Page 12 of The Starlit Ring (The Chronicles of Liridin #1)

T he ballroom still pulsed with gluttony and debauchery when the soldiers cracked the doors to reveal hallways cleared of corpses. The puddles of blood had been wiped away, but their remnants still stained the floors. The stone would remember the slaughter for weeks yet.

Rowan steered me away from a table that sheltered a fornicating couple, drunk and giggling, all skirts and silks.

It wasn’t my place to judge, but I thought those skirts belonged to Lady Barrington, whose husband was currently asleep on a bench near the door. The discarded blue and gold silk pants were surely worn by the Earl of Quelling, whose wife was nowhere to be seen.

A brush with death left everyone in the room hungry and desperate.

Dances were no longer organized and proper.

Couples were feral, spinning and ducking and kissing as if the world was minutes from ending.

Blouses dangled from the rafters. Undergarments were strewn across mostly-empty serving platters.

Everything smelt of alcohol and piss and vomit.

Trapped in that drunken dream, time passed quickly. Somewhere in the devastation, a doomsday party began in earnest .

Even I guzzled several cups of strong, sweet wine, and slipped into the foray, my ankles and calves covered only by the leather of my boots. Any other day, it would’ve been a proper scandal. In a room strewn with lost underwear and shoes, I was nearly modest.

I stood by Rowan’s side. Even when I was drunk on the dance floor, swaying to the music, he accompanied me, happy to glower at anyone who approached.

We were never close, but I appreciated him nonetheless, especially when he punched Alger in the stomach.

For his troubles, Rowan received a bloody nose.

A gleefully drunk bearded man I didn’t know stuck a well-deserved fork in Alger’s thigh.

Afterward, Alger spent the rest of the night lying on a bench, moaning at anyone who stopped to check on him.

As soon as the guards released us, I waved goodbye to an exhausted and bewildered Callum, kissed Rowan on the cheek, and bolted away before anyone could stop me.

“Where is the king?” I demanded of the first guard I recognized.

He looked me up and down, snorted, and said, “I’m not telling you His Majesty’s whereabouts.”

Fair enough. Drenched in blood and sweat, I was far from my normal self. I doubted he knew me, and I lacked the energy to convince him.

But I was the pleasant princess. Ria was the assertive one, and she wasn’t with me. So I nodded politely and left.

I dragged myself to my rooms, pausing to listen outside Ria’s door, where I heard a faint rustling. Rats? A maid? Or Ria herself?

I threw the door open with the ceremony of a drunk stumbling her way out of the tavern.

Ria sat at the vanity, blotting away last night’s makeup with a kerchief. She startled when I burst through the door.

“Talina!” she spat, leaping from her chair and holding a hand to her breast. “Don’t do that. ”

“You’re one to talk,” I snapped, slamming the door behind me. “You left me locked in that ballroom for hours. What happened?”

“I—” Ria glanced nervously around the room. “I—Look, sit down, alright? I’ll explain everything.”

I plopped down onto the edge of the bed with such force that it squeaked and groaned beneath me. “Fine. Start explaining.”

Ria returned to her chair, scooting around to face me. “I don’t owe you anything,” she sighed. “I did what was best.”

“You owe me an explanation,” I said, crossing my arms. Anger shivered through me. Would she try to skirt the issue? Well, I wouldn’t let her. “What happened , Valeria?”

“Fine,” scoffed Ria, frowning at me. “Fine. All right. You’re right. I—Talina, you know why he’s here. He wants me . He wants Father to honor the treaty. I had to do it, or they’d slaughter everyone. You know that.”

“Great way to start a marriage,” I huffed. “And no, I don’t know that. The Tocchians weren’t the ones doing the slaughtering.”

“What are you talking about?” said Ria. All emotion disappeared from her voice. I knew that tone. She didn’t want to believe me, because if she did, it meant she had acted on misinformation. Misinformation that could change the trajectory of her life, for better or for worse.

I inhaled through my nose. “I ran into a soldier on the stairs. He let me go. And the Tocchians—they were giving people a chance to surrender. And when they didn’t?—”

“They took the guards downstairs,” finished Ria, blood draining from her face. “Fuck. Fuck! We might have had a chance.”

Oh. Was that where they’d stashed our soldiers?

I gave a despondent shrug. “I think they wanted to cause the least amount of damage possible.”

“While still getting the point across,” Ria reminded me sullenly.

“This is Father’s fault,” I fumed, throwing my arms up. “Tocchia tried to negotiate with him?— ”

“Yes, I know,” said Ria, raking the brush through her hair. “And he wouldn’t hear of it. Now we’re all paying the price.”

