Restlessness is a kind of hunger. It gnaws at the ribs, polite at first, then insistent, until even the velvet hush of the Crimson Court begins to grate like sand against skin.
On the morning after the gathering—after the test, after his voice had bound me in a new way in front of those bright, hungry eyes—I lasted three hours. Three hours of pacing the length of my chambers and back. Three hours of listening to the river murmur to itself and the pale flame in the lanterns breathe without heat. Three hours of running my fingertips over the black parchment on my desk, leaving smudged crescents on the edges where my nails had pressed too hard.
Then I opened the door.
The guards posted there straightened, their stillness the only sign they had not expected me to emerge. They were young—young as vampires measure it—mouths too red, eyes already too old. One inclined his head a fraction.
"Your Majesty."
"I'm walking," I said, and stepped into the corridor before my fear could remember how to speak.
They did not follow. Or if they did, they did it like smoke.
The palace in day is different to the palace at night. In night, it breathes; in day, it performs. Day here is a carefully rehearsed thing—mock-dawn light strung through windows that face a sun they no longer court, cold fire in crystal lanterns pretending to be warmth. The ceilings arched above me, ribbed in silver; the air smelled of beeswax, ink and the faint iron of old blood that no amount of scrubbing can entirely coax from stone. Servants moved with practised silence, their faces carefully blank, their throats carefully covered.
I had learned the main routes by now: the spine of the south corridor that leads from my rooms to the Hall of Ember; the chilled artery that runs towards the river-chapel, where water answers even the oldest magic with its own refusal; the narrower servants' passages that braid around the great halls like the lace hidden under a gown's hem.
Today, I turned my feet towards the unknown.
At the first turning, a tapestry breathed as I passed—the velvet pile shifting, revealing (just for me, I fancied) a stag lowering its crowned head to a black stream. I reached out impulsively and grazed the woven water with my knuckles. It was rough; the thread caught on a callus formed the week we'd pulled the last of the pears and cut the tree back, hoping pain would make it bloom properly. I smiled without meaning to and moved on.
The corridor narrowed and then opened into a gallery hard with light. Tall casements filtered dawn into something the colour of watered milk. In niches between the windows stood marble figures—kings and queens of the Court, or what the sculptors thought they should look like: high-boned, cold-lipped, life size and twice as sure of themselves as any human statue has right to be. Plinths bore names in the old tongue. One read Castriel—an older spelling. The curve of the mouth was familiar, even though the artist had softened it. I looked away.
At the end of the gallery, two doors faced one another across a square of black stone. The right-hand door bore a sigil: a spray of lilies picked out in silver. A small brass plate below it read The Sable Library. Admission by leave.
I touched the plate with the tip of one finger. Cold. The kind of cold that is not a temperature but a policy. I glanced up and down the corridor, half-expecting one of the silver-eyed guards to materialise and shake their head at me like a disobedient child. No one came.
Another day, then. With leave. Whatever that meant here.
I took the left-hand door.
It opened on a breath of chill that lifted the hair at the nape of my neck. A long, narrow hall stretched away, its walls mirrored from floor to ceiling in sections, each panel framed in engraved silver. I knew at once where I was, though no one had thought to tell me it existed.
The Mirror Walk.
In Willowsend, the only mirror I had owned hung over the washbasin and wobbled on its nail each time the wind pressed against the wooden wall. Here, mirrors are politics. The old people say vampires do not cast reflections; the young say that is a story simple folk tell themselves to make fear soft around the edges. Both are wrong. They reflect—but not reliably. The more they leave of their human selves, the more the mirror returns them. Ancient ones walk past without a flicker. The newest of them—turnings barely a decade old—glimmer weakly, as if the glass is embarrassed on their behalf. The Court uses such things to measure courage and to humiliate.
I stepped forward. My reflection stepped with me: pale, mouth set, a bruise-coloured gown I had chosen for walking because it did not shout as loudly as crimson. As I moved, the light shifted, and faces rose behind mine: courtiers gathered last night, the painted eyes of the sculpted queens, Aunt Mara's careful mouth before we made the bargain, Elias's stubborn jaw. One panel (this is how I knew it was an old walk) showed not what was but what the hall had seen crowds in different garments, banners with different sigils. A king—Castiel, again—standing in the centre of the Walk, the Court's eyes knife-bright behind him.
"Majesty."
The word slid across the glass, soft as silk, surprising as the scrape of a blade under a pillow. I turned.
