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Artemisia Palace has the grandest, most opulent dining hall Kai has ever seen, and that’s saying a lot. He’s an emperor; he has been to state dinners in every country and nearly every city on the blue Earth. He’s seen crystalline cutlery and wax candle chandeliers and food so impossible one daren’t eat it.
But Luna takes the cake. Literally, they have taken cake and transformed it into a fifty-tier, three-metre-tall sculpture, each layer separated by gold lace that should be physically incapable of holding such weight. A fountain flows in the centre, spurting out creamy gravity-defiant chocolate which falls in ribbon-like swirls into a golden basin.
And that’s just the cake. The decorations are excessive, the entertainment is sheer magic and the servers bow to all. No doubt a portion of the spectacle is accomplished through glamour, and that fact makes Kai uncomfortable.
Cinder, sitting at the head of the table, looks frazzled by it all. When she’d asked the chefs to prepare a meal for her and her closest friends, it was unlikely she’d anticipated this.
Her eyes are screaming at him. Feeling playful, he smiles as if clueless, shrugs and turns back to his diamond-studded parfait.
“She’s not quite in her element,” comes the voice seated at his right.
Kai switches his attention from the bowl—contemplating how the diamonds are edible—to the rouge beauty next to him. Her bright hair is pulled back into a simple ponytail with a braid crowning her head. Her dress is emerald, a similar cut to what she wore at Cinder’s coronation last week. The only ornamentation is stunning dangling crystals adorning her ears and her natural charm.
He laughs. “Not even slightly.”
“Sorry,” she says with that distinct French accent, although more rural than the Parisian diplomats he’s familiar with. “I meant to say hello, but someone”—she juts out a thumb at her neighbour; Winter, enrapturing the attention of all nearby—“won’t let me breathe.”
Kai smiles. “Not an issue.”
“So…” She cups her chin with her hand, resting a sacrilegious elbow on the table. “You’re the famous Emperor Kaito.”
“And you’re the famous Scarlet Benoit.” He recites the title with a deserved reverence. “I have to say, you’re very well-renowned with this crowd.”
“I’d better be.”
A retinue of servants approach the table in perfect unison, like synchronised swimmers of the culinary pool. They kneel beside the guests with a tray of merlot in gold and silver chalices perched on their heads. From across the table, Cress is flapping her hands with a spluttered, “I’m not eighteen!” while Thorne, despite not being of legal drinking age in his native country, is already a third of the way through a glass.
Kai and Scarlet simultaneously decline, more so that the server can be freed from this cramped position.
“I suppose you’re used to all this,” says Scarlet, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Not really.” He takes a bite from his parfait. The diamonds crunch under his teeth, melting into a syrupy honey on his tongue. “Even the Earthen elites don’t go all out like this.”
They share a look, and together: “Lunars.”
It sparks muffled laughter, knowing that most of their peers on this table are Lunar. It’s nice, still, to have some solidarity with a fellow Earthen, to both recognise how foreign this mingling of cultures would have been to their untrained minds just months ago.
Scarlet takes a bite of the pistachio sponge in her bowl, which is surrounded by dark chocolate trees and a matcha crumble moss. It’s the perfect scene of a fairy-tale forest, and yet Scarlet still mutters, “too many eggs.”
Based on the lemon cake she made for Cinder’s coronation, he’ll take her word for it.
She discards her spoon in her bowl and turns to him. “So, I assume you and Cinder are…together.”
“Absolutely.”
A grin. “Hm. She had the most obvious crush on you. I’m glad to know it was reciprocated.”
He wipes his brow with his sleeve, a touch embarrassed. “I was likely worse. Torin probably thought I’d returned to early puberty for how much I gushed about her.” Scarlet is still, essentially, a stranger, yet there’s something about her so honest and comforting, like a cup of hot chocolate from a kind old woman on a blustery day, that he has no qualms in baring these secrets. “Still,” he adds, contemplative, “not as much as Wolf to you.”
She rolls her eyes, but it’s a tender gesture. “He’s the worst.”
Wolf is across from them, gazing longingly at Scarlet. Iko arranged the seating plan so guests could interact with those more unfamiliar, and Wolf is evidently not impressed.
Scarlet notices his superglued gaze and blows him a kiss. He turns red.
Kai snorts. “You’re evil.”
“I know. That’s love.” Something flickers in her eyes as she leans back in her chair. “Speaking of which, may I ask when you realised you loved Cinder? After all, you were actively trying to track her down with your military. It makes for an, euh, unlikely romance.”
