Chapter Text
Before she dreamed of regicide, she dreamed of dancing.
She dreamed on Mondays and Wednesdays and sometimes Thursdays, when she'd finished practicing her letters and her friends hadn't seduced her away with promises of sweets or marbles. She'd eat a pear or plum and then run through her doorway and past the poppies in the garden, down winding cobbled streets with her bright red tail trailing behind her, until she reached the washed open courtyard of the theater. The usher, invariably an old lady with knobbly knees, would let her through into the stands with a smile and a wave, and she'd sit in the emptiest row and swing her legs to wring out all of her energy until her father came out onto the stage.
He would always welcome the audience before telling them this performance was special, and then tell them every performance was special. This always got a laugh from the crowd, because they always liked him. Then the audience quieted and the red curtains parted. The actors walked onto stage and spoke in ways that she almost understood. She sat through it politely, watching the motions of their arms, their careful steps on the wooden platform. Then intermission came, and men and women came by to pass out fruits and ale and dried meat, and everyone began to chatter.
But they always went silent when the dancers came out.
It was always two of them, often Courtney and Emerald Isle, and sometimes Oliver if one of them was sick. They took center stage as the lutist took a seat to one side, curtsying and lifting their white dresses embroidered with red. Then they stood to face one another and curtsied again, and the musician strummed the beginnings of a tune that tickled her ears.
Then, they began the bourrée.
They danced around one another in parallel, cloth shoes pattering on the stage in time with the thrumming strings and the lilt of her own heart. They drew a thousand lines across the stage with the hems of their skirts, like waterskaters drinking dew, like tendrils of frost along a winter window. And they always did it in perfect symmetry, directing smirks and stares at one another, with the familiarity of family and the vibrance of lovers. They led the lute through its counterpoint until the entire audience was holding their breaths. Then, as sweat beaded on their heads and they drew close enough to trample one another—the final chord rang out, and all was still.
She was always the first to clap and the loudest, and when the play finished, she was the first to run out and put her wooden token in the bucket of whichever dancer she'd liked more that day to express her support. As she walked back to her unassuming home, she’d close her eyes and taste the air and imagine herself as a beautiful adult on that stage, dancing with impossible poise. And in her mind, she was the best that anyone had ever seen.
Everyone told her that the stage was not an easy business. Emerald Isle would lament the creak of the old boards and the unappreciative audience, while Courtney lamented her decision to choose passion over coin. “Don’t become like us,” they always told her when they kept her company before a show began. “And don’t become like your father, who loves people too much to make money.”
It was the only thing they said that she didn’t treat as gospel. Everything else she absorbed greedily, like the way she should lace her shoes, or how to stretch her back and arches so that she could move as fluidly as possible. They loved to dance, no matter what they said.
Her mother was less in love with her father’s career. Whenever Shion brought up the topic at the table, she’d say, “I love your father to death, but he’d manage to find a needle in a stack of pence.” She said this the way someone would talk about a favored dog. Then she’d continue to talk as Shion sipped her soup of leeks and potatoes, saying that she had loved dancing too, but that she’d never found success in it, and that Shion would be better off being a nice little girl and finding a stable career, like stonemasonry or leatherworking. Shion would ignore this too.
Her father was the one who encouraged her dream. Occasionally they’d talk on walks through the workers’ districts together, with her father passing out rag flyers for the theater while she ate an apple he’d polished for her on his jacket. “People need art,” he told her reverently. “And not just the nobles, but everyone. Tales of heroism and defiance and love, moments of sublime harmony and motion. There’s nothing more important in the world.”
“Mom said it was all lies,” Shion said.
He said, “It is. But every lie has a bit of the truth inside it. Sometimes you have to tell a lie to convince someone to listen. Then, if you stack enough lies together in the right shape and color, it becomes the truth—the most magnificent truth you’ll ever see.”
Her father promised that he’d send Shion to a dance academy as soon as they had just a little more money. But the money wouldn’t come during the war. The Phoenix Prince had declared that the land would be smothered by flame, and while much of the theater’s clientele was too old to be drafted, they weren’t too old to feel their purses squeezed dry. Shion would be allowed to sit in the front rows during these slower times; at other times, the Prince’s forces would be pawing at the city walls, and there were no shows to go to at all.
