Page 2 of Only Hard Problems

“The solstice, eh?” Fergus said, drawing my attention back to him. A teasing grin spread across his face. “Wondering how many times you’ll have to dance with Lady Asterin at the solstice ball to placate your grandmother?”

I bit back a groan. Lady Asterin Armas was yet another one of my many problems. “Something like that,” I muttered.

Fergus reached up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Ah, don’t look so dour. Asterin seems like a lovely woman. Dancing with her shouldn’t be a chore. Besides, it’s nothing you haven’t done for the gossipcasts before, right?”

“Right,” I replied, giving him a bright, cheerful smile in hopes of ending this unwanted topic of conversation.

Fergus’s dark eyes narrowed. My patented smile might dazzle the gossipcast reporters, but he’d known me too long to be so easily fooled. Fergus hesitated, then squared his shoulders, as if bracing himself for an unpleasant task. “I’ve noticed some . . . tension between Beatrice and Wendell lately.”

I dropped my gaze from his and tugged down my right sleeve, even though it was already perfectly in place. “What sort of tension?”

“Wendell seems to be greatly upset with your grandmother for some reason. Of course, I’ve asked Beatrice about it, but she said it was a minor squabble. Some new design that your father is having an issue with that she doesn’t approve of.”

I tugged down my left sleeve with a sharp motion, almost ripping off an opal cufflink. “You know how cranky my father gets when he’s stuck on a project, and how much crankier my grandmother can be when she doesn’t immediately see the results she wants. I’m sure they’ll both figure it out soon, and then things will return to normal.”

The lies dripped easily off my tongue, although guilt knotted my stomach. Fergus was a dear friend, and I hated deceiving him, but it was a necessary evil, like so many other things in my life, both as an Imperium Arrow and as the heir to House Zimmer.

I raised my gaze back to Fergus’s and gave him another false smile. This one must have been much more convincing than the last, because some of the tension and worry eased out of his wrinkled face.

“Good to know,” Fergus replied.

He smiled back at me, then gathered up his pins, scissors, spools of thread, rolls of fabric, and other supplies. Unlike many Regal tailors, Fergus eschewed magnetic and robotic technology in favor of simple, old-fashioned tools. His designs, like my beautiful tailcoat, often took hundreds of hours to complete, but the fit, stitching, and other details were exquisite and well worth the wait.

Fergus packed everything into a battered wooden sewing box, which he hoisted into the crook of his elbow. “See you at the ball, Zane.”

“I wouldn’t miss it, especially when I look this good.” I winked at him, then spun around, making the tailcoat flap against my legs.

Fergus chuckled, then left the room.

As soon as the door shut behind him, the smile dropped from my face faster than a meteor plummeting toward the ground. I stepped down off the raised dais, moved away from the mirror, and wound my way past the tables, chairs, and settees piled high with books, weapons, plastipapers, and wayward tea mugs that filled my tower library. The housekeepers always clucked their tongues about the mess, but I found the clutter comforting—and I needed all the comfort I could get right now.

I went past a long table covered with chrome appliances, including a brewmaker and a beverage chiller, both designed by Vesper, and stopped in front of one of the windows. In the distance, catty-corner across a busy thoroughfare, Imperium soldiers were stationed in front of Castle Caldaren, an enormous, hulking, dark blue stone structure that looked as grim and dour as its absentee owner.

The soldiers had been guarding the castle for two weeks, more than long enough to know that Kyrion wasn’t coming back anytime soon, and they shot bored looks at the horse-drawn carriages that rattled over the Boulevard, the wide cobblestone avenue that fronted many of the Regal homes, including my tower in Castle Zimmer. Several more Imperium soldiers were stationed nearby at the edge of Promenade Park, their bloodred uniforms and silver blasters making them resemble man-size flowers with metallic thorns that had sprouted out of the park’s grassy, rolling lawns.

My tablet chimed. Time to finish getting ready for the solstice celebration.

