THE WINGED PRINCE

They say a prince of the air is never closer to the gods than at the Mating Ball.

I have never felt further from anything.

Once a year, the five courts of Aethermere gather beneath a single roof to trade smiles, treaties, and bloodlines. This year, my father has chosen the Spire of Ilmarith, the highest tower in the kingdom of Aelindral. Its crystal balconies spiral up into the clouds like the ribs of a great glass beast. A thousand lanterns drift between its pillars. Music and perfume and the restless beat of feathers fill the ballroom until I cannot tell the heat of the candles from the heat of desperate people.

I stand at the edge of the terrace, my wings folded tight against my back, white feathers dipped in gold. The wind rakes my face. It smells of ozone and cold.

It is the only honest thing in this spire.

Below me, the sky falls away in layers. Windcrown, our capital, drifts in the slipstreams at the heart of the kingdom, a cluster of floating citadels joined by bridges of woven light, so high that the clouds are a floor beneath its streets. In Aelindral, the nobility are born with feathered wings and the gift of wind: to bend the air, to ride the currents, to break a man's ribs with a single gust. We have built a kingdom for creatures who never touch the ground, and we have decided that everything that does belongs beneath us.

Aelindral is only one of five.

South, in the volcanic crags, lies Cindrakar, the Leathery Court of Fire, where the nobility wear the wings of dragons and bats. West, in the deep forests, the Insectoid Court of Terravine hides in its hive-city of Amberhollow, all iridescent wings and silent politics. East, along the coast, the Scaled Court of Marisenne, with its finned wings and poisoned smiles. And beneath them all, under the weight of the ocean, the Fathom Court, which the surface world insists is a myth.

Ley lines bind the five courts together. Treaties hold them apart. Tonight, they send their finest to my father's house to be paired off like livestock.

A mating bond in Aethermere is not a courtship. It is a contract written in magic. Two winged souls are joined, and each shares a fraction of the other's power and emotion. The stronger the match, the richer the court. Here, wings are currency.

Tonight, they are being traded.

Behind me, the noblewomen flash their colors in the lantern light. Iridescent blues. Fiery reds. A peacock's fan of emerald and gold, which belongs to Lady Pavonia, who has circled me all night like a hawk that has not realized she is prey. They spread their wings and pose, and wait for a spark that will bind them to the Crown Prince of the Air.

I feel nothing.

I have felt nothing for four years. In that time, I have searched every archive in Windcrown for the legend of a Soul-Bond that amplifies a royal's magic tenfold. I do not want it for love. I want it for the power to rewrite my kingdom's laws, and to finish what I began in the dark.

I have never told anyone why.

I was twelve years old.

The lower catacombs of the palace were forbidden to children, so of course I went. I followed a sound I did not understand down a stairwell I should never have found, to a door that was not quite shut. Lamplight leaked through the gap, and I put my eye to it.

A man lay strapped to a table, awake. A laborer from the Undercity, with calluses on his hands. Three men in white robes stood over him, and one of them held a saw.

They were taking his wings.

In the corner, a small girl sat in a velvet chair with her hands folded in her lap, wingless and bored and beautifully dressed. Her mother stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder, and watched the surgeons work the way one watches a seamstress take in a hem. The wings were meant for her daughter.

I did not scream. I stood with my face against the door and listened to a man's voice break, and break again, until there was nothing left in it but breath.

The next morning, I told my father's advisors what I had seen. They smiled. They had signed the order themselves.

That was the day I learned that the crown I was raised to wear was held up by bone.

The wind snaps at my cloak. I am twenty-four years old now, standing on a terrace with a goblet of untouched wine in my hand, and I can still hear him.

Since that day, I have worked in the shadows. I have found the surgeons. I have found the wing brokers who run the Plumage Trade out of the dark corners of the Undercity, and I have executed them one by one, without mercy. The court calls me cold. Brutal. A judge without a heart.

I let them. A prince who is feared can do things that a prince who is loved cannot.

On the dais at the far end of the hall, my father, King Orsolan, sits in his throne of lightning with his golden eagle wings spread wide. He believes the wingless are an unfortunate burden, and that the world is a thing to be ordered by the strong. Beside him, my mother, Queen Sigrun, sips her wine in pale owl-grey. She has a face like frozen water and a mind like a razor. She loves me. She also has a list of eleven eligible noblewomen folded in her sleeve.

My father has told me I must choose a bride tonight. He did not say I must like her.

A familiar shadow settles at my elbow, slate-grey falcon wings and two glasses of wine. Sorin Windspear is the Commander of the Royal Vanguard, my oldest friend, and the only person in this kingdom I trust without reservation.