After a few years of this, her father’s hair began to gray, and in desperation he took to soliciting the noble families in search of a patron. Shion didn’t know this at the time, being only eight years old, and only knew that he was absent for longer periods and often came home in his finest threadbare robes long after she should’ve been asleep.
She also didn’t know when he’d finally convinced one of them to attend. She knew only that one night he asked her to attend a specific showing. She’d already been planning on doing it, of course, so her behavior didn’t change at all. But now she was curious.
Everything seemed normal as she arrived—the same old lady usher, the same food being sold outside. Maybe the stage had been swept cleaner than usual? Her father’s smile shivered as he addressed the crowd, scanning the audience as if in search of a specific face. But the show started without fanfare.
Ten minutes later, someone sat down in the row in front of Shion.
He was a dark-haired umamusume, surprisingly tan for someone from Ashglame, with eyes suspended halfway between lilac and gold. He wore the linens of a commoner like it was a choice instead of a necessity. Presently he leaned back and stretched his arms out across the seats near him, then lifted a hand to her in greeting. She waved back, and the umamusume smiled. But he didn’t speak.
He was silent as he watched the first half of the play, although his gaze often wandered through the audience, across the clouds, and under his own gloves. During intermission he paid for a skewer of fruit with a denomination large enough to make the server's knees buckle. She didn't see how he ate it, though, since Emerald and Courtney had taken the stage again, and today they danced in a rare three-eighths tempo that she refused to not watch.
As the lute went silent and the dancers bowed, the umamusume finally spoke to Shion. “Do you want to become a dancer when you grow up?”
Normally her mother told Shion not to talk to strangers. But something about this man made her turn to him and nod anyway.
“Very brave. Is there anything stopping you? Because you don’t look like you have a dancer’s physique.”
She said, “I practice alone sometimes. But I can’t go to classes. Mom needs me to watch my siblings when she goes to work in the stoneyards.”
The man nodded as if Shion had said something profound. “Well, I hope you have the chance to learn someday.”
“Me too.”
The rest of the night passed without incident, and Shion all but forgot it the next day. It was only a week later, when her father returned home at noon with the smile of a madman and spun Shion around in his arms, that she learned that the man was named Stay Gold from the Gold family of the Nine Houses, and not only was he the new financial backer of her father’s theater, he had chosen to personally fund her dance education at the foremost academy in the city. And she wondered if dreaming was all she needed to do to make her wishes come true.
Those seven years of education were the best of her life. Four times a week she would walk under the pennants of the high district into a long whitewashed building containing several open dance rooms. There she learned the basics of branles and bourrée and quadrille, and even routines from other countries, like ballet from the Narmelaix and the basic rotational forms of Tasik Padang to the north. The woman who taught these forms wore vibrant reds and purples against her bronze skin, and she said that her people used these dances to create magic. Shion was the only one who didn’t marvel at this fact—her family’s umamusume hadn’t manifested a knack in three generations, and she probably wouldn’t either. Instead, she practiced the precise steps inside the room’s tall mirrors, keeping to the circle like the instructor told her to.
And she was good at it. She could understand any single movement after watching her instructions perform it a few times, and she could execute the short sequences assigned to her with only a few days of practice. Her only true limitation was her physical fitness, which took time to develop from her scrawny youth, but within two years she was tapped to perform her own variations in the studio’s seasonal recitals.
But she was never the favorite. Always the audience praised someone else, usually someone from a well-to-do family, and rarely someone who performed better than her. Shion could point out all the flaws in their form in rehearsal, and could even outdo them in her own solos, and her teachers would all agree that her form and expression was better. But always she would be second place in the crowd’s eyes. This was when she learned that the world played favorites, and that her family’s relative destitution was not a matter of fact, but instead the result of a complex tangle of factors that she would never fully understand.
But there was one person whose brilliance she was forced to concede to.
Stay Gold brought the girl in at the start of her half-year ballroom dancing class. After chatting briefly with the instructor, he noticed Shion from across the room and pulled the girl with him. “This is my daughter, Orfevre,” he explained casually, as if his heart and mind were elsewhere. “The governess says all the kids need to learn ball dancing instead of just imitating me at galas, and his time has come up.”