Lady Selvara had not been in my thoughts and still she arrived as if summoned by the mirror of my dislike. She was draped in smoke-grey this morning, sheer over the deep red of a bodice laced in an X so neat it must have hurt. Her hair fell in black sheets to her hips; a ring shaped like a thorn circled her first finger. Two men flanked her: one I recognised—Lord Veynar, all pallor and knives for cheekbones. The other was new: younger, beautiful in the way tracing paper is beautiful when the thing beneath it is more dangerous than you first assumed. He wore no ring. Only a small silver cross at his throat, ironic and meaningless here.
I felt my shoulders lock. I made myself soften. "My lady."
Selvara's mouth lifted at one corner. "Exploring?"
"Learning," I said.
"Learning," echoed Veynar, tasting the word and finding it less sour than he expected. "And what does our mortal queen hope to learn in the Mirror Walk?"
"How light behaves," I said, evenly. "How it lies. How it tells the truth if you stand very still."
Selvara laughed, low. She moved closer without appearing to move at all. "What an interesting answer."
The young one said nothing. He watched me as cats watch birds, they are not quite hungry enough to eat yet, his gaze sliding to my throat and away, to my hands, to my mouth, back to my throat, as if measuring.
"What do you want?" I asked and made sure the question sounded tired rather than frightened.
Selvara turned her head as if considering the mirrored me and not the me standing in front of her. In the glass, her reflection doubled and then again, until it seemed the Walk was full of her. "To welcome you properly," she said. "The Court was… entertained last night. You did not faint. You did not weep. We are always curious to see whether a performance continues after the curtain falls."
"You mistake me for a performer," I said. "This is no stage."
"Everything is a stage," Veynar murmured. "Some are simply better lit."
The breath I took was careful. I could smell them now: something like wine steeped with iron and white flowers with their heads snapped off. I let my gaze drift past them, into the deep of the mirrors. Reflections can be armour if you let them.
Selvara stepped closer again. Close enough that the air cooled where it moved around her. "There is a game we like to play in this hall," she said conversationally.
"No."
She blinked, slow. "You do not know the rules."
"I know enough," I said. "I know I will not play."
"But it is so simple." She tilted her head. "Stand very still. Stare very hard. Listen. If—" she paused delicately, "—if your will is yours at the end of three breaths, you win. If not—"
"The lower law forbids touching the queen," I said. "Shall I call the guard to quote it for us, or will you manage?"
The young vampire smiled then, the kind of smile men wear when they find a crack in a wall and see a way to widen it with one hand. "No touching," he said. "We are scrupulous. But a voice is not a touch, and neither is a look."
Their eyes fixed on mine. The Walk tightened. The breath I took caught on something had they placed there or that had always been there. The first breath went in easily. The second snagged. On the third, Selvara spoke softly, the syllables falling like pins: "Sleep."
I did not. But the world moved an inch to the left, and the mirrors moved back again, and in that moment, it would have been so sweet to be obedient. I felt something coil under my skin that did not belong to them. Not desire. The other thing. The thread that had tightened in my palm above the Oath stone. It did not warm me. It braced me. I heard the river inside it, and the priest's voice saying The fire remembers and my own voice answering Not in fear and a bell far away ringing once, low and sure.
I blinked. The mirrors flickered. For one thin slice of a second, I saw Selvara's face in the glass with no reflection at all.
"You are older than you allow them to see," I said, and my voice steadied on the saying. "You are old enough to forget what you used to be."
Her eyes flashed pleasure or anger or hunger, I could not tell. "Another interesting answer."
Veynar's hand lifted—so slight, so courtly you would have thought he meant to offer me a flower. My body remembered the iron ring around Elias's wrist, and I stepped back.
The cold hit me like a wall. I had reached the place where the Walk opened into a cloister. A low archway stood to my right, its stone worn smooth by centuries of hands. Beyond, a narrow garden: pale roses nodding over a rill where water ran, fast and bright. The sound of it stroked the inside of my skull. I moved into the arch and felt the world change. Not dramatically. A pressure loosening, that was all. I had not known until then that I had been breathing a little too shallowly, that my pupils had narrowed for someone else's convenience.
Selvara did not follow. She stood with her hands folded at her waist, mirror to each side and behind, the hint of fangs just touching her bottom lip in a suggestion of a smile. The young vampire had gone very still, like a scenting animal. Veynar frowned, the smallest crease.
"Running water," he said, not to me. "How quaint."
"Not quaint," said a voice behind me. "Merely inconvenient if one is trying to coax a queen to humiliate herself in front of the glass."
