“As long as Her Lightness requires.”

  Effie rolled her eyes. Why do I even bother?

  “Will that be all?” Dagda made no effort to hide her eagerness to leave, and Effie saw no reason to continue enduring her frosty company.

  “That will be all,” she said.

  With another curt nod, Kelestina’s majordomo left, and Effie was finally alone.

  The sudden silence paired eerily with the luxurious confines of her glass cage. Unsure where to start, she paced the chamber several times before catching another haggard glimpse of herself in the vanity. Groaning, Effie returned to the tub and set it to fill while she went to work on the platter of food. Once she reduced the plate to a pile of bones and a buttery smear of turnip, she uncorked the cherry liqueur, poured herself a snifter, and undressed before lowering herself into the tub.

  The hot bath kneaded life back into her weary bones while the tart spirit sanded all the edges off her tension, threatening to lull her to sleep. The suite came provisioned with a wide array of ointments and tinctures in assorted vials of colored glass. Effie experimented with each one until her bathwater boiled over with effervescent foam. She massaged a lilac-scented scrub into her tattered hair. It took her forever to finish rinsing the ointment away and by the time she was done, her fingers and toes had shriveled to prunes. She pulled a porcelain plug to let the bathwater drain and stepped dripping onto the tiles to pat herself dry with a set of ivory towels. With her hair bound up in one of them, she glanced down at the tarnished outfit she’d discarded in a heap at the foot of her bed. It hardly made sense to undo all her fastidious cleansing by returning to a sweaty tunic and a bloodied pair of canvas pants, so she checked the contents of the armoire for better options.

  Kelestina’s staff were certainly thorough. They’d provided a full complement of outfits, including a set of the Celestial’s blue livery, a gray and brass Patrician suit, a nightgown, a silk slip, a diamond-encrusted formal gown, and several casual dresses dyed in expensive hues. Effie pulled out one of the dresses in an eye-catching robin’s egg blue. She inspected the garment’s lace bodice and extended its wide, gauzy silhouette. Too casual, perhaps, but the diamond gown seemed overwrought in the extreme. She laid the dress out on her bed next to two other outfits for comparison. In Kelestina’s livery, she’d look like a servant, and that wouldn’t do, but the Patrician suit seemed presumptuous. She eventually settled on the dress, which fit her dimensions so perfectly it left her a little unnerved. So attired, she sat at the vanity to brush out her hair.

  She smiled at her revived appearance in the looking glass. The scrub had imbued her hair with a healthy violet sheen, and the hot soak restored much of her natural color. She pinned up her hair, and the visage staring back at her reminded her suddenly of Vanna.

  For her entire life, she’d been subjected to unsolicited commentary about their resemblance. Effie always bristled at the comparison, but she could no longer deny its truth. She was still softer than her sister—possessed of a rounder face with a less prominent chin and a plumpness to her cheeks that Vanna’s training had ground away. Effie’s nose was smaller and her eyes a slightly lighter shade of green, but in adulthood, the two had grown more similar than not. She imagined Vanna’s snaggletoothed smile onto the reflection in the vanity, and the image uncorked a well of longing that surprised her with its depth.

  Effie knew she might never see her sister again. All she had left were memories, and the reminder of their common features suddenly seemed a priceless gift. She mourned the loss of all that time she wasted on resentment these last few months. It all seemed so trivial, now. At least they had reconciled before the Ascension. Effie was thankful for that. Enduring bitterness might have numbed the sense of loss, but that would be cold comfort in the years of estrangement to come.

  Seeking distraction, she opened the vanity drawer and pulled out a set of cosmetics. She lined up jars of contour, foundation, and unguent—uncapped a complete prism of polish and paints. She discovered glass cylinders of eye make-up in every shade of the open sky. Smiling again, Effie went about constructing a mask to match her environs.

  She passed hours testing every bottle. By the end, she’d applied so many layers of clashing accents that she looked more like a mummer than a sophisticated Dama of a Celestial court. She cleared the canvas with a damp, gray washcloth and began anew, limiting herself to a thin foundation that matched her natural tone and a dash of blush along her cheekbones topped with a light dusting of powdered gilt. At last, she applied a dark purple accent to her eyelashes with an absurdly tiny brush before packing the rest of the ointments away.

