“I don’t remember much of my father’s lessons,” Ettian starts softly.
I tense. Apart from his loud declaration in the court, I’ve never heard him talk about his parents—not even in vague terms during our years at the academy together. I know Marc emp-Archon was the carrier of the imperial line. I know he was the first to fall to my mother’s ax. But I’ve never seen him through Ettian’s eyes, and I’m not sure if I’m ready to.
“He didn’t have much time to impart them on me, and I was too young for most of the important stuff,” Ettian continues. “But one thing he made sure I knew from the moment my tiny brain could first comprehend it, was that a ruler who measures himself through notoriety is a ruler who has lost his way.”
“That doesn’t…You don’t…” I scrub my hands helplessly down my face. “How else are you going to prove that you’re actually doing something?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe by overseeing the legion of ministers it takes to usurp a government when ownership of a planet transfers in a single day? Maybe by making sure there’s a plan in place for governing the next world we take that accounts for imperial rule? But of course, you haven’t thought of that because only one person at this table has ever worn a crown.”
“Ah, and there’s something else my mother told me,” I counter. “Bloodright can’t be bought with the metal and stone on your head. It can only ever be seized. And yours is slipping through your fingers.”
“So what would you have me do?” Ettian asks. His eyes fix on mine, unblinking, unbearable.
“Go to the front,” I tell him.
It would be better if he laughed, and I spend the long moment where he just stares at me trying to process exactly why that is. Isn’t this what I wanted? For him to take the suggestion, to seriously consider it, to eventually admit it’s the only way forward. It’s working, for gods’ sakes. So why does the sight of it working fill me with dread?
In my head, it seemed so neat. The easiest way to get Wen to turn against Ettian is to separate them. Create a distance that forces them to keep secrets from each other. With Wen all but tied to my side, I can unravel her insecurities stitch by stitch, aligning them with everything she doesn’t know about Ettian. And once she sees all the ways he’s using her, all the ways he’s trapped her in this life, all the ways he’s going to get her killed—then I can convince her to free us both.
And as for Ettian, well. There’s a risk that the front of the war might challenge him into becoming a leader to be reckoned with—one who can actually take his bloodright with more than a dinky ring. But the greater risk, the one I’m gambling on, is that it’ll just kill him. I’d even be satisfied with some light maiming if it took him out of the picture long enough for his people to lose faith in him. Even if he manages to stay unscathed, throwing him in the same room as his army’s senior staff is going to bring him head to head with General Iral, pitting him directly against the man who could probably take back these systems and restore the Archon Empire.
The convenient bonus being that it’ll leave him with very little time to pay attention to me.
I didn’t think I was particularly convincing in the lead-up to my suggestion, but Ettian’s face says otherwise. His brow is furrowed, and the sight of him locked in concentration sends me rocketing back to days at the academy I spent staring at him out of the corner of my eye as he puzzled through a tactics essay, blinking guiltily away every time his focus lightened enough to realize he had an audience. He was never a master strategist—it never came to him as innately as to Hanji or Rhodes—but he wasn’t scraping by, either, because he always thought long and hard about all angles of a problem.
Which, I’m fast realizing, is a problem for me. The more time I give him to think, the more time he has to rut me over.
I snap my fingers in front of his face, startling him enough that his knee knocks into the table and sends every liquid on it shuddering. “Sorry,” Ettian murmurs. “It’s just…You really do want me dead, don’t you?”
I sputter. “Should I not?”
“You used to be different.”
“Did I?”
“Gal, don’t bullshit me. After we escaped the academy, you told me you’d spent your whole career there working out ways of dismantling your mother’s violence. I followed you because I believed in that cause as much as you did. I thought you’d manage a rise to power that didn’t involve you stepping over bodies—I put my own life on the line for the idea of an Umber imperial like that on the throne.”
My fingers tighten around my cup, its heat searing against my skin. I was an idealist at the academy. I’d never been shot at, never had to fight back, and so I romanticized the notion of a subtle war that pulled the strings of my mother’s rule until it unraveled. Ettian, who’d been fighting back all his life at that point, should have known better.
He should still know better.
And now there’s a real war to reckon with. I’m no longer inheriting an empire where I could rule as a peaceful negotiator. When I take my crown—when, I swear to myself every goddamn night—I won’t get a choice of whether to rule with violence. If I don’t fight back, Ettian’s rebellion will metastasize across the former Archon territories and leave them ravaged for generations to come. To save them, I have to stay vicious.
“It never would have worked,” I tell him. “It took me a while to understand it, but…I got there.”
I got there the moment he claimed his bloodright. There are no soft wars to be waged here. This ends in blood—his, mine, or maybe both of ours—and no other way will suffice.
“I turned you into this,” Ettian says, staring into his cup. “And now you’re trying to turn me into you.”
“What, you think it’s that easy? You think you’re just going to show up at the front of the war and the proximity alone is going to unlock your dark side?” I pause, feeling the right words bubbling on the edge of my tongue, stained with bitter coffee. “Being a monster is a choice. You make it or you don’t.”
