Prologue

"Who am I? Lately I have wondered this, as I've struggled to discover my place in the world in which I find myself.

Mongrel, exile, stranger. I have always been tolerated, wherever I've been, but I have never been welcomed except by Ecl, the void darkness. And what does that mean, to be wanted by Nothing?

My father was Anjay Cobriana, a serpiente prince, the heir to the cobra throne. He was loved by his people and his fam ily. Though it has been twenty-five years since Anjay's death at the hands of the hawk prince Xavier Shardae, my father's followers still say his name with reverence. They look to me, as his only child, with respect, even though I never knew him; my father was killed within days of my conception. My mother was the falcon la'Darien'jaes'oisna'ona'saniet.

Darien was young, and she was powerful. She swore her service to the Empress Cjarsa when she was still a child. Years later, she conceived me during Anjay's visit to our falcon land. The trauma of his death triggered in her a vision of events the Empress had long before struggled to hide: the creation of the ancient avian-serpiente war. Darien stayed quiet for the months before my birth, but once I was no longer dependent on her mothering body, she began her treason, which culminated in an attempt to kill the Empress's heir, the Lady Araceli.

That was the last time my "mother" bothered to care for her child. I was raised a mongrel in the beautiful white land of Ahnmik; I was a flaw in the center of an otherwise priceless diamond. The Empress herself took a hand in my upbringing. She alone showed me tenderness during my childhood.

My earliest memory is of my Empress holding me after my magic overwhelmed me and filled my mind with images no child should ever see. My memory is of pain and blood - and of my Empress's gentle arms and the sadness in her eyes when I burned my voice away with my screams.

After that day, Cjarsa allowed me to grow the wings of my Demi form, so that I could take to the sky. She taught me to dance, and for a few brief years I was a child. I ran with the dreams of others, laughing with the spirits of the past and the future that always walk the roads of the white city, invisible to most  - but never to me. I made friends with those who did not exist, with those who might never exist, and with those who had died millennia before. I remember one woman, who most frequently filled my constant waking dreams. Though born of mixed blood, she had learned to control her power. I wanted so badly to know her-to be her-but like all my ghosts, she never looked at me.

Sometimes, when I danced, I could feel my Empress watching. She was one of the very few people who were fully real to me. When she smiled, I felt Ahnmik's magic shimmer with pleasure as if I had been granted a gift by the divine.

Then came the day when

-

Ahnmik' falmay'la.

Ahnmik, help me; grant me your black peace. Do not make me think of that day. I can speak for ages about the lives, the hopes and fears, of others; please, keep me from my own nightmares.

I can speak of the Dasi, the ancient coven from which the falcons and the serpiente both come. I can almost feel the hot sand of the Egyptian desert beneath my feet and smell the

Nile. I can see their altars. I can see them dance and pray.

I was lost in the darkness of Ec l for so long, and I was content there, until a guard sworn to my father's line - a guard with royal falcon blood I could not ignore - called to me. Duty compelled Nicias to try to pull me from my void, but it is hard to say exactly what compelled me to return.

And now here I am, a mongrel in a land of mongrels and yet still an outsider. All I have from my mother is a broken falcon form I cannot call upon, and all I have from my father is cursed blood and a black onyx signet ring to symbolize the family that I've no desire for.

She'ka'hena.

We are not.

We never were; we never shall be. We return to the void we never left, for Mehay is the center of all, and all is the center of nothing.

Chapter 1

Fire.

Serpiente who held to the old myths believed that the world began in fire. Out of the numb void came passion and heat, and Will too strong to be denied. Order and chaos  -

Ahnmik and Anhamirak  -  began their eternal dance, and from the embers of their battle, the world was born.

So perhaps it was not surprising that the world would end of that same heat. I was pulled from my musings as the door opened, drawing my attention to the small two-room building in which I had been sitting cross-legged before the hearth, perhaps for several hours. I looked up as a trio of falcons entered the candle shop, their steps uncharacteristically light and their expressions unguarded.

