Prologue

Petalspire — The Night the Palace Bit

The palace ate the priestess before Ilyra could decide whether to save her.

One moment Sister Calanthe was hurrying across the western anther bridge with a crystal vial hidden beneath her ceremonial sash. The next, the orchid wall opened behind her.

Petals did not move that quickly. They were supposed to unfurl with stately grace, responding to rank, mood, and ritual command. These snapped shut like jaws.

Calanthe screamed once.

The sound ended in a wet crunch.

Ilyra remained motionless inside the mirrored alcove, every chromatophore along her body locked to the same moonlit ivory as the wall. Her raptorial forearms were folded in the court posture of harmless devotion. Only the tips of her antennae moved, reading the chemical violence in the corridor.

Fear. Rot. Sacred nectar.

And beneath them, the sharp wine-red scent of a lie.

The palace opened again.

No body fell out. Petalspire had absorbed the priestess into its living tissue, leaving only three amber beads from her prayer chain and a dark smear across the floor. The concealed vial rolled from the folds of crushed silk. Black fluid pulsed inside it.

Ilyra waited until the corridor’s defensive tendrils withdrew.

Then she stepped from the alcove.

Her body changed color as she crossed the bridge, ivory becoming soft orchid pink, the diplomatic shade of concern without accusation. Anyone watching through the palace’s thousands of sensory pores would see an ambassador investigating an unfortunate architectural malfunction.

No one would see the spy counting heartbeats.

She knelt beside the vial.

The glass was warm. Whatever lived inside it tapped against the stopper in a deliberate rhythm—three beats, pause, three beats, pause. Not random fungal expansion. A cultured strain.

“You should not have eaten her,” Ilyra murmured to the floor.

The palace trembled beneath her tarsi.

Petalspire had moods, appetites, and loyalties. It could guide favored residents through blooming corridors or fold an entire delegation into a room with no doors. The priesthood claimed the great orchid recognized moral purity.

Ilyra had always suspected it recognized only what it had been trained to fear.

She reached for the vial.

A green blade slammed down beside her hand.

Ilyra sprang backward, raptorial arms opening. Her outer plates flashed from pink to violent crimson before discipline cooled them again.

The blade belonged to a warrior she knew by the missing notch in his left foreclaw.

Captain Reth stood at the far end of the bridge, dark green carapace wet with humidity. Black decay webbed the seams at his throat. His compound eyes reflected Ilyra in a hundred fractured copies.

“Leave it,” he rasped.

“You are dying.”

“We all are.”

He took one step. The bridge rippled under his weight. Rot had eaten through the lower plates of his abdomen, but his grip on the resin sword remained steady.

“Did the warrior caste grow what is in that vial?” Ilyra asked.

Reth’s mandibles clicked with bitter amusement. “That is what they will announce tomorrow.”

“I did not ask what they will announce.”

His gaze shifted toward the wall that had swallowed Calanthe.

The palace shivered again.

Ilyra lowered her arms by one measured degree. “The sacred nectar carries the same odor as this culture. The priestesses distribute the rations. Tell me why.”

Reth’s chromatophores had been scarred into a permanent military green, but a thin strip beneath his eye flushed with fear.

“Ask the flower mother,” he said. “Ask why she has stopped opening the healing vault.”

“No one reaches the flower mother without the Stigma Throne.”

“A married pair can.”

Ilyra went still.

Reth coughed. Black spores sprayed the inside of his jaw. “The palace needs two colors in agreement before it releases the cure. That is why they cultivated the blight. That is why they need you.”

“Need me for what?”

The warrior’s sword slipped from his weakening grip.

Before it struck the floor, a new vibration rolled through Petalspire. Low. Ceremonial. The announcement frequency of the Stigma Throne.

The living walls bloomed around Ilyra.

Reflections multiplied across a hundred wet mirrors. In each one she stood beside a different shadow-green male. In some futures she cut his throat. In others he knelt between the great roots while her body blazed wine red. In the last reflection, their colors spread through the palace together and every locked healing petal opened.

The male’s face sharpened.

Soren.

General of the warrior caste. The commander who had burned the orchid gardens of Ilyra’s homeland twelve years earlier.

The palace projected him in dark green armor, kneeling before her with one claw extended. Not surrender. Invitation.

Ilyra struck the mirror.

Her serrated forearm shattered the image, but every surrounding reflection repeated it.

Reth laughed until the sound became a choke. “It has chosen.”

“The palace does not choose my husband.”

“Then the priesthood will choose him for you.”

The wall behind Reth opened.

This time Ilyra moved.

She crossed the bridge in a blur and caught his upper arm as the petals snapped inward. Her claws dug into the seam below his shoulder. For one second she held him against the palace’s strength.

The black veins in his throat ruptured.

Reth looked at her with a strange calm.

“Do not let them make the general your enemy,” he whispered. “They already know how much you want him to be.”

His arm tore free in Ilyra’s grasp.

The palace took the rest.

Silence returned to the bridge.

Ilyra stood alone, holding a severed green forearm and breathing the thickening scent of her own fury. Her chromatophores betrayed her, flooding from ivory to pink, from pink to a deep, unmistakable wine red.

Desire and rage shared the same color in orchid mantidfolk.

Petalspire knew it.

By the time the Stigma Throne released its emergency summons, Ilyra had hidden the black vial beneath her sash, washed Reth’s blood from her claws, and restored her body to diplomatic ivory.

Tomorrow the priesthood would blame the warriors for the rot.

Tomorrow Soren would enter the living throne room.

And Ilyra would discover whether the palace intended him to be her cure, her executioner, or the first prey she had ever wanted to hunt twice.