Inside, the palace echoed with the sound of trickling water. Petra saw that while some of the walls were glossy marble dotted with mosaics of wriggling octopi, at least one side of every hallway showed the untouched surface of the mountain on which the palace was built.

Neel blindly turned a corner, and the others followed him down a wide chamber. On their left, a natural fountain poured from a jagged rock wall. Water spilled down and rushed across their path in a stream that cut through the floor. Neel forged ahead, pulling Petra and Tomik after him into the water.

“Stop!” Arun moaned from where he and Treb stood at the stream’s edge. “That’s drinking water, and you’re absolutely filthy! Besides, there’s a bridge, if you’d only let me show you…”

Petra tugged her arm free of Neel’s grasp, and Astrophil squeaked as her foot slipped against the stream’s tiled bottom, plunging her and the spider beneath the water’s surface. But the river was shallow, and when Petra scrambled to her feet, the water only came up to her waist.

Neel had finally stopped his mad dash through the stream. He looked at Petra and Astrophil. “Are you all right?”

Fury mounted in Petra’s bones and spread through her blood. This evening wasn’t supposed to be about Neel. Meeting the Roma queen was supposed to have nothing to do with him. Petra had imagined what would happen when they reached the Vatra. This is what she had seen in her mind, so many times: that the queen would be grateful for the globes, and to Petra for her role in obtaining them. As a reward, Queen Iona would offer any resources her country had to help find a cure for Petra’s father.

Neel wasn’t part of this picture, and he certainly had no business tearing around the palace in a panic over nothing. He wasn’t the one with problems. She was. “No, I’m not all right!” She shoved wet locks of hair out of her face so she could glare at Neel better. “And you’re behaving like an idiot!”

“Really?” Neel grew calm, thoughtful. “I’m an idiot?”

“Yes!” cried Petra, Tomik, and the spider.

“But it’s strange.” Neel’s voice dropped. “The queen wanting to see me. Maybe I stole something of hers without realizing it, or … I don’t know … this is a surprise, and an odd one, odd as a two-headed dog, and that kind of beast bites twice as fierce.”

“Surprises are not always bad,” Astrophil said hopefully, but in Petra’s experience they often were.

She looked at Neel’s dripping face and remembered when he had helped her steal her father’s eyes from Prince Rodolfo’s Cabinet of Wonders almost a year and a half ago. A sudden flood had swept Petra, Astrophil, and Neel through the prince’s castle, and they were as wet then as they were now. Neel hadn’t been afraid that time—or, if he had been, he had hidden it well. But here in the Vatra, anxiety lurked in his yellowy eyes. Petra realized that fear doesn’t strike everyone in the same way. With a sense of shame, it also occurred to her that her anger had a selfish edge, a belief that her worries were more important than his.

Tomik sighed. “Can we please walk through the palace like normal human beings and not members of an underwater circus?”

“Indeed,” said Astrophil, shaking water from his legs one by one.

They turned and waded back to Arun and Treb.

Every step Arun took seemed louder than necessary as he led them over the bridge. His feet stamped against the planks. “No respect”—stamp—“the glory of our homeland”—stamp—“a pair of outsiders”—stamp—“dirty children”—stampstampSTAMP.

“We’re not children,” Tomik objected. “We’re all of age,” he added, though none of them knew if his statement truly applied to Neel, whose exact birthday was a mystery. He had been abandoned by a Lovari campsite as an infant.

Arun stepped onto the stone floor on the other side of the river and swept ahead to a broad staircase that led into a deep-bellied cave. A torch-lit tunnel glowed at the back of the cave, one so narrow that all of them had to enter singly, and the space inside was so tight that smoke from the torches stung Petra’s eyes. She heard Neel shuffle behind her and glanced back to see whether his fear had returned. He moved ahead silently, his face grim.

Tomik, walking behind Neel, looked past him to catch Petra’s look of concern. Tomik reached forward to lay a steady hand on Neel’s shoulder, and the other boy seemed to breathe more easily.

