Tanks and armoured carriers swarm the courtyard, the kestrel badges gone. A new uniform fills it, tired faces staring at me from above rumpled collars, from beneath tilted caps. Dozens stand beneath the palms, wielding weapons, gazing at the sky where two aeroplanes fly low. And from the gates, the Resyan flag is lowered.
The fox and crossed swords are raised.
Indistinct fury rises in me, billowing like the smoke still staining the blue sky. I fumble for the jewels at my neck, rip Callia’s necklace from my skin, then pull off her bangles of glory and the gems from my ears.
In the face of war, I will not gleam.
* * *
The first official negotiation is held over a dignified dinner of wine and spiced meat, the table covered in lace and satin—the strangest meal that’s ever been shared. Ripe with mistrust. Rahian, Jali, Havis, and the Resyan generals are already present. Rahian sits at the head, appearing about ready to jump out of his skin. Havis sits across from me, slight agitation to his gaze. He should be nervous. He’s as guilty as any, and if the Safire discover the ruse he gave them in that briefcase …
Commander Dakar enters at precisely noon, cleaned up and impressive once more. His uniform is no longer stained with mud and blood. It’s the glorious one with medals, and I try to reconcile the fact that while Madelan still burned, someone was charged with the task of flying in a fresh costume for this conquering warrior.
His gaze fixes on Rahian at the far end of the table. A deathly, brutal stare, and Rahian gestures to the only open seat.
We’ve made sure to put ten feet of fine dining between them.
The Commander sits and takes a bottle of wine. A servant rushes to help, to pour the glass, but the General’s son is already drinking straight from the decanter itself, and the room stares at the spectacle. When he’s finished, his gaze falls on Rahian. “You have something to say to me, Your Majesty?”
“Please, help yourself,” Rahian replies, an edge to his voice.
“To what? This?” The Commander waves at the rich spread before him. “To your kingdom?”
“You’ve rescued us. You’ve rescued me from Seath.”
“Goddamned lies!” The Commander’s voice snaps, his hand still gripping the wine. “You could have surrendered the first day, but you didn’t. Your guilt condemns you.”
No one speaks, and I feel obligated to intervene. “This is a sovereign kingdom,” I remind the Commander, “and the League forbade your war. Of course he’d fight if invaded. It has nothing to do with guilt.”
The blue eyes dart to me, seated on his right. “Honour may demand a fight, Princess, but not for this long. The innocent would have welcomed our investigation. But this man”—he jabs a finger at Rahian—“chose to take the hard way. The League was wrong, and I’ve proven it.”
Again, no one speaks.
Havis stares at his hands.
“It’s not that simple,” I say, forging on. I feel like the only one still trying.
“Not that simple?” the Commander repeats. “The Nahir have been after us every step of the way to Madelan. They were already in this kingdom, as I said long ago. It’s a shame it took all of this to make the world see it.”
“They were never on my order,” Rahian interjects.
Everyone turns, Jali’s brow arching sharply as she does.
The Commander cocks his head. “Then you were aware of them?”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Do I?”
“Commander, I—”
“Then there are no Nahir revolutionaries within your borders? You blew out your own bridges over the river Lirak? That was you destroying your own infrastructure? Two five-hundred-year-old bridges, priceless relics of Resya’s history? Trapping your own army in a cauldron of slaughter?”
“Do not mock me, boy!” Rahian growls. His sudden passion is riled and fierce, with the elegance of a monarch. “I’ve already lost too much these past months. Look at my city! Look at the waste! You think I would invite this? This kingdom is buried. You’ve buried it, child!”
The Commander hurls the decanter to the floor.
