1. Adair Courtwright

Chapter 1

Adair Courtwright

The threads of fate are fickle creatures. One day's bright pink of adoration will turn to the deep crimson of hatred the next. Without attention, the broad ribbons of plum that mean abiding affection can wither and blacken to cobweb strands of disdain. It can be impossible to follow them all, let alone understand them.

Most people have at least a few dozen. Some have hundreds. A few people have thousands; so many it can hurt to look at them.

Unfortunately for Oberon Gloombringer, first of his name, last of his line, head of the Gloombringer family, and one of the four lords of the Summerlands, all of his thousands of threads were slowly turning white.

And white only meant one thing.

Death was coming for him.

It was disconcerting to watch, day by day. At first, I'd thought I was imagining it, because it was happening so slowly that it was hard to notice. I convinced myself that maybe it was the way the light caught the threads—except that light didn't actually interact with my magic, so no amount of sunlight or lack thereof made the threads change colors.

Every day they were just a little paler. It had been happening for at least six months, and the colors that had once been vibrant and alive were now pale, sun-washed versions of themselves.

Sometimes, I wondered if it had affected his relationships. If the people who despised him suddenly despised him less because his threads were fading. Because his relevance to the world was fading away along with his life. I wondered if it was a curse laid on him by one of his dark red threads, the ones that still stood out in a fading field of color.

Most of the time, I was too busy worrying about the fact that I was shackled to a man who was dying. My strand with him had faded like all the others, but it was still one of his strongest, thickest ties. Just as my father's tie to him had been before me. And just like my father's tie to his father, the previous Lord Gloombringer.

Steel gray and thicker than my index finger, it was the strongest tie I had to anyone.

Again, almost exactly like my father's.

My mother had asked me about it once. I'd been a teenager, newly bonded to my stone, and she'd been trying to comprehend the scope of the power I'd been saddled with, asking questions about how it worked and people's relationships with each other. She'd been in the hospital, dying of cancer, surrounded by beeping machines.

My father had been working.

I had lied to her.

"Of course Father's bond to you is his strongest ," I'd promised. " You're his wife. His whole life. He just can't say no when Lord Gloombringer calls."

She'd given me a sad, knowing smile and squeezed my hand as tight as she could manage. " You're a good son, Adair, but remember this moment. Remember that love was important enough to lie to me about. Because it should be the truth, even if it isn't for your father. Don't let the Gloombringer steal your heart and turn it to stone too."

They were some of the last words she'd ever said to me, since she'd slipped into a coma soon after, and we'd lost her within the week.

My father had never seen her conscious again. He and Lord Gloombringer had made a show of coming to the public funeral, wearing white and bowing their heads as though...as though they had cared. But I'd known the truth then. The Gloombringers and their minions had no hearts at all, stone or otherwise.

And now I was one of those minions.

Oh, my link to Oberon Gloombringer wasn't quite like my father's had been. Mine was grayer than his, which had been almost silver-bright.

It was mostly a neutral color: gray. The color of links between people who knew each other well enough but didn't have particularly strong feelings about each other. The fact that mine was darker than my father's meant that the feeling edged toward disdain, which was no surprise.

Why would I have any other feeling for a man with no heart?

But my feelings weren't relevant. Feelings themselves weren't relevant. That was the Gloombringer way. Once, the Gloombringer family had been the heart of the Summerlands. Their original name had been Duskbringer, to signify a time of day rather than the pervading sense of gray that their family gave the world now. Sunset and gloom were decidedly different things, and I thought the Summerlands were altogether worse for the change.

Now...well, it was fashionable to be detached, wasn't it? Feelings were so silly and hysterical and...passé. One was supposed to be born, work a job, and then die, leaving the world to a new generation of worker drones who would do the same.

I probably would have given in and become one of them, just like my father, if not for my stone, Rhodri. She was strong, opinionated, and insistent—all impossibly rare things, particularly for a stone. She also regularly reminded me that I wasn't like anyone else. I'd heard her song, and no one had done that in centuries. She'd been in a museum when I'd heard her, and they'd had to remove her from display because we had bonded.

