Page 63 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

“Are you celebrating too?” I ask, watching her in the mirror while she detangles my hair.

Nidaw doesn’t look up when she says, “All of us are, even with the coming war.”

“The war?” My eyes widen and Nidaw bites her lip. “What war?” I ask before the siren can decide not to talk to me at all.

“There’s war in this world. It started fifty years ago in the northern realms but has now spread all over. It reached our borders this month.”

“That’s why I saw the high lords with their swords bloody,” I gather.

Nidaw’s lips become a slim line, but she nods once, curtly. “Yes. That’s why they are not much around these days,” she confirms with another meaningful glance toward me. Something I don’t understand.

When my hair is done, I want to get up, but Nidaw’s claws push me down again. “You too—it’s a tradition that we dress up and so will all of the servants, includingyou.”

With that, she pulls out a golden thread, matching the one she’s wearing in silver, and starts to twirl it through strands of my dark hair. When she is done, she forms some tiny stars out of the thread with a talent I find hard to put into words. Then she places them all over my hair as if my head is the night sky I so often watch from the window.

It’s nothing short of beautiful.

Nidaw gets up and brings me a long, black dress—so similar to the one Lyrian gave me that fatal night weeks ago.

I take it shyly, only slipping into it after realizing that all of the servants are wearing the same style of dress. That too seems to be part of the tradition.

The servants step forward, their long-clawed fingers pulling the fabric into place before they start to dust my milk-white skin all over with golden powder. Finally, my whole body shimmers with a gentle, warm glow as I regard myself in the mirror. Some patches look solid gold. Some, like my collarbones, are only lightly dusted. Other parts, like my cheeks, have streaks that accentuate my face strangely, but beautifully.

When I’m done, I find even the servants looking at me differently, as if I’ve transformed into one of them, as tall and slim and beautiful as they are, my hair hiding my human ears.

“Now—let’s go,” Nidaw offers, obviously content with her work.

I follow her, more than a little nervous, as we venture into the main hall. Exotic music’s now drifting through the corridors,reverberating from the high stone walls. Eerie, haunting voices, singing a chant, underlined by a beat that sounds almost electronic—nothing I’ve ever heard before but something that thrums across my skin and along my bones.

“Remember to keep your head down,” Nidaw says as a final warning before we slip through the kitchen and into the ballroom with the huge terrace I ventured through on my first night here. I barely recognize it, though as my gaze sweeps over the room.

It’s been transformed into a twilight revelry, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.Almostnaked, painted bodies flash everywhere, lit by a thousand candles.

Some fae stand, some lounge in chairs and on low benches that have been carried in. There’s a lot of naked skin on display, lithe figures with skins in all ranges of the palette—from sapphire to topaz green to a subtle amethyst. Gold and silver dust covers the bodies, flickering and glittering in the light, the wild colors singing to the painter in me.

In the semi-darkness, I spot hooves and curled horns coated with gold and adorned with jewelry, and the same sort of filaments I wear in my hair.

In a corner, there’s the group of sirens singing to the strange music, next to two naked men playing on harps and two fauns beating various drums. The air’s heavily fragranced with the smell of jasmine and orange petals that some green-skinned men with those beautiful pixie wings crush under their bare feet to disperse their scent. Others burn incense that blurs the outlines of the room, the brown wood smoke curling in the air like filaments.

Everywhere in between, servants glide through the crowd, carrying plates stacked with goblets of wine and laden with overripe fruits and other strange delicacies.

I know some of these flavors from the faun cook who slips me some things to try when no one’s looking. Today it was a raspberry so delicate and sweet that tears filled my eyes. And a tiny bird, its skin honeyed and crackling with fat, stuffed with crushed nuts and pomegranate seeds.

I watched the cook and Nidaw eating them, too, bones and all, spitting out the beak.

Nidaw seizes my arm to steer me back to the kitchen. There, she orders me to grab a plate of food and follow the other servants. I obey, taking one of the trays laden with macadamia bread, adorned with a ball of cinnamon butter, sugared violets, and those bittersweet cocoa-coated, summer-ripe raspberries, and venture out. I struggle to find my way between swaying bodies, trying hard not to bump into anyone while I avoid faces, just as Nidaw told me to.

But a moment after I step out of the kitchen, several heads turn to look, and a murmur goes through the crowd. Some even gape at me with their mouths wide open.

Everyoneseems to stare at me, bathed in candlelight.

A wave of heat and sensation crushes over me, and I fight not to look up. Fight my suddenly racing heart and sweating fingers. I want to run straight back into the kitchen and hide.

Do I look so alien to them?

I doubt it. Doubt my round ears show through my long hair at all.

Maybe it’s my smell? Maybe I smell human?

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