"The Ambassador from Marisenne is watching you again," he murmurs. "And the Fire Princess looks as though she would like to set the chandeliers alight."

"Then perhaps someone will die," I tell him. "It would be the first interesting thing to happen all night."

Sorin sighs and offers me a glass. I do not take it.

I look out over the room instead. Lord Nerian, the Water Court's ambassador, slides through the crowd on wings that shimmer with wet iridescence, smiling at everyone and counting everything. Princess Sahira of Cindrakar lounges against a pillar in ember-colored dragon wings, her molten eyes amused. Lord Pica, my father's spymaster, drifts between the guests in magpie blues, selling secrets for coin.

And at the edge of the dance floor, in crimson velvet and patchy, greying vulture's wings, stands Arch-Magister Pelagius, the head of the Royal Academy of Magic. He watches the room with the patience of a man who has already decided what he wants from it.

I know that patience. I have seen it once before, over a table, with a saw in its hand.

At the far end of the hall, the herald strikes his staff against the floor.

"Lady Nimue, High Advisor to Her Majesty the Queen of Terravine," he calls. "Commander Hakon, formerly of Cindrakar."

The murmur of the court dips.

Lady Nimue glides through the doors on enormous, soft wings the color of a pale-green moon, silver dust drifting from every feather. She is Queen Elytra's sister, and she moves with the watchful grace of a woman who has been politely hated her whole life and survived by being kinder than the people doing it.

At her side walks a man with no grace at all. Heavy. Scarred. Skin like cooled magma. One leathery wyvern wing hangs whole and fierce from his left shoulder. The other is shredded into ribbons, folded tight and useless. The former High Commander of Cindrakar's armies, I remember, who gave up his homeland and his emperor for a moth. He glares at the room as though he would like to burn it down.

And between them, half a step behind, is a third figure I cannot place.

The herald does not announce you.

You wear a modest gown of spider-silk and velvet, and for a moment I take you for a servant who has wandered into the wrong room. Then Nimue's hand drifts to the small of your back, light and protective. Then the Commander's hand, huge and scarred, hovers an inch from your shoulder, as though he expects the entire court to lunge. Then I see the way they walk, one on either side of you, like a wall.

Their ward, I think. Or their child. They have none of their own. The Terravine gossips say it is because earth and fire do not breed.

I do not know who you are. I know who you came with, and that is its own kind of answer.

Then the whisper sweeps across the room like a wave.

Wingless.

You turn, just slightly, and the candlelight finds the line of your back. Two long, jagged scars run down your spine, pale and ugly beneath the silk. A ripple of disgust passes through the nearest courtiers, discreet and practiced. They raise their fans. They whisper behind their feathers. Somebody laughs.

In Aelindral, the wingless are barely tolerated. They serve, they clean, they mine. They cannot own land or marry above their station, and the nobility calls them mistakes of nature. Ancient protocol requires their families to attend the Mating Ball, and so one of them has been dragged here to be stared at like a broken toy.

You walk with your chin up.

I watch you cross the floor between your parents, past the sneers and the spread wings and the whispering fans, and I realize I have stopped breathing.

Something is happening in my chest.

It is not curiosity. It is not pity. It is a thrum, deep and low, like a bowstring drawn taut behind my ribs, as though a hook has set itself in me and someone, somewhere, has just pulled the line.

I am moving before I know I have decided to move.

No. It is impossible. A Prince of the Sky does not feel the bond for a grounded thing. I have stood beside every noble my father has ever paraded before me and felt nothing at all, and I am not going to feel it now for...

"Taloren," Sorin says quietly at my shoulder. "Your hands."

I look down. Lightning crawls over my fingers, bright enough to throw shadows across the floor.

I close my fists around it until it dies.

When I look up again, the crowd has surged, and you are gone.

A duchess has cornered Nimue. Two lords have trapped the Commander with questions about his wing. For the space of one breath, you are alone, slipping toward the terrace to escape the heat, and I lose you behind a wall of feathers.

By the time I find you again, you are standing at the very edge of the balcony with your knuckles white on the rail, staring out at the clouds.

And Lady Pavonia is gliding up behind you with a smile.

I see her hand rise. I see the calculation in her eyes. I see what she means to do the way I would see a blade drawn from across a room.

"No!" I shout.

The word rips out of me, and my wings snap wide, and half the ballroom turns to look.

It is too late.

She shoves.

I never hear you scream. That is the part I will never forgive myself for. You go backward over the low rail with your hands clutching at empty air, and your eyes meet mine through the wind, and for one frozen second, they are not afraid.

Then the dark takes you.

I am over the railing before my mind finishes the thought.

