Shocked, he turned his hands over and studied the subtle lines of dusky color against the suntan of his skin. Then he bent to look at his belly and chest, twisted his neck to try to see his shoulders and spine. It was so bluish all over.

  “Mother!” he said, and one of the mirrored sorcerers offered a small silver mirror. He handed it to Syra, who angled it to Sunrise.

  His eyes were dark purple and flecked still with the warm brown they used to be. The blue-violet lined his cheeks and jaw and streaked back into his hair. He looked demon-kissed. “It is perfect,” his mother said. “You must stay away from amulets of transformation, if possible, which might undo the spell.”

  “Why?”

  One of the sorcerers flicked a dismissive hand. “Sorcery can be fickle.”

  “I mean…” Sunrise tried to bow but tilted with vertigo. His mother caught his elbow. He said, “I mean why make me like this?”

  “You will be accepted faster into the palace,” Syra said. “Being demon-kissed will make up for being a woman warrior. And your background will be less investigated.”

  Sunrise licked his lips, ignoring the prickling discomfort of woman warrior. “But I’m not fast or strong. I have no demon-kissed talent.”

  “Your memory is extraordinary,” said one of the mirrored sorcerers. Maybe the same one who had spoken before.

  “Oh.” Sunrise stared at the sorcerer, at the strange smooth features, like an unfinished painting. The sorcerer smiled, and glanced at Syra.

  Her eyes shone with a strong emotion Sunrise didn’t understand—but he found himself suddenly ill at ease all over again.

  “Sunrise,” she said, “it is like proof of your father’s power. He was not demon-kissed, but he was a sorcerer. Marking you with magic is a way to show people you are born of it.”

  Sunrise touched her cheek with his knuckles, as he did when she was ill. Her skin was flushed, her gaze wild. Then he nodded. “I understand, Mother,” he whispered.

  demon-kissed would have a different name, the great bear spirit said.

  Sunrise jerked, surprised.

  Even Syra looked up sharply.

  The bird of prey spirit spread its wings lazily, and the tiger spirit stalked toward Sunrise. He did his best to remain still as he carefully said, “What was my father’s name, before he was your Skybreaker?”

  “Good,” said one of the sorcerers, and the other said, “Very good.”

  The bear spirit, lifting to its full height, nearly brushed the ceiling of the workroom—it had to be twelve feet tall suddenly.

  Sunrise leaned his head back and gripped his mother’s hand.

  Osian, the bear said. Skybreaker’s first, human name was Osian.

  “Osian,” he repeated.

  “Osian,” his mother murmured, long and mournful. “Osian will destroy the family of Kirin Dark-Smile.”

  And Osian imagined he felt the slick sensation of the name—as if it were alive to choose—claim him, sticking to his palms and the bare soles of his feet, diving into his chest to find his heart.

  ONE

  RALIEL DARK-SMILE MET THE great demon of the palace for the first time face-to-face when she was seven years old, just after she’d given herself her name.

  Of course, she’d seen scraps of the demon’s aether and slippery dark shadows in long hallways and pockets of the palace gardens. She’d felt it humming as she learned to play the harp at her mother’s side. But it wasn’t until that night, seven since she’d declared her name, two since her father had been enthroned as the Emperor with the Moon in His Mouth, that the demon appeared.

  She woke from a dream, and there it crouched upon the foot of her bed. It was the size and shape of a child her age, made of shadows and darkness, with seven round silver-white eyes like seven moons clustered on the flat plane of its face.

  Raliel had been startled but not afraid.

  She knew it was the great demon, as she’d lived in the Palace of Seven Circles, which was the demon’s house, for all her life. It slept, her nursemaid had told her, far below in the foundations of the palace. It slept like a serpent guarding its nest, rolling over sometimes so the palace floors trembled, and hissed its breath in the occasional cold wind gusting through the smoke-ways in the sticky summer. The demon only woke, her nurse said, when a new emperor took the Moon into themself and at the heir’s investiture ritual—or if it was needed to defend the palace, which had not happened since the great demon of the Fifth Mountain had tried to kidnap the emperor, years before Raliel had been born.

