Burning Glass (5 page)

Every word she spoke came like a blow to my gut. I had done this, not she. I had locked the Auraseers away. Let the peasant man in. Allowed his insanity to overtake me. Allowed it to start a fire that burned everything, harmed everyone. Killed them. Killed my best friend.

I needed to sit. No, I had to stand. Pace. Leave. See Yuliya for myself. But my legs were made of lead. My heart was heavier. Because how could a person with any feeling do what I had done?

“Pardon me, but . . .”

Distractedly, my eyes wandered to Prince Anton, who had just spoken. He darted his gaze between the sestra and me, clearly uncomfortable with what he’d just witnessed between us. I could only imagine his discomfort if he knew what the sestra did—that I was guilty. He merely understood another Auraseer had died. What was she to him among so many who’d perished at this convent?

“That is to say,” the prince continued, “I’m very sorry for your losses. However—”

“You do not care about us or our losses,” I snapped, ignoring the prickling sense of fresh sorrow within me. It couldn’t possibly be coming from him. “You think only of your own.” I referred to the death of his mother, another monarch who surely didn’t mind that the Auraseers of her empire were herded
like cattle and given a life akin to slavery.

Anton’s distinguished brows slid together until they almost touched, and his brown eyes hardened into stone. “You have my sympathy,” he said, “whether you choose to believe me or not isn’t my concern. I will not express it again.”

I clenched my teeth.
Let him be angry.
Anger was useful. I could leech onto it, let it blind me to far more painful emotions—to the image of Yuliya’s face, pasty and drained of life. To the terror she must have felt in her last living moments.

Anton broadened his chest and didn’t flinch from my stare. “I am required back at the palace in haste. The
law
”—an intense sentiment ignited in him at that word, so fleeting, however, I couldn’t name it—“also requires I bring the eldest Auraseer of Riaznin.”

“Sonya,” Sestra Mirna said.

“Yes?” I looked to her, but her eyes were fixed on the prince.

“The others are dead,” she said. “Yuliya is dead. Sonya is the eldest.”

A
HORRIBLE CONCOCTION OF AMAZEMENT AND
DREAD
churned in my stomach. Judging by the slack-jawed look on Anton’s face, his emotions were the same and compounded those within me. Our eyes met with mutual displeasure.

“Is there no one else?” Anton asked Sestra Mirna in a low voice, as if somehow I wouldn’t be able to hear him.

“The remaining two are but children.”

Anton frowned, his gaze raking over me. “She cannot be much older.”

Dimly, I registered being affronted at that.
He
couldn’t be much older than me. But what did it matter how old I was if no other Auraseer could outrank me in age? As Anton said, the law was the law and . . . I could no longer think. Nausea took a sudden hold of me, and I tightened my grip on the chair. This couldn’t be happening.

Sestra Mirna clasped her hands together at the front of her
bloody apron. “Sonya will be ready within the hour to accompany you to Torchev.”

“Within the
hour
?” I blinked at both of them. “I cannot possibly . . . Yuliya has her burial rites. She cannot be laid to rest for three days.” My heart ached with immeasurable grief. My eyes burned, too dry from incessant weeping to produce more trapped tears. They wouldn’t make me leave now, not without saying a proper good-bye to someone who had died because of me. This day had been cruel enough.

I felt Anton weighing my words over, as if they were a measure of barley cupped in his hands. His booted toe tapped the stones in deliberation.

“She was my only friend here,” I said, grasping for his sympathy. Was a prince of Riaznin capable of any—even a fragment?

Tap, tap, tap.
His boot kept its cadence. Perhaps he asked himself the same question. Could he give a no-account girl like me compassion?

My heart drummed. “Give me three days.” In three days I could do many things. Accept Yuliya was dead. Somehow part with her. Find a way to escape before the emperor required me.

Anton’s boot stilled. I held my breath.

“We must leave this night.” His gaze lowered to my nose, anywhere but my eyes. My chest fell, collapsing like my bones were brittle clay. “My brother is insistent. Your circumstance will not move him.”

