Chapter Three: The First Clash of Fire and Shadow

Lia was locked in a small chamber on the west side of the side palace.

To call it imprisonment was really to call it house arrest—the door was unlocked, the window stood open, but two Flame Guard stood outside it, never leaving their post. The way they looked at her was the way one looks at a rat that means to swallow a living ember, or at a thing that might burst apart at any moment.

Lia huddled in the corner, the pendant clutched so hard in her palm it ached. Her mother's face was at once blurred and vivid in her memory, and the assassin's words rang in her ears again and again—"On the night of the Blood Moon, come to the Temple of the Sunken Moon. Your mother is waiting for you there."

Her mother had been dead for eight years, hadn't she? She had watched the flame fall with her own eyes. What did "waiting for you there" even mean?

The sound of the door swinging open cut her off. Kaelric walked in, followed by an old man, stooped and spare of frame and face—Lia knew him. He was the royal physician, a walking tome who knew more of medicines and poisons than anyone in all of Maeris.

"Your Highness," the old man said, bowing respectfully, "do you truly mean to subject... this girl to the blood test?"

"Test her." Kaelric spoke a single word.

The old man sighed and drew from his sleeve a silver needle, its tip steeped in a faint blue glow. He came before Lia, bent down, and said in the softest of voices, "Child, have no fear. This needle has been steeped in shadow-gazing dew. It will only test whether the root of shadow runs in your blood. If it does not, I will speak for you myself and see you sent back."

Lia did not move. She watched the silver needle draw near, watched her own shadow stir faintly in the corner of the wall, watched Kaelric stand by the door with his arms folded, those deep amber eyes fixed on her without once blinking.

"I have nothing," she heard her own voice say, dry as sandpaper. "I am not a caster. I can do nothing."

"Then let it be tested," Kaelric said. "Once it is, I will let you go."

The pain came as the needle pricked her fingertip. A bead of blood welled up and fell onto the silver dish the old man held in his palm.

Everyone held their breath.

The bead of blood rolled across the dish—and then began to blacken. It went utterly, richly black, like a drop of frozen night. The shadow-gazing dew on the dish touched the blood and at once came to a boil, sending up a near-blue-black smoke that gathered in the air into a small, trembling shadow, like a moth startled from the dark.

The old man staggered back two steps and went white. "Your... Your Highness! This is pure blood! A pure-blood shadow line! Stronger even than those remnants of the Dusk Order—" His voice shook. "—in these last hundred years, only Melaira, the Shadow Queen, ever shed blood like this!"

A dead silence fell over the side palace.

Lia looked down at her own hands. The black drop still lay in the dish, smoking blue-black. She opened her mouth to say I have nothing, I do not know—but the words all clogged in her throat, and not a single one would come out.

Truly, she did not know. All she knew was that her mother had made her live, had pressed the pendant into her hand, and had never told her that such a thing ran in her blood.

"Take her below," Kaelric's voice came from very far away. "Until the Blood Moon, she is not to leave the palace grounds by so much as a half-step."

"Your Highness—" the old man lowered his voice. "By law, pure-blood shadow must be put to death. If those few at court were to learn of this..."

"I said," Kaelric's voice held no trace of feeling, yet it weighed like a hammer struck on an anvil, "take her below."

The old man dared say no more and withdrew.

The room held only the two of them.

Lia raised her head and looked at the man who ought to have ordered her burned. He stood at the window, moonlight falling on his shoulder and rimming that black-and-gold uniform with a cold, pale edge. He was not looking at her; he was looking out at the night, the scar across his brow gleaming and fading in the shadow.

"Your mother's death," he said abruptly, his voice very low, "my father... had no small part in it."

Lia went rigid all over.

"That execution eight years ago," Kaelric said slowly, "was an edict approved by my own father. The charge was collusion with the Dusk Order. But I looked into it afterward. Your mother, from first to last, was only an ordinary woman who wanted to keep her daughter alive. She was framed."

He turned and looked at Lia, and for the first time there was no hostility in those deep amber eyes—only a very tired, very complicated light.

"That is why I am not burning you now," he said. "Not because I am a good man. Because I believe this matter was wrong from the very beginning."

Lia's tears fell without warning. She did not know why she was crying. Perhaps it was grievance, perhaps fear, perhaps it was because the son of the enemy who ought to have burned her had said, in eight years, the one thing no one had ever said to her.

"I will look into your mother's case," Kaelric said. "Stay here, and do not stray. Once the Blood Moon has passed, I will send you somewhere safe."

He turned to go. At the door his steps paused again, but he did not turn back.

"Your shadow," he said, "has been circling about my feet all this night. It knows me."

The door closed behind him. Lia stared blankly at the empty doorway, then looked down at the shadow at her feet. It was trembling gently, in the direction Kaelric had gone—like an anxious, joyful beast that had at last waited long enough for its master to come home.