I’m coming apart at the seams.
“What’s wrong?” I finally ask.
She doesn’t answer.
“I know something’s wrong, Ali.”
“You left me this morning,” she says hollowly.
I stop rubbing. “This is about this morning?”
“Yes.” She looks at me. “You just left.”
The depth of hurt in her shaky glare says enough. I should not have left. I should have stayed—but I couldn’t. “I had to go,” I admit, hoping she can hear the longing in my voice. “I had no choice. You know I can’t always do what I want.”
“Can’t you?” There’s a sting of hatred there that’s alarming. “Well, I’m happy to hear your schedule’s more important than what we shared,” she continues. “It was hardly that exceptional for me either.”
No, I’m not in a good position right now. Engine smoking, on the way down.
“I’m sorry, Ali. I really am. Please, tell me what I can do to make this right.”
She glances at me, and for a moment I think she’s softening.
Very slightly.
She hands me the nearest napkin. “Make me an aeroplane.”
I don’t question the strange request. I get straight to work, folding the cloth carefully, one wing at a time, then pinching it tight to be sure it will hold. I pass it back to her.
She holds it, studying.
Then she stares at me, studying.
I swallow, terrified of her meticulous inspection, nowhere near as enjoyable as it was last night, then she drops the napkin into the nearest candle flame, the whole thing igniting to a tiny pile of nothing.
I stare at the ashes.
What do you do once you’re on the ground? Wait to be captured?
“Oh no,” Arrin’s voice announces from across our table. “Do I sense trouble?” He looms over us, and there isn’t a speck of true concern in his grin. He’s watching Ali more than me. “Are you upset with the Lieutenant?” he asks her. “I can have him punished, you know. Court-martialed?”
“No,” she replies.
“Demoted?”
“No.”
“Shot at dawn? How terrible is this?”
“No.”
He raises his brow at her anger, and she stands abruptly. “I don’t want to see any of you right now, Commander.”
“Any of us?” Arrin repeats.
But she’s already gone.
My airplane smoulders pathetically in a pool of candle wax.
“That’s who you were with last night?” Arrin asks in Savien, thoroughly unimpressed. “Wish it had been a whorehouse, little brother.”
I glare at him, waiting for the rest of the lecture.
The reminder that I’m a goddamn traitor.
Instead, he says, “I know you don’t like to take advice from me, but I’m somewhat of an expert with women, and you might consider following her.”
Half of me thinks Arrin is definitely not an expert and this is terrible advice. The other half of me wants to find out for sure. But then his expression tightens, and he leans down. “Don’t let anything happen to her, Athan. She’s a valuable prize, and this party is a target. Keep a close eye on her. Can you handle that? Though maybe not as close as you’d like. You know what I’m say—”
I bolt across the room. His warning is enough. If Seath is on the move, looking to sabotage this situation further, then the last thing I want is for our misstep with the Nahir to endanger Ali. I’m an idiot about many things, but I won’t let that happen. Not now. I race to keep up to her, because she’s moving at a good pace, darting between the dancing and conversation, and I follow her out into a hall littered with anxious footmen. One tries to offer me brandy. I ignore it.
When I catch up, she’s stopped on a balcony currently occupied by a wealthy Resyan couple. They both look startled by her sudden presence—and frightened of mine. They disappear quickly.
We’re left alone.
She faces the shadows, away from the radiant palace, and the stars are wild above. I have the sudden feeling of being in a circular sky. Nothing beyond. Stuck in this infinite sphere of empty depths, around and around and around, a flame at the very center that can’t actually be reached.
“Ali, please tell me what—”
“I hate this,” she hurls, whirling on me. “All of this. It’s wrong. Has everyone already forgotten what’s been lost? I watched this city burn. Burn right up in flames! And all of the people here—” She flicks a hand at the bright doorway. “They saw none of it. They returned in time for peace.”
I consider my next words carefully. Whatever I say has to be right, because she’s liable to take flight again—possibly right over this balcony and out of sight. “The world justifies war too easily,” I agree.