I looked at Ria, her hair long and loose, a cut slashed across her forehead, bruises beneath her eyes.

I hated that she was reduced to nothing more than an object for men to fight over.

Like she wasn’t a person with thoughts and feelings and experiences.

In a royal court, this was all we were. Like the figurines in the war room, we had a name and identity assigned to us, but our birthright scrubbed us of our features, designating us to a single role.

“I’m sorry,” I said, falling back onto the bed before I could think better of it. The gore splattered across my dress had long dried and felt like something from a half-remembered dream, but I shouldn’t risk staining the bedspread. “So what happened?”

“I met with Prince Marius and told him I would marry him if he agreed to stop the slaughter at once and withdraw from our lands by tomorrow morning at the latest,” said Valeria, too calmly.

It sounded as if she were placing an order at the florist’s, not describing a life-altering event that had happened only hours earlier.

“Um,” I said, trying to parse out which details were the most necessary, and which ones I could draw from Valeria before she became a brick wall, as she often did when I asked too many questions. “How did you find Prince Marius?”

“Blond. Cold. Exactly as he was years and years ago,” Valeria answered. “I don’t like him, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I almost laughed. Ria’s preference for brunettes was notorious among our ladies-in-waiting. “Was he angry?”

“No,” said Ria, setting her brush on the vanity. “He seemed… like he didn’t want to be here at all. Like he wanted to go home.”

“I guess it wasn’t difficult to convince him, then.”

“No.” Ria gave a short laugh. “Father thought it was too easy. Spent hours negotiating with him.”

“What are the terms?” I asked, sitting up and leaning forward .

“Well, for one, I have to marry the prince. Two, Father isn’t allowed to retaliate, and three, we owe them a dowry.”

“When do you marry?”

“I don’t know,” said Ria, shoulders sagging, chin dipping. “But I leave tomorrow morning.”

“ Tomorrow morning?! ” I gasped. “They can’t just take you?—”

“Yes, they can. I agreed to it. I’m going to honor my commitments and go north with the Prince. And all of this will be but a dream.”

“That’s much too soon!” I said. I jumped to my feet, pushing my hands through my hair so that it finally spilled from its haphazard knot. “You can’t— They can’t?—”

“Talina,” said Ria, rising to catch me by my shoulders. “I have to go.”

“But you can’t just leave me here!” I burst out. Tears burned in my eyes, unshed, as Ria pulled me close and wrapped her arms around me. “You can’t! Not like this…”

“I’m sorry,” said Ria. Something hot and wet landed on my shoulder, and I realized that she was crying, too.

“I don’t want to go. But this was always going to happen, and I—I need to do the right thing.

I need to do what Father wouldn’t. So that you, and Rowan, and Baden, and everyone else here can be safe.

I’ll write to you every week, and I’ll see you at the wedding, alright?

It’s going to be fine. You’ll see. In a month, you’ll forget all about me and go on forging crazy things and you’ll drive Cranz insane, and it will all be fine . ”

I squeezed her tightly, burying my face in her shoulder. “I’m not ready for you to leave.”

“I’m not either,” said Ria. For the first time, I detected dread in her voice. “But it will be alright. I want you to make me something and bring it the wedding for me.”

I drew back, confused. “What should I make?”

Ria laughed. “Whatever you want. Make me impenetrable to the forces of darkness. Make me float. Turn me invisible. Whatever sounds most fun.”

“I don’t want to have fun,” I grumbled. “I want to be sad.”

“Fine. Be sad. Then pour your grief into something you can be proud of.” She wiped her eyes, then mine with the kerchief.

I wondered what she’d ever worked on in her life.

Embroidery? Fencing? Lessons? Finishing a cup of tea or a book of poetry?

Once, she’d tried to bake bread with the help of one of our bakers.

It had gone disastrously, with the dough expanding all over the counter until it looked as if a puffy cloud had fallen out of the sky and exploded in our kitchen.

It struck me then that for all the time we spent together, I barely knew her. She indulged my hobbies and interests with the occasional eye roll, but I didn’t know what she enjoyed in her spare time. But Ria referenced work as if it were something she knew, and I believed her.

“I don’t want you to go,” I told her, crying again.

“Me, either,” she said. “But it’s going to be all right. Prince Marius isn’t so bad, and we’ll still visit. I promise.”

I left Ria’s room with reddened cheeks and burning eyes, and returned to my chambers with shaking knees.