Shion vaguely heard this, but she was too busy staring at Orfevre to really process it. The girl stood only several centimeters above Shion, but he did so proudly enough to make it feel like at least twenty. His hair fell down his soft face and back in a split cascade of orange that rippled as he folded her arms and frowned at her. And his eyes! The shock-purple irises held the magnetism of a star and the fragility of a soap bubble. Shion had to intentionally break away from the girl’s stare so she could curtsy. “It’s n-n-nice to meet you, Orfevre.”
In response, Orfevre frowned.
“He’s not good with anyone except his older sister,” Stay Gold said. “But I think a class like this will help him open up.”
He didn’t open up. As Stay Gold left, he moved to lean against a back wall and survey the room as if he owned it. He continued to sit there as the class began, even as the other twenty-odd attendees lined up on the floor and watched the instructors demonstrate the basic motions of the box step. It was what Shion imagined a judge did inside a courtroom.
After half an hour of this, the instructor set a metronome in motion, and they were split into pairs to practice the steps. Shion was assigned Orfevre, which was expected—she had learned affability and patience with her younger siblings, and could handle just about any personality in the class now. Still, she found herself struggling not to wilt beneath this girl’s gaze as they faced each other. The anxiety was only amplified by her knowledge that Orfevre knew magic. Most of Stay Gold’s five umamusume children could use the family’s knack to turn objects into resilient golden metal, and they each also had a second magic that was entirely their own. Could they twist her knuckles or run her temperature up? She didn’t know.
Still, Shion tried to be kind. “If you’re uncertain what to do, just follow my lead,” she said to Orfevre with a smile. “I’ve done this dance a few times before, and—”
Orfevre’s eyes pulsed with a ring of gold, and Shion’s joints locked.
It was like her head had been cut from her spine. Frantically she tried to run, to break their eye contact, to shout. But nothing came except a haze of gold in her vision.
“I do not follow,” Orfevre said. “I lead.”
He raised his arms to the closed position, and her arms swung upwards against her will to meet them.
“You will follow my step,” he said, and she knew that it would be true, regardless of her will.
And then they danced.
It was a beginner’s work. Orfevre did not attempt any spins or take them out of the closed position. But he led Shion through the movements with such effortless certainty that she could barely tell. Each step was placed without fail, and his body remained in perfect balance even as he pulled her into a line for fifth position breaks. His presence was so intense that the other students moved preemptively to avoid him. If this level of understanding had come only from informal practice, then he was a prodigy.
Shion moved in perfect synchronicity with him, because she had no choice. The conceit in his eyes reflected her own terror back towards her. When the instructors finally called for them to stop, he drew her back to the default position before releasing her.
Immediately she fell away from him until her back was against the wall. As the whole class watched them, she whispered, “What did you do to me?”
“I made you glorious,” was all he said, as if it justified itself.
Her shock curdled into anger. She snarled, “Never do that to me again.”
He shrugged. “So be it. You shall not partake in my brilliance.”
She never danced with him again. That girl had crossed an inviolable line, one that only Shion herself seemed to be bothered by.
“I think it's fun when he leads me along,” one of her classmates said as they waited between graded partner performances one day. “He knows what he wants and he takes it. It's like riding an unruly ox.”
“Because he could kill you?” Shion asked.
“Because he’s strong.”
Her instructors’ responses were similar in tone, if not in content. They told her that he’d only be taking the single class and then leaving, that he had no interest in a career in dance. “And the stage has room for everyone,” one of them said. “There’s no need to get competitive.” Hearing that was the first time in her life that Shion wanted to curse at someone.
Shion's family, at least, agreed that Orfevre had gone too far. Her mother had begun to encourage her aspirations of dance once she'd realized it would be royally funded, and hearing her daughter complain grabbed her attention more than a thousand church bells could. “There should be rules about where and when people can use knacks,” she complained as she prepared mutton stew one night. “Letting children pull others around like puppets… It's not right.”
