“Probably.”
Content to follow Rolan’s lead, Nick speared through the crowd to a wall of glass doors thrown wide along one side of the ballroom. His brother was right. The sparkle of Lyd’s smile rivaled the gilded chandeliers and gleaming architectural flourishes of the venue. Her green balloon skirt swished as bright as an emerald among the throng of tribesmen and women outfitted in ceremonial black. Her laughter rang out as a happy counterpoint to the sedate music of the orchestra hired for the event.
The tribes didn’t trust humans. Many still believed humans were an inferior species.
They nonetheless adored Lydia Whatney. As much as the tribes had embraced Nick, they loved her more. Nick was certain of it and equally positive, if Lyd decided her best friend should be honored with a commemorative coin, Nick would carry one in his likeness in his pockets before long. He squinted at her. “Is she dancing with Benjic?”
“Who the hell knows.” Rolan tugged him. “C’mon. Let’s get while the getting is good.”
An annex of the Winter Palace, the ballroom spilled out to a terrace skirting a formal garden. Despite the cooler temperatures of autumn, partygoers collected in groups near the building, so Rolan guided him into the surrounding greenery. Towering redwoods soon blotted out the stars, gravel paths winding between the enormous trees and occasionally threading through arches carved into the trunks. White flowers bloomed in the darkness alongside fronds of silvery leaves. The Winter Palace’s moon garden of flora specially selected for night viewing nestled among statuary, marble benches, and fountains. Wineglasses with dainty stems abandoned by the party’s revelers dotted the landscape. As Nick and Rolan retreated deeper into the forest, they passed a pair of neatly folded tuxedoes—at least two of the tribe had elected to roam the imperial grounds in their animal forms.
Nick had toured the palace earlier, most of which had been remodeled for government use and was therefore open to the public, but the ballroom and famous gardens had remained closed, used only for the grandest of state events.
The minders that the elder council had appointed for Nick, Rolan, and Lydia had not offered to show Nick the imperial suite that had been his home every winter of his first seven years, and he hadn’t asked to see it. The rooms had been stripped after the rebels had captured them. Nick had read newspaper accounts of the pillaging as a college student. Why they’d torn his family’s private rooms apart he couldn’t say since the furnishings in their personal quarters had been sturdy, serviceable pieces, the art and decorations scant. Eton and Olina accepted finery in the rest of the palace as their due, and necessary, but outside the public eye, they’d preferred to live simply. The peasantry had still ransacked the imperial suite, prying up the floorboards and punching holes in the walls in search of hidden loot. The damage had been so severe, perhaps the rebels had sealed off the rooms rather than make repairs. Just bolted the doors shut.
After the war, the tribes had shuttered away anything hinting at the disgraceful and criminal treatment his family had suffered after they’d surrendered.
Except Nick.
They couldn’t close the door on him.
“Here,” he said, taking the trail to the right when the path forked.
As a boy, his parents had seldom permitted him access to the moon garden or the grand ballroom, but like all the other emperor’s isolated children, Nika had learned his way from the family’s private rooms to an overlook from which the gallant opulence of parties and festivals could be observed in secret.
“Through the bushes,” he said over his shoulder to Rolan as he plowed into a berry thicket that seemed vaguely familiar.
“Ow. Damn it, Nick. Wait!”
Nick couldn’t. Excitement zipped through him, prodding him from a hurried walk to a jog, then to a sprint through the undergrowth. He ignored the thorns and briars snagging his clothes and pricking his skin. Unimportant. The trail he and his siblings had forged twenty years ago had faded, overtaken by wild brambles and low vines threatening to trip him in his haste, but Nick would not slow. Although the grand ballroom had been faithfully restored to its former elegance, Nika Marisek had been inside it very little. None of that part of the palace was recognizable to him barring pictures he’d seen in books.
This stretch of unmanicured forest had been an intimate friend to him, though, and a regular haunt for his brothers and sisters alongside him.
This, he knew.
Ignoring Rolan’s loud curses, Nick ran. He nimbly jumped a fallen tree limb, the trunk to his left as massive as a house. The wood had splintered since the last time he’d leapt through the tangle of branches, the stringy fibrous bark sloughing away in the intervening years as woodland creatures reclaimed the trunk for their own. Memory guided Nick through the mess, and when he emerged on the other side, he turned right—back toward the ballroom annex. He almost lost the path. Lush, fertile growth had filled in this area of the palace grounds, and without the imperial children’s feet beating down the brush, evidence of the trail had disappeared. None would discover it, unless they knew where to search.
Heart thumping a glad staccato, Nick raced to the copse of trees he’d known as a child and, upon reaching it, he collapsed upon a flat thigh-high boulder that had provided prime seating frequently fought over by the emperor’s children. His fingers relearned the shallow dips and grooves in the rock, now covered with a thin carpet of moss.
Directly ahead, the lights of the ballroom glittered like a jewel.
How many nights had Nika and his sisters watched the pageantry from afar? The dark formalwear of the rich contrasted with the brightness of the venue, making it easy to distinguish nobles from wealthy commoners who, forbidden from wearing black, had traditionally opted for somber grays and midnight blues. That much had changed. The peasantry hadn’t been barred from black clothing since the revolution and wore it in abundance now. Nick spotted little else in the milling crowd on the terraces and inside.
Barring Lyd’s voluminous green dress, of course. Even at this distance, she was a vibrant and welcome splash of color. Nick imagined many tribeswomen studying his best friend while others glared with envy at her. Perhaps Lyd would launch a new trend and the fashion for unrelentingly dark clothes more suitable for funerals and mourning would finally subside in the capitol.
“You shouldn’t leave me behind.” Rolan broke through the curtain of vines behind Nick with a clatter that would have warranted warning murmurs for quiet from the imperial children not many winters ago. “Any one of them could be roaming around these woods—wow.”