Page 63 of The Court of Venus

It nearly tore me apart to hear them again.

Kitty leaned against the door and pressed her ear against the wood. “—your father’s consent!” Prospero was hissing.

There was the thrust of a body against stone. Hal’s curse.

“Find your reason. Find it! You were your father’s legacy before you ever were a man. We are all extensions of his will, you most of all.” Prospero made an exasperated sound. “You, my boy, must have restraint where he has only sensibilities.”

“Ah, yes,” Hal said bitterly. “Grow old as my father is allowed to remain a child forever.”

“But you will grow into a better king than he is. You are right. He is stunted. A boy still.”

Though I couldn’t see Hal’s face, I knew it must be twisted from the way he spat his words out. “What if a good king is simply the advisors who stand beside him?”

“A threat?”

“A reminder.”

Another shove, and one set of footsteps stormed away.

I was lifted from the memory as Kitty concluded, “The next morning he was dead. Curious, is it not?”

“Prospero is not a suspect,” I snapped, forgetting the pretense of Roland’s charm.

She smiled coyly. “A suspect for what, exactly? I’ve come to no conclusions myself.” Her eyes lit up again, her lips parted. I was embarrassed by the lust pointed directly and falsely at me.

“What conclusions have you come to?”

“Well, I only thought that if the king had sworn Hal into his privy council, he wanted to give him more responsibility. And I suppose when one is given power, it must be taken from someone else. I don’t suppose that person would have been very happy about it. Especially if he knew the prince would choose someone else to be his magician and lord chancellor when he ascended the throne. You, perhaps. Or the other one. The Moonborn.” She shrugged. “But these are just my silly little thoughts.”

“Prospero would never. He—” My voice died. He was searching for immortality. For the king, or for his own assurance?

No. How easily I’d point a finger at him, the man who saw the quick step of my young mind and taught it how to run. And Prospero loved Hal, had rung the bells himself to announce his birth. He taught us to be powerful magicians, but he taught Hal to be king.

“What of Fulke Roet?” I asked.

“What about Fulke?”

“Where was he that morning?”

“Well…” I’d noticed how often she began her stories with well and then paused, as if to stifle her eagerness. “Presumably, he was asleep. He liked Hal well enough. You were the one he always despised. His poor—” She broke off, peered up at me. “Roland, your eyes are strange.”

My gaze snapped to the window.

The sky was black.

No Moon tonight.

Fifteen

It is impossible to know how often magicians are struck on the anvil of the sky. There is no discernable pattern. Yet magicians ruled by the two luminaries, the Sun and the Moon, are by far the rarest, followed closely by those of Saturn. The Moon has had no recorded births* and the Sun has had three in the past century of recordkeeping.

*Amendment: one recorded birth

—PROSPERO THE ALL-KNOWING, THE CELESTIAL BODIES

The first time I was ripped from my magic, the sky outside was a blank, cruel face. It must have happened each month since I was born, but I didn’t understand it until I was five, six, seven, when I’d begun experimenting with transformation, turning into a mouse or cat to hide from my father.

Each month, all the emotions in the inn—those nails against my skull—suddenly, gone. The world was quiet. I did not know anger or boredom or fear. I had to read facial expressions like everyone else, knowing what was shown was not necessarily what was felt. For how many times had I smiled sweetly while my fury thrashed inside of me?