I turned. The woman in the cloister was not soft. She had built elegance like a wall and then hung ivy on it for those who needed something to look at. Her skin was a warmer shade than most in the Court—ambered, as if she had once stood beneath a sun that loved her and been reluctant to let it go. Her hair was pinned in a careful shape that promised it would not move unless she told it to. She wore grey—not Selvara's sly smoke, but the grey of old stone with pearl sewn into the seams. When she inclined her head to me, it was almost a bow.
"Your Majesty," she said. Her accent softened the consonants, a music I wanted to follow back to where it had been born. "Welcome to the cloisters."
Selvara's eyes thinned. "Lady Isolde," she said, and the name cut a fraction sharper than courtesy allows.
"Lady Selvara." The newcomer's mouth suggested a smile and did not commit. "Lord Veynar. My lord—" she glanced past them to the young man with the hungry mouth, "—you are unknown to me. How fortunate for you."
The young one coloured with pleasure as if she had praised him. He bowed, shallow. "Call me Aeon, my lady."
"I will call you nothing at all," Isolde said gently. "There is a rule in these halls that the newest mouths are the quietest. Perhaps Lord Veynar neglected to teach it to you."
Veynar drew breath. Let it out. He had made his calculation and found it unfavourable for the moment. "We were merely offering the queen a tour of the Walk."
"And I," said Isolde, "am offering her a walk in the cloisters. Where the river sounds so loud it drowns out everything except what is worth hearing."
She turned to me. Up close, I saw what I had thought was warmth was something else patience, perhaps, multiplied over centuries until it resembled kindness in certain lights. Her eyes did not skate to my throat and back. They rested on my face and remained there as if that was where the conversation resided.
"Will you join me, Your Majesty?"
I stepped fully beneath the arch. The water took the corner of my fear and ran off with it. "Gladly," I said, and did not look at Selvara when I said it.
We walked between the pale roses. Their petals were not white. They were the colour of milk just beginning to take on a blush, and their scent—unexpectedly—was green. Leaves after rain. Grass underfoot. Isolde's skirts made the smallest sound: a decision dressed as a rustle. When we were beyond the mirrors, beyond the sight line of the hall, I let out a breath that felt dangerous while I held it.
"Thank you," I said.
"For interrupting a game they cannot resist playing?" Isolde smiled properly now. It changed her face without making it any less strong. "Think of it as community service. The Mirror Walk produces more paperwork than you would imagine. Broken glass. Bruised egos. Occasionally a mortal with more curiosity than wisdom."
"And if I had stayed?"
"You would not have been touched," she said. "And you would not have been compelled." She regarded me with that steady, assessing gaze. "But you might have left with a wound they could not be punished for."
"Which is?"
"Doubt." She tipped her head towards the rill. "Few resist the first time, even knowing there are rules. You would have doubted yourself afterwards, and they would have fed on it for a week."
I thought of how quickly I had almost obeyed; how sweet it had been for a breath to let someone else hold the weight of my head. "And the water—"
"Blunts the edges of small magics," she said. "Not because it is pure, as the poets would have it, but because it is busy. Things that are busy have little time for other things to lean on them."
I laughed then, before I could help it. The sound surprised us both.
"Lady Isolde," I said. "Do you make a habit of rescuing inconvenient queens?"
"On the contrary," she said. "I make a habit of keeping the peace. Rescuing comes under that umbrella more often than you would expect." We reached a carved bench. She did not sit until I did. "I suppose now is the part where I tell you never to walk alone."
"I have been never to do so, and yet here I am." I looked down at my hands to avoid the confession in her face. "I could not stay in those rooms a moment longer. The walls have learnt to whisper. They are improving at it."
"Then you must teach yourself to whisper back." Her gaze softened by a degree. "The palace is a mouth. It chews. But there are places between its teeth where one can keep one's shape."
"And you are one of those places?" I had meant to be flippant. It came out more earnest than I liked.
"I am one of those places," she said simply. "So is the Sable Library, when the Librarian is in a good mood. So is the river-chapel if the Keeper is officious enough to be reliable. The kitchens at noon. The Night Guard's practice yard at dusk—provided you do not stand where they can accidentally spear you." She considered, then added, "The staircase behind the Hall of Ember at exactly two in the morning, but only then. The Grey Tower roof in thick fog."
It occurred to me that she was mapping the palace for me not with rooms but with hours. "Why help me?"