Why is Neel acting like a trapped animal? Petra asked Astrophil after she had turned to continue down the tunnel.

We know very little of the Roma queen, the spider replied. She may be … cruel.

Petra thought of Bohemia’s prince: a twenty-year-old with a brilliant smile and an ambition as cold as winter. What would happen if she were brought before her country’s ruler? Death, or maybe something worse. I am not going to kill you, he had told her when they last stood face-to-face. I am going to keep you.

Petra wrapped her fingers around the hilt of her invisible rapier. She knew what it was like to be at the mercy of a ruler’s whim. But would she defend Neel, if it meant shattering her hopes that the Vatra could offer a cure for her father? Would she and Tomik share Neel’s fate, whatever fate it was that waited for him in the queen’s reception hall?

Before she could begin to answer these questions, the tunnel opened into a vast chamber. Arcades of windows were cut into the walls, and the night breeze poured in, guttering the torches. Petra could see that each of the room’s four walls was painted a different color.

“Every wall represents a Roma tribe,” Treb explained. “Green for the Maraki, red for the Ursari, yellow for the Lovari, and blue—”

“For the Kalderash,” Neel muttered as they walked slowly, now side by side, toward the three people seated in front of the blue wall.

Petra had never seen someone who had only weeks, maybe days, to live. But even the quickest glance was enough to tell that Queen Iona was fighting death tooth and nail. The enthroned woman’s hair was thin and lank, her nose a sharp beak in a sunken face. Iona had four things that glittered: she gripped a golden scepter in her bony hand, a sapphire earring shone on her right ear, and her eyes, too, were as bright as jewels.

“Ma!” Neel shouted, and rushed toward the woman seated to the queen’s left. For a moment, it seemed like Damara would pull him onto her lap as if he were still a small boy, but then she stood and simply rested a hand on his shoulder.

Treb stepped forward to greet the man to the queen’s right. Though shorter than the captain, the man resembled Treb so much that Petra knew this was Tarn, whose face was not as merry as his younger brother’s.

“Something really is wrong,” Tomik whispered.

“Yes,” Arun said shortly, and left them to stand by his queen.

Astrophil urged Petra to approach the throne. There is something unusual about Queen Iona’s eyes, he said.

Petra had seen many Roma, and they all had eyes whose color was somewhere between brown and black—except for Neel. His irises were yellow flecked with green, like autumn leaves with only a few drops of summer left.

Queen Iona looked at Petra with those very same eyes. The scepter dropped from the queen’s weak hand, and an unseen force caught it before it could clatter against the floor. The queen had not moved, yet there was the scepter, secure again in her grasp.

She has the gift of Danior’s Fingers, said Astrophil.

Petra’s brain felt like a machine. Pieces clicked into place and her thoughts were spinning, whirring, driving toward a realization. She gazed at the jewel on Queen Iona’s ear and remembered Neel’s older sister telling her, in the dark dormitory of Salamander Castle, that Neel’s full name meant “sapphire.” Sadie’s voice drifted through Petra’s memory, explaining how her brother had been adopted as a baby:

Nobody wanted to take him at first, especially because he had no token around his neck.

Token? Petra had asked.

A string. Or a bit of leather with a ring or a stone on it. Anything, really, that means that a father has acknowledged a child as his. Neel was just wrapped up in a blue blanket, with no clothes or anything else.

The color blue had trailed after Neel all his life, and now it was staring him in the face. The blue wall framed the queen whose magical gift matched his. Although Neel had told Petra on the very first day they met that Danior’s Fingers was a talent found in every tribe, no Roma doubted that it was first and foremost a Kalderash trait.

Could Petra’s suspicion be true? She glanced at Neel and saw anxiety flare again across his taut features.

“Ma, what’s going on?” he asked Damara. “Why’re you here?”

Before she had a chance to reply, the queen opened her thin mouth. “She’s here because she is not your mother,” she rasped. “I am.”

5

The Heir

“WRONG!” SAID NEEL. “You’re dead wrong!”

