Winter's Ball Read online

  Copyright © 2021 Giselle Ava All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Sign up for my newsletter for free books and giveaways via:

  https://www.subscribepage.com/q6a6e9

  Contents

  Introduced in Winter’s Ball

  1: Winter’s Ball

  2: An Inconvenience

  3: Indigo

  4: It’s Time

  No Eyes

  Introduced in Winter’s Ball

  Sarina Mithriv, high lady of Lavus

  Mikka, a cat who is not like other cats

  Tasha Vasil, a hired assassin of Lavus

  Sir Tam, the Mithriv family’s loyal guard

  Yorik Glaz, a friendly apothecary

  The Man With No Eyes, one of the six “Knives”

  Andreius Mithriv, the stylish uncle of Sarina

  Alyos, a fashionable man obsessed with time

  Sofia Satvus, a daughter of the notorious Satvus family

  Yuri Untruis, the oldest son of House Untruis

  Pambi Challan, a fat imp of a man

  Eveline Challan, the most cunning woman in Lavus

  Nikolas Kursive, the master of war

  Gregoth Trovik, a handsome man from the deep west

  Ari Trovik, the new pregnant wife of Gregoth

  Desmond Da’vail, a childhood friend of Sarina

  1: Winter’s Ball

  Sarina loved the winter’s ball. She loved standing on the beautiful gilded balcony which overlooked the marvelous, glimmering ballroom, watching the fancy-dressed noblemen and women filing in; and she loved dancing with Mother to the music which shook the walls; and she loved the food and the boys from other noble families, and she just loved it all.

  She was twelve years old and had just realised that if she grew out her hair long enough, it took on a classy red shine, and when she stood under the right lights and tilted her head at the right angle, those red hairs became the best thing in all of Lavus City.

  “Um, Sarina?” said Edward, the oldest man in Castle Lavus. “Why are you simply standing there in the middle of the sitting room and is your neck alright?”

  She swung around to meet Edward’s multi-colored eyes, one blue and one yellow, one expressing confusion and the other concern. She blushed, straightening her neck and stepping out of the precise center, which was right beneath the glittering chandelier.

  “Sorry,” she said with a smile.

  Edward knelt down in front of her with moderate trouble, fixed the collar of her pink dress, then smoothed down her hair. “Your mother has done quite a remarkable job on you,” he said, before drawing back his hand and rubbing the sticky product from his large, callused fingertips. “I like your dress. Simple, and yet sophisticated. You look stunning.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Edward smiled at her, then groaned as he leaned down to whisper into her ear, “Keep an eye on that cat of yours. Last year, I believe he managed six minutes before blacking out drunk. An improvement over the year before, yet quite poor nonetheless. Tell him, at eleven o’clock tonight I would like to have an intellectual conversation with him regarding our favorite topic, ancient politics. That ought to keep him sober for a little while.”

  Sarina smiled and Edward retreated back to his full height, which was quite impressive indeed, and gave her a secret knowing look before walking away through the double-leaf door into the grand chamber itself. Sarina felt butterflies as she glimpsed the majestic hall that lay beyond it, heard the voices of gathering nobility.

  She watched the guests arriving through the large, round sitting room window that stretched from the floor to ceiling. The glass burned frost against her fingertips, and the icy fog of her breath on the windowpane drew a myriad of odd shapes. The sky had a peaceful, stony look to it, crying a gentle drizzle of snow. A thin layer of smog sat about the rooftops and spires, occasionally being ripped apart by bursts of smoke from chimneys. Beneath her, the castle gardens were lit with garish, rainbow-colored lights. Streamers hung from posts and awnings, and the road had been swept of ice, as horses and carriages arrived one or two at a time.

  She lifted her gaze to the beautiful city beyond the castle walls. People came here from all over the world to celebrate the last night of winter and the coming of spring. It would be seven days of non-stop festivities, seven days of music and laughter, and carnival games. If you ever wished to do something you could never do, they said tonight was the night to do it.

  At nine thirty she was standing under her father’s expensive clock, which he’d imported from Karrim, that lavish city across the sea that was in all those ultra-expensive paintings. The social room was filled with people wearing lots of different colors and fabrics and styles. If you’d spontaneously decided to knock everybody out with poison gas and steal their clothing, Sarina figured you’d end up quite rich indeed, rich enough to sail to Karrim.

  “But who would try that?” said Mikka the cat, standing beside her with a glass of wine between his paws, which he occasionally sipped. Mikka was not like other cats. He was smarter, more cunning, and, well, could spit out a few choice words. He was also loyal to the bone. He served father and before him his father, who’d named him after a mouse.

  Sarina simply enjoyed his company.

  “You mean who would try poisoning everyone here so they can strip them naked and then take their expensive clothes?” Sarina said to Mikka’s question. “Shall I answer that?”

  Mikka gave her a concerned look. “You’re too crafty for twelve years old. It makes me very frightened for what you will become give a few more inches.”

  “Mother says this will be my final height,” she sighed.

  “Your mother has a wit that is matched only by some. Such as this feline.” He pridefully ran a paw across his tiny blue dress shirt, which covered mottled grey-white fur.

