Stars Above: A Lunar Chronicles Collection (The Lunar Chronicles) (19 page)

It had been years since her father’s murder, and months since she’d dreamed of it, but the shock and horror felt the same every time.

Not bothering to wait for her pulse to slow, Winter pushed herself from the bed. She fumbled around in her wardrobe for a pair of soft-soled slippers and pinned back her wild curls before slipping into the corridor.

If the guard who stood watch at her door was surprised to see her up in the middle of the night, he didn’t show it. It was not a rare occurrence. There had been a time when she sneaked down nearly every night to the palace wing where the guards and their families lived, back when the nightmare had plagued her in earnest. Those nights when she and Jacin would fix themselves mugs of melted cream-and-chocolate and watch stupid dramas on the holograph nodes. When he would pretend that he didn’t notice her crying as she pressed her face against his shoulder.

This night, though, she did not make it all the way to the guards’ private wing.

Rather, as she approached the main thoroughfare of the palace, she heard chatter bouncing off the windows. The
clomp
of booted feet. A pair of maids whispered sadly in an alcove, startling and curtsying when they noticed Winter in their midst.

She followed the commotion and found it centered in one of the libraries.

Thaumaturge Aimery Park stood near a window. He was wearing his crimson coat, even though it was the middle of the night. “Your Highness, what are you doing awake?”

Winter did not like Thaumaturge Park, though she was smart enough not to let it show. She couldn’t even pinpoint what it was about him that set her nerves to vibrating when he was nearby.

He always smiled when he saw her, but it was the smile of a vulture.

Not wanting to mention the nightmare, Winter answered him, “I thought I heard something.”

He nodded. “Something tragic has occurred, young princess. You do not need to see.”

He looked back out the window, and despite his warning, he didn’t stop Winter as she made her way to another window, where two guards were looking down toward the gardens.

Winter gasped.

A body was sprawled out in the fountain beneath the window. Blood filling the basin. Limbs turned at odd angles.

She knew, though it was too far to see for sure, that it was the servant woman. The one she’d saved years ago, when she was only a child. The one who Winter had been feeding happiness to for more than half her young life. At least, she thought she had.

Winter stumbled back.

“She was ill, Princess,” said Aimery. “It is terrible, but these things do happen.”

Unable to speak around the emotion clogging her throat, Winter turned and rushed from the room. Walking at first, then faster,
faster.
Behind her, she heard the familiar
clomp
of boots as her guard chased after her. Let him run. Let him chase.

She ran as fast as she could, arms pumping, feet barely touching the cool floor.

When she reached the wing where the guards lived, she passed Jacin’s father, Sir Garrison Clay, on his way to start his next shift. He was a palace guard, like Winter’s father had been. They had been in training together years before and had been friends from the start—which is how she’d known Jacin all her life too.

“Highness,” said Garrison, eyes widening when he saw her and took in what must have been a look of shock. “What’s wrong?”

“Is Jacin awake?”

“I don’t think so. Are you all right?”

She nodded and whispered, “Just another nightmare.”

His expression was understanding as he turned and headed back to the apartment he shared with Jacin and his wife, along with two other guards and their families, all in about the same amount of space as Winter’s private chambers. He let her inside with a fatherly squeeze of her shoulder before leaving—it was not acceptable for a guard to be late for duty, even if it was the princess herself who came knocking on his door.

Jacin was still asleep, but he was a light sleeper, and his eyes snapped open the moment Winter creaked open the door. His mother’s heavy breathing could be heard from the cot on the other side of the room. “What is it?” he whispered, pushing himself upward.

Winter took a step forward, but hesitated. For years, it would have felt like the most natural thing in the world for her to crawl into bed beside him. After all, he had comforted her more times than she could count after her father died.

But lately she could sense something changing. Jacin was fourteen now, and no longer the slightly gangly boy she’d grown up with. It seemed like he was taller and stronger every day.

There had been recent changes in herself, too, though she wasn’t sure if he’d noticed.

