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

right hand went down to a hidden spot behind his back.

“None will stand at all,” he said.

There was a flash of movement and the glint of something shiny. Her mother jolted but did not fall. Neither of them moved. Sarina, growing ever more anxious, slid from her hiding place and peered around the edge of the bookshelf—

The man revealed a bloody knife, about the length of Sarina’s forearm, and jammed it back into her mother’s stomach. Her mother gasped, clinging to him. Sarina all but screamed, grabbing her mouth, as the man with no eyes slit her mother’s throat in half.

Her head fell back and she dropped.

The man with no eyes flashed a look in Sarina’s direction and she swung back behind the bookshelf, legs buckling underneath her. She fell onto the carpet, both hands grappling her twitching mouth as salty tears like blood began streaming down her cheeks. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears, drowning out the sounds around her. Her vision was going dark.

The man with no eyes left the room.

Sarina stayed there all night, wishing she could turn back time and run back into that library and scream for her mother to hide, wished for it harder than anything else. She had been so close and she had just stood there, watching it unfold.

The assassins poisoned most of the guests, including her father, and Edward. Her brother put up a fight, or so it seemed from the damages he’d left in his quarters where it happened, but they’d cut off his hand and then slashed his face so that it split open like a tulip.

Everybody else died.

Nearly everyone.

Mikka survived—something about a very specific feline immunity—and he was the one who found Sarina there in the library, and he stayed there with her all through the night.

Meanwhile, Sir Tam, her mother’s loyal guard of twenty-five years, was drunk in the castle courtyard. He would later try to hang himself in the stables, but a friendly apothecary named Yorik consoled him, and he pledged his allegiance to Sarina herself.

There was also Tasha, just two years older than Sarina, who had been knocked out in an explosion, with memory loss. Her entire family perished. There were probably other survivors, at least enough that Lavus City was able to prevail beyond that night, but the horror outweighed any flake of positivity.

And the horror was bad. The Six Knives, as they would later be known, not only killed almost every nobleman and -woman in the castle, but also those in the city. But only the nobility, as if their goal was to fundamentally dismantle Lavus City.

And all the while, twelve-year-old Sarina hid like a coward.

They never found who did it, not even one of them—but how could they? The murders were quick and ruthless, and nobody who saw them lived to speak of it.

Nobody but Sarina.

And yet she told no one.

They called it the Killing Night. There was no winter’s ball the year after, and the year after that it was a low attendance, high-security ball, and the year after that was the first one Sarina attended since the Killing Night, and she threw up three times.

The people would ask: why uphold such a marred tradition? The truth was, Sarina didn’t know. Something about not letting the bad guys win, about the spirit of Lavus prevailing even when it’s tested, about re-establishing normality. Normality was all anybody wanted.

And then it was as if the murders never happened. Lavus City reasserted itself as the crown city of the world. A new court emerged, Sarina named High Lady, Mikka her first advisor, Sir Tam her sworn protector. In no time at all, seven years had passed.

It was the last day of winter.

2: An Inconvenience

Sarina hated the winter’s ball.

“They did what to my dress!?” she snapped.

Mikka, who was lounging on the edge of her dressing table, looked up from his newspaper. “Ripped it in half, were, I believe, the words that they used.”

“They just ripped it in half, did they?”

“Well, not deliberately.”

“So I suppose I’ll walk out there naked tonight.”

“Oh no, that never ends well.”

Sarina sighed, sitting down on her bed. She’d bathed and was wearing a traditional, nondescript shirt with black pants. She unwrapped the towel from around her hair and let her dark, reddish locks fall across her shoulders. She kept her hair short, just past her shoulders, so that it dried quickly and tended to keep out of her way. The only other person in the room was Sir Tam, who stood in the corner, sword in scabbard.

“If it’s any consolation,” Mikka said, “they aren’t just going to make you walk the ballroom in that hideous thing. You will have a dress...just not your dress.”

“My mother’s dress will not fit me, Mikka.”

“You would be surprised at how many dresses she had. A few adjustments and one will fit you perfectly. We already have it picked out. It’s better that than you ordering them to fix that ruined one or make you a brand new dress from scratch. You would be working them all to death. Besides, was the new one that good anyway?”

She stared at him with dagger eyes. “Yes.”

Mikka sighed and slid off the dressing table, rolling up the newspaper into a tube and then cradling it underneath his furry, grey and white arm. He waddled up to her with those stubby little legs of his, and he looked up at her with yellow eyes, one of which was cupped by a stitched-up scar and a strip of no hair.

“Trust me, Sarina,” he said. “Wear your mother’s dress.”

She thought about it. “Fine.”

“Excellent.” Mikka walked right out.

“Where are you going?” she said.

He stopped and turned, waving the newspaper as though it were a wand. “Well, to inform them that you’ve elected to wear your mother’s dress. I must say, they will be thrilled to hear that they may stop fixing that old bloody one and enjoy the rest of the day off!”

He left and the door shut before Sarina could protest.

She looked