Magic was the one thing that not even the lords of the Summerlands could truly control. Sometime during puberty almost every single person found a stone whose song they could hear.

At least, that was how my mother had told me the story. My father had said that was romantic nonsense, and in truth it was all scientific, about a human's ability to resonate on the same frequency as the stone.

Mother said we felt the same song.

Father said we heard a sound because of resonance.

It seemed to me that they were saying the same exact thing, just that Mother wanted it to be something nice, and Father wanted it to be just another thing, like one item on a list of facts .

I wasn't much of a romantic, but I still liked her way better.

Different types of stones meant different types of magic. There was the ubiquitous common diamond—which was usually some simple change to one's body: being faster or stronger than one might have otherwise been. Probably half of people bonded a diamond or something else equally bland. Then, there were dozens of smaller stone groups. Emeralds and sapphires and topaz and such, rarer than diamonds and with more useful abilities like luck or empathy.

Rhodri was a stone from one of the smallest groups. She was a moon tear. They were largely shades of gray but with a rainbow-gold sheen in them that varied greatly from stone to stone. The moon tears weren't the rarest stones in and of themselves, but humans rarely heard their songs.

More than that, Rhodri was old enough, strong enough, that she had a personality. A name that she'd chosen for herself—to say nothing of the fact that as a stone, she'd made the decision to use feminine pronouns. Bonding Rhodri meant that most of the powerful people in the Summerlands knew who I was. Despite the centuries my family had worked solely for the Gloombringers, I'd received—still received—job offers regularly, for ridiculous amounts of money, houses, and other forms of wealth.

A Dawnchaser cousin had offered me my own island once.

As much as I disliked Oberon Gloombringer, though, my father had instilled one thing in me: loyalty. The Gloombringer family had supported me, sent me to school, given me everything I had. I wasn't one to abandon them after that .

Unique stones like Rhodri were part of why the four families of the lords of the Summerlands were in power—each family had a stone that resonated with their line, passed from one lord to the next. Those four stones were the most powerful known in the world, and frankly, put Rhodri to shame.

With the heart sapphire, Verelle, Oberon Gloombringer could manipulate the hearts and minds of every person he came in contact with. Make them joyous or send them into a fit of tears for no reason other than that he felt like it. Rumor had it that with the Moonstriker family stone, an aquamarine named Iri, Cove Moonstriker could stop time itself on command.

Stone types usually ran in families, like...well, like the man I was looking at right then.

Lord Gloombringer's personal physician, Emile Landreau. He had bonded an amethyst, like his parents and siblings. While no two stones were precisely the same, each one was in a family. Amethyst meant health. Some with amethysts could see and diagnose illnesses in people, like Emile. Some could do the same in animals. Some had limited abilities to actually heal wounds or illnesses.

The doctor sat down on the rolling stool in front of his computer, shaking his head and sighing. "I'm sorry. I understand that Lord Courtwright sees something happening, and clearly there's no reason to doubt him. But I promise you, there's nothing physically wrong with you. You are the picture of perfect health for a man your age, my lord."

Landreau wasn't trying to bring doubt on me. He truly did believe me. The very average bonds he had with both of us pulsed a simple light gray. He wasn't lying. Wasn't scheming and plotting his lord's death. He truly didn't see anything.

Unlike him, Lord Gloombringer...well, it wasn't that he didn't believe me. It was just that?—

"I told you that you were being paranoid, Adair," he said to me as he buttoned his shirt, then turned back to the doctor. "He keeps on about how my threads are going pale, and it must mean something. I told him maybe his eyes are going bad, but he won't listen to me."

Landreau looked to me, his own eyes glowing faintly lavender as he stared deep into mine. It was awkward, but I knew he was using his diagnostic ability, not being strangely intense, so I held the gaze without comment or shrinking away. After a moment, he shook his head. "I can't see a problem with them either, if I'm being honest, my lord."

Gloombringer waved him off. "He's thirty now, you know. Just turned in February. I told him the eyes start to go when you're thirty. That wouldn't be an illness, would it? Just regular degeneration. And maybe with his song, they'll get worse faster than the rest of us."

