He slaps the watch back on his wrist, standing. “You’re dismissed, Lieutenant.”
I don’t move, and he looks down at me with a silent threat. One that says he’ll haul me out of here himself if he has to. “This girl has been across the lines every day for us,” he hisses in Savien, eyes narrowed. “Without a gun or a plane. She’s braver than you. Braver than me. So just get out and quit with that noble judgment. It’s hilarious coming from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
He gestures at the girl standing, confused, in the doorway. “I’m not lying to her.”
It’s the jugular. Right for the kill. I feel momentarily disoriented, sitting in this chair, in this shattered house, two sets of eyes staring at me and waiting for me to move.
I stand finally, hating where I am. Hating what’s happening around me. “What would Rozmarin think?” I ask, the only weapon I have, this girl he once loved enough to ink on his own skin. “She’s the one you got pregnant, isn’t she? When Father tried to marry you off? You don’t even care. You just move from one to the next and don’t give a hell about what it means!”
He shoves me roughly for the door. “You’re wrong.”
“One day,” I snap on the way out, “you’re going to get yourself killed and it’ll be entirely your own fault.”
“Believe me,” he snaps back. “I know.”
And he slams the door in my face.
25
AURELIA
Madelan
The days after my discovery at Lark’s address are a strange blur. I feel entirely alone with the truth of my family, no safe place to turn for answers, and my sleepless nights are spent sifting through every conversation from this summer, struggling to explain Lark’s final bid in Etania. To explain how my mother could ever rise from revolutionary to queen. The photograph album is hidden away in my room, and I can’t bring myself to look through it again.
I’m a fraud, I think. I’m avoiding the truth, just like everyone else.
But I’m also terribly afraid, and my tangled thoughts are often pulled back to the camp by the airbase—ignored, left to the wayside—and I feel a deeper kinship with them now, some memory of shared blood. What will happen when the frontlines reach Madelan? Who will make sure they’re safe? We need to move them into proper homes, the protests of the locals here be damned.
Somehow, this feels within my reach, a place to direct my miserable, restless energy, and I’m on my way to appeal to the one royal here who might understand their situation when Officer Walez catches me, joy on his face.
“We decoded a recent directive from the Safire Commander,” he tells me under his breath. “Any soldier caught shooting prisoners is under immediate court-martial.” He smiles with relief. “Congratulations, Princess. I think your words found the right ears!”
I can scarcely believe it. My Savien pamphlets actually worked? It’s a small shared victory in the face of darkness, a reminder that reason can still exist.
On impulse, I embrace Walez, desperately grateful.
By the time Jali Furswana appears for her daily ritual in the pool—wrapped in her usual cream robe and dark sunglasses, black hair pinned high with gold clips—I’m waiting for her. I sit at the edge of the water, dipping my toes in, and her smile dies at the sight of me. No doubt anticipating another round of prying into her personal history. With a half-hearted wave, she removes her robe, limbs luminous in the sun, then settles herself into a lounging chair near me, helping herself to a platter of fresh fruit meticulously cut into star shapes.
I don’t waste her time, or mine. “There’s a camp in the city,” I inform her, taking the chair beside hers, “and it’s filled with people from across the border. They have no home, no proper shelters. Rahian is afraid to help them, but perhaps you can convince him otherwise?”
She doesn’t answer, flicking her lighter to a cigarette first, a peacock etched onto the bronze metal. “He refuses to act,” she says finally, “because he’s being wise. People like that only bring trouble.”
Her tone is so pragmatic, I find I have no patience for it.
“But they’re not Na—”
“Oh yes they are,” Jali barges onwards, “and Landore’s the one stirring them up to the point they feel frantic enough to leave Thurn. If you’d like to blame someone, blame the North. Blame yourself. All of you were content to draw up borders and lines and scatter people to the wind, taking the wealth for yourself. Now we have to suffer the consequences of your foolish arrogance? It’s preposterous!”