“You’re not a monster, Gal.”
I bare my teeth, feeling my heart constrict against my better judgment. “I could be. I will be.” Those words sound pathetic. I regret them the second they leave my mouth, because I know they’re empty threats. For rut’s sake, I’m sitting across a table from my mortal enemy, unobserved, with several potential weapons within reach, and the worst I’ve done so far is flick some sugar into his lap. The monstrous thoughts don’t mean anything if I can’t act on them, and I can’t act on them. I can all but hear my mother’s voice whispering in my ear to grab the carafe and throw it at Ettian, to smash the ceramic mug and take a sharp edge to his throat.
But killing him doesn’t win this war the way I need to, and I promise the throbbing ache in my chest that it’s the only reason I’m staying my hand.
“I might be the only person in this palace who truly has your best interests at heart,” I say after a long pause. “And I’m telling you: you need to go to the front.”
A heavy, quiet moment passes, the two of us sitting in the truth of those words.
“Then I’ll go,” Ettian says at last.
I didn’t expect to get this far, and I don’t know what to do with the moment now that it’s here. My eyes fix on Ettian’s. His lock on mine. And though I’m still having trouble believing the words, there’s no doubt about the conviction sparking through him.
It worked. It actually worked.
I think of all the times he berated me for not having a plan of my own and have to suppress the urge to smirk. How’s this for a plan, Ettian? You go off to lead your war and the painful, agonizing failure that will inevitably result, and in the meantime, I’ll turn your most loyal follower against you and free myself from your ruttin’ imperial—
“And you’re coming with.”
Shock grips me like a squeeze toy, my eyes bulg
ing and my stomach feeling like a dreadnought has just hit it at superluminal. “Excuse me?” My voice skips up a dignified half octave.
Ettian leans forward. “Did you expect otherwise? Did you think I’d abandon you here to the next assassin?”
“But I’ve got Wen looking out for me now—”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but the Flame Knight does occasionally need to sleep. She’s effective, but I’d never leave the task to her and her alone. And besides”—he rises, a smirk playing over his lips—“she’s not the most effective protection in this palace. They may call Maxo Iral the Shield of Archon, but don’t think I’ve missed that someone else deserves that title just as much.”
I sputter. “I’m the reason my mother’s gunning for you so hard. The Imperial Fleet—”
“You’re the reason this city hasn’t been blown off the map yet,” Ettian says coolly. “And I think that confirms something else. You’re an only child, aren’t you?”
“There’s no real way of knowing—”
“Nah, your mother’s reaction tells me all I need to know. They don’t have a backup. You’re the only hope of the Umber imperial line continuing.”
He has the audacity to lean over the table, his eyes fixed on mine, confident and unblinking. I have to hold myself back, to keep myself from rising to meet him.
“And I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
CHAPTER 5
It’s the dead of night, the palace has gone quiet around me, and I’m quickly discovering that the realities of an escape attempt are so much less fun than I’d originally imagined.
It’s not like I haven’t thought this through. I’ve had a solid month where the most strenuous demand on my faculties was a knock-down-drag-out fight for my life that lasted about a minute, tops, which has left me with more than enough free time to put together a couple options. But when Ettian declared that he’s dragging me to the front with him, I realized I couldn’t sit around and wait for him to ruin my life so thoroughly. There will be no hope of freedom once I’m aboard a dreadnought in his fleet.
Well, apart from the sweet release of death, but I’m aiming to avoid that outcome.
So I picked the most well-developed plan in my arsenal, one that was all but gift-wrapped by my would-be assailant. If someone can get in through the vents, I reasoned, there’s probably a way out in that direction too. Over the span of my imprisonment, I’ve learned the interior of the estate well enough that I’ve put together some solid guesses about how the ducts wind between the rooms, and I committed that information to memory—sometimes encoded in mnemonic songs I’d make up and whistle at the guards just to irritate them. I paid close attention to the adjustments palace security made to my quarters in the wake of the assassination attempt, using them to deduce what options were still open to me.
All of this is to say that I had a plan. But I might have overestimated a few aspects of this when I managed to pry the screws loose from one of the cooling vents tucked in the back of my suite’s bedroom and stuff myself into the awaiting maw. How was I supposed to know how hard it is to squirm through an enclosed space barely wider than the span of your shoulders? Or how noisy the whole affair would be—which has slowed my progress to a miserable, inching crawl in an effort to keep half the palace from realizing what I’m up to. My confidence in which turns to take withers by the third intersection, when it truly settles in for the first time how little of this palace I’ve actually seen.
It’s almost a relief when a shadow falls over the spill of light from one of the vents. “Had enough yet?” Wen asks.
There’s a panicked animal part of my brain that considers bolting—damn the noise, damn the fact that she can probably keep pace at an easy stroll. I want out, and I’ll go kicking and screaming if I have to. I already lost all my dignity when I knelt before Iral. There’s nowhere lower I can go.
But all that’s going to lead to is Wen dragging me out of here by my ankles, and I’m not in the mood for more bruises. I let out a long sigh, going limp. “Yeah, I’m done,” I groan, the duct’s metallic echo rattling my words back at me.