So arrogant, Oberon Gloombringer. Determined that my eyes were going bad at the relatively tender age of thirty, instead of something being wrong with him, at fifty-six.

The doctor paused, considering. "I...I suppose that's possible." He turned back to me, shaking his head. "I'm so sorry, Lord Courtwright. It's just too rare for me to know, about your?—"

Instead of finishing the sentence, he swallowed hard and glanced away. My song, he meant. The ability to see the threads. I'd been seeing them for fifteen years, and I had no idea why it made everyone so uncomfortable, but it did. Maybe it was too close to the sapphire ability to see and manipulate emotions, and they worried I would see something in them that they didn't want anyone to know.

"It is rare," Gloombringer boomed, far too loud for the enclosed space of a doctor's office. Both the doctor and I winced, but Oberon didn't seem to notice. "That's why I keep him around, of course."

Of course.

Because people didn't have any intrinsic value. I wasn't worth keeping around just because my father had been his father's closest confidant. Just because my family had been tied to his for centuries. He kept me around because I served, and my ability to see the threads of fate was useful and rare.

I personally meant nothing to him, and sometimes it rankled.

Landreau turned away from us, back to his computer to begin making his notes on the visit. I was no Gloombringer, with a stone that gave me power over emotions, but even I could tell he was uncomfortable. No one liked to be reminded that the man in control of their destiny didn't care about anyone at all, not even the people who were most loyal to him. He was a good doctor, but his magic wasn't unique. It wasn't even rare, the ability to see illnesses. While no two stones were precisely the same, his was similar to a few thousand other doctors working in the Summerlands. He was a few thousand times more replaceable than me, and his lord had just told him that loyalty meant nothing to him.

I didn't bother speaking up.

It never helped.

Oberon tucked his shirt back into his trousers, then fastidiously brushed himself off and straightened his clothes before putting his dark gray jacket back on. It was the softest hand-dyed wool, custom made to fit his broad shoulders, and probably cost more than the doctor made last year. I couldn't say much, since my so-rare ability meant Oberon paid me very well, and I had a similar jacket in my own closet.

Still, even mine seemed excessive to me, despite the fact that I was expected to dress that way.

My father had been the Gloombringer's right hand just as I was now, but his uninspiring common magic, diamond-boosted intelligence, had landed him almost as much valet as adviser.

I was grateful that at least Oberon dressed his damned self.

That's because you didn't need some bauble to make you smarter , Rhodri's high-frequency, melodic whisper popped into my head. You're already smarter than your father without needing some pointless shiny rock.

The stones, of course, had their own social hierarchy, and they didn't think much of diamonds either.

Why would we? They're common clear shiny things. If we cared about them, we might as well be crows rather than intelligent creatures.

The notion of a crow bonding a diamond stuck in my mind, and Rhodri returned a feeling like a shrug.

Maybe, I don't know. I've never bonded anything but a human.

Which made sense. Crows didn't have fate threads, after all. If they had strong abiding emotions, or relationships, they weren't the kind I—or Rhodri—could recognize with our shared song.

Oberon and I walked to the car in silence. It was how we spent most of our time together—silent. I ended up spending most of that time talking to Rhodri in my head, because the company was better .

The driver—a fellow with a diamond boosting his reflexes—held the door for us, and I slid in after Oberon, who remained quiet, looking out the window as though the city we lived in was fascinating. I wondered if it was fascinating to him. If Verelle and he spoke as Rhodri and I did, and he could feel the emotions of the millions of people in the city the way I could see random threads racing along the city streets, coming from every building and car nearby.

It should be even more meaningful to him than it was to me, because they were people under his family's protection.

Why do you care if he dies? Rhodri asked me, out of nowhere. I know you're worrying, but if he dies, you can find other work. A new place to be. Your life doesn't end just because his does.

It wasn't the first time she'd asked, but as yet I'd been unable to give her an answer she found sufficient.

I supposed I didn't have an answer I found sufficient. As his right hand, it was my job to care if he died, but personally, there was no major reason I wanted him alive.

