Burning Glass (28 page)

T
OSYA TOOK ONE STEP DOWN THE STAIRS, AND HIS
GAZE NARROWED
. Did he truly not recognize me? I had seen him every spring for eight years, though the last one we’d shared together was a full two years ago. Tosya had been my family among the Romska, the closest person I had to a brother. I pulled the scarf off my head. The motion brought my blonde braid over the front of my shoulder. His eyes popped wide. His lips parted as if to say my name.

Anton put a hand on my back. “Tosya, you remember Klara, don’t you?”

Tosya blinked, quickly catching on. “Yes, yes, of course.” He turned to Ruta, who had carefully watched his reaction. “It’s all right. This girl is, uh, Gavril’s . . .”

Tosya and Anton spoke over each together, finishing my introduction.

“Cousin.”

“Wife.”

I jerked my head up to Anton.

Even in the dull light, I saw color sweep his cheeks. He cleared his throat. “We’re married now. I married my cousin.”

Tosya’s brows lifted as he suppressed a grin. “You have my congratulations.”

Anton gave him a warning look.

“Very well.” Ruta frowned. “But I don’t want any trouble. Go to the parlor and keep your voices low. I won’t have you waking the other guests.” As Tosya descended the stairs, Ruta tugged her shawl closer. “There’s a tray of bread and jam in the kitchen, and a bottle of kvass in the cupboard.”

“We’ll be fine,” Tosya assured her. “Get some sleep.”

She grumbled, muttering to herself as she hobbled back to where her upstairs room must have been.

“I think she likes you,” I whispered when I was sure she was gone.

“I’m a favorite with all the ladies.” Tosya preened himself by smoothing his vest.

I laughed, and he hopped off the last step and swooped me up in his arms. He kissed my cheek and set me down. “Did you get shorter?”

“No.” I smacked his chest. “You got taller.”

“That’s what my friends keep telling me, but I have this theory that everything in the world keeps shrinking but myself.”

“Hmm. I think your education gave you an ego.”

“A necessary requirement of a poet. That and a wide range of insecurities.”

I laughed again and shook my head as I breathed in all of him. He carried the scent of the forest mulch and campfires surrounding the Romska wagons. His aura was equally familiar—light on the surface, but beautifully deep and awe-inspiring beneath, like the sea under shallows where the sunlight reaches. “It’s so good to see you.”

“And you.” His humor simmered to something more sincere for a moment. Then he clapped Anton’s arm. “I can’t believe you went off and got married without telling me!”

The prince lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Don’t start. I had to say something since you were tripping all over your words. You’re better with a quill, you know.”

Tosya scowled at him and threw me a teasing smile. “Your husband is frank to a fault.”

Anton groaned. “Shall we move to the parlor?”

“And domineering,” I added.

Anton brushed past us, muttering, “Maybe it was a mistake bringing you two together.”

Tosya and I giggled like naughty children and fell in tow behind him.

The parlor was at the back, down a narrow hallway and adjacent to the kitchen. Everything in the lodging was a little off-kilter, from the slanting floors to the crooked windowsills and doorframes. But with Tosya at my side, the place was
starting to grow on me.

We sat around a small, circular table, probably meant for a game of cards. Our three pairs of knees kept colliding—Anton’s because he sat closer to me, and Tosya’s due to the length of his legs.

Tosya set his candle on the table and leaned forward, his chin propped on a knuckled hand. “I never imagined I’d see the two of you under the same roof. How is it you know each other?”

Anton glanced back to the hallway. In a quiet voice, he answered, “She is the sovereign Auraseer.”

Tosya turned large eyes on me, which swiftly softened. “Oh, Sonya . . . I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

I swallowed and fought to resist his pity. “It isn’t so bad.” When he didn’t reply but only stared at me, his aura tightening my throat, I added, “At least I have Anton.” I’d chosen my words poorly. I’d made it sound like I owned him or belonged to him or that we were somehow
more
. . . more than what we were.

Anton’s leg settled against mine beneath the table and made the complicated energy entwining us pulse with more intensity. I felt Tosya’s piqued curiosity, as if he wondered, all joking aside, what the prince and I really meant to each other. If he’d asked us directly, I wasn’t sure we could have answered.