Isolde studied my face as if she were measuring a dressmaker's form and needed not my measurements but my tolerance for needle and thread. "Because the Court is at its most tedious when it believes itself invulnerable," she said. "Because your presence irritates them into attention. Because—" she allowed herself the smallest shrug, "—once, a very long time ago, I was the wrong person in the right place, and someone took my arm and led me through a door I had not seen."
"Who?"
"The man who wore the crown then. It did not make him kind. It made him pragmatic. I prefer to believe I am both."
We sat a moment and watched the water talk to itself. It is easier to speak truths when the space between them is full of a sound that promises to carry away the excess.
"What should I know?" I asked.
"Only three things." She held up a finger for each, elegant as calligraphy. "First: never be the first to speak in a room where you are uncertain of the hierarchy. Silence is sometimes the highest-ranking thing present. Second: if a vampire smiles with their bottom lip curled inwards, they are lying to spare you. If their top lip curls, they are lying to hurt you. If neither curl—leave. Third: do not bleed where they can smell it."
"I did that on the Oath stone," I said.
"On the Oath stone it becomes law," she said. "In the hall it becomes hunger."
"And you?" I asked before I could stop myself. "Do you—" the word was crude on my tongue, "—do you drink?"
"Sometimes," she said. No flinch. No apology. "Less often than most. With more patience than most. With permission. And never in the Walk."
"Why never?"
"Because a mirror forces you to see the thing you are doing. The Court thrives on not seeing." She rose when I did; it was a kindness. "Come. I will see you to your door. On the way, I will point out two passages that servants use when the main corridors become… performative."
We walked back beneath the arch. The mirrors waited. Selvara and her pair had drifted on—bored, perhaps, or unwilling to play where the water made their edges blunt. In the glass, the reflections behaved. Mine showed me my own face again, only mine, steady as I could make it.
"I do not know my place here," I said as we stepped into the wider corridor. "Everyone else seems born with a map. I was handed a contract and told to learn the landscape while it is moving."
"Maps lie," Isolde said. "They tell you what someone else wishes were true about a place. The only honest map is the one you draw yourself, with the points labelled 'Here I bled', 'Here I learned', 'Here I ran', 'Here I stood'."
"And if I get lost?"
"Then you find a river," she said, as if it were obvious. "And you follow it."
At my door, she stopped. The guards' faces did not change, but something in their shoulders acknowledged her with the minute shift men save for those they respect in spite of themselves.
"Lady Isolde," I said. "If I wished to visit the Sable Library—"
"Ask me," she said. "The Librarian owes me a favour I despise having to collect. We will use it anyway."
"Why do you despise it?"
"Because it is the sort of favour that breeds," she said dryly. "But you will not waste it."
"I will not," I said, and did not add because I have not had anything like a friend in a week, and I would rather pay interest for a lifetime than waste this.
Her mouth warmed. "Good. Then lock your door. It will not stop anyone who wishes to enter, but it will convince those who wish to watch that you have remembered the game. That, too, can be useful."
She inclined her head again, and was gone.
I stood a long moment with my hand on the latch. Then I went in.
The room smelled as it had that morning—beeswax, the ghost of roses, iron thinned to a suggestion under the polish of civility. The desk waited with its black parchment and its bottles of silver ink. I sat and pulled one close. The nib of the pen hesitated over the page, then set down a single, quiet line:
The Mirror Walk is not a stage if you refuse to perform.
Another line beneath it:
Lady Isolde—grey dress, patience like stone. Possible ally.
The word ally looked odd on the black page, too white, too hopeful. I left it there anyway.
Beyond the balcony doors, the river turned over in its sleep. Far away, a bell struck—one low note that made the flame in my lantern give the smallest bow. Something in the bond stirred at the sound—an answering thrum, a pulse that was not mine and was. I set the pen down and went to the open casement.
"Not in fear," I said to the water.
My breath broke into the cool air in a shape that might have been a laugh and might have been a prayer. I thought of Selvara's pale hands, Veynar's measured contempt, Aeon's hungry silence. I thought of Isolde's voice, steady and amused. I thought of Castiel, somewhere in the palace, the tether between us humming whenever my thoughts slipped too near his shadow.
I was not safe.
But I was not alone in quite the same way I had been when the day began.
The palace has many mouths. It chews. It swallows. It hums to itself between courses. But between its teeth are spaces where the things that wish to remain themselves can set up home.
I closed the window against the delicate pretend-dawn and, for the first time since the wedding, slept without dreaming of chains.