Crystal shatters, blood-red bursting, and he stands to his full frame. “How much it has cost you? Sitting here? Eating all this?” A platter of meat joins the glass shards and wine, ringing on tile as everyone sits rigid, on a razor. “Do you know what that one bridge from Erzel cost me? That one bridge? Three thousand lives, Your Majesty. Never mind the hundreds I lost every day we were trapped. And you sit here and tell me what you’ve lost? You don’t even know what you’ve lost! You don’t know the ones who fought for you or where they’ve been or what they’ve seen. You know nothing!”
It’s very slight, but his eyes glimmer with rage—and possibly grief. And looking at him, standing there, everything destroyed on the floor at his boots, something sharp tightens in my stomach. Something painful.
Three thousand.
Because of one bridge!
I feel my chest constricting again. Too many numbers that have no end. I was naive to believe Athan was alive, somewhere. He isn’t. He’s only one of the hundreds lost every day, and I have to prepare my heart to live in a world without him—without so many others—and the truth is, I’ll probably never learn his fate.
I’ll wonder forever, in vain.
A story with no end.
“Are you all right?” Havis asks, the first thing he’s said.
I realize he’s looking at me, across the table.
But my grief doesn’t matter. Rahian is standing now as well, his expression defiant. “I am a king,” he declares. “Tell me, Commander, if leaders should be with their soldiers, then where is your father? He’s a general. Why would he send you to do this? Why are his boots not as dirty as yours in this wretched business?”
Tension quivers in the silence, and the Commander stares at Rahian. “Save your excuses for the League, Majesty,” he says, scathingly polite. “You’re under arrest until my father arrives.”
33
ATHAN
Airbase, Madelan
The third night in our newly occupied barracks, the nightmare comes again. It’s like the one I had when I was drunk on the pier, fusing together with distant sounds outside our little hut. Drunken laughter rings with the metal wings in my dream. The creaking wind shudders like a cockpit and faint cigarette smoke becomes the scent of searing metal.
I cry out. I know it’s me—my own voice loud in my head, too close—and someone shakes me awake. Blurry, out of focus. A shadow-shape I’m terrified of.
“Relax,” Cyar says. “You’re dreaming.”
Terror recedes in the face of relief. He’s towering over me, looking slightly afraid—an expression I see more and more when he finds me like this at night.
“What the hell goes on in your head, Athan?”
“A lot of headaches,” I reply, trying to grin.
He doesn’t return it. He doesn’t understand that I’m too afraid to speak the dream out loud and somehow make it real again, even for a second. But he’s still giving me his pitying look, and for some reason, it annoys me. “It’s the same one we all have,” I relent. “Got hit and couldn’t get out. Couldn’t shatter the canopy, even with my pistol. It didn’t break.”
“But you’re fine,” he says.
I sit up, strange frustration scrambling again. “No.”
Cyar pushes me back. “You’re fine.”
“But you weren’t. You were dead.”
He stares at me. It’s just a stupid dream. It’s the fear we all have, every pilot in every air force—trapped in your own cockpit as you plunge to fiery death, and your wingman’s gone. It’s nothing special or unique, and I know it, but the feeling of helplessness is like a beast snarling inside me. It has to be how those Resyan soldiers felt when I killed them. Friends falling down on every side. The horror of it haunts me, and it feels good for Cyar to understand finally. To stop with his stupid words that mean nothing.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Cyar says. “You’ll never have to fly without me.”
No.
Still the stupid words.
I glare at him in the darkness. “That’s a damn lie and you know it. We’re not invincible. We’re not deathless. I’m the General’s son and I’ll die up there like anyone else. At least they’ll remember me. But you? You’re just—”
I almost say, “just a kid from Rahmet,” and Cyar’s looking less sympathetic now, more like he might hit me.
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” he replies after a moment. He ducks back into his bunk below mine. “Good night, Athan.”
There’s literally nothing good about it, and I jump down from the bed, heading outside, banging the door behind me. In the compound, a few tipsy pilots are staggering back from an evening of leave. Greycap and Spider and Garrick. Lion’s Paw and Moonstrike, reunited again. They’ve found the nearest drinking hole, a place with rooms to rent for an hour, and the last person I want to see is Captain Merlant—the one who taught me to be honourable. A pilot made of an ageless nobility. I’ve been avoiding him, petrified he’ll look at me and read the truth. That I slaughtered surrendering men.
