Violet Made of Thorns (Violet Made of Thorns #1)(16)

“You wouldn’t?”

I look up and find Ziza appraising me as much as I am appraising her. “What do you mean?”

She shrugs. “Forgive me if I speak too frankly, but the animosity between you and Prince Cyrus is well-known. I myself wondered if he would return from his tour with a poached Seer and replace you. Verdant has two Seers, after all, and he visited their court, did he not?”

A prickle of a threat runs down my spine. “Replacing a sitting Seer is unprecedented in Auveny.”

“Ah, but it’s a king’s job to set precedent. You are a dangerous woman, Miss Lune, and I mean that in the best sense.” Ziza’s fingers clink with a dragon’s hoard’s worth of rings as she folds them together. Her smile could cut glass. “Kings may rise and fall by the love of their people, but a Seer demands nothing as fickle as love. It is we who demand you. Your Fate-blessed words carry weight with or without a formal title. Words that could prevent His Highness from taking the throne, if you wanted to.”

My eyes narrow. Treasonous. But true. I could foretell any number of dreadful things about his reign and send Cyrus’s coronation plans spiraling; it’d have consequences, like any knife to the back, but I could do it. Easy as a whisper, as long as people believed me.

But…I couldn’t stomach giving the dukes an easy win. I dislike Cyrus, but he’s right to demand integrity from them.

I don’t receive as many patrons from the countryside, but I see enough in their threads to paint a picture of struggling villages. It doesn’t match up with the wealth that floods in from their dominions. In the threads of lords, I see their safes full of coin and smudged ledgers, and I wonder what they’ve done to make the math favor them. Greed is more common than flies, but it still repulses me when I think too long about it; they already have so much.

I might admire the prince’s idealism if he had practical plans attached to it. But he’d have a better time trying to squeeze integrity out of rocks.

No, I wouldn’t choose the wolfish Council or Lord Fidare or some other untested scheme over Cyrus. But the possibility of my betrayal exists, like a weapon sheathed.

Without breaking my gaze, I swallow any hint of temptation. “I think you speak too frankly.”

Lady Ziza bows her head, a tiny smile playing on her lips. “My apologies, Sighted Mistress.”



* * *





The patrons who come in after Ziza are not nearly as interesting as her. For a brief while, I’m thankful, until the hours start feeling like days. Beyond divining love lives, I also give readings to a woman investigating a family secret, travelers from Yue seeking approval from the Fates for their crusade, a farmer who wants to know what his newly bought magic seeds will sprout into—my Sight doesn’t work on inanimate objects, but my regular eyes could see they were dried peas.

When the bells strike seven, I turn away anyone still waiting and go upstairs and fall back onto my bed.

People exhaust me.

I shut my eyes—just for a rest. All the threads I traced today meld together into blurry snatches of the Sun Capital and masked revelers. Visions of the past imprint into my memory easily, but trying to remember threads of the future can be like cupping water with open hands.

I hear the clock tower again—eleven tolls this time. Night falls into further darkness and stars light up the sky, spinning and spinning, fluttering and twirling….

No, not stars.

Fairies. A sky full of fairies.

I’m dreaming.

I open my eyes—and the fairies don’t go away. They hover like golden ornaments, silent save for the hum of their wingbeats.

I am on my feet, standing on nothing. No matter how often it happens, this slipping between waking and dreaming never gets easier to distinguish. As I reach out, a trio of fairies land on my knuckles. Their tiny limbs tickle. At least with dreamed fairies, I don’t sneeze.

It is time, voices in the wind rasp. They will rise—beast and briar—at last, at last.

A shiver runs through my body. The wind dies down.

One fairy crawls to the tip of my finger and tugs. It’s too small and bright for me to see what it’s gesturing at, but it keeps pulling, hard as a pinch, like it wants to show me something.

I walk forward.

Another step, and the darkness seems to part. Craggy edges of underbrush take shape where nothing existed before. Under my toes, moss springs to life. When I breathe, a chill fills my lungs.

The rest of the fairies surge into the underbrush. I follow the path they light, elbowing through boughs and vines. Thorns tear tiny cuts into my skin. My grip is slippery as I clamber in deeper, but I maneuver with the grace of memory: I’m a little thief again, weaving among the clotheslined rooftops.

This place doesn’t feel like a forest. There are no tree trunks, no ferns or stone, only ropes of leaves, twisting and twining, stretching toward some center. When I halt long enough for the rustling to fall silent, I hear a steady pounding, and the vines around me pulse to the same beat. Like a heart.

I shouldn’t be in real danger, but I’m unsettled just the same. I quiet my breathing and check every footstep. The fairies get scarcer. A sliver of moon breaks through the growth to light a gap in the greenery. In the knot of bramble ahead, something is caught—

A body.

A boy.

Lashed upright, eyes shut, lips as red as fruit. So beautiful, even I want to kiss him once.