Petra wrapped her fingers around the hilt of her invisible rapier. She knew what it was like to be at the mercy of a ruler’s whim. But would she defend Neel, if it meant shattering her hopes that the Vatra could offer a cure for her father? Would she and Tomik share Neel’s fate, whatever fate it was that waited for him in the queen’s reception hall?
Before she could begin to answer these questions, the tunnel opened into a vast chamber. Arcades of windows were cut into the walls, and the night breeze poured in, guttering the torches. Petra could see that each of the room’s four walls was painted a different color.
“Every wall represents a Roma tribe,” Treb explained. “Green for the Maraki, red for the Ursari, yellow for the Lovari, and blue—”
“For the Kalderash,” Neel muttered as they walked slowly, now side by side, toward the three people seated in front of the blue wall.
Petra had never seen someone who had only weeks, maybe days, to live. But even the quickest glance was enough to tell that Queen Iona was fighting death tooth and nail. The enthroned woman’s hair was thin and lank, her nose a sharp beak in a sunken face. Iona had four things that glittered: she gripped a golden scepter in her bony hand, a sapphire earring shone on her right ear, and her eyes, too, were as bright as jewels.
“Ma!” Neel shouted, and rushed toward the woman seated to the queen’s left. For a moment, it seemed like Damara would pull him onto her lap as if he were still a small boy, but then she stood and simply rested a hand on his shoulder.
Treb stepped forward to greet the man to the queen’s right. Though shorter than the captain, the man resembled Treb so much that Petra knew this was Tarn, whose face was not as merry as his younger brother’s.
“Something really is wrong,” Tomik whispered.
“Yes,” Arun said shortly, and left them to stand by his queen.
Astrophil urged Petra to approach the throne. There is something unusual about Queen Iona’s eyes, he said.
Petra had seen many Roma, and they all had eyes whose color was somewhere between brown and black—except for Neel. His irises were yellow flecked with green, like autumn leaves with only a few drops of summer left.
Queen Iona looked at Petra with those very same eyes. The scepter dropped from the queen’s weak hand, and an unseen force caught it before it could clatter against the floor. The queen had not moved, yet there was the scepter, secure again in her grasp.
She has the gift of Danior’s Fingers, said Astrophil.
Petra’s brain felt like a machine. Pieces clicked into place and her thoughts were spinning, whirring, driving toward a realization. She gazed at the jewel on Queen Iona’s ear and remembered Neel’s older sister telling her, in the dark dormitory of Salamander Castle, that Neel’s full name meant “sapphire.” Sadie’s voice drifted through Petra’s memory, explaining how her brother had been adopted as a baby:
Nobody wanted to take him at first, especially because he had no token around his neck.
Token? Petra had asked.
A string. Or a bit of leather with a ring or a stone on it. Anything, really, that means that a father has acknowledged a child as his. Neel was just wrapped up in a blue blanket, with no clothes or anything else.
The color blue had trailed after Neel all his life, and now it was staring him in the face. The blue wall framed the queen whose magical gift matched his. Although Neel had told Petra on the very first day they met that Danior’s Fingers was a talent found in every tribe, no Roma doubted that it was first and foremost a Kalderash trait.
Could Petra’s suspicion be true? She glanced at Neel and saw anxiety flare again across his taut features.
“Ma, what’s going on?” he asked Damara. “Why’re you here?”
Before she had a chance to reply, the queen opened her thin mouth. “She’s here because she is not your mother,” she rasped. “I am.”
5
The Heir
“WRONG!” SAID NEEL. “You’re dead wrong!”
“I wish I were,” said Iona. “It does seem unfitting that a dirty guttersnipe should be the Kalderash heir, but”—she studied him from top to toe, then continued in a croaking, amused voice—“at least someone tried to give you a bath.”
Damara’s eyes flashed. “Don’t insult my son.”
“I am dying,” said Iona, “and I am your queen. I will do whatever I like. Moreover, old friend, we both know full well that Indraneel is not your son.”
Petra recognized the emotion blazing across Neel’s face, because it was one that she had felt before, when she learned that her father had been transformed into a monster. It was the feeling that the known world is crumbling apart.
Damara gathered Neel into her arms, sighing. The resigned sound of that one low breath said everything. It was true.
“Neel,” she began, “this is no more than what you’ve always known: that I didn’t give birth to you.”
“It is more!” He twisted out of her embrace. “It’s a whole lot more. It’s years of mocking. ‘Neel, left by the fire, the trash baby no one wanted—’”
“I wanted you.”
“Insults and jibes like little, salty cuts. ‘Neel, the by-blow, the blackguard foundling, bastard boy—’”
“That is correct,” said the queen. “You are entirely illegitimate. Your father was no husband of mine. He died, thrown by a wild horse. You were a mistake, and had to be hidden.”
Tarn spoke for the first time. “This is a trick.”
“Kalderash sneakery,” Treb added. “A plot to steal the throne from the Maraki. When you die, dear queen, it’s rightfully ours.”
“Yes, I do wish to keep the throne for the Kalderash,” Iona acknowledged in her ruined voice. “But I am not lying. Damara will testify that this boy is my child, and few will doubt it.” She lifted her left palm, and Neel strained against unseen fingers that reached across the room to grasp his chin and turn his face from side to side, so that everyone in the room could observe the uncanny resemblance between him and the queen.
“Stop that!” Neel’s hand twitched, and Petra imagined what she could not see: his ghostly fingers swatting away the queen’s.
“Even his magical talent is proof,” said Iona. “He has the Gift of Danior’s Fingers, and of course he would. However illegitimate he may be, he is still a direct descendant of Danior.”