And, of course, he’s the one I smack right into.
“Headache,” he greets brightly, his old nickname for me. He’s nobly escorting one of his stumbling pilots to their barracks. “Can’t sleep?”
That’s an understatement—and I never thought the nickname would prove fortuitous.
“Thirsty,” I lie.
Relinquishing his pilot to another, he stays with me beneath the lamps, seeming to sense my guardedness. Perhaps he knows I’ve been avoiding him. Perhaps he knows what happened with the regiment we took out.
I can’t tell, and his smile lessens slightly. “I was hoping to catch you, but you’ve been scarce.”
“You’ve caught me now.”
“Good, Lieutenant,” he says, voice lowering, “because I’m going to tell you something as a favour, since you know I admire you.” He looks at me, clearly probing for our lost connection. I nod reluctantly. “You lot are damn lucky General Windom took enough pity he mobilized us to come to your rescue. Or rather, his daughter pitied you and pressed him to intervene with our king. But you should know His Majesty Gawain isn’t pleased with this mess your brother got himself into. The sheer bloody scope of this campaign.”
My brother didn’t make the mess, I want to snap back.
There was a plan.
A solid plan.
The Nahir made the mess when they betrayed us.
But I can’t say that, so I nod again.
“What I’m trying to say,” he continues, “is that I’m not sure your family should be expecting favours of this magnitude every time. You might pass that along?”
“I appreciate the warning, Captain.”
“Please, take it with my respect. I don’t mean to offend.”
“Of course not.”
We stare at each other, me mustering the closest thing to a smile I’ve got right now, then he pats my shoulder, a sad expression on his face, and wanders back towards the Lion’s Paw barracks. Maybe it’s good if I start keeping him at a distance. The Landorians are friends, but they’re also not. They’ve got their own agenda. We have ours. And maybe it’s even good if Cyar and I start fighting more. I need to begin cutting him away. Need to learn to live without him.
I hit my head, hard.
What the hell’s wrong with my brain? These thoughts have built like a sickness. I’ve somehow destroyed the shred of decency I once clung to, the thing that made me believe I wasn’t like my family. But as it turns out, I’m exactly like them. Because when my guns fired into that Resyan regiment, I felt nothing but thrill. Victory. Desire for the power in my deadly wings. That’s my dark secret, and none of this will go away, never, not even in my dreams.
Dying was supposed to be the worst fate in war.
But it isn’t.
The worst fate is surviving and learning to live all over again—like this.
VII
WINGS
34
AURELIA
Rahian’s Palace
Rahian’s house arrest saps the palace of whatever remaining nobility it had left. At the enemy’s mercy, the remaining officials and staff operate under an uneasy truce as whispers trickle in about the eastern parts of the city that suffered the worst of the bombs. Homes destroyed, bodies buried, limbs turned black.
Two thousand.
Five hundred.
An entire family.
The numbers start large, overwhelming, then shrink down into individual names who will never be remembered beyond Madelan. The ashes of war. The Commander refuses to answer my questioning, but the one named Evertal, a powerful woman in Safire uniform, stoops to address me. It was a mistake, she explains. Bad winds. Stray shells. They could never have deliberately done such a thing, she assures—and since she won the war, everyone nods and pretends to agree.
I silently add the numbers to a notebook I’m keeping of evidence.
I’m terrified to ask anyone about the camp. No one mentions it, and perhaps to them it never existed, but to me it holds every piece of my sorrow and regret, the forgotten symbol of all this horrific conflict represents.
The void where hope disappears.
“I can’t take this any longer,” Havis finally announces a week after the surrender. He looms in the doorway of my room as I sit on the sofa alone, trying to decide what message I’ll cable my mother, now that the wires are up again. “We need to get you away from here. An escape.”
