Nothing stared between them. The hairs on her neck tingled, and she shivered down her spine. Witches made her nervous because their sigils and familiars connected them to the aether, the windy layers of magic surrounding the world. They could hear the warnings of spirits and the laughter of demons—and Nothing could too. She’d worked to hide her sensitivities because Kirin had told her she must if she did not wish to be forced into a witch’s life. The priests of the palace left her alone, being concerned with philosophy, gods, and the occasional ghost, but the witches: they suspected she was more than she seemed.
“I have not a single thing to say,” Nothing said. She tilted her chin up, imagining Kirin’s easy arrogance. “It is not my fault you did not see what was obvious to me.”
Aya narrowed her eyes; Leaf laughed.
“We see you,” Leaf said, “even when the rest of the court has forgotten you are anything but a slip of a girl the prince has taken for a pet.”
“Nobody will forget you after today,” Aya said softly, relishing the words.
Nothing pushed past them. She hated that they were right.
The aether-eyes of the raven familiars remained on her back as she walked silently away. Nothing felt their cold gazes tickling at the base of her skull.
The Lily Garden bubbled off the inner wall of the fifth circle of the palace. This was a small garden, as palace gardens went, shaped like an eye: it curved in a teardrop against the wall, the round head home to an equally round pond, the tail narrowing gently in a path trellised by hanging sunset lilies. Concentric beds of various types of lily circled the pond, creamy and white and the fairest blushing pink. Climbing star lilies graced the red-washed walls. Though the garden was rarely empty at this time of day, the uproar in the palace had cleared it for her now. Nothing headed straight to the pond, tucking herself against the short lip between two red-glazed pots of cluster lilies. She sighed and closed her eyes, breathing deep of the comforting air this near to the ground. Still water, moss, cloying floral perfume, and the sweet, persistent smell of rot.
It was into this garden that Nothing had been born.
Oh, not literally, but here she’d been discovered as a baby, the week of the spring turn, swaddled in light-green silk embroidered with a flower none could name. The same flower shape was burned into her tiny sand-white chest like a brand.
Sometimes the scar ached, and she put cold water against it; other times it throbbed and the only relief to be found was bringing it nearer to heat.
That was a detail she’d never told anyone but Kirin. He said she was a Queen of Heaven reborn, with a fire spirit for a heart, though such things were impossible. Spirits had no flesh—they were shards of aether. Demons were dead spirits and could only possess and steal energy from their houses.
Though no woman claimed to have borne her, and none could be discovered, Nothing had been raised with the babes of the court until she was old enough to slip into the walls and smoke ways. Then she’d met Kirin, and being his friend was enough to ground her here, despite uncertainty, despite having an impossible name and no other place.
The great demon of the palace, that one time Nothing had asked who she was, shrugged deeply enough to crack plaster off the walls in the empress’s bathhouse and said, I don’t mind you are here.
Which was hardly an answer, but the best it would give.
“Where are you, Kirin?” she whispered.
A splash in the pond answered her. Nothing blinked and did not move. The splash was followed by the swish of water as a small tail waved across its surface and a dragon-lily spirit drifted toward her side of the pond.
Dragon lilies were elegant and occasionally grotesque if not sculpted by a master gardener. From their heart-shaped leaf pads, their stalks rose in a curve like the sinuous shape of a dragon, and their white flower faces spread like whiskers, with one heavy petal dropped open like a gaping dragon’s maw to reveal blister-pink stamen. This dragon-lily spirit’s head mirrored the shape of its flower, with eyes just as blister-pink as the stamen that flickered with simple thought, and of course it was a flower spirit, not a dragon, but every time a gardener mentioned its name, the spirit latched on to the power in the word for dragon and puffed a slight bit larger, a slight bit brighter, until it had chased the other species of lily spirits from the garden. It did not mind Nothing hiding here, naturally, because Nothing was no competition.
“You smell like tears,” it said.
Nothing tilted her face to show the round curve of her cheek, and the spirit licked her tearstains with a tongue softer than petals.
This spirit was one of Nothing’s only friends. She had a few because once Kirin had told her it was safe to make them, so long as she never loved any more than she loved him. So she didn’t.
The Day the Sky Opened was not Nothing’s friend, though they knew each other better than most.
Her nonhuman friends included this dragon-lily spirit, the great demon of the palace who liked the tickle of Nothing’s fingers and toes as she climbed and slipped through the smoke ways, and three dawn sprites who hovered in the window of the Second Consort’s changing room. Nothing fed them tiny crystals of honey the color of Kirin’s eyes on every Peaceday.
Beyond that, Nothing considered only Whisper, the youngest tailor in the palace, to be her friend. A small list, but a dear one.
So small that it might never recover should she lose Kirin forever.
Another tear slid down her cheek as Nothing contemplated a life without him. It made her feel empty. As if she did not know what to be without Kirin telling her. She’d only managed this summer by knowing he would return. Without that certainty, she worried she’d fade away. A bad state of affairs, she knew, but it was simply the way of her heart.
“Other side?” asked the dragon-lily spirit, and Nothing lifted her chin so it could slither across her collar to her other shoulder and lick her left cheek. It curled there, a skinny white-and-green wisp of light, nuzzling her, quite hidden by the fall of her loose hair.
Nothing was a pretty girl, neither beautiful nor remarkably otherwise, with cool sand-white skin too dull in tone to be considered a bold contrast to anything, half-moon brown eyes with short lashes, round cheeks, and a mouth that might’ve been charming if it did not rest in a flat line most of the time. Her hair was thick, unevenly black-brown, and haphazardly wavy—she could have straightened it with little effort and dyed it for vivid contrast, but she preferred to remain unremarkable. She cut it herself, and the ends were ragged as a result. She did not maintain proper bangs as had been in fashion for girls this past year. Nothing was considered helplessly unfashionable by the consorts, when they considered her at all, but Kirin had always defended her fundamentally blurry nature by telling his father that a perfect prince such as himself could only truly find contrast with an accessory like Nothing. The First Consort had replied that Kirin was appallingly rude sometimes, even for a prince, and Nothing only sank lower in her bow. Kirin had saved her from explaining to his father the truth about why she’d ruined her hair: Someone told her when she was very small that her mother must have touched the black fringe around her baby face, and so Nothing believed the ends of her hair were all of her mother that remained. She’d refused to cut it and worn it in plain looping braids with the ends trailing against her jaw so when she moved, they brushed her in a soft maternal caress. At thirteen, in fury at some fault she could not remember, though likely Kirin did, Nothing braided it all into a thick rope and hacked it off. A weight had lifted from her. With the ends, she’d made two bracelets: one for herself and one for Kirin Dark-Smile. The imposter had not been wearing it.