Shadows of tomorrow

Chapter Three: A Face With No Name

Mira

She started with the only thing she had: a face.

Not a name — she'd tried, lying awake, to catch the sound of it again, the way his name had felt in her own mouth in the vision, and it slipped away every time, the way dreams do the harder you chase them. But the face stayed. Sharp jaw. Dark hair pushed back like he never had time to fix it properly. Eyes that had looked at her like she was the only steady thing in the room.

A face like that had to belong to somebody real.

She spent two days doing what she did best — watching. Not stealing, not yet, just watching. She stood at the edges of the Merchant Ring where the wealthy did their business in the open, matching every face she saw against the one that wouldn't leave her alone. None of them fit. Merchants' sons had a different kind of confidence, she was learning — looser, careless, built on money instead of duty. The man in her vision hadn't looked careless. He'd looked like someone who'd been taught, very early, that wanting things was a luxury other people got to have.

That thought stopped her cold in the middle of the street.

Taught. Early. Duty.

She knew exactly one kind of person raised like that.

❧

Calder

"You're asking about the royal family," Calder said slowly, "like it's a normal thing to ask about."

"I'm curious."

"You're never curious. We covered this." He set down the ledger he'd been pretending to read. "Why the sudden interest in the palace?"

Mira had rehearsed an answer for this exact question and used none of it. "What does the prince look like?"

Calder went very still. "Which one."

"There's more than one?"

"There's the crown prince, who's forty and has a beard like a hedge and three children. And there's the younger one — the nephew, actually, adopted into the line after his parents died in the fever year. Kael. Everyone just calls him the prince, since the crown prince mostly stays out of public business." Calder studied her face with the particular care of a man doing sums he didn't like the answer to. "Why."

"No reason."

"Mira."

"I saw someone," she said, choosing her words like a person crossing a river on stones that might not hold. "I don't know who he was. I thought he might be someone important."

"Someone important like the prince."

"Maybe."

Calder was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its usual lightness. "Where would a girl from the Lower Districts see the prince? He doesn't come down here. He's never once come down here."

"I don't know," Mira said, and it was, for once, the whole truth. "I just saw him."

Calder didn't ask how. She was grateful for that, and unsettled by it too — because not asking meant he'd already guessed something close enough to the real answer that he didn't want it confirmed out loud.

"Be careful," he said instead. "People who get noticed by the palace don't usually get to choose whether they stay noticed."

❧

Kael

The portrait gallery was the one place in the palace Kael was allowed to be alone, mostly because nobody else wanted to spend time there. Two hundred years of dead relatives, painted in their finest clothes, staring down from the walls with the particular blankness of people who'd been told to hold still for four hours and had run out of thoughts after the first one.

He liked it anyway. It was quiet. Nobody needed anything from a room full of paintings.

"You're hiding," said Ren, finding him there between lessons, arms crossed, unsurprised.

"I'm studying my ancestors."

"You're hiding from Master Orlen's afternoon session on succession law."

"Those two things aren't mutually exclusive."

Ren almost smiled — a rare enough event that Kael made a mental note of it, the way he made mental notes of most rare things. "Your uncle asked after you this morning."

"Did he."

"Wanted to know if you'd settled into the diplomatic track yet. I told him you were adapting." Ren's tone made it clear this had been generous. "Are you? Adapting?"

Kael looked up at the nearest portrait — a great-aunt he'd never met, dead sixty years, painted with an expression that suggested she hadn't enjoyed the sitting either.

"I don't know what I'm adapting to," he said. "Half the time it feels like I'm being fitted for a life instead of living one."

"That's most of what being royal is, in my experience."

"Comforting."

"I didn't say it to comfort you." Ren's face softened, just slightly. "I said it because it gets easier once you stop expecting it to feel like something you chose."

Kael didn't answer that. He turned back to the portraits instead, and found himself, for reasons he couldn't name, thinking about the roof above the east wing, and the view of the city from up there, and the strange, specific feeling he'd had two days ago — that something in the day was leaning toward him.

He still didn't know why. He was starting to suspect he wouldn't know for a while yet.

❧

Lady Maera

"There's been a sighting," Iris reported. "Unconfirmed. A girl in the Merchant Ring, asking questions about the royal family. Specifically about the prince."

Lady Maera did not look up from the papers in front of her. "Asking what, exactly?"

"What he looks like."

That got her attention.

"Description of the girl?"

"Young. Lower Districts, by her clothes. Nobody got a name." Iris hesitated. "It could be nothing, my lady. Servants gossip about the prince constantly. Half the city has an opinion on his face."

"Half the city doesn't ask a shopkeeper for a physical description like they're identifying someone," Lady Maera said. "They ask because they've already seen him and want to confirm it."

"You think it's connected to the missing fragment."

"I think," Lady Maera said carefully, "that it would be an extraordinary coincidence if it weren't."

She set down her papers and folded her hands, and for a moment allowed herself to consider, fully, the door she had kept shut for nineteen years. If the girl who had taken the fragment was the girl she suspected — if the blood had run as true as she'd once feared it might, despite everything she'd done to prevent it — then this was no longer a matter of retrieving stolen property.

This was a matter of a mistake she had made a long time ago, walking, unknowingly, straight toward the one person who could undo it.

"Find her," she said. "Quietly. I want her brought to me before the Shadow Court hears so much as a rumor of this. Do you understand? Before."

"Yes, my lady."

"And Iris." Lady Maera's voice was very even. "If you find her — do not frighten her. Do not let anyone frighten her. Whatever this girl is to this city, she is not to be treated as an enemy until I have seen her myself."

Iris bowed, clearly full of questions she knew better than to ask, and left.

Lady Maera sat alone a while longer in the windowless room, and thought, not for the first time, that fate had a particular sense of humor about which debts it chose to collect, and when.

❧

Mira

She didn't find a name that day. But she found something almost as useful — a woman selling ribbons near the palace gate, who'd lived her whole life in the shadow of the white towers and had opinions, freely given, about everyone who lived behind them.

"The young prince," the woman said, when Mira asked, careful to sound like idle gossip and nothing more. "Kael, they call him. Adopted into the line after the fever took his parents — terrible thing, that was, whole family gone in a season, except him. Handsome boy, from what I hear. Serious. Doesn't smile much, not in public anyway. They say he'd rather be anywhere than court, though nobody who says that has ever asked him directly, far as I know."

Kael.

The name landed in Mira's chest like something slotting into a lock it had been made for.

She didn't say anything. She thanked the woman, bought a ribbon she didn't need to make the conversation look ordinary, and walked away with her heart going too fast, the word repeating itself over and over in a voice that sounded, she realized with a small cold shock, exactly like her own voice from the vision.

Kael.

She had a name now. She still didn't know what to do with it, and some sharp, sensible part of her — the part that had kept her alive for four years of thieving — was already telling her that knowing his name changed nothing, solved nothing, and very likely made everything more dangerous than it already was.

She didn't listen to that part. Not fully. Not this time.

Somewhere behind those white towers was a boy whose face she had never seen with her own eyes and already couldn't stop thinking about, and a blade that hadn't finished moving toward him yet, and a version of the future that felt, the longer she carried it, less like something that had already happened and more like something that was still, somehow, waiting to be stopped.

She just didn't know yet that the palace had already started looking for her too — and that the woman doing the looking wanted, more than anything else in the world, exactly the same thing Mira did.

To find her before it was too late to matter.