I let my pointed silence answer him. My page is still blank, because I have no words for my mother. None that I can send like this. A thousand questions demanding answers.
“The General won’t be arriving for another few days,” Havis persists. “It’s a long journey from Savient.”
I find it incredible how many excuses people will concoct for a powerful man. He should have been here days ago. But Havis doesn’t give up, sitting beside me, his weight crushing the cushion. “I know you swore never to forgive me,” he remarks, “but what if I offered you the one thing your heart desires most?”
“Peace throughout the world with not a single lying man left in existence?”
“All right. Perhaps the second greatest desire of your heart?”
I glance up finally. “I’m not leaving Madelan, Havis. I have to be here to mediate with the General.”
“We won’t go far,” Havis assures, and if he thinks I’m mad for putting myself into the negotiations, he doesn’t touch it. He’s getting wiser. “Just our estate.”
I sigh. The offer is tempting. A place filled with flowers and sunshine rather than cigar smoke and suspicion. Away from the unpredictable Commander hovering at my neck. The Commander who watches me every day, his suspicion coiling, like there’s a secret message written beneath my skin, and someday, very soon, he’ll read it and know who I am.
It’s exhausting, being afraid.
“Why did you help Damir and Tirza?” I ask Havis instead, a question that’s been weighing on my mind. “You gave them work here, support their press. You did a good thing, and I’m not sure what it offered you in return.”
Havis laughs shortly. “Yes, imagine that. Me helping someone and getting nothing in exchange.” He shakes his head. “I know you think I’m purely mercenary, Aurelia, but I do care. I do have a heart. And I did the only thing anyone can do—I helped a family. One brother, one sister. You can’t save everyone. You simply can’t.”
“It didn’t occur to you they might be Nahir?”
“Oh, I was fully aware. But here, that’s part of life, and you don’t judge people based on who they are. You judge them based on what they do.” He pauses. “And that’s an idea you might want to consider carefully in days to come.”
I don’t have to ask what he means.
He’s talking about my mother, the angry blank page still sitting before me.
“All right, I’ll go to your estate,” I relent at last. “But only for one day.”
He brightens. “Good—and you might want to put on something pretty.”
I ignore that ridiculous request and lace up my leather boots, throw a few things in my traveling trunk, then head for the door.
* * *
I realize quickly that we’re headed in the wrong direction. Our automobile rumbles down avenues which now hold Savien tanks and soldiers directing stunned residents through the shambled city, and it’s not towards his estate. Though Havis steers us clear of the worst wreckage, the damage still lurks, and in my shame, I don’t wish to look. Yes, Safire planes put this city to flame, but it was also the ghost of a man—a man who runs in my veins—who brought them here. A man who doesn’t want to negotiate, who condemned this kingdom to war.
When the motorcar finally stops, I’m confronted by a wire fence, foreign soldiers posted on either side of a wide gate. Two aeroplanes swing down onto a runway shivering in the afternoon heat.
“An airbase?” I ask, confused.
“It’s the only one that survived the bombing. And I think it might hold something of value for us.”
“Why? What’s in your briefcase this time?”
He chuckles, scratching at the shadow along his jaw. “Can you believe a year ago I found you wearisome? As it turns out, you’re actually quite clever and interesting, and I’ve begun to wonder what you might accomplish if you had true cards in your hands.”
“I don’t follow,” I say, suspicious of his sudden flattery.
“I’m telling you that you’re someone I like, and there aren’t many people I’d put in that category. For that reason, I’m going to give you a gift, trusting you’ll use it wisely, with the good sense I know is in your head.”
The trouble with Havis’s compliments is they end up sounding a lot like pandering.
“I’ll still never forgive you,” I inform him. “I’ve seen what you do and my judgment is final.”
Storm from the East Page 24