“I wish I were,” said Iona. “It does seem unfitting that a dirty guttersnipe should be the Kalderash heir, but”—she studied him from top to toe, then continued in a croaking, amused voice—“at least someone tried to give you a bath.”

Damara’s eyes flashed. “Don’t insult my son.”

“I am dying,” said Iona, “and I am your queen. I will do whatever I like. Moreover, old friend, we both know full well that Indraneel is not your son.”

Petra recognized the emotion blazing across Neel’s face, because it was one that she had felt before, when she learned that her father had been transformed into a monster. It was the feeling that the known world is crumbling apart.

Damara gathered Neel into her arms, sighing. The resigned sound of that one low breath said everything. It was true.

“Neel,” she began, “this is no more than what you’ve always known: that I didn’t give birth to you.”

“It is more!” He twisted out of her embrace. “It’s a whole lot more. It’s years of mocking. ‘Neel, left by the fire, the trash baby no one wanted—’”

“I wanted you.”

“Insults and jibes like little, salty cuts. ‘Neel, the by-blow, the blackguard foundling, bastard boy—’”

“That is correct,” said the queen. “You are entirely illegitimate. Your father was no husband of mine. He died, thrown by a wild horse. You were a mistake, and had to be hidden.”

Tarn spoke for the first time. “This is a trick.”

“Kalderash sneakery,” Treb added. “A plot to steal the throne from the Maraki. When you die, dear queen, it’s rightfully ours.”

“Yes, I do wish to keep the throne for the Kalderash,” Iona acknowledged in her ruined voice. “But I am not lying. Damara will testify that this boy is my child, and few will doubt it.” She lifted her left palm, and Neel strained against unseen fingers that reached across the room to grasp his chin and turn his face from side to side, so that everyone in the room could observe the uncanny resemblance between him and the queen.

“Stop that!” Neel’s hand twitched, and Petra imagined what she could not see: his ghostly fingers swatting away the queen’s.

“Even his magical talent is proof,” said Iona. “He has the Gift of Danior’s Fingers, and of course he would. However illegitimate he may be, he is still a direct descendant of Danior.”

Petra recalled the anger that had ripped through her when she had stood in the palace river. She felt it again, this time for a different reason. “Why are you doing this to him?” she challenged the queen.

“Why, I thought it was clear, little gadje. There is no one else left to be the Kalderash heir, no one else whose veins flow with Danior’s blood. My tribe has plans that need to be carried out over the rest of our reign. No doubt the news about my son will be shocking to some, but I am too tired to care, and too sick to feel any shame. It is my right to name an heir, and I name him.”

Tarn stepped forward, and Petra could see that he and Treb shared the same oil-black eyes and a physical strength that could be brutal. Tarn looked at Neel with resentment. “If you knew what was good for you, cousin, you’d deny any claim to the throne.”

“I do.” Neel’s voice was low. “I do deny it.”

But Tarn had already left the room. Treb was not far behind him, and shook his head at Neel on the way out. “There’s something about you, lad, that attracts trouble. It follows you like a bad storm.”

“Neel,” Damara said quietly. “I’m sorry that you discovered the truth like this, but don’t let a golden opportunity slip by denying it. You are the rightful Kalderash heir.”

“You’ve known all my life about this?” said Neel.

“Yes.”

“How come you kept it a secret? Didn’t I deserve the truth?”

“You deserved not to be broken by disappointment. Iona and I have been friends since we were little girls. Fifteen years ago, she came to me, pregnant and unmarried. She was the Kalderash heir to the throne then, and feared what would happen if her secret became known. She begged me to adopt her child. I agreed.”

“Don’t sugar the story,” said Iona. “You said yes because I threatened to abandon the baby to the wolves.”

Damara shot a warning look at her. “Iona planned to marry another man,” she continued, “and to have legitimate children by him. One of them would inherit the throne after her.”

“They were never born.” The queen shrugged. “And my husband is dead, so that leaves you, Indraneel.”