No one—asides from Levana—has asked him yet if he loves Cinder. But Scarlet is keenly observant. It’s not a matter of if he has fallen in love, but when.
“Here, on Luna, while I was trapped inside this prison for a pal—” he clamps his jaw shut, wishing to retract his words. Yes, his confinement to his suite in the palace had been tortuous, but Scarlet had actually been imprisoned. And actually tortured. “Um, while the others were in the outer sectors,” he amends, “I had a lot of time on my hands to think. I worried about her constantly, and I guess at some point it just ticked over in my brain. It wasn’t a sharp realisation or anything. It was just fact. I was in love with her.”
He finds his eyes latching onto Cinder unbidden. She’s in a beautiful gown and a glimmering tiara, courtesy of one Carswell Thorne, and scoffing at one of Jacin’s snide comments. “I am in love with her.”
“I hope she knows that.”
A flush covers his ears. This is revenge for mocking Wolf, he knows, because the florid is far more obvious on Kai’s pale skin than Wolf’s tanned.
To be frank, he hasn’t told Cinder. Not because he doubts his feelings, rather, because he doesn’t know how deep hers are. It’s all new, and he doesn’t want to scare her off with premature confessions.
Scarlet blessedly doesn’t mock him. She folds her hands over the table. “You know, Cinder has been treated horribly these past months. Actually, her whole life, I think,” she includes, scowling. “I’m sure you know it well: the terrible, salacious claims they made about her in the newsfeeds. And people do believe it. In my own town, Rieux, when the footage from the ball was released, they said—ugh—disgusting, perverted things.”
He sighs, knowing all too well what was levelled against his girl. “Right. Being cyborg and Lunar. How appalling.”
“Cyborg and Lunar, yes, and also”—she looks at him very seriously—“how much they wanted to take her home and use her.”
His face contorts. “...Use her?”
A grim nod.
Kai has to bite his tongue to stop himself from thumping the underside of the table. He knew this, minutely, logically, yes he knew. But he didn’t…he couldn’t…
“Unfortunately, people haven’t changed their opinions yet. Particularly when it comes to your relationship. You are ‘the victim,’” she air quotes, “and her ‘the predator.’”
“They’re vile. The whole lot of them.”
“Of course.” A platter of fruits is presented before them, and Scarlet lets out an awed, “real food.” She nabs a strawberry, sucking out its sweetness. After a bite, she says, “I know I don’t know you very well, but I do feel I know you to some extent.”
“Most people feel that way,” he assures, “my being a public figure since birth and all.”
Her lips purse into a smile. “I actually had a poster of you on my wall when I was fifteen. My grand-mère cut it off—”
“—a cereal box?" he half chuckles, half grimaces. “That was never a licenced product, by the way.”
Iko, four seats to his left, leans her chair onto its hind legs and calls, “I had that cereal box too! And a fan club membership—number one fan!”
“Stop eavesdropping!” Scarlet yells back.
“Can’t help that I have super high-radius hearing.” She swings back to all four legs with a clomp as Cinder corrects, “Peony had the membership.” “She said I could share!”
Kai snickers.
When he returns to Scarlet, she is shaking her head, carrying on as though uninterrupted. “I put that poster on my wall because I thought you were cute, but also respectful and good-hearted,” she recalls plainly.
Although this praise is not uncommon, Scarlet strikes him as someone not easily impressed, and a flutter of bashfulness thrums in his chest.
“Meeting you now, I still hold that opinion. That’s why I believe you will be good to Cinder.” She plucks another strawberry from the tray, carefully tearing off the leaves. “Still, if I was unsure of your relationship status, how much more so will the public be? How much more so will the rumours persist.”
Sure, they haven’t announced anything. But they aren’t the only ones: Scarlet and Wolf’s relationship was confirmed through loving glances. Jacin’s arm around Winter apparently made it official last week, and the only surprise is that Kai learnt that they weren’t already dating. Cinder bumped into Thorne kissing Cress in the hallway and warned him not to mess with her feelings, which received a grave:“I’m not. I love her.”
(When Cinder relayed the tale to the others, Kai mentally patted himself on the back. His pep talk in the Rampion podship had penetrated deeper past Thorne’s defences than Kai had ever hoped.)
Still, Scarlet is right. The difference is clear: Cinder and Kai are the ones the public cares about.
She extends the fruit to him. “Cinder doesn’t deserve those comments, does she?”