  Of course, that wasn’t the way her father the emperor told Raliel the story. He said he’d not been kidnapped at all, not exactly, and that Night Shine, the great demon of the Fifth Mountain, had saved him, been his good friend. The emperor also said their great demon, whose name was Moon, rarely slept these days, rather slipped through the walls from shrine to shrine, listening intently to gossip. Moon brought some of it to the emperor, if the demon thought he should know a thing. “That’s our secret, little moon, yes?” the emperor told her, and she asked, “Except from Mother and Father?” The emperor smiled his tilted smile and whispered against her ear, “No exceptions.”

  So Raliel learned sometimes the emperor kept secrets from his consorts. She had tried to speak to the great demon herself, but it never said anything to her, or seemed to notice her back.

  Until that night it stared at her from the foot of her bed. “Hello,” Raliel whispered, pushing sleek black hair behind her ear. It always escaped her night braid.

  hello, the demon whispered. No part of its face moved: no gash of a shadow-mouth appeared, no flash of fangs or forked tongue. The whisper simply formed itself like delicate glass filaments, and Raliel could not be sure if she heard it or felt it.

  Resisting the urge to draw her legs up to hug her knees to her chest (which would be a sign of emotion), Raliel peered at it. Throughout her room, moonlight reflected: in her mirror, gleaming against the polished cheeks of toy dancers and carved rain forest animals in the corner, shining off the crystal globe etched with a map of Heaven, and highlighting the gold ink tracing the lines of imperial ancestry along scrolls spread over her tea table. Everything in her bedroom shone or sparkled as it caught hints of silvery moonlight. Except the demon. Its small form swallowed light, a child-shaped void, darker than anything.

  Raliel shivered, rather excited. “What are you doing here?” she asked softly—her mother instructed that a cool, soft tone was less revealing than a whisper.

  I like your name. It is a dragon’s name, the demon said.

  “Thank you. I picked it myself,” she answered, unable to stop the pleased blush of her cheeks. It had taken her years to find a name she liked, that sounded the way she felt, and meant something she wanted.

  the emperor did not give you a name.

  “He told me my name should be the responsibility of nobody but me.” Raliel did not truly understand such reasoning but could repeat the words her father the emperor had spoken again and again.

  Until recently she’d been called nicknames and endearments— “little moon” by the emperor, “my sweet” or “little empress” from her father Sky, and simply “daughter” from her mother. Her grandmother, the previous Empress with the Moon in Her Mouth, called her “darkling smile” with resignation, and her grandmother Love-Eyes called her “child.” Her grandfather Sun-Bright called her “Kirin’s reward,” which she didn’t realize was sarcastic until she was a lot older. To her cousins and aunts, to the Lord of Narrow and witches and dawn priests, she was “the princess.” Everyone was frustrated and everyone complained, but her father (now the emperor) insisted she find a name for herself only when she was ready.

  She found her name in a song, one she had plucked from the library for its simple melody with which she could practice her fingering on the lap harp her mother had given her. When she realized she knew her name, she declared it to her parents in the Moon’s Recline Garden because this had been the garden where her father, who had been Kirin then, had taught her that she could be anyone she liked. She would be known as a girl, he said, because that was expected, but it did not mean she was a girl, or had to be. Not in chosen name or identity. “You listen to yourself,” he had told her, snuggling her in his lap, her cheek pressed to embroidered bluebirds along the lapel of his elaborate morning robe. “That’s what I’ve always done, little moon, and I’m perfect for it.”

  With the name finally ready on her tongue, she tugged his sleeve. Kirin had set down his bowl of tea and flicked his fingers for the attention of First Consort Sky and Second Consort Elegant Waters. Lifting his unpainted face into the cool cast of listening, Kirin said, “Our daughter has decided who she is. Tell us, little moon.”

  She straightened her back, pressed her palms to her folded knees, and said in a voice she tried to make as easy as his, “Raliel. I am Raliel Dark-Smile, after my father and the great dragon of the Tylish Lake, who was murdered and became a great demon to wreak vengeance upon its enemies. After they banished it”—her smile widened with childish bloodthirsty wonder—“the dragon demon became a song! And if you sing the song, you’ll die within seven days!”