“Once the girl was punished for misbehavior,” her father said. “But the Gold house is ascendant now, and his knack is developed enough to kill. Anyone who would want to criticize him could potentially draw the ire of all the Nine Houses. So they remain silent.”
“I thought you liked Stay Gold,” Shion said.
The man sighed with the heave of an old goat. “I do like him. And I respect him as my benefactor. But there’s something sick inside his house. None of the children are well; none of their mothers are present. And children are a parent’s responsibility.”
Shion couldn’t see the full depths of his feelings, but she nodded anyway. “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t become like Orfevre.”
He smiled. “I know you won’t, my little apple.”
So Orfevre continued to assert himself, and Shion continued to avert her eyes from his glory. Or at least, she wished that she could. It was as pointless as staring at the sun with closed eyes. Her fellow classmates were always chattering about Orfevre—how he was proficient with the saber and rapier at the age of fourteen, how he’d written a political treatise with his sister Dream Journey, how he’d already turned down an arranged marriage from the Narita family.
This chatter she could ignore, but his ballroom performance? It was peerless. He’d learned every position they would teach him, every dip and turn and gesture, to the point where the instructors were encouraging him to consider a career in the profession. This, of course, he rejected. “An eagle ought not remain among doves.” Shion wanted to bloody his nose.
It was at about this age that she began to understand her father's plays as more than monologues and blocks, but as unsubtle political and heroic commentaries. And her father had many things to say. One week before the dance recital that would mark Orfevre's departure from the ballroom class, her father debuted a two-act titled The Tyrant Child, about a young umamusume who was given the keys to a kingdom and proceeded to destroy it through malevolent caprice. The message was well delivered and the child’s parent’s actor put his heart into the monologue, but in truth, Shion felt that it missed the point. The crowds who were blindly devoted to Orfevre weren't just foolish devotees—they were victims of his magnetism. And her father hadn’t understood.
Stay Gold was at the premiere as well. Shion had half expected him to throw a fit at the end of a play that portrayed him as impotent to a crowd of hundreds. But instead, he watched like a sick animal, pale and silent and limp. When the show ended and it was just him and Shion alone in the theater, he stood and walked out with unenergetic motions like a revenant.
The Tyrant Child performed modestly well for one of her father’s shows. By contrast, it seemed as if half the kingdom attended Orfevre's dance recital. Certainly there were more than a fair share of nobles, including guests from the Narita and Admire families. Shion got her first glimpse of the other Gold children in the audience: the bored Nakayama Festa inspecting her chipped nails; the rowdy Gold Ship and stiff Fenomeno, the latter constantly staring guilty daggers at the former; and Dream Journey, Orfevre’s full sister, who looked as if Stay Gold had been given gray hair and the disposition of a jaguar.
Orfevre himself stole the show with his knack-controlled partner, of course, and even Shion had to concede that his steps were better placed than hers. But unlike his eclectic children, Stay Gold was not there to see it. Two months later, while Shion was listening to the town crier to see if Orfevre had bested her at anything else, she learned that he’d abdicated, and that Orfevre had replaced him as head of the Gold family. Her father assured the family that the endowment that Stay had provided for her education was in the hands of the dance studio, and that Dream Journey had also promised that the theater would receive their continued support. But he said it with the pallor of a man who’d lost a friend to war.
The war was something Shion tried to ignore. She knew that she was privileged to live in Rhinesroten, which hadn’t faced direct attacks from the Prince since the nation’s first summoning wards were established. But as Orfevre went on glorious excursions to the front lines in the war’s tenth year, she entrenched herself in ignorance. The less she heard of Orfevre’s name, the better, especially when it distracted her from her passions. She would be allowed to take the examination for a professional certification in the summer, and her instructors were very confident that she could pass. Soon Orfevre would be nothing more than a memory of a blemish that had once clung to her face.
Her father, however, could not ignore the war. Shion first realized this one year before his murder, when her father put on a new play he’d written about the exploits of a general who’d lived a century after the Empresses had established the Nine Houses. Rarely did he delve so far back into Ashglame’s history, and never had he spun a tale so sentimental toward the upper crust.
The play ended with unusually little response from the audience. After they cleared away, Shion walked up to where he stood on the stage and asked, “Why did you write a play like that?”
