She had left his letter on the mantle. It was charred on the edges; she had tossed it into her fireplace in a fit of cold fury, before fishing it out again when the corners had started to blacken and the thought of burning it, really burning it, had sent her scrambling for a poker.

I set sail at first light—

She had spoken to no one of it. The red-tailed hawk that had swept through her curtains at first dawn would seem, to any curious observer, only one of the dozens of letter-bearing avians that dove in and out of the emissary's window at all hours of the day. And if the young emissary herself had seemed uncharacteristically quiet at breakfast, well—perhaps fatigue had finally caught up with her. 

From the day of her appointment, Emissary Aghavni had never missed a moment at Court. Few, in fact, could recall a time when the Hajakhan princess (for it was common knowledge now, though no noble worth their rank had yet dared to broach it in public) wasn’t escorting ambassadors to the king, or penning letters as she breakfasted, or requesting crates upon crates of wax candles to be brought up to her tower—she went through them at alarming speed.

There was nothing she couldn’t do, nothing she couldn’t master. Least of all her own heart.

‘Dearest August,’ she had written back, ink spotting the page in her haste. ‘Upon your return from the seven seas, be sure to bring back a necklace of pearls as big as sparrow’s eggs to present to your future majesty, Queen Sol IV. Failure to do so will result in you being turned coldly away at the palace gates, with no chance at redemption.’ 

Her grip had shook as she'd reached the end of the parchment, but her calligraphy betrayed nothing. If August had thought his departure would arouse any sliver of devastation in her—the nib of her quill snapped, leaking ink, and Aghavni had cursed as she reached for a new one and moved her blotter over the spreading stain. 

‘Charmingly, A.’ Then he had thought wrong. Even if her heart had shattered to pieces, even if she had sent all her chambermaids scrambling out so they would not see the weakness leaking from her furious eyes—

(A letter! That was all he had left her with, before bidding her a sailor’s farewell, forever. Aghavni was not stupid enough to hope that August would one day return. Better that he didn’t. Better that she never saw his face again, so that he would never know how weak she really was beneath her pretty words and bold farewells.)

A Hajakha could betray the whole world, even each other. But never themselves.

----
She departs for Dusk at nightfall, August’s letter cold on the mantle, her hair in pearl-strewn, latticed plaits, and her eyes as green, and as hard, as cut emeralds. 

----
“So—do you think this place is as grand as the Scarab?” Aghavni asks O, lips pulling into a wry smile. She bumps her hip lightly against the buckskin’s dusky shoulder and glances over, a little indifferently, at a tray of canapés balanced on a passing waiter’s hip. 

She plucks one from its plate—a wine-soaked cherry—and pops it into her mouth. It bursts at once across her tongue, sweet and then bracingly tart, and her dark lashes flutter in a display of mirth.

Look upon the Solterran emissary now, glittering gold beneath the floating lanterns, and nothing could have ever been once undone. Her posture is, as always, refined and disciplined; the line of her jaw and the tilt of her gaze calculated to give an appearance at once alluring and disarmingly innocent. She does not try to appear more than her age; instead, she wears her youth like a crown of holly, a fey creature on the cusp of girlhood and womanhood. 

But when she smiles, as she does now at lovely little Apolonia, the sharpness of it whispers: This is a girl forged of ambition. If you are wise, you will watch her carefully for the teeth that do not flash, but hide: deep in the gums, unseelie and savage. 

Humming, Aghavni draws close to Apolonia's satin ear and glances discreetly into the crowd. “You know, O, that girl over there has been watching you ever since we entered the room.” And smirking, seized by sudden muse, Aghavni detaches her emerald scarf from her neck and loops it around O’s. “There. Now you look even more lovely. Let’s dance!”

Let’s dance and dance, she thinks, bitterly, as she twirls towards the center of the ballroom. Until we forget everything, even ourselves.