He was the last of his line, because he'd never married and had children, but he did have a sister who could take over. The problem with that line of thinking was that Titania drank her breakfast. And lunch. And if she was still conscious by dinner, that too. She'd always been pleasant enough to me, but constantly drunk, she couldn't possibly take responsibility for the millions of people who lived in Gloombringer lands. People who counted on Gloombringer protection.

The people , I reminded Rhodri. Without him, they're vulnerable. Exposed. The people need a Gloombringer. Someone to control Verelle. Someone to...

I almost shuddered as I trailed off. Someone to handle the upcoming peace summit, I finished to myself, even though that was the tip of the biggest iceberg in the world. Someone needed to take the part of the Gloombringer family in the peace summit between the four families—a summit that was starting that very evening.

The families had a string of disagreements starting some fifty years earlier that had eventually led to most of them rarely speaking to each other over the last two decades.

It would have been fine, since it was still peace, if a cold sort of peace, if not for Mount Slate. The enormous mountain that lay in the middle of the Summerlands, that wasn't a mountain at all, but a volcano. A volcano that had been rumbling beneath our feet with increasing regularity over the last few years. A volcano that stories said could only be kept under control by concerted effort of all four unique family stones, together. I didn't know what emotions, time, luck, and shapeshifting had to do with controlling a volcano, but they did.

The Gloombringer, Moonstriker, Dawnchaser, and Sunrunner needed to work together, something they hadn't done at all in twenty years, or the entire country was in danger of being obliterated.

It was sobering to think of, and at the moment, it was the heart of the reason I couldn't bring myself to walk away, despite my growing dislike of the Gloombringer and his life.

Millions of other lives. Possibly a hundred million lives now, depended on four family leaders meeting, putting aside old hurts and giant egos, and working together.

Oberon was the eldest family leader, and I'd talked him into holding the summit himself, here, in Amalion City in Gloombringer lands, where the rumblings of the mountain could be felt regularly with one's own senses .

The other family leaders were a good decade younger than Oberon, and I didn't think they'd been personally involved in the family arguments. Surely they would care more about keeping the Summerlands from drowning in lava rather than their own egos?

Yeah, no one believes that , Rhodri helpfully pointed out. Not even you .

I sighed, but when Oberon looked at me, I shook my head.

He chuckled. "Don't you envy them sometimes? The people with stones that don't talk to them?"

Of course he knew what I was sighing at, if not the details. On the other hand, no, I didn't envy people with non-sentient stones.

Maybe that was strange.

Rhodri was...a lot to deal with. She was pleasant enough company, but the magic could be overwhelming. The first time I'd seen Oberon after bonding her, I'd had to look away, and ended up with a blinding headache. It was too much information, all at once, and my brain couldn't help trying to process it all.

I'd gotten better at ignoring the excess information over the years, faster at processing what was necessary and important, and now, Oberon's thousands of threads were easy to look at. Easy to track, making sure nothing had changed or threatened him. Meeting new people was easy again, taking on the massive amount of information every meeting offered was almost old hat.

Maybe I was smarter than I'd been when Rhodri and I found each other, when I was a teenager, or more experienced with the song, or maybe I was just more settled in my own head now. Either way, I...I liked it. I looked back at the time before Rhodri and hardly even knew how I survived the emptiness. Alone in my own head. Constant silence. And never knowing what people around me thought or felt, whether they loved me or hated me, or whether, like my father, they thought of me as a neutral entity. A coworker, a fellow drone, and nothing more.

Life was so much easier when you knew where you stood.

When I looked up again, Oberon was smirking at me. "You don't. You like it. Having power over people."

It wasn't that. I didn't give a damn about having power over anyone. But I'd never tell him that. He liked having power over other people, and he thought people who didn't have it were lesser. Not that he thought anyone was his equal, but he didn't even know his driver's name.

So I shrugged and gave a half-answer like I always did. "I like not being a pawn."