His face soured like someone had spilled vinegar onstage. “It was at Journey’s request. She wants the theater to be producing… shows that encourage the national spirit.”
“She wants propaganda for Orfevre.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Who taught you that word?”
“Mom taught me all my letters.”
“Right.” He sighed. “Yes, propaganda. You could see the heart wasn’t in it, couldn’t you?”
Shion nodded.
“Well, she’s only asking for two plays per year to be done this way. I’ll make a few sacrifices for the sake of art.”
The sacrifices did not remain few. By the fall, Dream Journey required all of her father’s scripts to be reviewed by one of her secretaries before being staged, and they often returned in drenches of red ink. Her father now spent his nights burning candles as he pored over revisions with his favorite pen, and even the dancers began to complain about the lack of spirit in the scripts.
Things came to a head in the next summer. Her parents only argued when they thought the children were asleep, but Shion had been nursing a swollen Achilles tendon and had spent the past two hours keeping her floor company. Suddenly her breath stilled when she realized she could hear them through the floorboards.
“You absolutely cannot put this to the stage!”
“I have to, dearest.”
“When it’s so clearly a satire of the Gold house? You’ve never been subtle, love, but this beggars belief!”
“Stay Gold made me promise to stay true to myself before he left. You know that—”
“He didn’t ask you to get yourself killed! You know the rumors about the Gold family.”
Shion had heard them too, in the chatter of the crowd during intermissions and the whispers of her classmates. Minor political opponents or competitors with Gold-aligned guilds would disappear without notice, with the excuse that they’d fled the war despite being patriots. Glimpses would be caught of familiar faces among mangled dead bodies, or sometimes within the ranks of noble houseservants. It was another thing Shion chose to ignore.
Her father’s voice quieted. He said, “I’ve compromised my beliefs for too long, my love.”
There was a long pause. Then: “I love you, dearest. But I can’t die with you.”
“I know.”
The next morning, her father was absent from breakfast. As her mother served them unleavened bread, she explained that the family would likely die unless they fled the city. “I have a sister in Clayfigen that will take us in. We’ll have to share a home with them for a while, but it can’t be smaller than this place.”
Her two younger sisters took to the news with no small dismay, especially once they learned their father wouldn't come to see them off. But they had always favored their mother anyway. Once she’d sent them upstairs to gather their things, her mother turned to Shion. “You’re sixteen years old, basically an adult. And I can already tell you want to stay.”
Shion nodded. “My certification exam is in a week. I won’t leave my dream behind.”
Her mother shook her head. “Just like your poor father.”
And that was that. They were gone by evening.
One week later, she passed her examinations in ballet and bourrée. The head instructor had brought the lead of a dancing company contracted with the Admire family to watch, and the man offered her a position in the troupe as soon as she passed. She took it immediately.
The week after that, her father’s play premiered. Titled The Purulent Five, it portrayed a pentad of umamusume nobles that poisoned the water supply of their home city through a combination of incompetence and sabotage. The play ended with all of them drinking from the one well in the city that they thought had been isolated from their malfeasance and promptly dying afterwards. The actors looked terrified as they performed it, and even Emerald Isle lacked the usual joy in her movements. But it was her father's art.
Three nights after that, Shion awoke to the front door of her home shattering open.
She grabbed the dagger she’d purchased in an alleyway with her first week’s wages before stepping into the hall. Moonlight slivered across the hallway as she crept towards her father’s open door.
Inside, Dream Journey stood in black robes above her father’s dessicated body.
His pen had been stabbed through his throat.
Shion’s vision went red, and she lunged towards the woman. But Journey wouldn’t be caught off guard. She touched a thick chain that hung from inside her cloak, and it shot out to entangle Shion’s legs. She fell into the wet with a smack.
Journey’s boots thumped against the floor as she approached. She stared at Shion and, after an inspection, clicked her tongue. “You have some fight, just like him. Dangerous… But I can’t leave too many dead bodies around. It's messy enough as it is.”
Shion heard the snap of a clasp before she was kicked over to face the ceiling. She caught only a glimpse of the woman’s face before a cloth smothered her mouth and stole her consciousness.