  The first warm colors of the approaching sunset crept into the chamber through her lancet window. Effie contemplated dangling the call skirt just for a chance to speak with one of the Avian servants, but she wasn’t sure how a Dove might react to having its time wasted to satisfy her peasant curiosity.

  She could always sleep. The canopy bed didn’t look any less inviting than it had upon arrival. If she allowed herself to recline across that downy quilt, she suspected she’d not be long for this world, but with so many new things to experience, unconsciousness seemed like a terrible waste. She drummed her clean nails atop the vanity, and her eyes finally settled on the door.

  She saw her own mischievous smirk in the looking glass.

  Effie stepped into a pair of soft white slippers and crept across the room. She half-expected to find the entrance locked, confirming her chamber for a prison in truth, but the crystal doorknob turned easily in her palm, and the door swung silently open on its oiled hinge.

  Resist the urge to wander, Dagda had said.

  If she meant it, perhaps she should have been more forthcoming. Insolence had served Effie well enough to this point. In fact, her oppositional temperament seemed to be among her most virtuous traits.

  She stepped out of the chamber and began to climb the Twin Spire.

  Dagda mentioned other important guests in the tower, but Effie saw no one as she circled the spiral steps. She passed more closed doors—even pressed her ear to a few—but heard nothing to indicate the presence of another resident. She’d nearly reached the top of the spire when she came upon another door left slightly ajar. She pushed the door a few more inches. With no protests forthcoming, she let herself inside.

  The chamber was set up much like her own, with a wide canopy bed and a tiled bathing suite, but this one showed more signs of prolonged habitation—a pile of discarded laundry at the foot of the bed and a line of open tinctures next to the sink. She pushed deeper into the chamber and gawked at its bizarre decor.

  Wide sheets of canvas defaced with charcoal scrawl covered every inch of the walls and much of the marble floor. A canted drafting table occupied the space where Effie’s vanity stood. In its open drawers, Effie spied a set of complex measuring tools and charcoal pencils of varied widths. A fresh canvas lay unfurled across the desktop with the first tentative scribbles already adorning its edge. Effie picked up a metal compass and pressed its sharp tip against the pad of her finger, just on the verge of drawing blood.

  Based on the furnishings, she might have assumed the chamber belonged to some court portraitist, or else a visiting artist of royal renown, but the charcoal drawings plastering the room looked nothing like court portraits nor works of expensive art. The wild scribblings seemed almost directionless—overlapping clusters of chaotic lines, simultaneously precise and illegible, as if the artist layered several designs on top of one another, obscuring any clear impression a viewer might hope to glean. Effie had seen abstract paintings before, but even those esoteric works at least possessed some semblance of internal consistency. There was no beauty in these drawings—no subtle craft to appreciate nor suggestions of interpretative form. On the contrary, the artist responsible for these drawings seemed almost at war with his creations. With so many scribblings haphazardly pinned to the walls, the chamber looked less like the den of some brilliant aesthetician and more like how she imagined the lunatic colony on Lonely Spur.

  The works fascinated Effie as much as they appalled her. She drifted around the room, tracking this disturbed individual’s descent into madness through each charcoal stroke. So taken with morbid curiosity, she nearly forgot she was trespassing until a yelp from the doorway reminded her.

  “I—I’m sorry.” Effie whipped around with one hand clutching her lace bodice.

  She expected to find a disheveled madman standing in the door, but instead her eyes landed on a boy in a Patrician uniform with brass buttons undone. The open jacket hung from narrow shoulders incapable of filling its bust. He looked just as shocked as she felt and twice as terrified.

  “Who are you?” The boy’s tenor voice quailed with an adolescent crackle. “What are you doing in my room?”

  “I didn’t mean to intrude,” Effie said. “I got a little lost on the way back to my chamber—and I found the door ajar.”

