Page 179 of A Liar's Twisted Tongue

“Piphany will get you ready.” Lusia shoos me out of the room, and I find Piphany waiting for me when I exit. She walks fast ahead of me, and when I sit in front of the vanity mirror, she looks at my reflection from behind me.

“Not sleeping?” she says in a high-pitched voice devoid of compassion.

“Let’s do this without chatter, shall we?”

Piphany smiles. The kind that doesn’t meet her eyes. I’ve spoken in front of a live and public audience before, to Lucents and Folk with their pens and papers and idle lust of gossip. I’m familiar with the pampering as she wipes damp brushes under my eyes.

A few minutes later, the entire room is full of Lucents, measuring me or makeup-ing me. “We all offer you our sincerest apologies,” Piphany says and plucks again at my eyebrows, nodding in an entirely unsympathetic way.

“How does it feel?” I ask slowly.

“Hm?” she mumbles, her focus taken by my eyebrows.

“To be the head advisor to the queen and king of Soma, yet still be responsible for plucking my eyebrows?” I glance down at her as she stiffens. “Pity.”

Piphany scoffs lightly. “Did Queen Lusia and King Labyrinth give you your briefing on what it is you are to do?”

“No.”

She pushes my eyes closed and brushes powder on my eyelids. “I’ll grant you an idea. You shall be pandering to the rich and noble orphia who matter to our kingdom.”

And Azaire wasn’t one of them. She doesn’t have to say it, not when it’s lined between her words and filling the gaps in her teeth. Not when I know exactly what our public speeches entail. She is right, it is entirely pandering. Pandering to exactly the types Piphany’s described. Those who, without our system, would collapse. The middleman between us and the septics.

“Yes, Piphany,” I say with my eyes closed gently shut. “I’m well aware of what my title entails.” She ought to be nicer to me, I think. Who will she become when Lilac is queen?

“Pity,” she whispers my word back to me slowly.

I take the silence for what it becomes—bliss. The moments before disaster strikes. For I am not naive enough at this point to think that there wasn’t a reason Lusia told me I’d see Lilac after this meeting. A subtle threat, yet still one, nonetheless. I try not to ponder on the question: what will she be asking me to do?

A little under an hour later, the crew clears out and I am in another extravagant suit. This one is bright and iridescent like the Stone of Light, an obvious display of power and rebirth. My first clue that this meeting will be holding importance to the kingdom. It seems, from Piphany’s talk, that while the news of Azaire hasn’t spread through the school, it has spread through the kingdom.

I slide the merai blade he last held down the sheath at my back.

His room is a blank slate. His existence wiped clean, as though his blood could ever be wiped from my eyes.

The world will never look the same again.

The view from his room is more familiar than my own. My hiding spot in my own house. The only piece of him left in the space.

The snow falls thunderously outside, landing over the Great Sea that borders the kingdom, coating the glaciers. Is his soul truly gone? Obliterated by the venom of the fatta? Or is he only part of the universe now? Atoms that once formed his body now creating the snow that falls from the sky? My eyes chill from being so near the glass, and my tear freezes against my cheek as the words take on a new meaning.

“May we meet again,” I finally say my farewells.

Perhaps I’ll see you in the snow.

I trudge myself to the courtyard before the audience arrives. A translucent tarp has been tugged over the skyline, blocking the snow for the neighboring orphia who don’t know how to handle the burning cold.

It’s only Lusia, Labyrinth, Piphany, and the guards in the space surrounded by glass paneling and white marble exterior walls. The floor we stand upon is made of white and blue stone, mocking the pattern of the Great Sea and its glaciers, while Piphany sets up the reqreium—a device that projects what it sees through its partners. Something only the wealthy and noble acquire.

“You look dashing,” Lusia says.

Labyrinth stands tall, holding his staff straight. “You have an hour to prepare. You’re the face of our conquest, act the part.”

Lusia hands me a scroll, and I skim my eyes through the material before asking any further questions.

The conquering of the corenths. My defeating a single fatta has been ramped up to me defeating them all. Are the corenths gone at all, or is this all a facade so they can still have their ball?

My eyes snag a quarter of the way through the paper. Azaire’s name in blasphemy. They want me to say that he forced me to the battlegrounds to fight.

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