I turned away from the window and went over to a nearby table. A small weapon that was a cross between a hairpin and a dagger rested atop an uneven stack of paper books. Blue opals and sapphsidian chips adorned the butterfly-shaped hilt, although dried blood crusted the thin, sharp silver blade, marring the weapon’s delicate beauty. I’d been so busy chasing down leads for Holloway about where Kyrion and Vesper might have gone that I hadn’t had a chance to clean Dargan Byrne’s blood off the blade yet.

More memories drifted through my mind. Taking the weapon from my mother’s jewelry collection before the midnight ball . . . Handing the butterfly dagger over to Inga, one of the Crownpoint servants, so she could secretly slip it to Vesper . . . Vesper yanking the butterfly dagger out of her hair, whipping around, and stabbing Dargan with the blade . . .

For the third time, I blinked and pushed the memories away. I hadn’t known about my familial connection to Vesper when I’d arranged for her to receive the dagger. I’d just wanted to ease my own guilty conscience and give her a sporting chance to escape the horrific fate Holloway had in mind for her. Without risking myself, of course.

But now . . . now I wondered if my subconscious had known the truth about Vesper all along.

I was a psion, a broad term that also included seers, siphons, spelltechs, and other people with telekinesis, telepathy, telempathy, and other extraordinary mental abilities. No one knew exactly where psionic powers came from or how to consistently replicate them with science and technology, which was why many folks referred to such abilities as magic. I was a particularly strong telekinetic, able to move objects with my mind, but perhaps something else in my psionic powers had whispered a warning and prompted me to act so recklessly. Either way, Vesper Quill had caused nothing but trouble ever since she’d burst into my life a few months ago.

I glared down at the sparkling jewels, then reached past the dagger and grabbed my stormsword off an even larger and more haphazard pile of books. The long, sharp blade was made of lunarium, a precious mineral that enhanced psionic abilities and could even transform them into physical elements like fire, ice, lightning, and wind. The opalescent blade gleamed with a pale blue sheen in a reflection of my own psion power, but the bits of sapphsidian embedded in the silver hilt seemed to soak up the late-afternoon sunlight, making the jewels look black rather than the deep blue they truly were.

I traced my index finger over a piece of sapphsidian nestled in among the manyZs that were carved into the hilt. Perhaps it was my imagination, but the jewel looked like a wide, open, accusing eye embedded in the silver, like Vesper Quill herself was staring at me from somewhere deep inside my own sword. She was a seer. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she could be psionically spying on me.

Vesper seemed to be quite powerful in her own right, and her truebond with Kyrion would make her even stronger, since the connection would allow the two of them to share thoughts, feelings, and instincts, along with strength, fighting skills, and psionic abilities. During the midnight ball, their combined psion power had ripped through the Crownpoint throne room in a vicious shock wave, toppling bronze sculptures off the walls, cracking the white marble floor, and knocking over Regals, servants, and guards. Vesper peering at me through a jewel in my own sword would be child’s play compared with that previous decimation. Or perhaps it was just my own turbulent thoughts giving life to such fanciful musings.

I had always been so bloodyproudthat my sword bore the Zimmer family sigil, just as I had always been so proud to wear the ice-blue color of House Zimmer. But now . . . now I didn’t know how I felt about my family tree, especially this new, unexpected branch.

Holloway might be focused on where Vesper and Kyrion were going, but ever since they had fled from Corios, I had been secretly retracing their steps, trying to learn everything I could about my wayward sister and the rogue Arrow who had been my former boss.

I didn’t have all the details, but someone—most likely Daichi Hirano, Kyrion’s chief of staff—had discreetly hacked into the Regal archives a few months ago to compare various DNA samples. Daichi had hidden his tracks well but not quite well enough. According to the time stamps I’d found, Daichi—and by extension Kyrion—had been trying to figure out who Vesper’s father was for months, although they hadn’t matched my DNA to Vesper’s untilafterthe midnight ball.

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