The invitation arrived in Verais on a grey morning, sealed in gold wax stamped with the rising sun of the Lucenne Empire. Duke Alaric Veyron turned it over twice before he opened it, already certain he wouldn’t like what was inside.

He was right.

You are cordially summoned to the Festival of the Two Moons, to be held across two months at the Imperial seat of Castelmere, in celebration of the Empire’s three hundredth founding...

He set it down on the breakfast table with the particular care of a man setting down something he’d rather throw in the fire.

“No,” he said, before his sister had even asked.

Lady Noelle Veyron looked up from her tea with the wounded patience of a younger sibling who has had this exact argument many times before and intends to win it eventually. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to say you want to go.”

“I was going to say I deserve to go. I’m twenty-two, Alaric. I have been to exactly one ball in my life and you spent the whole evening standing by a wall like a piece of furniture someone forgot to move.”

“I was guarding the door.”

“From what? Joy?”

He didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question that deserved one.

The truth — the truth he didn’t say out loud, because saying it out loud made it sound smaller than it was — was that Alaric had no patience left for courts. He had spent his twenties learning exactly how much a smile could cost and exactly how little it was worth once you’d paid for it. He had watched his own betrothal dissolve into a transaction the moment a better offer came along, watched the woman he’d thought loved him marry a count with deeper pockets within the same season, and had walked away from the whole arrangement called romance with the calm, settled conclusion of a man closing a ledger. It wasn’t grief anymore. Grief required ongoing feeling. This was just fact. Love, as far as he could tell, was a story people told each other to make ambition more bearable.

He did not believe in it. He had stopped believing in it on purpose, the way you stop touching a burn.

But Noelle had spent her whole short life inside the walls of Veyron, raised by a brother who treated the outside world like a hazard to be managed, and she was right, and he knew she was right, and that was the worst part.

“I won’t go without you,” she said, softer now. “I’m not asking you to enjoy it. I’m asking you to stand in a room while I enjoy it.”

He looked at the invitation again. Two months. An eternity of music and forced conversation and the particular exhaustion of smiling at strangers.

“Fine,” he said. “Two months. Then we come home and you don’t ask me again for a year.”

Noelle’s answering smile was bright enough that, for a moment, he almost didn’t regret it.