"Hanlak'ni-aona'pata'rrasatoth-rakuvra'pata'Diente."

Cobras change kings, Spark observed with some amusement, as easily as the white Lady's heir changes lovers.

The four falcons who frequented this shop at the edge of the avian hills of Wyvern's Court were in hiding, criminals who would probably be executed if they ever showed themselves in the white city again. Though Spark, Maya, Opal and Gren disguised themselves as simple avian merchants in the public areas of Wyvern's Court, here they switched back to the falcon language ha'Dasi.

I enjoyed hearing the language of my home, even spoken by these exiles. Some of the serpents of Wyvern's Court tried to use it, but ha'Dasi always sounded stunted and twisted to me when it came from the tongue of a snake.

Opal emerged from the back room, his eyes heavy lidded from sleep. Without sparing a glance at me, he asked, hena?" What happened?

Gren, the owner of the candle shop, answered in the same language. "Oliza Shardae Cobriana," he announced, "has just abdicated the throne of Wyvern's Court. She and some wolf have run off in the woods together, leaving Salem and Sive holding the bag." The words stole my breath, not because they shocked me but because they left me with a powerful sense of da vu. Months before, I had seen a vision of the wyvern princess dethroned. The image had been unclear, and all I had been able to do was go to Oliza and warn her: "You are about to do something that changes everything." I had hoped to make her think through her actions.

Instead, I had triggered the very events I had sought to avoid. Around me, the falcons continued their conversation. "Changing leaders like autumn leaves is better than letting one rule for a thousand years," Gren observed.

"It makes you wonder, though, how easy it might be to put someone on the serpiente throne who would turn this land in a more favorable direction." Maya looked pointedly at me.

This was not a new argument, and Opal dismissed it before I even needed to reply.

"Makes you wonder, perhaps," he scoffed. "One would think that several days of punishment by the Empress's Mercy would have taught you not to speak treason with every word."

"The Heir gave me to her Mercy for conceiving a child?

Maya spat. This was the crime that had led her to flee from the falcon island. "If that is treason  -  "

"Which it is," Opal said, interrupting, "seeing as the Empress forbids kajaes from breeding."

Kajaes were falcons born without magic, freaks in a city whose inhabitants breathed power and worked spells as if they were weaving baskets. But Ahnmik's magic was poison to new life; the royal house had had only one child in the past thousand years: Araceli's son, Sebastian.

Kajaes children were conceived more easily.

Almost as easily as quemak, mongrels like Opal  -  whose father was human, leaving Opal with the stigma of mixed blood in addition to no magic  -  and of course me.

"If that is treason," Maya said softly, "and is deserving of what I suffered for it, then do you think I fear a cobra's punishment? Besides, I speak only of replacing one cobra with another. It's nothing new for serpents."

Sometimes I envied Maya for the fire of her hatred. Though kajaes, and therefore powerless to make any change, she maintained an incredible passion that I was no longer able to feel, no matter how I tried.

"Sebastian's child guards the new serpiente king," Opal pointed out. "Nicias sees us all for what we are, and don't think he doesn't watch us carefully. You don't think he would stop you if you tried to  -  "

Maya uttered a curse. "Then we get rid of him  -  "

"At which point you consign to the Ecl the false queen you wish to place on the throne," I said softly, interjecting. This argument was old, and I was bored of it. "But not until I teach you agony the Mercy never dreamed of."

Silence crashed down. Unlike these four, I was not harmless kajaes. I had the full ability to carry out my threat, if I chose.

"Salem Cobriana is beloved by his people," I said. "The dancers adore him, because he is the first in more than eight hundred years to be raised in the nest nursery. He follows their most ancient traditions and knows them all as well as any dancer. He is supported by the previous Diente, by the beloved princess Oliza, and by the avian Tuuli Thea. Most serpents tolerate me, but only because I do nothing that offends them... that they know of," I added. If they knew I spent my free hours with falcons and the white vipers of the outlaw Obsidian guild, they would tolerate me far less. "Sive Shardae, on the other hand, can barely stand to be in the room with me  -  "

"Who cares what the hawk thinks?" Maya asked, challenging me.