  The two of them smiled at each other and then Sarina chuckled, trying not to spill her glass of apple juice. Mikka stood up on the tips of his paws. “That boy in the red coat has been ogling you for the last fifteen minutes. Would you like me to accidentally scratch his eye out?”

  “I see him,” Sarina said, blushing. The boy was Lord Petro, from Takh, the terrible place about two days south where they produced a lot of coal, which made them very wealthy, especially come wintertime, enough to make up for the other three seasons.

  Lord Petro blushed and hid from sight.

  “I can be very clumsy, you know,” Mikka said.

  “Gouging out an innocent boy’s eyes?” Sarina said.

  Mikka purred sadly into his wine as he took a sip and then rested the empty glass on the closed, grand piano beside them. “I’m going to grab some more of those cakes,” he said, already three steps away from her. He spun around, paws sliding on the carpet, and she met his large, yellow eyes. “Can I get you anything, Sarina?”

  “I’m going to go dance,” she said.

  Mikka smiled and left.

  She saw her brother slip off with some very pretty northern girl at around nine forty, as that was when the dinner bell rang and the cooks came out with a hand-picked spread of food, which filled the entire chamber with wonderful smells. Mother didn’t like him slipping off into the secluded castle depths with girls he had just met but Sarina wasn’t a dobbing spy—well, she was a spy but she wasn’t the “dobbing” part of it.

  At three minutes to ten, she was strolling through
the lavish halls, skipping across the rich velvet carpet and narrowly avoiding the ire of other mingling guests: tall, strong men from Salar, beautiful women in incredible ball gowns, the hems of which billowed out across the floor. There were fancy, conical wine glasses in hands. Glossed-up lips spreading gossip: news from the east (they finally caught Marci the Pumpkin Witch) and news from the north (a new queen sits on the throne and she just gave birth to triplets).

  Tasha was running through the halls as she often did, with far too much energy for Sarina to ever keep up with her. Her blonde pigtails flew out behind her head, which she on-the-record hated, but her mother—who was Lavus City’s notorious gossip queen, Lady Galan Vasil—insisted that they be done that way in respect to something “interesting and historical.”

  “Hey—” Sarina began, but Tasha was gone.

  What do I expect? Sarina thought to herself as she watched Tasha disappear, stumbling into several other guests on her way through the castle corridors. It was difficult to make friends in the court of Lavus. She got along passably with Lady Stanvoith’s two daughters, twins, Abi and Mari, and she was close with Cloe, but Cloe had fallen abruptly sick and had not been in Lavus since last winter. The illness was bad was all Sarina knew.

  But she didn’t need many friends, especially on the winter’s ball. The energy in every single corridor, every single room, was incredible. Expensive furnishings shone with candlelight and re-reflected expensive jewelry. A thousand scents from a thousand different parts of the world filled every room she entered and she breathed it all in, exhilarated.

  At around eighteen minutes past ten, going off the little pocket watch her father had procured for her twelfth birthday (“A lady must be punctual”), which always reverted to being about one minute too slow, a couple of low voices led her into the off-limits library with its impressive bookshelves and artful paintings.

  She gently closed the door behind her. She wasn’t exactly sure what brought her there besides the natural curiosity of a twelve-year-old girl, but she knew she wasn’t allowed. The library was off-limits during the winter’s ball, and always off-limits to visitors from beyond the city. Sarina didn’t know why, unless it was to prevent theft and damages. Ancient books lined the shelves from top to bottom, with ladders on rails providing access to the very heights. The ceiling was one giant glass mural of a queen and a rose, ivory horses and blue skies. She instinctively looked up at it as she entered and lightly tiptoed towards the voices.

  She hid behind one of the shelves and peered out from around it. Two people stood in the centre of the room. One of them was her mother, in a beautiful blue gown with golden hems, her chestnut brown hair curled and resting on her shoulders in two parts.

  The other was a man...with no eyes.

  The man with no eyes wore an expensive dress suit, the attire of another lord, though she had definitely not seen him before. He had no hair except the hair on his eyebrows, which were thin—as though carefully trimmed. Very nice eyebrows, actually.

  The only way she could describe his eyes was that they were simply non-existent: hollowed out eye sockets covered by small black circular glasses, and if you looked at him from a certain angle, you could see his empty eye sockets, and she shivered intensely.

  The man stood alarmingly close to her mother, speaking in a low voice.

  Sarina crept closer, darting from one bookshelf to another, her steps not completely light or skillful, but muffled by the soft turquoise carpet nonetheless. Her ear grazed the books on the shelf. She felt the woody grain of the pages, smelt the age on them, the smells of another time and another place. And through the books she heard his voice.

  “—your guards are dead.”

  Her heart was beating so fast it hurt and yet she couldn’t move from that spot, partly out of fear of being spotted and partly because she knew that, in doing so, she would leave her mother there and she could never do that. So she stayed. She shut her eyes, turning off her other senses to hear them better. Her mother’s voice was quieter than usual.

  “The west will not stand for this.”