“But death has touched
him
, too. Your own mother—”

“Do not speak of my mother!” His finger whipped to point
at me, as threatening as if he’d held forth a blade. “She was buried while I traveled here for
you
. I could not take part in her last rites. I could not even bear the weight of the stone to seal closed her coffin. This errand for another Auraseer”—his hand waved dismissively at me—“for the means to protect the emperor and his
mighty
throne
”—those words pelted like acid—“came at the expense of everything else. So believe me when I tell you, Valko does not have ears to hear your plea.”

It took all my resolve not to step back, not to hide or throw up some defensive measure against him. Instead, I allowed his visceral anger to absorb through my skin. Until it fired along my nerves and entered my bloodstream. Until I became its source and could spit it out myself.

“If you cannot stand up to your own brother, you are no better than him! You are worse than that, you are his puppet!”

His eyes flashed. “And will
you
stand up to him? Your head would be on the chopping block before you unpacked your trunks.”

Trunks? As in more than one?
I bit out a harsh laugh. “Only a prince would assume I had that many belongings.” Something tickled my face, and I swiped a hand under my nose and the corner of my eyes.

Anton threw back his dusk-blue cape so it billowed in folds behind one of his broad shoulders. He turned to Sestra Mirna, whom I’d forgotten was here for how statuesquely she stood. “If this girl is the example of how Auraseers are raised at this convent, then this place has wasted far too much of Riaznin’s wealth.”

The sestra shot me a withering glance. “Sonya has only been with us eight months.”

I rubbed under my eyes again. Was I crying? I never shed tears when I was angry. And I couldn’t cry when I had wished to a moment ago.

“The emperor will not find that excuse tolerable,” Anton replied.

“Yes, you have made the emperor’s stance on this convent quite clear.” Sestra Mirna straightened her back. “Let us not waste any more words. Sonya will leave—”

“When we have buried Yuliya,” I finished for her, “and paid our respects to the fallen Auraseers.”

She frowned at me, her gaze drifting to my hair. “What are you doing, child?”

I pulled my hand away from my head to discover a clump of hair caught between my fingers. “Dasha,” I murmured, spinning around to the open doorway.

The little girl stood barefoot in her nightdress, her hands working away at what little hair remained on her scalp. Beside her, Tola whimpered, nose running and face streaming with tears. I touched my wet cheek. How much had they heard?

“Are you leaving us, too?” Tola asked me.

My heated emotions took a sudden halt. Looking at the two remaining Auraseers—the only two, besides me, who’d managed to survive—my heart split apart like the last leaf from an ice-frosted tree. What if I did run away? Anton would be forced
to take Tola to Torchev. How could I allow a child to be sent in my place to protect Emperor Valko when a seasoned Auraseer had been executed for failing to do just that? It would be a death sentence. And after Tola, Dasha would be required.

Building within myself a shaky fortress of resolve, I crossed to the doorway, knelt by the girls, and took their hands in mine. If I made a show of convincing confidence, they would glean it from my aura. “You must be brave,” I said. “Sestra Mirna will depend upon you.” My words felt insensitive as they spilled from my mouth. Dasha and Tola were more fragile, more vulnerable, than they had ever been. But I needed them to find the courage to live here in such an abandoned state. “I will go to the emperor myself and see to it you are comfortable here.”

Tola nodded, accepting her fate, though her tears never ceased to flow. I swallowed my heart, clawing up my throat, and looked to Dasha. “And when I come to visit”—something the emperor would surely never allow—“your hair will be so long, it will sweep the convent halls.”

Dasha grinned a little at that, and I did my best to mirror her flickering hope. Then, biting my lip, I rose to my feet and revolved to face the prince. His piercing gaze was inscrutable, his emotions locked behind some new barrier he’d thrown up against me.

“I will go with you to Torchev,” I said. “Tonight. So long as you promise to have these walls rebuilt and send a guard immediately upon our return to protect the convent.” At least
some provisions remained here. The cold storage cellars were surely standing, and the library’s fireplace could be used for cooking now the kitchen was gone.

Anton’s eyes lowered to Dasha and Tola, flanking my sides. His boot tapped three times before he said, “You have my word.”

I inhaled a steadying breath. Every fiber holding me together threatened to give way until I crumbled back to the dust and earth I came from. “Then you should prepare your horses.”