Tosya sighed and templed his fingers at his mouth as he gazed at me. “We were so good at hiding you.” I knew he meant my days with his caravan and countless others. “I thought we could hide you forever. Now to see you
found
. . . like
this
. . .”
He shook his head. “What a life for you.”

His words brought back memories. Once I had grown older and a little more cautious with my ability, I should have been safe from the authorities. Though discretion was never my talent. I would have escaped notice had the bounty hunters not tracked me from the time I was fifteen, when my parents were executed for withholding their gifted child from the empire. And at the end of last spring, when Tosya must have been at university, the bounty hunters had finally succeeded in finding me. My arms had been covered in bruises from their brutal grip as they’d dragged me away.

Rubbing his brow, Tosya turned to Anton. “Did you bring her here so I could hide her again? I would gladly do it. You know I would.” My chest tightened with his guilt. Why did he blame himself for what had happened to me? Even if he had been with the Romska caravan last spring, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. The bounty hunter, Bartek, once he’d discovered my whereabouts, held five Romska children hostage, with me as their ransom. Tosya wouldn’t have let them die; he would have made the same choice their families did.

Anton remained silent, giving me a chance to answer Tosya’s proposal. I considered my friend. Leaving Torchev behind was a wonderful temptation. But then Tola and Dasha seemed to ghost through the room, two little girls huddled in the folds of Sestra Mirna’s skirts as they watched me leave on one of the hardest days of their lives. They were now the children I had to save, their fates dependent on me.

“I wish I could see the Romska again,” I admitted. “But my days of hiding are over.”

Tosya nodded and watched me sadly. “How do you bear it? Serving the emperor? Being walled inside the palace with so many people?”

He must still see me as the haunted girl I was at fifteen, the girl troubled by the fresh wound of her parents’ death, a reality that woke me screaming from my sleep. Somehow Tosya had been able to coax smiles out of me, even an occasional laugh. He’d distract me with stories and quiet musings. And now I had read his book of poetry.
The mighty isn’t one, but many.
Words Anton told me were sweeping across Riaznin. I didn’t want Tosya to think me weak. “I’ve grown stronger,” I answered him.

“She’s truly incredible,” Anton added, the energy between us burgeoning with pride.

Tosya’s curiosity bubbled again. He turned calculating eyes on his friend. “Have you shown her your birthmark?”

Anton’s aura jolted. He pulled his leg away from mine. “Is anyone hungry? Ruta mentioned bread and jam.”

“Have you?” Tosya asked, unrelenting.

“What birthmark?” I spun to Anton. “What is he talking about?”

Neither man answered. Anton couldn’t bear the weight of Tosya’s stare for long. He stood and walked back to the kitchen.

“What birthmark?” I asked Tosya again, this time lower so Anton wouldn’t hear.

“It’s nothing. I only thought he might have . . .” He idly
rubbed a spot on his inner forearm, his gaze drifting back to the prince. “It’s nothing.”

Clearly it wasn’t nothing. My skin tingled with the remembrance of when Anton had drawn back my sleeve and examined my arm in the very same spot.

Unable to restrain myself, I pushed up from my chair and followed Anton to the kitchen. I’d spent enough months in the dark, as far as his secrets were concerned. I thought they’d all come to light, but I was wrong. And the prince was, too, if he thought he could keep something else from me.

Anton stood by the slab of the kitchen table. He studiously avoided my gaze as he unwrapped a loaf of bread from its cloth.

“Give me your hand,” I said.

He removed the lid off the crock of jam.

“Anton.”

“Let this go, Sonya.”

Ignoring him, I took his right hand and revolved it, then slid back his sleeve. He sighed. There on his inner forearm, just where I knew it would be, was the birthmark Tosya had mentioned. It was pinkish brown, no larger than my fingernail, and reminded me of the head of a lynx in profile: snarled mouth and pointed ears, slightly longer than an average cat’s. I brushed my thumb across it, and Anton’s skin pebbled, his muscles tight as balalaika strings.

“What has this to do with me?” I asked.

“It doesn’t. That’s the point.”

“Then why did you look at my arm that night?”

His frown deepened. “I don’t know.”

“Why won’t you tell me? Don’t you trust me?”

