Cress

This was just a woman with an invitation to the royal wedding. This was just another task to cross off the list.

“Yes?” said Adri, skeptical gaze swooping over her.

Cinder-the-Palace-Official bowed. “Good morning. Is Linh Adri-jiĕ at home?”

“I am Linh Adri.”

“A pleasure. I apologize for disturbing you at such an early hour,” said Cinder, launching into her practiced speech. “I am a member of the royal wedding planning committee, and I understand you were promised two invitations to the nuptials between His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Kaito, and Her Lunar Majesty, Queen Levana. As you are one of our distinguished civilian guests, I am honored to personally deliver your invitations for tonight’s ceremony.”

She held out two pieces of paper—in reality, disposable napkin scraps, but to Adri’s eye, two finely crafted, hand-pressed paper envelopes.

At least, she hoped that’s what Adri was seeing. The closest Cinder had yet to come to changing the perception of an inanimate object was her own prosthetic hand, and she wasn’t sure if that counted.

Adri frowned at the napkins, but it quickly turned into a patient smile. No doubt because she now believed she was talking to someone from the palace. “There must be some mistake,” she said. “We received our invitations last week.”

Cinder feigned surprise and withdrew the napkins. “How peculiar. Would you mind if I took a look at those invitations? So I can make sure some mishap hasn’t occurred?”

Adri’s grin tightened, but she stepped aside and ushered Cinder into the apartment. “Of course, please come in. Can I offer you some tea?”

“Thank you, no. We’ll just clear up this confusion and I won’t intrude anymore on your time.” She followed Adri into the living room.

“I must apologize for the heat,” said Adri, grabbing a fan off a small side table and flicking it before her face. “The air has been broken for a week now and the maintenance here is completely incompetent. I used to have a servant to assist with these things, a cyborg ward my husband took in, but—well. It doesn’t matter now. Good riddance.”

Cinder bristled. Servant? But she ignored the comment as her gaze traveled over the room. It hadn’t changed much, with the exception of the items displayed on the mantel of the holographic fireplace. Belongings that had held such prominent position before—Linh Garan’s award plaques and alternating digital photos of Pearl and Peony—had been crammed together at the mantel’s far edge. Now, at its center, stood a beautiful porcelain jar, painted with pink and white peonies and set atop a carved mahogany base.

Cinder sucked in a breath.

Not a jar. An urn. A cremation urn.

Her mouth went dry. She heard Adri padding across the living room, but her focus was pinned to that urn, and what—who—would be inside it.

Of their own accord, her feet began to move toward the mantel and Peony’s remains. Her funeral had come and gone and Cinder had not been there. Adri and Pearl had wept. Had no doubt invited every person from Peony’s classes, every person from this apartment building, every distant relative who had barely known her, who had probably griped about having to send the expected sympathy card and flowers.

But Cinder hadn’t been there.

“My daughter,” said Adri.

Cinder gasped and pulled away. She hadn’t realized that her fingers were brushing against a painted flower until Adri had spoken.

“Gone only recently, of letumosis,” Adri continued, as if Cinder had asked. “She was only fourteen.” There was sadness in her voice, true sadness. It was perhaps the one thing they had ever had in common.

“I’m sorry,” Cinder whispered, grateful that in her distraction, some instinct had maintained her glamour. She forced herself to focus before her eyes started trying to make tears. They would fail—she was incapable of crying—but the effort sometimes gave her a headache that wouldn’t go away for hours, and now was not the time for mourning. She had a wedding to stop.

“Do you have children?” Adri asked.

“Er … no. I don’t,” said Cinder, having no idea if the palace official she was impersonating did or not.

“I have one other daughter—seventeen years old. It was not very long ago that all I could think of was finding her a nice, wealthy husband. Daughters are expensive, you know, and a mother wants to give them everything. But now, I can’t stand the thought of her leaving me too.” She sighed and tore her gaze away from the urn. “But listen to me, carrying on, when you must have so many other places to be today. Here are the invitations we received.”

Cinder took them carefully, glad to change the subject. Now that she was seeing a real invitation up close, she changed the glamour she’d made up for the napkins. The paper was a little stiffer, slightly more ivory, with gold, embossed letters in a flourishing script on one side and traditional second-era kanji on the other.