  The man lowered his voice. Sarina opened her eyes. Through a gap between the books, she watched him lean in closer. His right hand went down to a hidden spot behind his back.

  “None will stand at all,” he said.

  There was a flash of movement and the glint of something shiny. Her mother jolted but did not fall. Neither of them moved. Sarina, growing ever more anxious, slid from her hiding place and peered around the edge of the bookshelf—

  The man revealed a bloody knife, about the length of Sarina’s forearm, and jammed it back into her mother’s stomach. Her mother gasped, clinging to him. Sarina all but screamed, grabbing her mouth, as the man with no eyes slit her mother’s throat in half.

  Her head fell back and she dropped.

  The man with no eyes flashed a look in Sarina’s direction and she swung back behind the bookshelf, legs buckling underneath her. She fell onto the carpet, both hands grappling her twitching mouth as salty tears like blood began streaming down her cheeks. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears, drowning out the sounds around her. Her vision was going dark.

  The man with no eyes left the room.

  Sarina stayed there all night, wishing she could turn back time and run back into that library and scream for her mother to hide, wished for it harder than anything else. She had been so close and she had just stood there, watching it unfold.

  The assassins poisoned most of the guests, including her father, and Edward. Her brother put up a fight, or so it seemed from the damages he’d left in his quarters where it happened, but they’d cut off his hand and then slashed his face so that it split open like a tulip.

  Everybody else died.

  Nearly everyone.

  Mikka survived—something about a very specific feline immunity—and he was the one who found Sarina there in the library, and he stayed there with her all through the night.

  Meanwhile, Sir Tam, her mother’s loyal guard of twenty-five years, was drunk in the castle courtyard. He would later try to hang himself in the stables, but a friendly apothecary named Yorik consoled him, and he pledged his allegiance to Sarina herself.

  There was also Tasha, just two years older than Sarina, who had been knocked out in an explosion, with memory loss. Her entire family perished. There were probably other survivors, at least enough that Lavus City was able to prevail beyond that night, but the horror outweighed any flake of positivity.

  And the horror was bad. The Six Knives, as they would later be known, not only killed almost every nobleman and -woman in the castle, but also those in the city. But only the nobility, as if their goal was to fundamentally dismantle Lavus City.

  And all the while, twelve-year-old Sarina hid like a coward.

  They never found who did it, not even one of them—but how could they? The murders were quick and ruthless, and nobody who saw them lived to speak of it.

  Nobody but Sarina.

  And yet she told no one.

  They called it the Killing Night. There was no winter’s ball the year after, and the year after that it was a low attendance, high-security ball, and the year after that was the first one Sarina attended since the Killing Night, and she threw up three times.

  The people would ask: why uphold such a marred tradition? The truth was, Sarina didn’t know. Something about not letting the bad guys win, about the spirit of Lavus prevailing even when it’s tested, about re-establishing normality. Normality was all anybody wanted.

  And then it was as if the murders never happened. Lavus City reasserted itself as the crown city of the world. A new court emerged, Sarina named High Lady, Mikka her first advisor, Sir Tam her sworn protector. In no time at all, seven years had passed.

  It was the last day of winter.

  2: An Inconvenience

  Sarina hated the winter’s ball.

  “They did what to my dress!?” she snapped.

  Mikka, who was lounging on the edge of
her dressing table, looked up from his newspaper. “Ripped it in half, were, I believe, the words that they used.”

  “They just ripped it in half, did they?”

  “Well, not deliberately.”

  “So I suppose I’ll walk out there naked tonight.”

  “Oh no, that never ends well.”

  Sarina sighed, sitting down on her bed. She’d bathed and was wearing a traditional, nondescript shirt with black pants. She unwrapped the towel from around her hair and let her dark, reddish locks fall across her shoulders. She kept her hair short, just past her shoulders, so that it dried quickly and tended to keep out of her way. The only other person in the room was Sir Tam, who stood in the corner, sword in scabbard.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Mikka said, “they aren’t just going to make you walk the ballroom in that hideous thing. You will have a dress...just not your dress.”

  “My mother’s dress will not fit me, Mikka.”

  “You would be surprised at how many dresses she had. A few adjustments and one will fit you perfectly. We already have it picked out. It’s better that than you ordering them to fix that ruined one or make you a brand new dress from scratch. You would be working them all to death. Besides, was the new one that good anyway?”

  She stared at him with dagger eyes. “Yes.”

  Mikka sighed and slid off the dressing table, rolling up the newspaper into a tube and then cradling it underneath his furry, grey and white arm. He waddled up to her with those stubby little legs of his, and he looked up at her with yellow eyes, one of which was cupped by a stitched-up scar and a strip of no hair.

  “Trust me, Sarina,” he said. “Wear your mother’s dress.”

  She thought about it. “Fine.”

  “Excellent.” Mikka walked right out.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  He stopped and turned, waving the newspaper as though it were a wand. “Well, to inform them that you’ve elected to wear your mother’s dress. I must say, they will be thrilled to hear that they may stop fixing that old bloody one and enjoy the rest of the day off!”