I fume, knowing she’s right, but also knowing she’s being as absurdly selfish as anyone.
“How can it be a burden to help children?” I ask, pushing one of Tirza’s leaflets at Jali. The dead woman and her infant. “Look at this and tell me you don’t understand why they’re running.”
Jali raises her sunglasses, studying the mother. For the first time, I see something soften in her eyes. Something almost sympathetic. But then she shakes her head. “I was ten years old when the rebels came for my family, Aurelia. My parents always said it would be fine, that the Nahir’s revolutionary influence could never spread to Masrah. But they were wrong. Their propaganda roused dissent, made our people rise up, and the day they came into our palace, even our own guards turned on us. I watched as they shot my brothers and father like criminals. I never saw what they did to my mother, and perhaps that’s for the best. They put my sister Callia and I in a little room with no windows, said we were next. Everything after that is mostly gone from my memory. I remember a lot of darkness and endless running. Somehow, Callia got us both out. She was only sixteen, but she took us west, to the one royal left in all of the South. When we finally showed up in Madelan, we scarcely looked better than those people in the camp.”
“Then you understand,” I press, sensing a victory. “You know what it’s like to run and be afraid.”
“Understand?” Jali grips my arm, her long pearly nails biting into my skin. “What I understand is the moment our own guards turned on us. Those young men—they played with me every day. They worshipped us, and I don’t think they ever wanted to overthrow us. But they did. Because in that moment, when the guns were firing and things seemed very hopeless, they forgot about what was right. They saved themselves.” She flings a hand towards the iron fence surrounding the pool, towards Madelan. “That’s what common people are like. They save themselves when the monsters come.”
Her hazel eyes are pained, her heart finally exposed from beneath the sunglasses, and I want to tell her I understand. I want to say yes, I know the fear, I remember it from that night when I almost lost everything as well, our own coup.
But the pity doesn’t hold.
I pull from Jali’s grip. “I’m sorry for your family. I truly am. But why should we be so afraid? Why should we tremble? We have guards and palaces. An entire army ready to fight at our command. We have everything, and those people in the camp…”
I gesture at the pamphlet, the mother and child.
Slain in the crossfire of a game they certainly never asked to be part of.
But Jali only laughs shortly. “Don’t you dare make me out to be the callous one, Aurelia. As I said earlier, your Northern imperialist friends are the true fiends here. These massacres are their bloody work. Power-hungry fools who have no right to even an acre of this Southern earth. And the Nahir? They have no right to it, either. They’re mobsters happy to profit from chaos. To upset the natural balance. But while Resya, Myar, and the kingdoms of Thurn endured their time beneath Northern rule, my beloved Masrah alone stood for a thousand years without a single day under foreign influence. Not one day!”
“But did you even try?” I demand, unable to curb my own anger.
She blinks. “Try what?”
“To defend those other kingdoms that fell! Or did you simply watch them being devoured while you were safe, feasting in Masrah.”
“Stars, Aurelia. I will not feel sympathy for some
Nahir propaganda.” She crumples the pamphlet. “They stole our home right out from under us, and I refuse to fan the flames of their resistance in Resya now, too.”
“Nahir propaganda?” I repeat.
“Of course! They think they speak for justice, for freedom. But Seath and his rebels? They only want power. They want to destroy the order of things and be the only ones with an answer. And this is how they do it.”
She shoves the destroyed leaflet back at me.
I’m still struggling to register this one accusation—Nahir propaganda—when a noise across the pool makes me turn. Tirza stands there, frozen. “I was looking for Aurelia, Your Highness,” she says to Jali. “I apologize for interrupting.”
That’s all she says, but her gaze catches mine—anger and guilt and fear there. And it reveals enough. All at once, like a snap of fingers, I see it. It’s not as shocking as when Lark’s revelation came. This time it feels like an inevitable conclusion. A place that, somehow, someway, makes perfect sense given the patterns of this world I now know.
