Chapter 2

They strip my god from me with careful, oiled hands. Warm water laps at my skin, scented with something sweet and spiced that makes me want to gag. The white of my temple robes—stiff with dried blood and smoke from that last night—is peeled away layer by layer, as if they are shedding a dead thing. It is the last piece of Viserra I own. “Careful,” one of the younger girls whispers in our broken shared tongue when the cloth sticks to a burn on my shoulder. Her fingers tremble. She is afraid of me, or of the man who sent me here. Maybe both. “His Majesty said no scars,” the older maid says sharply, in perfect Aserlan. “If we mar her, it is our heads.” His Majesty. I freeze, water clinging to my lashes, heart lurching at the reminder. As if the burn of iron on my skin is less real than his voice on that ship: You don’t die unless I say so. Steam blurs the carved golden screens around the bath. Beyond them I hear the dull weight of armored boots, the soft jingle of chains. Guards. Even in here. Even with my naked body hidden by silk and steam, I am not unwatched. “Arms up, Moon-bird,” the older maid orders. Moon-bird. I taste rust. In my language, “moon” meant vows, altars, songs sung until dawn. Here it is a pet name for something caged. They towel me dry with cloth softer than anything I’ve ever touched, then bring the dress. Not a dress. A costume. It is made of layered sheer fabric the color of crushed pearls, threaded with gold so fine it looks like captured sunlight. When they lift it, it whispers against itself, a sound like wings. “It’s too thin,” I hear myself say in Viserra’s tongue. My voice comes out hoarse, unused. “It’s… transparent.” They don’t understand the words, but they understand the way my arms lock at my sides. The older maid’s mouth tightens. “This is how our women dress in the inner palace,” she says. “His Majesty chose it himself.” That makes it worse. They slide it over my head anyway. The fabric slips down my body, cool and traitorously gentle, clinging where it finds curves, leaving my shoulders bare, my throat exposed. Where my priestess’ mantle once covered me to the wrist, now my arms are naked, small silver scars from childhood lessons suddenly visible to any eye that cares to catalog me. A thin golden chain is hooked around my waist, another around my ankle, delicate as spider silk. When I move, tiny bells sewn into the anklet chime with each step. A pretty leash. “Jewels,” the older maid murmurs, almost reverent. She brings out a tray—earrings shaped like crescent moons, a narrow collar of beaten gold. I flinch back from the collar. “No.” My voice cracks, but the word is there. She hesitates, then lowers it a fraction. “It is not a shackle, my lady. It is an honor.” I want to laugh. I want to scream. In Viserra, collars were for the oxen that turned the temple mills. Still, when she reaches again, my resistance dies halfway. What is the point? They’ve already collared my country. My god. My body is just… a detail. The metal is cold against my throat at first, then warms quickly to my skin, a ring of heat. The clasp snicks closed at the nape of my neck with a sound that echoes in my skull. “There,” the younger maid whispers. “Beautiful.” I stare at the polished bronze mirror they tilt toward me. A stranger stares back. The ash and blood have been scrubbed from my hair; it falls in dark, damp waves halfway down my back. My face is thinner than I remember, eyes too big, mouth pressed tight. The thin dress makes me look ethereal, almost unreal—like the painted goddesses on the temple walls, except those never shook with fear. “Is this what a war trophy looks like?” I murmur in my own language. The stranger in the mirror does not answer. They leave me by the window after that, with a bowl of fruit I don’t touch and a cup of watered wine that tastes like ash. Daylight pours through the latticework, thick as honey, turning the room into a box of molten gold. It is the first time I’ve seen the tower by day. Last night, when they pulled the blindfold away, it was only flickers of lamplight on gilded pillars and jeweled lanterns. Now the full shape of it presses in on me. The ceiling arches high above, painted with suns and moons chasing each other in a circle that never breaks. Every wall is faced in pale stone veined with gold, the patterns curling like vines. Carpets from a dozen conquered lands lie soft underfoot. Perfume burns in