"Only alright?" Aghavni's cheeks dimpled in a fleeting grin, her gaze trailing restlessly over the room's wreathed columns, the moss-and-gossamer-draped settees, the earthen floor covered in a skin of shimmer.

Terrastella's was a beauty as coy as Solterra's was decadent; as demure as it was heavy-lidded, a waking dream for the devout and the dreamless. It enchanted and irked her in equal measure. Why play at subtlety, she wondered, when the goal was precisely the same: to arouse desire, to seduce loyalty, to fan the flames of sympathy. To twist what refused to give.

It did not make you more pious, or more upright, she thought, when you pretended not to see your own shadow. It only made you a hypocrite.

A shiver shot down her spine as O's lips ghosted over her flank, butterfly-soft; by the time she recovered enough to move again, to act (and act authentically) unfazed by so sudden a touch—the moment had ossified into history.

She swallowed thickly, and accidentally glared at an innocent passerby; except that the slick, dark-suited man hadn't been entirely innocent. He had been watching her, just like the others, and she hated it. How scrupulously they fixed their eyes to her, breaths held in collective anticipation. Of this, she knew, all the courts were the same. Vespera's children, Solis's children—anyone with something to lose and much more to gain hungered for the fall of those like her, the ones who did wrong with their mere, privileged existence. 

So much more reason to flaunt it.

"We've met." Curious, Aghavni mirrored O’s casual glance across the room. Looked closer at the figure she had seen, just barely, between swirling skirts and their accompanying wine glasses. Hints of sleek grey materialized first; then, an elaborate headpiece—or was it apart of her?—of a bright coral; finally, as she tugged O forwards by her scarf, a blink of brilliant green eyes.

Almost identical to her own.

All of it together, the grey and the coral and the bright, bright green, presented a perfect picture of—

Anandi, she realized, too slow. The foreign-born Emissary of Dusk.

“Apolonia! How lovely to see you.” As if on cue, out of the parting crowd stepped the emissary herself, swirling to a halt in front of them. With her came a cloud of expensive perfume and a man clad all in red; just by the way he bowed (a beat too eager, a heartbeat too long) Aghavni knew it was his first soiree. The emissary called him Austin.

But not before calling Aghavni—

A stunning friend. Nameless and titleless; a pretty face with nothing more to it. What was your name again, love?

Her greeting, practiced and polished, died abruptly on her tongue. So in place of one, she tilted her head and smiled; the pearls woven into her mane clinked against each other like a symphony of bells. They were enchanted to do so; her father had gifted them to her the last time she'd seen him, months ago.

Even stripped of her scarf, every bit of Aghavni dripped of Hajakhan luxury. But, she noticed, so too did Anandi wear the finery of her bloodline. In a subtler way, perhaps—there it was again, that Terrastellan obsession—but undeniably she wore it: in the gleam of her frills, in the unnatural sleekness of her coat, in the octave pitch of her voice.

If the rumors were true, and rarely were they not, Anandi was a princess too. Of some distant undersea kingdom, peculiar in both its elusive obscurity and its kinship to the sea's creatures.

Or, to quit the euphemism: she was a kelpie.

"O, you neglected to tell me you were acquainted with Dusk's very own emissary," Aghavni said, nudging Apolonia's scarf-clad shoulder with her own (now bare) one. After, and only after, did she sink into a flourishing bow.

"Emissary Anandi, I am Aghavni. Forgive me for not introducing myself earlier, on behalf of the Solterran court. Of course you would not recognize me." Her teeth flashed amicably as she rose. "I have only just been appointed as emissary."

But of course you knew that. Shrewdly, brow lifting ever so slightly, she looked from O to Anandi and decided that she wasn't, in fact, mistaken.

The tension between the two was thick enough to cut. Anandi's green eyes glowed in a mirror-replica of Aghavni's own, and only when she was feeling one thing: jealousy.

