Stars Above

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.

The difficult part was making herself seem older. In order for a glamour to be effective, you had to believe that you looked as you wanted others to see you. And while Winter found it easy to change her tight curly hair or the hue of her brown skin or to make herself taller or shorter or thinner or curvier—making herself mature, with all the grace and experience of her stepmother, required a mental focus she was still developing.

She was getting better, though. Master Gertman praised her often.

Someday, she would be powerful.

Someday, she could be as strong as a thaumaturge.

She stared at the top of the servant’s head.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

The tutor frowned.

Rubbing the back of her neck as if she were embarrassed, Winter gave him a faint smile. “I’m just so tired. And distracted. Perhaps we should try again another day. If that’s all right, Master Gertman?”

His frown did not disperse. The servant made no movement, nothing to suggest she had even heard Winter or cared the slightest that the princess would not be manipulating her today. It was as though she weren’t there at all.

Finally, Master Gertman leaned back and nodded. “Of course, Your Highness. You should go rest. We’ll try again next week.”

She stood and smiled as prettily as she could. The tutor looked briefly flustered. “Thank you, Master.” She curtsied before leaving his office.

Jacin was still waiting in the hallway, just where she’d left him. He scrambled to his feet in surprise. “Done already?”