I was not ready. Nothing could have prepared me for this moment.

“I am ready,” I said.

S
ESTRA
M
IRNA STOOD IN THE SNOW BEFORE THE
BLACKENED
rubble of the convent. Dasha and Tola clung to her skirt. The three of them watched me on the edge of the road, preparing to say one last good-bye as I waited for the troika to pull out from the stables.

Breathe, Sonya. Just breathe.

I pictured Yuliya in the infirmary when I had tried my best to give her a deserving farewell. Sestra Mirna hadn’t yet had the chance to clean her body, so I stripped away my friend’s crimson-soaked sheets and removed the bandage from the crook of her arm. My hands trembled when I sponged away the dried blood from the gash in her leg and worked the tangles out of her matted ginger hair.

“I’m so sorry,” I told her again and again.

Tending to her was a torment. Every time I touched her
blood, the echoes of her last agonizing moments of life rushed into my awareness.

Terror. Helplessness. Sheer anxiety. Pity. Sorrow. Despondency. Her suffering stole my breath, made my body seize with pain, my teeth grind together so I wouldn’t cry out.

Then a strange euphoria flooded into me. A blissful abandon, even though her physical suffering intensified. And past it came the most amazing feeling of all—calm courage. She was brave in the face of dying.

Setting my rag aside, I swallowed, closed my eyes, and took her cold hand in mine. This time I let myself cry. I fell to my knees and bent my head over Yuliya’s stiff hand.

“Stop that at once!” Sestra Mirna ripped my hand from Yuliya’s.

My eyes flew open, and I gasped out a sob from the separation of auras. My wet lashes blurred my vision, but I didn’t need to see to feel the sestra’s fury.

“Leave her be!” she said.

I absorbed her disdain until it transformed into my own shame. Still, I tried to defend myself. “I’m not harming her.”

“Unnatural child!” She flung the accusation in a harsh whisper. Beneath it, I felt her visceral fear of me. “No one should be able to sense the auras of the dead. Your gift is unbridled. You are abnormal.”

“Forgive me,” was all I could say against the sting of her dagger-sharp words. “Please forgive me.”

The sestra’s shoulders fell. Her fear turned to remorse. It
paved its way across her weathered face and into the marrow of my bones. “What more could I have done for you?” She sighed, touching my wet cheek. “How was it possible to teach you anything?”

I shook my head. I had no answer for her. And her brief tenderness did nothing to comfort me. It only racked me with more humiliation. “This wasn’t your fault, Sestra Mirna.”

She dropped her hand. What “this” meant, we both knew—the deaths of twenty-three Auraseers, those whom the sestras deemed holy, blessed by the goddess Feya, even if the empire saw us as nothing more than a race of slaves.

Just as I saw tears glisten in her eyes, Sestra Mirna turned away from me and lifted her chin. “You must listen to me now, once more. It is imperative you strive to perform your duty to your utmost ability. If not, Sonya, you will have the blood of more Auraseers on your hands.”

Her warning grounded me with resolve, as well as a resounding chord of foreboding. She spoke of Dasha and Tola. We both understood what would become of the little girls she kept under her wing if I failed the emperor. If he executed me as he did Izolda.

“I promise,” I said.

And now as I waited for the troika, I said it again, though Sestra Mirna couldn’t hear me from where she stood at the edge of the road with Dasha and Tola, the snow swirling about their faces. Dasha lifted her little hand in a wave and gave me a delicate smile. That she, the youngest of the three, should try to
comfort me in this moment nearly broke me—she whom
I
was abandoning, whose life
I
was leaving in shambles.

I wiggled my fingers back at her and forced myself to return her smile. My vow was as much for Dasha and Tola as it was for Yuliya. I would be the best Auraseer I could be. And if that meant guarding the emperor with my gift—guarding the dynasty of rulers whose law brought me the life I had known, a life torn from my family and sent into hiding with the Romska, measures that had all been for nothing—then I would do it.

I’d taken Yuliya’s wooden statue of the goddess Feya from the infirmary windowsill and tucked it into the pillow slip that now served as my traveling bag. The idol would be a constant reminder of my promise.