shallow dishes—amber and myrrh and something sharp, like crushed cedar. It is breathtaking. It is a cage. Every window is a masterpiece: slender arches filled with colored glass and filigree gold, flowers and stars and coils of script I can’t read. When I press my fingers to one, I feel not the outside air but the chill of hidden metal bars beneath the delicate work. I try the latch. It doesn’t move. I try the next. And the next. All sealed. My bell-chained ankle sings softly as I move, the sound mocking my effort. At the door, a heavy brass lock sits flush with the carved wood. I lean close. There are scratch marks on the metal, tiny and white. Someone else tried to pick it, once. Or claw through it with their nails. Outside, men in dark uniforms stand at every turning of the hallway, blades at their hips, eyes forward. When one of them shifts, armor glints like teeth. No escape. From the highest window I can see the city, the lake that girdles this stone island, the spears of the outer walls. The world is spread out like a map: crimson banners snapping in the wind, little black ants that are soldiers drilling in the square far below. Between the lake and the walls there is nothing but bright, empty space. No forest to disappear into. No alleys to slip down. Only water reflecting the sky and stone too smooth to climb. The golden tower gleams in the sunlight, proud and perfect. And all I can think is: they have built this whole place to make sure that when I scream, no one hears. By the time night comes, I’ve worn a path from window to door and back again. My feet ache. My throat is dry. No one has spoken to me for hours. Then the locks turn. Not just the outer bar, but some deeper mechanism I hadn’t noticed. Metal grinds against metal, heavy and deliberate. The maids drop to their knees so fast the younger one’s bowl of figs tips, fruit rolling across the carpet. He enters without announcement. He doesn’t need one. Emperor Kian of Aserlan does not look like a monster out of the old Viserra stories. Those had tusks and horns and eyes that burned with unholy fire. He looks like a man carved out of night and iron—tall, black hair bound at the nape of his neck with a strip of leather, plain dark tunic under a sleeveless coat worked with gold thread. No crown. He doesn’t need that either. His power is the way the room tightens around him. “Leave us,” he says, in his own language. The maids shuffle out on their knees, foreheads nearly to the floor. One of them pulls the door closed behind her. The locks slide back into place with a quiet, final sound. I am alone with the man who burned my world. He studies me for a long moment without speaking. His gaze moves over the dress, the collar, the bells on my ankle. I feel flayed. “You fit it,” he says at last, in accented Viserra. “Better than the blood.” I hate that he learned my language well enough to say that. “Did you choose this?” I ask. The words come out thin. “For me?” “Of course.” He walks past me to the balcony doors as if we are discussing a curtain color. When he pulls them open, night air rushes in, cool and sharp, smelling faintly of lake water and torches. Beyond the low rail, the drop is sheer. I look from the open doors to the guards I know stand below, hidden in the shadows, and say nothing. “Come here,” he orders. My spine stiffens. There is no point in refusing. Not yet. I go. He takes a jug of dark wine from a waiting tray and pours it into two cups—thin crystal, almost invisible. When he hands one to me, his fingers brush mine. I flinch. He notices. Of course he does. “Drink,” he says. I don’t move. His eyes narrow, a faint line forming between his brows. “You think I’d bring you all this way just to poison you in your pretty cage?” “I think,” I say carefully, “that what you choose to do with me does not have to make sense.” Something like amusement sparks in his gaze. “True.” He tips his own cup back, swallows a mouthful, then offers it to me again. “Now?” The wine smells rich and dark, like crushed berries and smoke. I take a sip because not doing so will only be another kind of defiance, and I am not ready to pay that price. It burns all the way down. He gestures toward the balcony rail. “Look.” I step forward until the cool stone touches my bare abdomen through the thin dress. The world below is transformed: the training ground lit by dozens of torches, lines of soldiers in ordered ranks, armor