  He held his guarded expression, still skeptical. Effie extended her hands in peace, hoping to calm him, but when she took a step toward him, the boy shrunk away.

  “I’m not going to bite.” Effie tried to affect an innocuous smile. “I’m Effie Strait. From Volturnus.”

  The boy’s brown eyes narrowed as he watched her from his defensible position in the doorway. “You shouldn’t be in here,” he said.

  “No, I shouldn’t,” Effie agreed, holding her smile firmly in place. She let her eyes wander the room again. “I didn’t mean to snoop, but I was intrigued by your artwork. You made these yourself?”

  His posture softened at the compliment. He took his first tentative steps inside the room. “They aren’t art,” he corrected, though he didn’t sound like he took any offense. “And you don’t have to pretend you like them. I know what they look like.”

  Effie nodded. “If not artwork, then what are they?”

  The boy stepped around Effie, moving toward a small crate next to his bedside table that held another set of canvas sheets furled up and bound with twine. He counted the bound canvases twice and rearranged them before turning back to her.

  “They’re maps,” he said, and Effie recognized the glint in his eye for boyish pride. “I’m a cartographer.”

  Effie fought the urge to giggle. She didn’t want him to think she was mocking him. Instead, she walked up to one of the largest and most frenetic drawings tacked to the wall and scanned it, tapping one finger across her lips. The boy didn’t seem like a lunatic, but she had a hard time imagining any sane sailor mistaking this madness for a map. She turned to the boy and folded her arms across the bodice of her dress. “You seem a little young for a cartographer.”

  He blushed. “And you seem a little overdressed for a trespasser.”

  Effie did laugh then. She batted her painted eyelashes, introducing even more color to the boy’s smooth cheeks. She found herself quickly warming to the boy, and realized it was because he reminded her of Kai. Not the confident, hard-bodied flier he’d become, but the gangly sidekick he’d once been—back when she could still look down her nose and see the top of his sandy head. This self-styled cartographer couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen, but then again, boys always seemed younger than they were.

  “What’s your name?” Effie asked.

  “Imerigo Vinson,” he said. “From the Isle of Myin.”

  “Well, Imerigo Vinson from the Isle of Myin—it looks like we’ll be sharing the Twin Spire for a time, though no one will tell me how much. I’m just six floors down if you’re ever looking for company.”

  His eyes brightened at the suggestion, but the moment was fleeting. His face quickly turned down to the floor. “I’m not supposed to bother any of the other guests…”

  Effie laughed again, and the pleasant sound drew his attention back from the floor. She winked at him. “Neither am I.”

  “Ah-hem.”

  Both Effie and Imerigo jumped at the sound of a third voice creeping in from the doorway. One of Kelestina’s liveried servants hovered there, looking pointedly displeased.

  “I didn’t invite her!” Imerigo sputtered. “She was here when I came back from the yard!”

  The footman glowered at Effie. “This way please, Miss Strait.” It sounded more like a command than a request. “I’ll show you back to your room.”

  Effie flashed the footman an unapologetic smile before turning back to Imerigo and curtsying with the wide silhouette of her light blue dress. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Master Vinson.”

  He smiled weakly as she turned back to the waiting servant at the door. The footman’s stern gaze lingered on Imerigo as she strode out of the room. He followed Effie in silent reprimand all the way back to her chamber door.

  “We do ask that you refrain from disturbing Master Vinson,” the footman said as Effie flopped onto her bed. “His work is very important to our host.”

  Effie pulled off her slippers and tapped a mock salute across her bodice lace. “Message received.”

  The footman performed a stiff bow and left, closing the door behind him.

  3

  VANNA

  Vanna struggled to extricate herself from the gathering after the Ascension. The rest of the islanders began sorting into social circles for the valedictory feast, but Vanna swam against their current. She needed to be somewhere else. It didn't matter where, as long as it was elsewhere. Away. Her bruised ribs complained with every breath, but she continued to fight the crowd until she finally broke free.