“Where did you get these pamphlets?” Jali demands, ignoring Tirza altogether.
I make a split-second decision. “Someone was passing them out in the square,” I lie.
“Ah, you see?” Jali’s eyes spark with satisfaction. “The Nahir have infiltrated this kingdom already! Isn’t that the irony? The Safire condemned us for this, and everyone ran to say it was a lie. But soon enough, there will be a reckoning.”
I don’t like the dark pleasure in her voice.
It’s her own brother-in-law who stands to take the fall.
Tirza has escaped back inside the palace, and I move to follow, desperate to reassure her that I won’t reveal her secrets—never—but Jali clutches my arm again, the cigarette still smoking in her right hand, sour stench making my eyes water. “Did you know one of my favourite officers found a leaflet in the streets the other day? Some passionate drivel against the Safire, and it quoted my poetry, which is rather absurd since I’ve never published before. Where, then, would these propagandists get my poems from?”
I keep my mask calm, unrattled.
Why the stars didn’t I think of this before I borrowed her line?
Her fingers tighten. “Listen closely, Aurelia. When this is over—and it will be over quicker than we think—you don’t want to be found sympathizing with the wrong cause. Justice comes for us all. Choose your side now, before your family chooses for you.”
It’s a clear warning, from one princess to another, a threat and a promise, and her pointed emphasis on my family only stirs greater alarm. She couldn’t possibly know the truth about where my mother came from, what my mother has done with a rifle … And yet the fear is there, reminding me that something still lurks out of sight, something dangerous.
The dark thread tightening all of this together.
The thing I can’t quite reach.
But I give her one more chance. One final question.
“There are children in that camp,” I say. “Little girls. Sisters. The same as you and Callia, and if we don’t move them to shelter soon, they’ll be offered up to Safire guns.”
Jali looks at me a long moment, then sighs. “It was their decision to come here. Why should Resya be burdened with their safety?”
I don’t know if it’s the helpless regret in her voice—like she’s simply being practical, reasonable—or the fact that I now stand before her as only half a princess, but I find my tolerance for her sapped completely, and my view of the world recast forever into something I never imagined, a strange new certainty finding foothold.
“All my life I’ve believed we were born to rule,” I say, pulling from her manicured grasp. “But truly, I think Masrah might be far better off without you.”
And then I leave.
* * *
I catch up to Tirza in the Queen’s gardens. It’s her favourite place on palace grounds, the place she always goes to be alone, because it’s filled with sweet-smelling orange trees—the favourite fruit of both the late Queen Callia and Tirza’s little brother who died in Beraya. Distant city noise drifts over the walls, butterflies spinning lazy circles, and far in the distance, out of sight, two armies stagger to death between the mountains.
She’s silent for a long while, offering me a slice of orange she’s stolen from a nearby tree, neither of us yet acknowledging the place we must go. The word hovering between us.
Nahir.
“I hate them,” Tirza eventually says, voice tight with anger. “These rich swans who have never known a hungry belly. Who have never gone a winter without bread or been forced to kneel at a checkpoint before foreign guns. I hate them all—Northern and Southern alike. We suffer, and they never even glance out the window. They have no need. A thousand years of pure delusion.”
I say nothing, simply let her speak.
“They despise Seath and turn him into a villain,” she continues. “Claim he only speaks in violence. But that’s hardly all of him, and they’ll never understand what he’s given us common people. He’s given us the strength to challenge and break and make new. The means to heal and protect. To seek justice and revenge. He’s sacrificed everything for our right to independence—and I’m not ashamed of who I am. Or of him.”
Her eyes meet mine, glittering in the sun, and I see only determination there, the reflection of Lark. Didn’t Havis once warn me not to underestimate my cousin? And in the end, he was right. Lark was a real person—full of far more depths and wounds than I imagined. Determined enough to turn his gun on Athan, to use me as a hostage even though I’m certain he never would have hurt me. He had a hidden tempest, a desperate courage that wasn’t afraid to sacrifice, to demand what was owed, and perhaps he wasn’t the only one.
