Chapter 2
Mira waited until the house had gone fully quiet before she slipped out through the side door that didn't lock properly — the one she'd discovered years ago and never once mentioned to anyone, least of all her father.
The stables were dark and easy enough to move through without waking a groom, so long as she kept her voice low and her hands steady on the reins. She'd done this often enough by now that the horse barely stirred at her approach.
The lake sat a short ride from the edge of the Marquis's land, past the tree line the household staff never bothered patrolling after dark, and Mira had learned the path to it well enough by now that she barely needed the moon to find her way.
Titernet root grew nowhere else nearby — a stubborn, unglamorous little plant that clung to the muddy bank just past where the water grew too cold for anything else to root — and it only gave up its properties fresh, cut at night, when whatever the plant considered its own version of sleep left its stems soft enough to bruise. Mira had read that in a book she was fairly sure her father didn't know she owned. She'd tested the theory herself twice already this year.
She worked quickly, kneeling in the dark with a small knife and steadier hands than an eighteen-year-old noblewoman's hands had any business having, filling a cloth pouch with more root than she strictly needed, because there was no telling when the mood to need it again might strike. By the time she'd made her way back, the house was silent and the sky had gone the particular black that came right before it started, very slowly, to consider becoming morning.
Brewing the potion itself took longer than gathering the root ever did — a slow reduction over a candle flame, patience more than skill, the kind of quiet, careful work Mira found she didn't mind at two in the morning nearly as much as she probably should have. She corked the finished vial, tucked it into the same drawer where the others waited, and was asleep before she'd properly finished thinking about where she might use it.
Zoe had them all moving before the sun had properly cleared the eastern wall, moving through Mira's room like a small, determined storm — pins in her mouth, a dress draped over one arm, muttering something about lords who scheduled temple prayers for the same hour honest people were meant to still be sleeping.
"Arms up, young lady. We are not going to be—" Zoe stopped mid-sentence, taking in the shadows under Mira's eyes with open suspicion. "You look like you haven't slept at all."
"I slept." Mira let herself be maneuvered into the dress without much resistance, mostly because resistance would have required an energy she didn't currently have. "Some."
"Some." Zoe's eyes narrowed further, but the hour was too short for an interrogation, and they both seemed to silently agree to postpone it. "We are not going to be late for this."
The dress was off-white, high at the collar, scattered with small yellow crystals that caught the candlelight every time Mira breathed, finished with a wide bow at the back that Zoe fussed over twice before declaring it acceptable. Mira turned once in the mirror and decided not to argue with any of it. There wasn't time, and Zoe's face had the particular set to it that meant arguing would only slow things down.
Downstairs, the carriage was already waiting — not resting on wheels the way the merchants' carts did, but hovering a hand's width above the courtyard stones, harnessed to a pair of horses whose wings were folded neat and white against their flanks. Silvia stood beside it in deep white, pearls at her throat, her hair pinned in a style that matched the fabric so precisely it looked deliberate rather than simply elegant. Ronan wore brown, the same warm, dark shade as his hair, and for once looked entirely comfortable being looked at.
Silvia caught Mira's arm gently before she could climb in, her voice pitched low enough that it wouldn't carry to where Ronan stood checking the harness. "What were you doing up so late?"
Mira smiled and let the question slide off her like it weighed nothing at all. "Nothing, Mom. Just reading."
Silvia's eyebrow rose, unconvinced, but she said nothing further — only "Just reading," repeated back with the flat, knowing tone of a mother filing something away for later — before releasing Mira's arm and letting the matter drop, at least for now, and at least in front of Ronan.
"Come along, then," Ronan called, already at the carriage door, offering a hand first to Silvia and then to Mira as he helped them both up into their seats.
"There's no need to speak with anyone you don't already know," he said to Mira once she'd settled, in the same easy tone he might have used to remind her to bring a coat. "Nod. Smile if you like. That's more than enough for today."
"And if anyone says something unkind," Silvia added, settling in across from her, "you come straight to one of us. Don't carry it yourself."
"I've got it." Mira said it lightly enough that neither parent seemed to notice she hadn't quite promised anything. She turned a small crystal vial over once in her palm and allowed herself a faint, private smile at it before tucking it away.
Zoe, climbing in last, caught the motion anyway. "What was that?"
"Laughing potion. Titernet root, mostly." Mira said it the way another girl might have mentioned the weather.
"Young lady." Zoe's voice dropped into something close to alarm. "If the Marquis finds out you've moved on from reading about poisons to carrying them, he is going to be very disappointed in both of us."