He snorted and shook his head. "We're all pawns, Adair. As much power as people like you and I have, in the end someone else pulls strings and we dance. Our families, our people"—he waved at the window, out to the city, a sour look on his face—"or even just the damned stones. You think I'd be trying to make peace with those arrogant asses if I didn't have to? If Verelle wasn't on my ass constantly about missing her friends ?"

In my head, Rhodri sighed. I didn't know what friend she missed, but I knew that sometimes, she did. Maybe other stones she'd known in her life. Maybe previous people who had shared her song. When she wanted to share with me, though, she did, so I didn't press her for information. We were friends, not object and owner, like some people and their stones. Or maybe...maybe she was just thinking Oberon was an ass. He was.

The driver opened the door, and I waited for Oberon to get out first. He stood and stretched right there in the open space of the car door, like he'd been in the car for hours and not half of one, before getting out of the way and letting me out. A little reminder for me, I supposed, that even if I liked my freedom and power, he had more of both because I worked for him.

I was one of the objects he owned.

When I got out after him, the smirk was back.

It was wiped away entirely when his sister Titania came outside to meet us. She was a tiny pixie of a woman with enormous fluffy red curls that almost dwarfed the rest of her, and she was constantly dressed in loose, flowing clothes, a sword fixed at her waist. Dueling clothes. As though anyone at Gloombringer Castle itself would have the gall to challenge Lord Gloombringer's sister.

Rumor had it that once, before all the drinking, she'd been one of the deadliest people in the Summerlands with that sword. It was hard to imagine that now.

We'd pulled up a long winding drive behind the castle, so it was the back door we were facing, a private area, but Oberon never liked seeing Titania's loose-hipped swaying walk, the way she moved when she was already well into her liquor for the day, so he was annoyed.

If there'd been any doubt of her state of inebriation, she had a lowball glass half full of amber liquid in one hand.

"The Moonstriker is here," she said, a smirk on her own face that didn't bode well.

Titania Gloombringer wasn't a cruel person. She didn't take joy in hurting people. But she did find it deeply amusing when someone decided to stick a pin in her brother's ego, and this smirk...well, it was that smirk. The one that said someone had done something to offend Oberon's dignity, and she was planning on thoroughly enjoying it.

I didn't sigh, but it was a close-run thing. Not that I minded seeing Oberon taken down a peg or two, but honestly, we needed the summit. We needed it to work. We didn't need Oberon to start out angry with one of the families.

Titania waved toward the house, so that he would precede her. She did that sometimes, with an extra flourish of her arm—a respectful gesture made disrespectful by her clear lack of fucks to give for Oberon's inflated sense of himself.

He huffed at her, but at least he was distracted from trying to poke at me for now. She might not be Lord Gloombringer, but she was too important for him to hurt her. As much as he was an ass, he wouldn't hurt her. She was his only family, and some part of him did value that.

At least, I liked to think so.

He marched his way through the house, and I thought fast as I followed along.

What could the Moonstriker have done to start the summit off on the wrong foot?

They were early, but that wasn't even a surprise. The Moonstriker were always early. At worst, they were precisely, to the second, on time. That wouldn't cause offense.

They had come, which had never been a certainty. It was the opposite of an insult, showing up when Oberon had asked for them to come.

So what?—

There was an audible snap in my song as we walked into the enormous foyer of Gloombringer Castle, so loud that for a moment I was afraid a tile beneath my feet had cracked. But no. A solid strand had appeared, completely new but already thicker than my thumb, running straight from the middle of my chest. It was the thickest thread I'd seen since my mother had died, taking her tie to me with her.

Rhodri made a small, surprised noise in my head, high and crystalline.

I followed the thread with my eyes along the glossy, polished, black-and-white marble tile of the foyer floor, up, up, up...to a man we were rapidly approaching. Youngish. Probably a handful of years younger than me, in his middle twenties. He stood stiff and straight, back a hard line, legs slightly parted and hands behind him, like a soldier. He had wavy, long golden hair tumbling over his shoulders, ice blue eyes, and wore a stark white outfit—a formal suit with tall leather boots that were also glossy white. At his side hung a sword, indicating he was prepared to defend himself in a duel, if the need arose.