As Anton guided the troika from the stables, my knees wobbled. Did I feel the fatigue of the three horses, whose rest from their initial journey hadn’t been sufficient, or was the weariness my own? Did it mark the resignation I would feel until my dying breath? I touched the black ribbon I had tied around my wrist, my emblem of mourning.

The twilight deepened. A gust of frosty air blasted through the thin gray dress I wore. It was nothing more than a laundered gown meant for the sick when they breached their next level of wellness. It was a dress meant for Yuliya. I should have left it behind for her to be buried in, but Sestra Mirna insisted I wear it into Torchev. It was the best the convent could offer. All the other clothes or trinkets in my possession had, of course, been burned.

My gaze drifted to the remnants of the east wing, where I hadn’t dared to go and say good-bye, where the bones of the dead Auraseers surely lay huddled together in some terrible dying embrace. Nadia was somewhere in there. She should have been taking this journey to Torchev, not I. As I scanned the fallen east wing one last time, I searched myself for some fragment of gratification that the once-senior Auraseer was gone, but all I found was my own self-loathing.

The troika pulled alongside me. Anton glanced over the blankets wrapped around my shoulders in lieu of a coat. The frigid air cast a pink tinge across his aristocratic nose and sculpted cheekbones. I shivered for him. “Don’t you have any furs?” he asked.

“I never wear furs.” I closed my heart off from the note of concern in his voice. I would not allow myself to think the prince capable of any small kindness. I would go with him, I would serve his brother, but he would not now, nor ever, be my friend. He represented the empire, whether or not he wore its crown.

“Why?” he asked after a brief hesitation, as if he’d lost the battle of resisting his curiosity, even if it meant engaging me in further conversation. I knew he cared as little for me as I did for him.

“I feel the aura of the beast who gave its life for its hide,” I answered plainly. “I feel the pain of its death. I would rather be cold than suffer that.”

He had no response, only a slight lift of his brows, which
brought me some satisfaction. Perhaps my confession was disturbing enough to render him silent for the rest of our journey.

As I moved to enter the sleigh, he held out a gloved hand. I slighted him and gripped the carved side myself. I succeeded in hefting in my own weight, but not in the proud way I’d imagined. The sleigh’s platform was too high, and I ended up half dragging, half crawling my way to sit on the bench seat beside him. He didn’t bother to catch me up by my elbow or assist me again. There was warmth enough in my skin to flush my cheeks with embarrassment.

“Is it customary,” he asked, “for Auraseers to sense feeling from the dead?” He adjusted his gloves and transferred the reins between hands. His manner was casual. Too casual. More like affected.

Flecks of white ghosted through the air between us. The snow had started falling again. “It is for me . . . when I touch something. Sestra Mirna said my gift was unnatural.” I pressed my lips together. I was speaking too much. He didn’t need to know these things. I wouldn’t report to him at the palace . . . would I?

I glanced back at the sestra and the two little girls as they shivered and still waited for us to depart. “We should leave.” I tightened the blankets around me. “Wolves roam these woods at night.”

Something behind Anton’s gaze sent a confusing fluctuation of warmth and cold through my body. Was he even listening to me? My thoughts strayed to my appearance. My face must be
streaked with ashy grime. Perhaps my quick scrub with the bar of lye in the infirmary hadn’t been sufficient. I itched to touch my skin to be sure, but that would only reveal my awareness of how unprepared I was to meet the emperor—and my new fate.

He cleared his throat and averted his eyes from my mine, just slightly until they settled on the bridge of my nose, like he’d done inside the convent. Then, making a clicking sound with his tongue, he snapped the reins and the horses jolted forward. My heart lurched in my chest. This was it. I was leaving everything I had known behind. Again. I’d never lived in a place long enough to call it my home. Even my years with the Romska were always spent in motion, changing from caravan to caravan to keep me concealed. Now all that hiding was for nothing. The imperial palace would be my final place of residence. But how could it ever be my home?

