Prologue

The Lower Ash Docks — Before the King’s Funeral

The dead king remembers falling.

His memory reaches me through a crack in the funeral urn, hot as a coal pressed beneath my tongue. I nearly drop the vessel into the open sky.

Four hands save it. My upper pair catches the bronze handles. My lower pair closes around the urn’s swollen belly. Above the dock, the Burning Moon turns the clouds the color of fresh wounds, and the wind screams between the mooring towers hard enough to tear an unwary Mothkin from the boards.

I should call the palace guard.

Instead, I press one velvet antenna to the crack.

The king falls again.

Not from a balcony. Not from a blade. He falls upward through a chamber filled with red silk while four hands hold him beneath the wings and a fifth hand pours silver powder into his breathing vents. His final sight is not his killer’s face. It is a crest reflected in the poison bowl: a crescent moon crossed by a black spear.

House Tovan.

The accused prince’s crest.

The memory ends with a name the king cannot force into the wind.

My own wings shudder. Bronze-pink silk snaps open behind me, catching the thermal rising from the ash furnaces. Along the chipped white edge of my upper right wing, the veins pulse with borrowed grief.

“Courier.”

I pull my antenna away.

The dockmaster stands at the far end of the gangplank, his four arms hidden inside a ceremonial coat. Crimson House pins cover his collar. He was not there when I signed for the urn. He should not know I have it.

“The procession changed course,” he says. “Hand over the vessel.”

I angle my body between him and the urn. “The royal transfer seal names me.”

“You have no name.”

The words land where they always do.

Five years ago, my House erased Eirra from its ledger. The white scar along my wing proves it. Without a registered name, I can carry ashes for families too poor to hire a proper choir, but I cannot challenge a lord, own a skyship, or be remembered in a legal wind.

The dockmaster smiles because he thinks the old wound has made me obedient.

“Give me the king,” he says.

Below us, the ash furnaces flare. Above us, three crimson skiffs detach from the palace tower and descend without signal lamps.

Not escorts. Hunters.

I look down at the urn. The crack is no longer there.

The king has spent part of his last color to show me the murder. If I surrender him, someone will burn away the rest before the official funeral. The wind will carry a clean lie across every island in Veyra.

“Of course,” I say.

I walk toward the dockmaster.

His upper hands emerge to receive the urn. His lower right reaches beneath his coat for a weapon.

I throw the king over the railing.

The dockmaster lunges with all four arms.

So do I.

My lower hands seize the emergency silk line. My upper hands catch the urn beneath the dock. The thermal hits my open wings like a fist and hurls me upward along the tower’s outer curve. A blade flashes past my ankle. Someone shouts for the skiffs to fire.

I climb.

The Burning Moon fills the sky. Heat scorches color from the edges of my wings while bolts tear holes through the clouds around me. The urn drags at my shoulders, too heavy for ash alone. Something solid knocks inside it with every turn.

At the abandoned sail loft, I crash through a rotted silk screen and roll across the floor. Four hands lock around the king until the building stops spinning.

Outside, searchlights rake the dock.

I set the urn between my knees and pry at its false base. A narrow panel opens. Inside lies a strip of funerary silk and a black iron key.

The silk bears three words in the king’s own ash:

TRUST NO HOUSE.

Beneath them is a route marked across the floating archipelago, beginning at the execution plaza and ending beyond the storm lanes at an island removed from every public chart.

The iron key is stamped with the crescent and spear.

Tovan’s crest.

The searchlights pause on the loft windows.

I fold the route beneath my breastplate and tie the key to my wrist. The only person who can explain why the king hid his murderer’s key inside his own ashes is scheduled to lose his head at dawn.

The bells begin before the sky lightens.

In the streets below, House servants open their wings one color at a time, turning grief into a pageant the Queen can own. My own wings remain hidden beneath soot-black sailcloth. The king’s ash beats against my ribs through the urn, keeping time with a memory someone tried to silence. Once, I would have traded anything to hear my name carried by that many voices. Tonight, anonymity is the only reason I can reach the plaza alive.

One chime for the murdered king.

Two for the traitor prince.

Three for the nameless courier they have just discovered missing with the body.

I climb to the roof. Far above the funeral plaza, a royal pyre blooms gold. At its edge, a four-armed man kneels beneath an executioner’s axe, his blue wings trapped in iron netting.

Tovan lifts his head as if he can feel me watching.

The wind changes.

I open my wings and dive for the dead king, the condemned prince, and the truth someone has already begun to burn.