Suddenly, having never before cared about all the court whispers of “propriety” and “decorum,” Winter found herself questioning the meaning of her oldest, dearest friendship.

“Winter?”

“She’s dead,” she stammered. “The servant. She … jumped out a window, into the gardens. She—”

She started to cry.

Jacin’s face twisted and he held his arms toward her.

All her concerns vanished as she scrambled onto the bed and buried her face in his chest. She was an idiot to think that getting older changed anything. This was, and would always be, the only place she belonged.

*   *   *

“Good afternoon, Sir Owen,” Winter said as she stepped out of her quarters the next morning. She gave a curtsy to her guard, guilty for having made him chase her halfway through the palace the night before, but he neither looked at her nor acknowledged her greeting. Which was the way of the guards. They were there to serve and to protect, and to act as a target and a shield for any intruder that might want to harm the royal family. They were not friends. They were not confidants.

But Winter couldn’t always bring herself to ignore them as they ignored her.

She glided down the hall on her way to her tutoring session and spotted Jacin waiting for her as soon as she turned the corner into an elevator bank. She smiled—an instinctive reaction—though it fell once she took in his expression. A frown creased Jacin’s brow.

He glanced once at her guard, who had followed a respectful distance in her wake, before dipping his head toward her. “They found a note.”

“A note?”

“From the servant. The one that…” He didn’t have to finish. “My dad is on the team conducting the investigation. It was found in the servant’s quarters. Probably won’t be made public, but he read it before it was taken away.”

“And it was a … suicide note?” she asked, her heart pattering. The words chilled her. Suicide was always met with suspicion in their society. Everyone knew, even twelve-year-old princesses, that an apparent suicide could just as easily have been a murder caused through manipulation. That was how almost all of the queen’s formal executions were carried out, after all. Hand the convicted perpetrators a sharp blade and let them drain out their own lives.

But the crown did not have a monopoly on the Lunar gift, much as the queen may have wished it so. No death could ever be proven a true suicide, and few murders were ever solved.

“What did it say?” Winter asked.

“It wasn’t murder. She definitely meant to do it.” Jacin’s voice stayed low as they stepped into the elevator, along with her stoic guard, and he said nothing else until they’d stepped out again and left the guard to follow a few paces behind.

Winter frowned. Much as she’d hoped that it was a misunderstanding, she wasn’t surprised. No one had been manipulating the woman in the throne room before Winter rescued her. Or thought that she’d rescued her. She couldn’t help wondering how many attempts the woman had made to take her life before she finally succeeded.

“But why?”

Jacin’s gaze darted around the hallway. A few young aristocrats wandered by, probably having just finished with their own tutoring sessions, and when they noticed the princess they stopped to gawk at her. Winter ignored them. She was used to gawking.

Jacin scowled every time and seemed relieved when they passed.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

She wasn’t sure at all, but she nodded anyway. What could drive a person to such a decision? What could make them think there were no other options? Especially when there were doctors and specialists who could ensure you never felt sad or lonely or frightened again.

Jacin swallowed hard. “She was pregnant.”

Her feet stalled. Jacin paused with her, his brow drawn tight.

“Pregnant?”

It clarified nothing. She’d only ever known women to be happy upon discovering a pregnancy.

Jacin’s jaw tightened. He had gone from looking sorry to angry in half a heartbeat. His blue eyes, normally so bright, were now shadowed with a fury Winter rarely saw. “The note said that Thaumaturge Park is—was the father.”

She stared.

“Evidently, he’s been manipulating her for a long time.” Jacin looked away, seething. “No one knows exactly how long it’s been going on. Or … what methods exactly he’d been using to…” His face was reddening, his breath erratic and his knuckles white.

What methods.

This was a horror that Winter knew of, yet so few spoke of it. Manipulation of the strong against the weak. You could make a person do
anything
, and though there were laws against it, with the powerful among the elite and the enforcers, who was to stop them?

She recalled the desperation in the woman’s eyes, the desperation that had gotten stronger over the years.