"Everyone who does not wish to return to war," Gren answered for me. I nodded. "And as you mentioned, Salem will now be guarded by Nicias Silvermead. I will kill any who touch the falcon prince. That is, if they aren't first killed by either the Wyverns or the serpiente palace guard."

Maya tossed her head. "You are forgetting that you are the rightful heir to the serpiente throne. You are Anjay Cobriana's only daughter  -  "

"And Salem is his nephew," I said.

"You are forgetting two very important things. First of all, the serpiente would rebel and dethrone any who dared challenge their beloved king. No matter what my birthright, they would never allow me to take the throne from the one they want there." Again Maya argued. "There are traditionalists among the serpiente who think you should be queen. I have heard them speaking. Whether or not they approve of you specifically, they think that Anjay's daughter  -  not the son of his younger sister  -  should take the throne. You are the oldest and the first in line. Blood may not matter to a serpent as much as it does to a falcon, but a cobra's blood still matters."

"The second and most important thing you are forgetting," I said, ignoring the valid but irrelevant argument, "is that I have no desire to be queen. Breathing is a bother to me. Why would I wish to rule?"

"Think what you could accomplish," Maya said, impassioned. "Imagine a world where the serpiente followed you. Imagine if you could rally your Nicias to our cause, or  -  "

"I could, what, topple the white towers?" I asked. "Survive, Maya. That is all you and I can do. And for some of us, survival takes enough effort. Let it be."

"If nothing else," Maya said, "you would be able to protect those of us who are here. We would be able to live our lives without constantly fearing that the serpiente will discover us and send us away, or that the Empress will remember us and have us dragged back to the island to be put down like feral dogs. If you would not or could not fight Ahnmik on the island, you could fight the Mercy if they came for us here. The serpiente army would be able to win if you showed them how to fight a falcon. We're all kajaes.

Our children would have no magic. They would be no threat to this realm. As Diente, you could give us a chance to have normal lives."

Tears glistened in Maya's eyes, no doubt as she remembered the infant the Mercy had ripped from her the moment it was weaned of its mother's milk.

Had my own mother ever cried this way? I thought not. Darien of Ahnmik had shown more compassion to these kajaes, whom she had smuggled off the island beneath the veil of her own magic, than she ever had to me, her own misbegotten child.

"Go to Salem, while he is holding his first child in his arms and feeling how precious it is," I said to Maya. "Or go to the Tuuli Thea Sive, when she is first a mother. Tell that monarch your story, and speak your plea."

"Trust a hawk?" Maya replied incredulously. "Or a cobra? What would stop them from turning me in?"

"Honor?" I suggested.

"Cobras have no honor."

I couldn't help smiling a little, though most wouldn't at that thought. "I am a cobra," I answered Maya. "

Quemak, remember? And the other half of my blood comes from one of the Empress's Mercy. Not a good lineage for a woman you would like to place in power."

"You're a gyrfalcon," Gren argued. "And your mother isn't just one of the Mercy; she is Darien, to whom we all owe our lives  -  "

"Darien," I said, "who tortured your mother, Opal, for her dalliance with a human. Darien, who  -  "

"People change. They learn," Opal asserted. "Darien most of all. She wants to  -  "

"My mother wants a lot of things," I said. "She speaks about a great many dreams as she stands in the white city, by the right hand of the Empress, while we rot in this mongrel land."

I tried to turn away, but Maya gripped my hand.

"Hai, please, try to imagine  -  "

" 'Try to imagine' a world where she cares," Opal spat. "Imagine a world where our mongrel cobra has the courage and conviction of her mother. But the Empress long ago wrote that a quemak child will have cowardice and treason in her blood  -  "

"The Empress says a lot of things about quemak, things that may serve her agenda more than the absolute truth," Maya snapped. I tried to pull away, and she held more tightly.