She glowers at me, fury in her eyes. “Your world, at least.”
I don’t know what that means. I’ve never admired these rich cowards, from the North or the South. Their only courage is in testing new wines and passing profound verdicts. Perhaps if I’d said this before, she would have laughed.
I don’t think she will now.
Her chin rises. “Do you think what you did in this kingdom is right, Lieutenant?”
The question is a death sentence. Lieutenant. Not my name. I feel it like a weight on my wrists, metal against my skin. I’ve confessed nearly all of my sins to her, and maybe I shouldn’t have, but now she’s put that to smoke—leaving only one bone of a question behind.
“It was for the greater good,” I say, hating the words, yet needing them to be true. Somehow. “It’s not always pleasant, but that’s life. That’s how you get something better.”
“Is that a line from your brother’s speech last summer?”
“No, my brother never—”
I stop. The trap was sprung too easily. I was distracted by my own shame, and she pounced. Her expression’s unreadable in the dark. Far across a sea of betrayal.
She flings something at me.
I catch metal tags against my chest, suddenly realizing they were even lost. That’s how far gone my head is these days. It’s all murky and knotted in there, a smog of thoughts and pain. “Ali, please listen. I’ll tell you everything. It will make sense, I promise. Erelis was my mother’s name. After she was murdered, we—”
“I don’t care!”
Her words slap me. They’re empty and cold, and they poke a hot coal of my own anger. She won’t listen. She doesn’t even know me.
Dark laughter throbs in my head.
Naked in all but your name, then?
“Don’t you think I deserved the truth when we met?” she demands. “Before last night at least?”
“Yes,” I say honestly. “I was going to tell you. I tried in a letter. I tried—”
She shakes her head. “Try isn’t good enough, Lieutenant. Try is meaningless.” I move towards her and she swings a hand, holding me back. “No! You think I’m angry at you? I am. I’m furious at you. But I’m even angrier with myself, because I was a fool. A fool. To think a junior officer could take me straight to the General in the middle of a coup. To think that made any sense at all! How could I have bought such a perfect lie?”
Because you were scared, I want to say. Because it was the only way.
“And when I faced him,” she says, “you did nothing. You stood there and listened like a nothing officer who didn’t matter at all. You let me face him alone. Tell me—did your father ask you to get to know me? Is that why you gave me the flower in the garden?”
I have no answer.
There’s an entire story built in my head, but it’s lost in the confusing mess of shadows and memories. It made sense at the time. It all makes sense—until it suddenly doesn’t.
“I love you,” I whisper. “I swear it on my soul.”
“Stop lying to me!” She backs away farther, horrified, like I’m a rabid dog getting too close. “Your father is a monster who wants war. He wants revenge in the only way he knows, a
nd his target is my mother. You thought I wouldn’t figure that out eventually? What the hell is wrong with you?”
She knows.
She knows it all, and I can only stare at her while she snarls in my face. “You took my most painful secret and turned it into profit for your family. You did that, Lieutenant. No one else. So don’t tell me you love me, because your version of it is something I can’t even fathom. Stars, I thought it was only your brother causing trouble. It’s not him—it’s all of you! You’re all the damn same.”
Wrong words.
Something breaks inside me. Something bruised and vicious. “I am not the same as them,” I hurl back, “and you of all people should know that! Before you start pointing fingers, you’d better ask your mother for her story first. You think she’s innocent? You think I’m the only one guilty here?”
“How dare you,” she hisses.
But I don’t stop. I pull out Mother’s photograph from my uniform, the one I always have with me, that’s followed me through both war and love, and hold it out to her like a gun. She stares, her rigid face stunned. “My mother bled out in my goddamn arms, Ali. Do you know what that’s like? Can you even imagine it? You stand here, judging everyone else as if you wouldn’t do the same thing. As if you’re somehow stronger and braver, but you’re not. You just haven’t had to make the choice yet. And if I can do this, so can you—and that’s the truth.” My accusation hangs, dangerous in the silence. “Go ask your mother what she did to my family. Ask her why she’s a killer. Then judge me all the hell you want.”