"He won't be." Mira looked out the window instead of at her. "Don't worry."
It wasn't even ten in the morning, and the sun still hadn't fully shown itself — the sky pale and flat, the air carrying the kind of breeze that belonged to autumn rather than the height of summer. Mira watched it without quite knowing why it bothered her.
They saw the temple's own horses before they saw the temple itself — a formation of them descending out of the low cloud in pairs, carrying carriages marked with crests Mira half-recognized from her mother's endless etiquette lessons. By the time their own carriage settled onto the temple's outer courtyard, the sky had gone the color of old pewter, and the air smelled faintly, impossibly, of rain.
The Temple of Glory was white. Not the soft cream of the mansion's stone, but a hard, deliberate white, polished until it looked less built than grown, rising in tiers around a central fountain whose water ran clear enough to see straight to the bottom.
"Don't worry about me," Mira told Zoe quietly, before she let her father hand her down from the carriage. She wasn't entirely sure why she'd said it. Zoe hadn't asked.
The clouds thickened as she crossed the courtyard. By the time she reached the temple steps, they had gone the deep grey of an approaching storm — which made no sense at all, in the middle of summer, and which nobody around her seemed to notice.
Inside, the temple opened into a hall lined with towering statues, each one some old immortal Mira half-recognized from a childhood of paintings and prayers — a god of harvests with wheat carved into stone robes, a goddess of tides frozen mid-wave, a dozen others whose names she'd memorized for lessons and mostly forgotten since. Sunlight fought its way in through high, narrow windows and lost, filtered grey by the clouds outside, so that the whole hall was lit the way a held breath might look, if a held breath had a color.
The air smelled of old incense and older stone, and beneath both of those, faintly, of the fountain water carried in on everyone's shoes. It was colder inside than the courtyard had been, the kind of cold that lived in buildings built to outlast the people who prayed in them, and Mira found herself standing a little straighter without deciding to.
The nobility filled the space in careful rows — priests and the masters of Artemis Academy at the very front, robes marking rank in ways Mira had been taught to read since childhood, then the imperial family behind them, a cluster of ash-blond heads that caught the grey light strangely even indoors, pale enough to seem lit from within. Behind them came the ranked houses, family by family, in an order that had never once been questioned in the history of the Empire and never would be. The Floridae family stood fifth in their column, close enough to see the front clearly, far enough to be unremarkable — precisely, Mira suspected, where her father preferred them.
Ronan and Silvia settled easily into their places, the practiced stillness of people who had stood in this exact spot every year of their adult lives. Mira stood between them and did not know where to put her eyes, until the crowd's collective attention did the deciding for her, turning as one body toward the center of the hall.
Until she saw the statue at the center of it all.
It dwarfed everything else in the hall — nearly three times the height of the priests standing beneath it, carved from the same hard white stone as the temple itself, though something about the way the light caught it made it look almost warm, almost alive. A woman frozen mid-motion, fire wrapped around one raised hand, a sword held low and steady in the other, her expression caught somewhere between fury and grief, her hair carved as though a wind that no longer existed had just stopped blowing through it.
Not a fairy. Not any of the soft, serene goddesses Mira had grown up seeing in temple books, hands folded, eyes closed in benediction.
Maya.
Something in Mira's chest tightened at the sight of her, sharp and sudden and entirely wrong for a statue she'd never once stood in front of before. For half a second the hall seemed to tilt — a flash of something behind her eyes that wasn't a memory, because she had no memory it could have belonged to, gone before she could hold onto any shape of it at all. She blinked, and the hall was simply a hall again, cold stone and quiet murmuring and her mother's shoulder an inch from her own.
"We will now begin the chant," a priest's voice carried through the hall, calm and practiced, the kind of voice that had said the same words at the same hour for longer than anyone present had been alive. "We ask the master of Artemis Academy and the imperial family to pass the torch."
A lamp sat in the statue's open palm, unlit until that moment — and then it wasn't. An ordinary flame, small and steady, nothing more than any candle might produce. Everyone in the hall understood exactly what it meant regardless: an honor lit once a year, in memory of a goddess a thousand years gone, a ritual old enough that no one living could say who had first decided fire was the right way to remember her.
Mira felt it the instant the flame caught.
Something answered from underneath her ribs — not warmth, not comfort, something closer to a struck match dragged straight down her spine. It was there and gone in the space of a breath, leaving behind nothing but a dull ache blooming behind her eyes, the kind that came from squinting too long into bright light.
She pressed two fingers briefly to her temple and said nothing. Nobody around her seemed to have noticed at all.