The sky roars around me. I fold my wings tight and dive, plunging after you through the clouds, and the freezing mist tears at my face like claws. Far below, a small figure falls and shrinks and falls, with miles of empty air waiting beneath it.

I am the fastest flier in the history of Aelindral, and I am not fast enough.

I was six years old.

My father stood with me on the roof of the highest tower in Windcrown, his eagle's wings spread against a bruised dawn. I was small and terrified, and my own wings had barely grown in. I looked up at him and asked him how to fly.

He did not answer. He lifted me by the back of my tunic and threw me over the edge.

I fell four hundred feet. I remember the wind screaming where my breath should have been. I remember the ground, an impossible green distance, rushing up to meet me. I remember thinking, very calmly, that this was a lesson, and that I would not live long enough to learn it.

And then my wings opened.

He found me an hour later, shaking in the grass, and told me that the wind never lies. That it does not care who you are. That it will answer you, or it will not, and that is the whole of the world.

I never forgave him. I never forgot.

The wind answers.

I throw my wings wide, and the air catches them so hard that my shoulders scream. It hurls me downward faster than any flier has ever fallen, a white-and-gold spear aimed at a falling star, and I can almost, almost reach you.

Fly, I think, and I do not know whether I am speaking to you or to myself. Defy the gravity. Fly.

And the sky answers again.

A shriek splits the heavens. Not from any beast, but from the ether itself, a sound like the world being torn down the middle. From the vault above the moons, something plunges like a thunderbolt: a pair of enormous wings, black feathers shot through with starlight, with no body attached. They rip through the clouds in a streak of violet fire and slam into your back.

A flash of light blinds me.

When my sight returns, they are on you. Fused to the jagged lines of your scars. They snap open in the slipstream and catch the wind, and your fall stops so suddenly that I nearly overshoot you.

I know those wings.

I have read of them once, in a forbidden scroll, by candlelight, in a locked archive. A text that carries the death penalty for anyone who keeps it. The Archivist's hands had shaken when he gave it to me.

Upon her scars, the Night shall cling, black as the space between stars. She will unfurl wings not of bone and blood, but of judgment and shadow. Where the White Wing falters, the Black Wing shall rise.

I read those lines four times that night, and told myself they were a myth.

The Nocturne Wings.

They are woven from the night itself, midnight and starlight, spread wider than any wing I have ever seen, blotting out the moons.

I hit you at full speed and wrap both arms around your waist like iron bands. My wings beat against the gale, shuddering, holding us both aloft. You are cold and limp and alive.

"Got you," I growl. My voice is rough, shredded by the wind, and I do not recognize it. "Do not move. Do you hear me? Do not breathe."

Your lips part. Your eyes find mine, and I see that you see me. Then your eyes roll back, and the black wings go slack against the night.

I turn for the only place in this kingdom I trust.

My sister's sanctuary is a circular room of polished white stone, lit by crystals set into the walls and thick with the smell of lavender and ozone. Princess Ilwen is the Royal Mender of Aelindral, and the only member of my family who has ever shown kindness to the wingless. She treats them in secret when my father is not looking, with a rare wind magic that knits flesh and soothes pain.

She has worked on you for three hours.

I have not sat down once.

I pace the room like a caged animal, and every time I turn, I see the black wings folded against your back. They are not a dream. They are the thing I have spent four years searching for, and the worst thing that could ever have happened to you.

Ilwen does not look up from her work. Her hands glow pale green over your spine, and her platinum braid hangs over one shoulder, woven with healing herbs.

"The integration points are stable," she says, her voice soft and very tired. "It is a miracle you survived the fall. It is a greater miracle you survived the transformation."

I stop at the foot of the table. "They were wingless, Ilwen," I tell her. "Until tonight."

"Not any longer," my sister says. Then, without lifting her eyes: "Taloren. Sit down."

I do not move. "No."

"You are frightening the patient," Ilwen says, with the patience of a woman who has said it to me many times before.

"The patient is unconscious," I point out.

At that moment, your fingers twitch against the sheet.

I stop pacing.

Ilwen's hands go still. "Easy," she murmurs, and her glow brightens. "If you move too quickly, you will tear the new flesh around the integration points."

Slowly, you turn your head against the table. Your eyes crack open.

They find the room first. The white stone. The crystals. My sister. Then they travel across the floor, past the jars and the herbs and the lamplight, and come to rest on me.

I have faced armies. I have stood at the edge of a cyclone and called it a challenge.

I have never been so afraid of a pair of eyes in my life.

I do not move. I do not speak. I let the silence stretch between us, cold as the high air.

Then I say the only thing I have never had to say to anyone.

"Your name."