I worried at my lip and twisted around to look once more at the aged woman who had tried to teach me, to tame me, to prepare me for this destiny if it ever chanced to become mine. I reached with my heart across the widening distance to Sestra Mirna and tried to feel out any sorrow from her at my leaving. The horses’ pace quickened. The sestra set her hands on the small shoulders of Dasha and Tola and guided them inside the ruined convent before I was even out of view. My breath hitched. I caged a sob in my throat. My sorrow for leaving Ormina was one-sided. Closing my eyes, I reminded myself it was better this way, better I leave now before I could harm three people I realized too late I loved.

I sat on my hands to keep them warm and steeled my resolve, pushing away the needling thought that the city of the emperor held ten thousand more people than this little village near the sea. Ten thousand more who would come closer to touching my instability. The only remedy was to be cold to them. Distant. Compassionless. Because any love I ever gave in this world only ended up destroying the very ones I cared about the most.

In the end it was I, not Anton, who broke the silence I’d made such a solemn pact with myself to keep. A three-day journey is an insufferable thing to bear with only the thoughts in one’s head. Especially if one is an Auraseer and can sense the boy she is alone with has a similar urge to speak. Or at least she hopes he does, because that urge multiplying inside her would be so much easier to justify as coming from
him
than would be the admission it could be originating from herself and her intense need to speak to someone, even a lofty prince, in order to distract herself from her anxiety over her future, which was as overwhelming as the harrowing guilt and sorrow for the dead she left behind. Conversing with Anton was the most viable option for escaping the darkness in my head, the darkness of who I was.

“Is it customary for princes to drive their own sleighs?”

I’d spent the better part of the last hour deciding how to phrase my question and felt rather clever in my choice of words, which were close to matching his from earlier. Would he
notice? Think me impertinent? Or perhaps just think me ridiculous for trying to banter on something he’d said half the night ago? Because, truth be told, the first morning of our three-day journey had yet to dawn. We were still in the vast woods outside Ormina, and here I was already speaking to him. My will was about as iron as battered tin.

Enough moonlight shone through the canopy of evergreens that I caught the sharp glance he gave me. Had I startled him by breaking the silence or merely annoyed him? “It is for me,” he said, also using the words I’d answered him with before we left the convent.

“When my caravan traveled near Dubrov,” I said, “we were forced off the road for a good quarter hour while a baron passed us with an entourage of twenty guards and servants on their journey to his summer home.
Twenty.
For a
baron
, not a
prince
—not the sole heir to the throne of Riaznin.” It was a well-known fact the emperor had yet to marry or bear children. He was only a year older than his brother. Their closeness in age spurred a deep rivalry between them. Or so the rumors whispered. “And yet you came here alone.”

Anton stared ahead, adjusting his position to move farther away from me. It was a subtle distance, only a fraction, but I felt the icy air take hold of the increased space from his body, which had been offering me much-needed heat. I locked my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. If a fur-lined coat were to materialize before me, I might trade its warmth for my ideals, after all. “A caravan?” he asked, avoiding the entire point I’d
been laboring to make. “Do you mean to tell me you’re Romska-born? Your coloring is all wrong.”

My fingers moved to touch the end of my blond braid. The Riaznian Romska were known for their deep-olive skin, dark eyes, and darker hair. “I never claimed to be a blooded Romska, only that I kept company with them.”

“Because you are an Auraseer?”

“Yes.”

“Because you sought to evade the empire?”

“Yes.”

“Because your parents thought giving you up to the nomadic tribes was a better trade than the loss of your freedom?”

I shivered, not from the stinging cold but the wonder that the prince had me pegged. “Yes.”

He nodded and roughly exhaled in a muzzled sort of laugh. His breath frosted the air. “As if anyone in Riaznin could acquire freedom so easily.”

His rudeness amazed me. I sat stunned, gaping at him until a dip in the road jostled my mouth into working order again. “You call what I went through easy?”

“I did not say it was easy. Ease has nothing to do with the fact you couldn’t have attained freedom no matter what you went through.”

“You don’t know
anything
about me!” I snapped. He didn’t have me pegged, he had me simplified. To him, I was merely another commoner who dreamed of a life the empire’s shadow
couldn’t touch. No doubt he thought himself big enough to be the one to cast the shadow.

“I am speaking of
true
freedom,” he said.

“Yes, which you’ve been kind enough to define as a thing I will never have—a reality of which I’m well aware and have had seventeen years to digest, thank you very much.”