The shadow shifts, and I can easily picture Wen setting her hands on her hips. “Over a month in chains, and this is what you try for your first escape attempt?”
I take a moment to consider my retort. If I’m not going to be able to make an exit tonight, I’ve got to make the most of this attempt at one. Wen thinks she’s got me. I’m stuck in a vent, completely at her mercy. She won’t be anticipating my strike.
“Has he told you yet?” I ask, the tremor I push into my voice aided by the duct’s acoustics. “Oh no, of course he’s already told you.”
“Told me what?”
I let the silence settle, let her doubts seed in it. Just as she’s drawing breath to ask again, I say at last, “He’s going to the front. And he’s taking us with him.”
Wen gives me an equally measured silence in return, one that makes me resent the fact that I’m pinned in the blackness of the vents with no access to the expressions that could be chewing their way across her half-burnt face. And like me, she waits for the second I’m about to break before snapping, “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”
“Not dying by dreadnought,” I sigh, “but apparently we can’t get everything we want.”
Wen’s shadow looms over the grate as she crouches next to it, and through its slivers I catch the flash of bared teeth. “As far as I know, this morning Ettian had absolutely no designs on the war front. He’s told me repeatedly that he’s leaving the war to Iral and focusing solely on governing what we’ve managed to secure—for the good of his people, for the stability of the region, for a thousand other reasons that make plenty of sense to me. What makes no sense whatsoever is him suddenly deciding to catapult off to the ragged edge of this empire—unless you talked him into it on your little date this afternoon.”
I nearly blurt an ill-advised excuse, but Wen saves me from it by diving into the next part of her tirade.
“But if you talked him into it, and you got what you wanted, then why the rust are you making a run for it now?”
“Like I said,” I snarl between my teeth. “Not interested in dying by dreadnought.”
“Then why—”
“Because I didn’t think he’d drag us along with him,” I snap, loud enough that Wen rocks back on her heels. I remember a time—a more innocent time, a more ignorant time—when I talked her nails out of Ettian’s throat by reminding her that he’d never put us in danger. Clearly that’s all been proven to be bullshit, but if the way she’s been single-mindedly devoted to his cause is any indication, Wen still seems to believe it.
So that’s the first fissure I’ll delve into.
“I thought I knew him,” I murmur, pouring a healthy dose of some genuine shame into the words. “I never thought he’d…well, maybe he’d risk me. I’d get it if he risked me. But you?”
I dose that you with a healthy amount of truth too. All my furious resentment for the girl who threw me into this situation, the girl who’s now been tasked with keeping me in it. I don’t envy her for being Ettian’s new best friend—I don’t envy anyone in that position after what he did to me—but I wouldn’t mind if she thought that venom in my voice came from jealousy.
“Ettian’s not the one risking me,” Wen says in a tone of voice that makes me grateful for the wall standing solidly between us. “I’ve chosen this. I chose him.”
“I thought I’d chosen him too,” I remind her. “But I wasn’t careful to make sure he’d really chosen me back. He said he did. Made all the pretty promises a boy can make. But if he’d really chosen either of us, I wouldn’t be in this ruttin’ air duct and you wouldn’t be waiting for me to crawl out of it.”
This time I don’t give her the breath to think. “Is this really what you’d pick for yourself if you could go anyw
here in the galaxy? Be anyone you wanted to be? Do anything you’d sworn to do?” I lay heavy on those last words, certain I’m pressing exactly where it hurts.
Because Wen’s already told us exactly what she wants—confessed it to us on the very night we met her. She latched herself to our coattails to escape the Corinthian mob that killed her mother and took her in as its ward, and she’s out for their blood. This whole affair with the Archon Empire is just a long, protracted detour, and I’m hoping to hitch my own wagon to her realization of just how far she’s strayed from her goal.
The silence on the other side of the grate tells me it’s working. “Look at yourself,” I say, glad she can’t look at me instead. This horrible girl who got Ettian’s secrets out of him before he ever bothered to tell me any of the important ones. I want her feeling as small as I do, pinned inside this narrow metal cage. “You let him gas you up with fantasies of being his knight, told yourself it was something you wanted, forced yourself into the shape of his expectations. I’ve seen the way you dress—all that armor, all that platinum, all that green. Like you’re trying to convince yourself you belong in his world.”
The dark of the night, I’m certain, is doing half my work for me. I’ve spent enough sleepless hours staring at the ceiling’s distant detail to know how easily your fears and doubts expand to fit the amorphous shape of the blackness around you.
There’s just one final twist of the knife I need to land this. “And none of it mattered. None of it worked—that’s the worst part, isn’t it? You gave up your dreams, you jammed yourself into new ones that didn’t quite fit right, and Ettian tore you away from them all the same, all supposedly because you’re the only one he trusts to keep me alive. And yet he’s dragging us to the front with him. You know what that says to me?”
“What does it say to you?” Wen asks. I can’t tell if her tone is weary or wary.
Oaths of Legacy Page 4