  Kirin’s expression cracked instantly, and even a little girl could recognize the sheer glee lighting him up. He laughed, raising perfect eyebrows at Sky.

  Sky had given both Kirin and their daughter a shared look of resignation. Elegant Waters had hummed, considering the situation. She lifted her tea to her pink lips—she already was painted for the day, in sweeping lines of black and pink like wings spreading from the corners of her large dark eyes—and tilted her head without disrupting a strand of intricately looped hair. “Tell me, my daughter,” she said, “if you are a dragon, what sort of dragon are you?”

  Raliel bit her lip before she remembered that would muss her own makeup, and even though she wasn’t wearing it yet, she must always bear in mind how she touched her face. In the same cool voice, she said, “A beautiful one.”

  Her mother had smiled just slightly. “Come here, little dragon, and I will help you with that.”

  Now in Raliel’s midnight bedroom, the small shadow-form of the great demon wrapped its arms around its knees and seemed to stare at her. She was glad it approved of her name.

  “Did you choose your name?” Raliel asked.

  Instead of answering, the demon said, you were thinking about the sky.

  “I was asleep,” she reminded it. “Thinking of nothing at all.”

  at the ritual. You were thinking about the sky.

  Oh, Raliel recalled that: it had been so boring, the elaborate ritual making her father the emperor. Boring but crowded, and Raliel disliked the press of courtiers and witches, the spark of aether knotting itself up with all the various intentions and antagonizing. She’d had only one small part to play—giving her name and making her vow to be the pure Heir to the Moon—and otherwise she’d stared up at the tiny windows at a very faded half-moon in a very blue sky. And wished to fly like the dangerous dragon of her same name. Or be anywhere else, really.

  do you dream? the great demon asked.

  Her fingers itched to reach up and tug on the end of her braid for comfort. She stared at the seven moon-eyes, wondering if there were one or two she should focus on. They clustered together in what might’ve been a spiral. The more she stared, the more she could see shapes in them, white on white. Her father the emperor had a voluminous black robe embroidered with a garden of black flowers. Even when he was still, the robe seemed to shimmer with a dark life of its own, but when he moved and it caught sunlight or aether-lantern glow, the black flowers danced, the illusion of deepening jungle drawing the eye further and further into the emperor’s power.

  The demon’s eyes were like that: seven moons each with a pale world inside them.

  Raliel shivered again and said, “Do you want a piece of candy?”

  It said, I cannot eat candy, but you can, and I will like that too.

  She narrowed her eyes, wondering where the trick was, but when she couldn’t find it, she slipped out of bed, pulled on a thin robe, and tiptoed out to the small sitting nook between her room and her mother’s. A dish of hard honey petals sat on the writing desk near the window, and she plucked out a dark one she hoped was red, but the moonlight washed the colors into shades of gray. Then she turned and gasped, for the demon had followed her. It hovered right there, exactly her height and its shoulders the same width as hers, and Raliel got angry that it was imitating her. But she did as her mother expected and made her anger cold instead of hot, then put the candy in her mouth and rolled it with her tongue as she glared at those seven moon-eyes. Shadows moved across the lower portion of its face as if it had a petal rolling in its mouth too.

  They stood there, mirroring each other, while the candy melted sugar down Raliel’s throat.

  Then she opened her mouth to show it the candy was gone and her tongue was much darker than before.

  The demon sank away into the parquet floor.

  Confused, Raliel remained standing there until her toes were too cold, and she tucked herself back into bed.

  TWO

  IF THERE WAS ONE thing everyone in the Palace of Seven Circles agreed upon, it was that the Heir to the Moon was perfect and good but too cold.

  The Lords of Narrow and Every Star, the Ladies Peach Blossom and Falling Red had nothing but compliments for the heir, for her poise and politeness; the lesser courtiers appreciated the clear notes of her music, the way she poured her father tea; the guards and generals found her sword-forms impeccable; the palace poets said her early efforts at composition revealed the potential for greatness; the tailors and cooks and ink maids enjoyed their turns painting her face or embroidering her gowns or adding just the right amount of pepper to her food as she was unerringly kind and remembered everyone’s names and relations and even some distant relatives or stories they’d spoken of once and assumed she’d forgotten. The scholars and priests who tutored her praised her memory, too, and her precision and clever mind. There was a retired battle witch called Immli who was suspicious of the speed with which she picked up complicated aether-work and drew sigils that ought to have been beyond her, but it was his job to be cautious with magic, and he was correct, in any case: the great demon of the palace helped the heir with her sigils and taught her the languages of spirits, which was a language that could not be spoken by human mouths and voices but written well enough, in ink or sand or pollen or blood.