  Bael had vanished just as surreptitiously as he appeared. The mere fact that he was somewhere on Volturnus made Vanna feel terribly exposed, but even that vulnerability seemed secondary to this fevered urge to escape. She slipped through the line of covered wagons clustered around the jungle’s edge and entered a torrid sprint.

  With the sounds of the feast receding behind her, Vanna began to cry. She tried to outrun the tears, but the agony outpaced her. She burst through the tree line at the other end of the jungle and collapsed to her knees on the open road, sobbing uncontrollably.

  If only Effie had warned her. If only she’d confided her plans. Vanna could have steeled herself against this moment. She would have been better prepared!

  Effie didn’t confide in her. Her sister knew better than to betray her wild intentions. Vanna would only have tried to stop her, and Effie never let anyone stand in her way.

  Vanna turned her head to the sky and screamed.

  She felt robbed.

  She didn’t begrudge Effie her secrets or her triumph, but she resented how abruptly her sister had taken herself away. It wasn’t fair—not to either one of them. Circumstance had robbed them of the chance to say goodbye, and now Vanna had to face the rest of her life on Volturnus alone.

  Concerned her cries might draw unwanted attention from the cliffs, Vanna collected herself and drove a hard pace to cover the lonely miles back to her empty home.

  She slammed the cottage door behind her and drifted toward Effie’s room.

  The bedroom was just as she’d left it—the covers turned down and the curtains drawn. Vanna felt her eyes burning again as she scanned her sister’s abandoned effects—an empty bowl; the small stack of books piled atop her nightstand; the foggy looking glass mounted to her wall. She fingered a dark cosmetic pencil beneath the looking glass, then walked over to inspect the short row of linen shirts and knee-length dresses clustered beyond Effie’s closet door. The Avernian gown she’d bought for her sister hung untouched from a wire clip, a dozen seamstress pins still holding its shape for display.

  Vanna shut the closet and fell back on her sister’s well-kept bed. As she sunk into the pillows, she smelled floral remnants of the lilac crush Effie used to fragrance her hair. How long would it linger? Days, perhaps—but not weeks. Her sister’s ghost still haunted this space, but it was a thin presence, all too easily exorcized by no ritual more ardent than the passage of time.

  It had been the same with their parents so many years ago, but their parents were dead in truth and Effie was only gone. Somehow, that made the longing more fervid.

  At least Effie would be happy—or so Vanna hoped. She’d proven her doubters wrong. She’d be a Pilot now. She’d bond a Leviathan and fly the Eight Skies of Ciel. It was everything she’d ever wanted.

  A chill prickled on Vanna’s skin as the setting sun slipped beneath her sister’s windowsill. She wondered dreamily if Effie watched that same sunset in the distant Aquilonian sky. Emotionally drained and still exhausted by her injuries, Vanna felt her eyelids flutter as she drifted toward a shallow sleep.

  In that liminal space between waking and dream, she saw Effie standing in cruciform atop a floating dauphine. The triumphant image melted into Bael’s mustachioed face, and Vanna moaned softly. His foreign voice cloyed at her unconscious mind.

  That’s not going to be good for her…

  A warning, perhaps. Or else, a poisonous lie…

  Vanna wasn’t sure how long she slept before the sound of heavy fists pounding against the cottage door woke her with a start. She jerked upright, heart thumping. She crept out of Effie’s room, alert from the shock. The knocking continued.

  “Open up, Vanna. It’s Kendy. Let me in. We need to speak.”

  Jokai fend… Now agitated, Vanna ripped open the door. “Balls of the deep,” she cursed. “What time is it?”

  Kendy walked past her without invitation. Jaffe, Seulin, and Kai followed behind, looking sober. Kai, at least, had the humility to flash a weak smile and an apologetic nod as he passed.

  “Did you know?” Kendy asked, his blue eyes frigid as he glowered back from inside her own home.

  “Excuse me?” Vanna felt her hands twitching into fists.

  “Did you know what your sister was planning?” he clarified.

  “Of course, I didn’t know!”

  Jaffe and Seulin joined their commander at his side. Kai lingered a step behind, red with embarrassment. “She could have been killed,” Kendy admonished.