Oberon stopped right in front of him, me as always to his right.

The man's clothes were Moonstriker designed, without a doubt. They all wore the same style, a long coat with a high collar, and a row of fabric buttons held in place with loops. As we approached I could see that the whole thing was embroidered with an intricate design in white and silver thread: a dragon, flying through snow, each snowflake embroidered separately. The dragon's eye was the only thing he wore that wasn't white: a tiny, twinkling light blue stone.

I thought Oberon's suit coat a ridiculous expense, because it was gray and boring and still cost more than most yearly mortgages. This man's suit wasn't a ridiculous expense for no reason. It was a work of art .

And somehow, this man, whom I'd never seen before in my life, already had a thread linking him to me. A color pulsed through it, though it was largely the strange grayish-clearish-colorless shade of a brand new thread. A relationship that didn't quite know what it was going to be yet.

Purple.

Interest. Well...a certain kind of interest. A kind that was unquestionably returned. The man was beautiful, well dressed, and well-formed. Who wouldn't be interested?

It was enough of a distraction that it took me a moment to truly take in what was happening. Why Titania thought Oberon's dignity was going to be offended.

The man, the focus of my attention, stood in front of two other people in similar Moonstriker clothing, if somewhat less formal, but they were lesser to him in every way. They had a few dozen strands each, most of which stretched back toward Moonstriker lands.

Him? He had thousands, like Oberon. He was...softly radiant. Like the moon. So many hazy silver strands, connecting him to people he knew only somewhat, but nearly all of whom liked him. There were a handful of heavy plum threads that felt like familial love, some stronger than others, but all strong and stretching in multiple directions. A few strained threads. A yellowish green that read of competitiveness to me, but from the other side, not his.

This man did not compete with anyone.

Why would he need to?

There was one thread that captured my attention. Dark, sickly brown. Dislike. Irritation.

It was as new as the thread that linked him to me.

It was attached to Oberon.

"You are not the Moonstriker," my lord announced to the highest ranked Moonstriker who'd set foot in his lands since he was in fucking short pants. But the man wasn't the Moonstriker, the head of the family, Cove Moonstriker.

Oberon had decided to take offense that a fellow family head hadn't traveled to Gloombringer lands personally. Fuck me, this whole mess was going to be even harder than I'd thought if he was going to get offended by imaginary slights. How could we save the fucking world if he cared more about his ego than peace?

Next to me, Titania covered her mouth, and I couldn't tell whether she was amused or horrified by her brother's rudeness. Maybe she didn't know which she felt, as glassy as her eyes were with drink.

The man didn't lose an ounce of the serenity his family was known for. He inclined his head. "I am not the stone holder, no. I am Rain Moonstriker, son of Delta Moonstriker. I am here to answer your call to make peace between our families, at my mother and uncle's behest. They agree that it is time for peace, and I am fully empowered to speak for them in this."

He hadn't specifically named himself the Moonstriker heir, but I was sure it was true. Like Oberon, the head of the Moonstriker family had no children of his own. Unlike Titania, Cove's sister Delta had a handful, one of whom was doubtless the heir to their family.

Maybe the man, Rain, was sensitive to the fact that the Gloombringer had no heir, and no one knew what would happen to Verelle when Oberon died. They were always careful and precise with their words, the Moonstrikers. They were known for their calm and intelligence, and he was proving both in that moment, ignoring Oberon's red-faced irritation as he stated his purpose .

The purple flashed through the thick strand between us again, this time from my end. Yes, yes, I thought smart was sexy. Didn't everyone?

I could almost feel Rhodri rolling her eyes at me.

The purple flashed again, and when I looked up, he was staring at me. "And you must be Lord Courtwright. It's an honor to meet you all."

Somehow, I had the feeling he was talking to me more than Oberon and Titania, even though that...that was ridiculous.

Right? He was there to make peace with the Gloombringer family, not flirt with one of their vassals. Still, his eyes and the stone on his jacket twinkled the same shade of blue, and I couldn't look away.

I was in so much trouble.