  Raliel grew accustomed to the great demon’s voice in her head, tingling in her palms or down her spine as if the demon held her hand or nudged her between her shoulder blades. When she knelt at one of the altars carved in alcoves in every level of the Palace of Seven Circles, she felt it kneel beside her, and as she prayed, it drank up the aether that gathered in candle flames or swirled in the thin lines of incense. That was how it ate: the prayers and offerings of every human in the palace increased its power, tying their lives to it with thin tendrils of magic. It drew from the imperial family, too, but that was a circuit, and when Raliel prayed, when her fathers and mother prayed, it returned strength to them sevenfold.

  Palace gardeners worked constantly, for flowers and trees with their roots in the palace soil were slowly drained of their aether to feed the demon. Mice that died in the walls fed it, and baby birds that fell too soon from nests in ornamental pear trees in the fifth circle, and any spirits that managed to live in the Lily Garden or dawn sprites fluttering in the chapels had to work triply hard to maintain their connections to the aether, lest the demon make little demons out of them, too. There were no ghosts in the palace, for ghosts cannot exist where there is a great demon to chew up their final spark at the moment of death, regardless of how or why they die. The priests in the palace mostly had forgotten how to make ghost amulets, focused instead on charms that could shield a dying old tailor or a gravely injured palace soldier from the demon so that their spirits could dissipate into the world and their names be recorded in Heaven.

  Despite earning the admiration of nearly everyone Raliel Dark-Smile met, she did not quite manage friendship. When she played her harp, she sounded as good as her very gifted mother but lacked something nobody could quite name. (Perhaps her true audience appreciated the music differently than human ears.) When she discussed historical tactics or legal reform, her words were smart and sharp but lacked fire. (Arguing at night with a demon taught one to be very careful and precise with weaknesses.) Her poetry, while technically superior, was strangely abstract. Beautiful yes, graceful yes, but the subject matter was more suited to obscure ancient texts than youthful wonder or exuberance. How much of an old soul she seemed—yes, that was it, the courtiers murmured among themselves. An old soul.

  Returning favors to her or giving her gifts was difficult, for no one knew what the heir liked. Oh, she might say she liked pale silks and white orchids in her hair, she might say she preferred the essays of Andel Aged or the styles of the water painters from the eastern canyons, and when she played she certainly gravitated toward haunting, yearning songs over joyful ones. She was diligent in her calligraphy and put constant effort into sword-forms, surpassed her peers in aether-work, but could any of that be proven a passion or merely duty? She was the only choice for Heir to the Moon, after all, and required to excel.

  Her father the emperor, who tutored her personally in poli–tics (mostly by asking her questions about what was actually happening and helping her map out patterns of internecine favoritism and grudges) was unconcerned. His daughter did not know who she was yet, and her bold choice of name promised when she was ready, she would blossom spectacularly.

  But the emperor was not Raliel’s only parent, and both the First and Second Consorts were worried.

  First Consort Sky spent part of every day working with his daughter on warcraft and meditation; he was satisfied by Raliel’s efforts in sword-forms and privately considered her better than him at any meditative techniques that allowed for stillness. Combining the two in Sky’s preferred style of mindful movement proved more difficult for her, but she tried. The first time Raliel smiled at him with distance on her face, Sky nearly fell over. It was an expression he’d never seen her wear, though Second Consort Elegant Waters looked similar sometimes when she herself was hiding a sudden surge of emotion. Sky knew both he and Elegant Waters were reserved people—one had to be, paired with the emperor—and he knew Raliel styled herself after her mother in poise and expression, but he’d thought it was a sweet imitation. He had thought he understood his daughter. And then appeared that cool smile.