gleaming like fish scales. Farther out, torches snake along the shore of the lake—prison barges, loaded with men whose banners I recognize even from this height. Viserra’s sun and crescent, ripped and hanging limp. “They arrived yesterday,” he says conversationally. “Your generals. Your nobles. They will be processed at dawn.” Processed. Slaughtered. Sold. Broken. He lifts his cup, points with it at the mass of bowed heads. “This is your new world, Lyra of Viserra. Those are my soldiers. Those are my prisoners. This—” he glances around the glittering room “—is your home.” “Home,” I repeat, the word sour in my mouth. “You should start to accept it.” He leans his hip against the rail, close enough that I feel the heat of his body through the thin veil of my dress. “It will be easier.” “For whom?” I ask softly. His lips curve, but it is not a smile. “For everyone.” The wine buzzes faintly in my veins, making everything a little too sharp, a little too bright. I focus on the distant torches so I don’t have to feel his eyes on me. “What do you want from me?” I ask. The question has been burning a hole in my tongue since the temple. “You have my country. My god. Why am I here?” He doesn’t answer right away. The silence stretches, taut as a drawn bow. Finally, he says, “Because you are useful.” I knew that. I’ve always known I was useful to someone. To the priests who paraded me before the altars. To the king who used my name in his oaths. To the uncle who promised my hand to a man I had never met. It still hurts. “Useful how?” My fingers tighten around the stem of the cup. “As a banner? A trophy? A… pet?” His eyes flick to me at that last word. Something darkens in them. “Yes,” he says simply. “All of those.” I breathe out, the sound jagged. “And if I refuse to play any of those roles?” He turns fully then, facing me, so close the edge of his coat brushes my hip. “You will not.” Anger snaps inside me so suddenly I taste blood. “You sound very sure.” “I am.” His voice stays maddeningly calm. “You like to live. I saw that in your temple, when you prayed to a broken god in a burning hall. That wasn’t for them. It was for you. For your belief that you could still matter.” He is wrong. He is right. I don’t know. The words that come out of me next are not careful. They are not priestess-smooth. They are jagged, born of smoke and ruin. “You think you know me,” I say in Viserra’s tongue, letting the old language pour out like a curse, “but you are just a butcher with a crown. A scared little boy playing war with real blood.” His eyes sharpen. For a heartbeat, I think he hasn’t understood. Then he answers—in my language. The accent is heavier, the vowels crushed, but the meaning is unmistakable. “Careful, little moon.” His tone is quiet, and that is worse than any shout. “Butcher or not, I decide who bleeds.” My breath catches. He continues in Aserlan, each word precise. “Did you truly think I would drag the symbol of Viserra into my palace and not learn the language of my enemy? I have been reading your prayers for months.” I feel suddenly naked in a way that has nothing to do with the thinness of my dress. He has taken my robes, my god, my country. Now even my tongue is not safe. “How flattering,” I say, the sarcasm weak but there. “The great Emperor of Aserlan, studying the words of a conquered people.” “Not the people,” he corrects softly. “You.” The air between us thickens. My pulse hammers in my throat, in my wrists, against the too-tight collar. “Why?” The word slips out, small and raw. Something flickers in his face. For the first time since he walked in, the mask cracks just a fraction. “Because you knelt in front of a dead god and did not ask to be saved,” he says. “You asked for your people. For the ones who left you there to burn. I wanted to know what kind of creature does that.” “A fool,” I whisper. “A believer,” he counters. Then his mouth hardens. “And believers are dangerous. They do not break the way others do. They require… different methods.” There it is. The threat wrapped in something that almost sounds like admiration. “Is this one of your methods?” I gesture to the dress, the collar, the open balcony where he shows me the ruin of my world like a stage. “Yes,” he says simply. “Beauty is a chain like any other. You will wear what I give you. You will stand where I place you. You will smile when I say so, and you will not spit Viserra curses at me in my own hall.” My