Winter's Ball by Giselle Ava (ebook e reader .TXT) 📗

of apple juice. Mikka stood up on the tips of his paws. “That boy in the red coat has been ogling you for the last fifteen minutes. Would you like me to accidentally scratch his eye out?”

“I see him,” Sarina said, blushing. The boy was Lord Petro, from Takh, the terrible place about two days south where they produced a lot of coal, which made them very wealthy, especially come wintertime, enough to make up for the other three seasons.

Lord Petro blushed and hid from sight.

“I can be very clumsy, you know,” Mikka said.

“Gouging out an innocent boy’s eyes?” Sarina said.

Mikka purred sadly into his wine as he took a sip and then rested the empty glass on the closed, grand piano beside them. “I’m going to grab some more of those cakes,” he said, already three steps away from her. He spun around, paws sliding on the carpet, and she met his large, yellow eyes. “Can I get you anything, Sarina?”

“I’m going to go dance,” she said.

Mikka smiled and left.

She saw her brother slip off with some very pretty northern girl at around nine forty, as that was when the dinner bell rang and the cooks came out with a hand-picked spread of food, which filled the entire chamber with wonderful smells. Mother didn’t like him slipping off into the secluded castle depths with girls he had just met but Sarina wasn’t a dobbing spy—well, she was a spy but she wasn’t the “dobbing” part of it.

At three minutes to ten, she was strolling through the lavish halls, skipping across the rich velvet carpet and narrowly avoiding the ire of other mingling guests: tall, strong men from Salar, beautiful women in incredible ball gowns, the hems of which billowed out across the floor. There were fancy, conical wine glasses in hands. Glossed-up lips spreading gossip: news from the east (they finally caught Marci the Pumpkin Witch) and news from the north (a new queen sits on the throne and she just gave birth to triplets).

Tasha was running through the halls as she often did, with far too much energy for Sarina to ever keep up with her. Her blonde pigtails flew out behind her head, which she on-the-record hated, but her mother—who was Lavus City’s notorious gossip queen, Lady Galan Vasil—insisted that they be done that way in respect to something “interesting and historical.”

“Hey—” Sarina began, but Tasha was gone.

What do I expect? Sarina thought to herself as she watched Tasha disappear, stumbling into several other guests on her way through the castle corridors. It was difficult to make friends in the court of Lavus. She got along passably with Lady Stanvoith’s two daughters, twins, Abi and Mari, and she was close with Cloe, but Cloe had fallen abruptly sick and had not been in Lavus since last winter. The illness was bad was all Sarina knew.

But she didn’t need many friends, especially on the winter’s ball. The energy in every single corridor, every single room, was incredible. Expensive furnishings shone with candlelight and re-reflected expensive jewelry. A thousand scents from a thousand different parts of the world filled every room she entered and she breathed it all in, exhilarated.

At around eighteen minutes past ten, going off the little pocket watch her father had procured for her twelfth birthday (“A lady must be punctual”), which always reverted to being about one minute too slow, a couple of low voices led her into the off-limits library with its impressive bookshelves and artful paintings.

She gently closed the door behind her. She wasn’t exactly sure what brought her there besides the natural curiosity of a twelve-year-old girl, but she knew she wasn’t allowed. The library was off-limits during the winter’s ball, and always off-limits to visitors from beyond the city. Sarina didn’t know why, unless it was to prevent theft and damages. Ancient books lined the shelves from top to bottom, with ladders on rails providing access to the very heights. The ceiling was one giant glass mural of a queen and a rose, ivory horses and blue skies. She instinctively looked up at it as she entered and lightly tiptoed towards the voices.

She hid behind one of the shelves and peered out from around it. Two people stood in the centre of the room. One of them was her mother, in a beautiful blue gown with golden hems, her chestnut brown hair curled and resting on her shoulders in two parts.

The other was a man...with no eyes.

The man with no eyes wore an expensive dress suit, the attire of another lord, though she had definitely not seen him before. He had no hair except the hair on his eyebrows, which were thin—as though carefully trimmed. Very nice eyebrows, actually.

The only way she could describe his eyes was that they were simply non-existent: hollowed out eye sockets covered by small black circular glasses, and if you looked at him from a certain angle, you could see his empty eye sockets, and she shivered intensely.

The man stood alarmingly close to her mother, speaking in a low voice.

Sarina crept closer, darting from one bookshelf to another, her steps not completely light or skillful, but muffled by the soft turquoise carpet nonetheless. Her ear grazed the books on the shelf. She felt the woody grain of the pages, smelt the age on them, the smells of another time and another place. And through the books she heard his voice.

“—your guards are dead.”

Her heart was beating so fast it hurt and yet she couldn’t move from that spot, partly out of fear of being spotted and partly because she knew that, in doing so, she would leave her mother there and she could never do that. So she stayed. She shut her eyes, turning off her other senses to hear them better. Her mother’s voice was quieter than usual.

“The west will not stand for this.”

The man lowered his voice. Sarina opened her eyes. Through a gap between the books, she watched him lean in closer. His