Winter pressed a hand against her stomach. Her mouth was suddenly stinging and sour and she couldn’t swallow fast enough. She would be sick.

“I’m sorry.” Jacin held her elbow. “I didn’t know if I should tell you or not. I know … I know you have to
see
him…”

Only in the court. She would only have to see him among the court.

It would still be far too much. “Will they do anything to him?” she asked.

But Jacin didn’t have to answer.

Aimery was a great favorite of the queen. No repercussions would come to him for this crime.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Winter accepted a brief embrace from Jacin before pulling away. He stayed with her for the rest of the walk to her session, but she hardly noticed his presence as her mind sorted through this terrible information.

The woman’s desperation.

The bruises that she sometimes noticed on her arms, only half covered by the sleeves of her uniform.

And Aimery looking down at her from the library. “
These things do happen…”

She stopped suddenly beside a potted plant and bent over, heaving into the soil. Jacin and the guard both dropped to her side. Jacin’s sure hand on her back, comforting. The guard asking if he should call for a medic.

She shook her head. “Something I ate,” she said, spitting as daintily as she could. “But … perhaps, if a servant could clean up…”

“I’ll alert someone straightaway.”

Nothing else was said of it, but Winter felt no better. Her stomach was still churning.

She had rescued the woman. She believed she had saved her.

When really she had handed her right back into the grip of her tormenter. She had allowed him to keep abusing her for years, and the woman couldn’t even have fought against it—not when Winter was forcing her to be happy, to be content, to
just keep accepting it.

Winter had not saved her at all.

*   *   *

“You are distracted today, Your Highness.”

Winter pulled her gaze away from the servant girl who was a constant fixture in her tutoring sessions. The one who kept her eyes lowered and her hands clasped in her lap. Who said nothing. Who was but a tool for Winter’s education. Over the past year, Winter had made the girl laugh and swoon, dance and touch her nose, fall into a deep sleep. She still did not know the girl’s name.

“Your Highness?” said Master Gertman. “Did you hear me?”

Winter smiled at her instructor. “I apologize. I’m still … a little upset, I think, about the servant. The other day.”

“Ah, yes. I heard it was the same girl you kept from jumping from the throne room when you were young.” Master Gertman laced his fingers together. “It is not for you to worry about, Princess. Tragic things happen sometimes, even here in Artemisia.”

Tragic.
Tragic.
Everyone said it as though the word had meaning.

But was the woman’s death the tragedy, or her life?

She looked again at the servant girl, waiting to be manipulated. She had a good life here in the palace, didn’t she? Winter never did anything awful to her during her trainings, never hurt her or forced her to hurt herself. She gave her pretty illusions to see. She fed only happy emotions into her brain.

For her service, the girl and her family were richly rewarded. It was better than anyone in the outer sectors could hope for.

Wasn’t it?

But looking at her now, Winter noticed, for the first time, a strained whiteness around the girl’s knuckles.

She was tense. Maybe even frightened. Of
Winter
? Of the tutor? Of one of the other pupils who trained here throughout the day?

Winter’s entire world was spinning and it occurred to her with sudden clarity that this was wrong. Her training sessions. The thaumaturges. The entire Lunar gift. The power that the strong, like she and the queen and Aimery, held over the weak. Like this servant girl. Like Jacin.

Like Winter’s father.

It was exactly what he had tried to tell her all those years ago.

“Try again, Princess,” prompted the tutor. “You did so well last week.”

She looked at Master Gertman again. “I’m sorry. I’m a little faint. I haven’t been feeling well, and … Could you repeat your instructions, please?”

“Just a basic glamour, Your Highness. Perhaps you could try changing the color of your hair?”

Winter reached up and grabbed a handful of her thick black curls. She could do that. She’d done it plenty of times before.

The servant girl inhaled a bracing breath.

Winter released her hair and ran her fingers over it instead. Beauty was usually the goal of simple glamour, and usually she would call up the glamour of the most beautiful woman she knew, the most beautiful woman
anyone
knew. Her stepmother, Queen Levana. The most beautiful woman on Luna.