Kai digs his nails into his hips. Isn’t it obvious to everyone in a ten-kilometre range that he loves Cinder? Even embarrassingly so, as Levana and Torin and Dr. Erland had made quite plain?
But people are people, and people persecute.
He kissed Cinder in front of Scarlet before the coronation, he recalls. They kissed on the Rampion in front of their friends, even when they hadn’t defined their relationship because commitment was too optimistic, the environment too fickle.
They have something now they hadn’t had back then—permanence, however strange and new and infeasible. He doesn’t even know how it can last when they will be rulers of different lands, doesn’t know if Cinder will even want to become empress. Doesn’t know if Cinder wants children when that is an essential requirement of being his wife. He doesn’t know her favourite colour or song or netdrama or much of anything about her.
And yet, in spite of every spite, it still feels permanent. There is no doubt.
He accepts the strawberry from Scarlet and bites down hard on its seeded sweetness.
“Long live the queen! Long live the queen!”
Cinder is considering throwing up. At least that would expel the butterflies from her stomach.
No, butterflies are how she feels with Kai—happy and fluttery and safe. Right now in her gut, squawking, belligerent crows are playing frisbee.
“They’re waiting for you, Your Majesty,” says Kinney, as he and another guard open the large double doors to the balcony.
Damned audio interface. The chanting is deafening, yet she’s forced to hear his whisper. If she pretends she didn’t hear it, maybe she won’t have to go out at all.
“Your Majesty?”
Cinder nods, or maybe shakes her head, before a force starts to push her forward. It could be Iko fed up with her nervousness, or even someone glamouring her, or just her own legs taking master of her body. Nevertheless, one moment she’s safely concealed inside, and the next she’s towering above thousands of her subjects.
Cheers erupt. Flags and banners are waved and the chant starts up again. “Long live the queen!”
The queen! She hasn’t even mustered up the courage to tell Kai she loves him, much less know how to lead these people! And she is responsible for every single face down there, not to mention the million others not gathered in this courtyard. There are those congregating in the streets of Artemisia; huddled together in public squares in the outer sectors.
How it can be so invigorating to stand in front of a crowd and galvanise them into rioting, yet paralysing to address them afterwards? Is it the massive drop? A UFO of doubt sucking her up in its beam?
Warning —Erratic heart rate. Recommended course of action is: Slow breaths.
Commencing in 3, 2,
Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
She is their queen, so she will stand unbalanced on this balcony in a ridiculously costly gown and diadem instead of her cargo pants and gloves and be their queen.
Cinder smiles awkwardly, and waves, (awkwardly), and either they are particularly forgiving or cannot see her strain from this high up, because they cheer even louder.
In. Out.
Something soft grazes her elbow, coaxing it to slow down, to take a more natural glide. It travels up her arm to firmly grasp her hand.
The crowd reaches an impassioned frenzy for Emperor Kaito of the Eastern Commonwealth. The last she knew, he is supposed to be with their friends in the ballroom.
“What are you doing here?” she whispers.
All the beauty of New Beijing Palace has travelled here, in this moment, over the landscapes of his face. “Hi.”
The crowd adjust easily, shouting, “Long live the emperor! Long live the queen!”
Her eyes magnify on their joint hands like a zoom lens. He’s never done this before in public public, even at her coronation where his polite kiss on the hand was taken as etiquette more than intimacy.
“Long live us, hey?” he murmurs, lips a ventriloquist for the cameras.
She emits a shaky laugh. “Let’s hope.”
Kai comes closer. Cinder lifts her cheek in wait of another whisper, inviting him to settle a dizzying kiss on her temple.
Internally, she’s toppling over the balcony rail. But outwardly she’s frozen, deafened by the nuclear explosion of sound below.
“I think they approve,” he muses into her hair, gloating.
There is no doubt.
Cinder attempts to pull away—check his face for traces of smugness, surely knowing this would bewilder her. Kai slides an arm around her waist so she can’t go too far.
“You just want your face on the cover of every newsfeed,” she berates with a grin.
“I want us on the cover of every newsfeed.”
The people beneath them blur into nothing, the sounds become wind. When he winks at her, it’s a far more picture-worthy moment than the kiss. One she will bottle up and unscrew and drink before she goes to bed that night.
Long live the emperor! Long live the queen!
Cinder buries their joint hands into the folds of her skirt, suddenly a lot less nervous. Suddenly she isn’t ruling alone, and neither is he.
Long may they live.