp. He’d been frantic last night, furious.
But this morning he was too tired to maintain his rage.
“It takes them eons to warm up, but once they do…” he trailed off. His fingers wrapped around a plump red fruit, snapping it from the branch. “They’ll produce fruit for another six, seven hundred years. Maybe more if they’re from a particularly strong lineage.”
Lunelle lagged behind him as he moved from tree to tree, his hands whispering amongst the leaves as they moved along. Her mother’s stare burned against her back, watching them weave through the grove from a lavish tent on the palace lawn. She’d stayed close all morning, uneasy after last night’s attack. When Arcas greeted them over breakfast in the tent, Lunelle expected her mother would join them.
She glanced over her shoulder, covered by the light fabric of her dress in an effort to prevent burns to her pale skin, watching the Inner Courtiers stretch out in the Sun, basking in its sacred light. They held no reservations as they let the warm rays spill across the bridges of their noses, freckling them with shimmering spots.
A golden beam slipped through the trees, toasting a perfect circle against her palm. She twisted her hand one way and the next, watching the sunlight chase her blood across icy skin.
She thought it would hurt—the Sun. But it was not pain that she felt. It was something much more frightening that took hold across her chest.
Desire.
Desire was not something Lunelle had much experience feeding, but plenty of practice ignoring. She’d certainly encountered its hungry mouth in her younger years when crowns were merely an accessory, the very notion of thrones reserved for her mother alone.
Lunelle had let it wash over her in midnight meetings in palace gardens against the unsteady hands of councilwomen’s sons. She’d felt it climb her spine as thick-lashed eyes flashed toward hers across ballrooms, courtiers spinning out in moonshine clouds. She’d given herself over to it a time or two when she was simply unable to distract herself. But mostly, she’d shoved it deep down under rocky shores where she didn’t have to stare it full in the face.
As was her duty.
She was the heir to a crown of stars, as ancient as the spray of glittering bodies that inspired it, and she had too much resting on her shoulders to risk distraction.
In the Plutonian Court, though, she found the thought of stepping into the gilded light more than pleasant. It was downright tempting.
“Which one is the oldest?” Lunelle asked, her swirling gaze sweeping the orchard. There must have been a hundred rows of trees, easily. They stretched into oblivion as far as she could tell.
Arcas’s lips tilted into a crooked smile. “This way.”
He dodged quickly into the thick walls of the pomegranate trees, cutting across a dozen neatly marked rows as she skipped over fallen limbs and rotting fruit to keep up.
“This one,” he breathed, stopping short in the middle of a row, his boots crunching against decaying leaves. Lunelle steadied herself at his side, looking up at a towering tree twice the size of the rest, its roots tangled and popping up from the ground.
Her heart twisted as she traced the curled and peeling lines of the bark.
“It’s incredible.”
