“Cebrinne,” Thaan said.
It was his voice.
But he said it with Madam Freisa’s mouth. With her strict lips. The seneschal of Thaan’s administrative office was a slender woman, almost bony, the skin beginning to sag under her jaw. Something about her face drooped in a way that wastight, every ounce of her youth stolen by Thaan’s invisible regime.
I glanced at the faces around her. Naiads. Ones I didn’t recognize.
They stood around us in the dark. Boxing us in so we had nowhere to go. I grabbed Selena’s arm.
Our mother isn’t coming, is she?
“Drones,” I murmured.
Madam Freisa’s chin lowered.
My breath frosted. It gathered in all the rain-soaked crevices of my hair, ice crystals blooming along my mouth and across my skin. I pulled off my swan-feather mask, my fingers so cold they ached as I stretched them.
Drones.
Thaan had called his drones in. Two months ago, I hadn’t even known they existed. But there was no arguing what they were.
And there was no point in trying to run. In trying to convince him I’d walked down to the water out of innocence. So much for disguising Vouriin a gown. I flicked the mask away, eyes shifting to meet Madam Freisa’s. “Is sheincanted, or are you standing here with me?” Her pupils appeared normal. But Thaan was so skilled atincantation, I could never tell.
Madam Freisa’s mouth twitched. Her jaw flared. Her hair shrank into her scalp. Spine lengthened. Shoulders widened. The skirt of her secretary dress pressed into her legs as they stretched, pant legs instead of a bodice, that strange tunic I despised softly flapping against the wind.
Thaan tilted his head, eyeing me with marked disdain.
I stared back. Numb. Waiting for fear to come.
I don’t know why it didn’t. I’d been waiting for years to feel it again. The only time it came and went was when Selena strayed beyond the boundaries of my sight. But she was safe, tucked up into the palace ballroom, most likely with Pheolix not far behind. There was no one here for me to fear for.
Except myself.
Maybe I’d used up all of my fear the day we’d been taken. Maybe you’re born with only a certain amount, and most burn through theirs slowly, a moment here and there across the span of a lifetime. Maybe—when they’d stripped me from my sister and dragged me under the waves, when they’d forced their mouth over mine, shoved Naiad air down my throat, brought me back to shock and white-hot pain at the surface, when I’d looked down to find a tail, bronze and gleaming under the full moon—maybe it was then that I’d dumped a lifetime’s worth of fear into the fire.
I’m not sure. But it didn’t come now.
“Why are you not at the Queen’s masquerade, Cebrinne?”
“It bores me.”
Thaan pressed his fingers together, eyes veering to the side as though in deep thought. “You don’t mind the rain?”
“No.”
He smiled, though that smile resembled more of a snake’s hiss. Too wide for his face, a face that wasn’t made for happiness. “Aren’t lies fun, Cebrinne,” he mused, turning to run his fingers down the stem of a plumplilac bloom. Water dripped off the tiny petals, catching moonlight as they fell to the grass. “Let me try to tell you one of my own. Though I doubt I’ll be as good as you are, with all the experience you’ve gathered lately.”
He paused, angling his head to look at me from over his shoulder. “I have no idea who you were with at the water’s edge.”
I forced myself to stand still. To not respond. To ignore the creep of nerves, the tickle of freezing wind across my shoulders, the ache along my spine to shudder and send that itch away.
“I didn’t see her walk down with you, nor did I see who sat on the rocks, nor the Naiad she joined in the water. And when you say the Queen’s masquerade was boring, well. I believe you. Because I’m certain you went. I’m certain you danced. Gossiped. Ate. Drank.”
My thoughts spun.
The pigeons that had nested under the archway—how had Thaan known I’d be here with Vouri?
Did he know the young woman in a masquerade dress was the same one who worked in his offices? It was dark, and Vouri had been wearing a mask. Had I been meeting only Aegir, I could have spun a tale supporting my pursuit of hiscordae. But reviewing the moment in my mind’s eye, it had been clear that I wasn’t there for Aegir.