He closed his eyes. My question of trust hammered on the wedge dividing us. “This isn’t important.” He slit his eyes open, but kept his gaze trapped on the leaning floor planks. “It has nothing to do with the revolution. It’s only some nonsense Tosya’s teasing me about.”

“He wasn’t teasing.”

“Sonya . . .” Anton gave me a miserable look.

“Please?” I softened my grip on his arm, trying to show him it was safe to open up to me.

He inhaled a long breath and stalled another moment before he finally gave in. “When I had to leave Trusochelm Manor,” he said slowly, haltingly, “when Valko required me in Torchev and under his watchful eye—I was torn about it. I’d learned to accept my fate, but rumors of my brother’s unforgiving rule had already spread across the countryside. I wasn’t sure if I could endure being with him . . . witnessing Riaznin crumble under his reign.”

As I listened, I wondered what all of this had to do with a birthmark, but I dared not interrupt for fear Anton wouldn’t finish his story.

“It was the end of another summer, and Tosya was on leave from his university studies. He took it upon himself to cheer me up. We got drunk and”—Anton shrugged like he couldn’t believe he was admitting this—“Tosya took me to an old Romska woman to have my fortune read. I suppose he thought it would bring me some comfort.”

The prince stopped there, scuffing the toe of his boot on the floor.

“What did she tell you?” I asked.

Scuff, scuff.
He glanced down to the parlor and sighed again. “That I would live to see the dawn of a new Riaznin, that the words of my Romska friend would part the clouds for the sunrise.”

I contemplated Anton. It wasn’t like him to heed a fortune-teller. He was familiar enough with the Romska to know there was nothing mystic about their ramblings. They only did what they had to do to bring food to their families like all the common people. But I could see why Anton believed the old woman—she showed him what he most wanted to have.

“What else did she say?” He was still dancing around the heart of his unease.

Scuff, scuff, scuff.

I moved my hands down from his birthmark and wrapped them around his fingers. “Anton?” I whispered.

His eyes lifted to mine and captured the glow of moonlight past the grime of the kitchen window. His aura made my chest ache. “She told me I would meet a girl who would change my life forever. Our two souls were fitted for each other.”

The pain in my chest expanded and rose to my throat. I thought I understood him. “And she would bear a mark like yours?”

A mark I didn’t have.

“Yes.”

I nodded slowly.

“I told you it was nonsense.” He grinned, but it didn’t sit right on his face.

“Was the old woman an Auraseer?” Not that my kind had the gift of foretelling the future. As far as I knew, no one did, but at least an Auraseer could sense what the prince hoped for and know if what she foretold rang true. Though most people in their desperation were fairly easy to read, even by those without my ability.

“I don’t know . . . she was different. Sometimes I wonder what magic encircles all of us, what we could do if we were sensitive enough to unearth it. Look at you, your connection with the dead. There’s been no Auraseer like you before.”

He was trying to console me, I realized. Distract me from the disillusionment of his confession—that he, despite all his wiser judgment, believed in the fortune he was given.

I had to stop troubling him to reveal his secrets. I wished I could give him back this one.

His large hand, cradled in my both my own, felt heavy. I let it go. “I believe we decide our own fate,” I said, unfailingly stubborn, as always. It was better than letting my heart break. “No one has the right to dictate who we are or what we can become. I thought that’s what you believed, too, what you were fighting for.”

“I do.” He managed to shake his head, cross his arms, and shrug at the same time, altogether not knowing what to do with himself. “I am.”

At some point Tosya had moved closer. He stood with his shoulder pressed against the crooked wall of the kitchen. With an affectionate smile, he said to us, “Come back to the table. The night is waxing late, and much as I’m delighted to see you, Sonya, I doubt Anton’s purpose in bringing you here was to reunite two long-lost friends.”

The prince cleared his throat and pulled his sleeve down. His shame thickened my throat as he quietly brushed past me and moved back to the parlor. He left the food tray forgotten. Numbly, I covered the bread and crock of jam.

Tosya approached me.

I traced a hairline fracture on the lid. “Why does he push me away? Why does he find any
trifling excuse
to shut me out? Why won’t he just confess he doesn’t believe I’m good enough for him?”