So she turned her attention to Austin (but not without wondering: gods, what had she done to deserve this, to land herself in a den of A names on top of unwittingly becoming a piece in a game of jealousy that wasn't even her own). "Rosé, please," she said sweetly, demurely. 

Subtle-ly.

She was in Terrastella now; it was only polite to take part in the local customs.

Around them the dancing crowd pressed in and twirled out again after a burst of jovial laughter—but at what? 

Mystified but too proud to turn and look, Aghavni plucked a champagne flute off of a passing tray and took small, measured sips. Bubbles fizzed and burst against her throat, pleasantly ticklish. She was too impatient to wait for Austin's return. When he chose to reappear again she would urge him to take her rosé for himself, and in his fumbling gratitude anticipate a dull sort of amusement.

From behind the sweet, rose-tinted glass of her drink Aghavni swept a coy eye over Anandi. The warping of the fluted glass did nothing to the emissary's image except to magnify it: clear satin skin, tasteful ocean finery, the highborn, near predatory way she held herself. She would rather die than admit it—and the Hajakhas were rarely serious except in matters of their own deaths—but Anandi elicited a fascination in her that she repressed easily enough, yet could not quite forget.

O's blithe remark, however, elicited a different sort of fascination that was so light and feathery Aghavni drowned her laugh in champagne. Wryly she looked at Anandi, this time purposeful—her smile was a reflection of O's own: lazy, indolent, forgivable.

“Oh Apolonia. Such a forgetful girl...” Anandi crooned, and Aghavni was almost dazzled by how effortlessly the blow was deflected. If it were her she could not say, with confidence, that she would have done it better. Yet still she was not fooled—there it lurked, the emissary's anger, in the glint of an eye, the tilt of a chin, the imperceptible tug on Apolonia's black locks. If O and I were proud, she thought, then Anandi is our equal in every way. 

Perhaps more.

Austin did not return. Maybe he did know a hopeless cause when he saw it, and they had all discredited him like sneering stepsisters, noses turned to the skies.

“It seems you two have a lot in common." (Twin eyes, positions, titles. The way they held themselves—effortless but not at all, like ducks in a pond, their serenity a sham if only you peeked below the surface.) Aghavni regarded O with a curious half-shrug. 

But Anandi spoke first. Aghavni's curls brushed her neck as she handed her glass to an idle waiter; we have similar eyes don’t we? Her spine tingled as the violinist launched into a thrilling vibrato; and at least one mutual friend. The ballroom burst into a frantic waltz, hips jostling hips, scarfs loosening around necks, sweat blurring sculpted hairlines.

A shoulder jostled into her. She stiffened and forgave it with a thin smile.

"Are you also a princess of a faraway tribe? Persecuted by distant cousins? Responsible for the survival of your species? Aquatic and carnivorous by nature?”

Suddenly Aghavni was overcome with sparkling amusement. Her teeth glinted like pearls as she reached forwards and ran her muzzle along Anandi's sleek neck. She smells of perfume, she hummed, and salt, and blood.

"I am neither carnivorous nor aquatic," she laughed, as if it were a shame. And then she spun away, far enough away to dance like a heathen (in a crowd of mystics) but not far enough to lose herself. Elegantly she danced, slim-ankled, swan-necked, in step with the raucous crowd. Sweat beaded along her pale, curling hairline. Roses in buttonholes burst into brighter bloom.

"But unfortunately, Emissary, we are more alike than you may think." The sea of glittering faces broke apart as she twirled dizzily through them, back to Anandi, back to O. The music swelled to a stop, and heaving breaths filled the ringing silence like wine in a chalice. She stopped, too, panting.

"The Hajakhas are a dying breed. My cousins—" she paused, smirking deeply, "—despise my father and in turn me. It is alright, I suppose. I am not so fond of them either."

She stepped aside as the fatigued retreated to fill their glasses, and the young snatched partners for another round. "And finally," she said coolly, "in Solterra my species is not so welcomed as yours."