temper snaps again, hotter this time, fed by wine and grief and the sick glittering of the tower. “And if I do?” I demand. “If I curse you? If I refuse to smile? What will you do, Kian of Aserlan? Kill me? You already said I am useful. You won’t risk your pretty symbol.” I expect anger. A blow. A guard’s hand on my arm. Instead, he steps in until my back hits the cold stone of the balcony rail. His hand comes up, fingers braced on either side of me, not touching but caging me all the same. His face is inches from mine, his eyes very dark. “Do not test how far my patience goes,” he says quietly. “You will not like the answer.” My heart is slamming against my ribs so hard it hurts. I can smell him—leather, smoke, a faint hint of the same spice that burned in the bath. There is a white scar along his jaw I didn’t notice before, a thin raised line disappearing into the shadow of his hair. Without thinking, I say in my language, “Did it hurt, when they tried to kill you?” His gaze flicks to my mouth, then back to my eyes. “Yes.” “Good,” I whisper. His lips twitch. For a second, I think he might actually laugh. Then the softness vanishes. He pushes away from the rail, steps back, the air rushing cool between us again. The distance feels like both relief and loss, and I hate that I notice the second part at all. “Tomorrow,” he says, reverting to Aserlan with that same unshakable calm, “there will be a feast. My generals expect their Emperor to celebrate his victory. My nobles expect to see what their taxes paid for. You will stand at my side.” The floor seems to tilt under my feet. “At your… side?” “Beside my throne,” he clarifies. “Where everyone can see you.” Heat surges into my face, a sick, hot wave of humiliation. “You want to parade me,” I say slowly. “Like a caged beast in a market.” “Like a warning,” he corrects. “To them. To anyone who thinks to defy me.” His eyes catch mine, hold. “And to you.” I swallow. My throat is suddenly too tight around the collar. “I won’t go,” I say. The words come out before I can stop them. Stupid. Useless. True. Something cold and bright flashes in his gaze. For a moment, the air in the room feels like the moment before a storm breaks. He steps close again, not as near as before, but near enough that I have to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes. “You will,” he says softly. “Because you like to live. And because if you refuse me in public, I will show you just how thin the line is between my mercy and my cruelty.” My stomach drops. Images flash unbidden: the soldier on the ship begging for his life, the way Kian’s blade opened his throat without a flicker of emotion. The warm swipe of his thumb as he wiped the blood from my cheek after. He sees something in my face and knows he’s won. Of course he does. He sets his empty cup down on the rail with a faint click. “Have them dress you in silver tomorrow,” he says over his shoulder as he walks toward the door. “The color suits your new name.” “What new name?” I ask, hating the tremor in my voice. His hand pauses on the lock. He doesn’t look back when he answers. “Moon Captive,” he says. “That is what they are calling you.” The words slice deeper than any knife. He unlocks the door. The guards outside straighten like bowstrings. Before he steps through, he adds, almost lazily, “Sleep, Lyra. You will need your strength.” “For what?” I whisper. He glances back then, just once. There is no softness in his eyes now. Only iron. “For tomorrow,” he says. “When you learn what it means to belong to an empire.” The door shuts behind him. The locks fall into place, one by one, the sound heavy as stones sealing a tomb. I stand frozen on the balcony, the bells at my ankle trembling with the faintest movement of my muscles, the golden collar burning my throat. Below, the torches around the prisoner barges flare brighter for a moment as someone stokes the fires. Men shift in their chains, tiny dark shapes against the lake. Tomorrow, he will drag me before them all. Tomorrow, I will be displayed, named, claimed. And somewhere in that sea of watching faces—noble, soldier, slave—someone might remember the girl I was. Or someone might decide the easiest way to topple a tyrant is to cut the throat of his favorite captive. The night wind lifts the sheer fabric of my dress, cold against my bare skin, as the realization sinks in: Tomorrow is not just a humiliation. It might be an execution.