Perhaps, I do too. My mother’s fierce heart beating inside me.
She tried it her way—a way that must be buried forever—but I’m here now, compelling the Commander to wage a better war, scaring Jali Furswana with my words.
I have a strange power, a blood of two worlds coursing through my veins.
A girl who is both princess and Rummhazi.
I put my hand on Tirza’s. “I believe you, Tirza, and I can go where you cannot. And I will go. I will make sure your story gets to those who need to hear it.”
She peers up at me, fragile hope in her gaze. “Where will you go?”
“To the Royal League itself,” I say. “And they will look their shame in the face.”
26
ATHAN
The Cauldron
We hear Garrick and Ollie before we see them.
They left fifteen minutes ago, sent on the reconnaissance mission Arrin devised for them, discovering an entire enemy regiment camped in a town just to the northwest of us. That regiment is the only remaining barricade between Arrin’s trapped force and the Safire frontlines at Adena we left behind a week ago. Breaking through them will reunite us with the southern march of Army Group North.
Huddled around the radio, we’ve been listening as Garrick reports numbers of artillery and tanks. He and Ollie are supposed to keep high enough to avoid trouble, but low enough to see what stands between us and breaking through. It sounds like a lot. Possibly an entire armoured battalion alongside the regiment.
Nothing happens, though. No one fires at them, not a single puff of flak, and they circle back, bickering the entire way about who did more work and gets the medal.
“Don’t touch my victory cigar, Charm,” Ollie’s voice crackles over the radio. “I’ll know if you sneak a drag.”
It’s the last one he has, entrusted to me for safekeeping.
“He won’t know,” Trigg whispers at me.
“And you too, Thief,” Ollie’s staticky voice adds, and everyone grins.
“That’s that,” Arrin says as their engines echo in the distance. “You pilots have an enemy regiment to strafe tomorrow evening before we make our push through. Make sure you bleed them out well.”
Both Cyar and Trigg look
a little apprehensive at that. I’m sure I do, too. But there’s only one way back to our lines and it’s through that regiment.
An explosion erupts north of the airfield.
“Damn it,” Garrick’s voice says over the radio. “Flak.”
“Who the hell’s shooting at us?” Ollie demands.
We all turn to Arrin.
Arrin frowns. “Everyone’s been ordered to hold their fire. They know our planes.”
There’s another shattering blast, and it can’t be from our lines. Everyone stands there, confused about how Resyan soldiers managed to crawl this close to our camp undetected, but I look at Arrin. The faint alarm in his gaze says enough.
They’re not Resyan.
“Shit, that was near my engine,” Ollie says. “How’s my fuel line?”
“Not good,” Garrick’s muffled voice responds.
“Left aileron’s hit too.”
“Hold up—come to the right. You’ve—”
The radio goes fuzzy again, but we don’t need to listen anymore, because there they are, flying in just beyond the runway. Two fighters side by side, one oozing black smoke as it weaves sporadically. A hit aileron means steering is a nightmare, and alarm grazes my spine.
“Get the extinguisher,” Arrin orders a soldier nearby. “He’s going to crash.”
“Hydraulics fading,” Ollie’s voice says, slightly panicked now.
“Get some height and bail,” Garrick orders.
“I’m not bailing here.”
“Then turn off the engine. Cut the—”
“I’m not dead-dropping onto this runway either!”
“You’ve got fuel draining all over your ass! Cut the damn engine!”
I want to shake Ollie. He has no choice but to bail or crash. But then I realize why he isn’t bailing. He’s hurtling towards this runway, where everyone in Safire uniform stands in shock, and his fighter’s spitting flammable fuel. There’s no room for error in this packed clearing and he can barely steer. And if he bails, this fighter goes wherever it wants. It will explode on impact. Right into us or into the wounded soldiers lying helpless beneath the trees.
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