Ali looks like she might hit me—for real.
Then she’s gone.
43
AURELIA
I don’t glance back. At last, I’ve let my anger unleash as it longs to, this inferno I’ve held tight between my hands all day. I’ve purged it from within, flung it at him, and he’s only made it worse.
How dare he have the nerve to look wounded?
I charge down an empty hall, despising his pain, his manipulation of the fight, desperate to get away. Here, the reality of Rahian’s palace becomes achingly apparent. A hollow shell in frightened subservience. The “life” in the reception is kept by a flame of necessity. Every other floor reveals a grief-stricken world still in defeat—memories of men in uniform now buried, the awareness of a king in chains, and a grand doorway in shambles from a short-range mortar.
“You think she’s innocent?”
Athan’s question mocks me as I flee. I’d wanted to slap him for that, and perhaps I would have, had I dared to get closer to his beautiful, wretched face. But the reality is, I know, now, she isn’t innocent. Not at all. And when he showed me the photograph of his own mother, I knew, at once, the woman there. That same faraway smile from my mother’s drawer, the one I found as I searched for Havis’s letter last spring. The same sea-grey eyes as Athan.
Sapphie elski’han.
Those were the words scrawled in ink. A silent threat I couldn’t translate, and now it all makes too much terrible sense. A never-ending war of vengeance, as Havis said.
I stumble into my room, my untethered thoughts summoning a sudden picture of the little girl, the General’s second child, burned alive when an old ally betrayed him. As blameless and tiny as the ones buried in this ruined kingdom. Athan’s own sister. For some reason, that makes it more real. A child with an identity, one my mother considered worth the cost of revenge. Even if Dakar deserved it, how could she have exhaled the same cruelty as him? How?
I hit the wooden vanity before me again and again. I savour the ache in my bones, my reflection in the mirror taunting—a panicked-looking girl, decorated like a Resyan jewel. Stars, I promised myself I wouldn’t gleam in the face of war. I rip away the necklace and earrings and bracelets. I yank down my hair from its gold pins.
My heart, at last, steadies slightly.
There I am.
The girl who wears leather boots and walks with Tirza. The girl who hopes, and rages. I take a few more shaky breaths, then grab a bottle of wine. I’m going to see Rahian first, then Tirza, and if I’m lucky, I’ll make my escape tonight.
I’m not staying here.
I’m finishing this mission to stop my rotten uncle—even if my mother refuses to help.
I march upstairs for the wing where Rahian’s being held hostage. Safire soldiers are posted by the doors, wearing guarded expressions, but I’m still the princess of an allied kingdom—for now—and they don’t protest. When I find Rahian, he’s sitting at his desk, scribbling hurriedly. He doesn’t look up until he’s finished. When his gaze meets mine, I find a broken man. Haggard and puffy eyed.
“I brought you something to drink,” I offer, extending the wine. Perhaps not great for his habit, but there are far worse things to worry about now.
He ignores it. He simply smiles sadly and says, “I’m sorry, Aurelia.”
He’s teetering on the edge of an abyss, his pride ruined, defeated—and yet it’s more than that. And I need to know what it is before I escape this place. I need to know before I look Seath in the face and gamble everything on our shared name.
Eyeing the Safire sentries, he motions me nearer his desk, and I relent. His expression is strained. “No one understands, Aurelia, and I fear my moment of testimony will be stolen from me. I’ll never get the chance to write my own history. But let me at least tell you. Won’t you listen?”
“Of course.”
“You are kind.”
“Not always,” I say, thinking about how I just abandoned Athan, unwilling to listen or learn from his story, despising him for blood in his veins he has no control over. Blood like the kind in my own veins—ambitious and monstrous and frightened.
No, I’m not kind.
Not right now.
“Remember this, please. No matter what others may say about me someday. Remember that he only said I had to fight. I had to let the war happen. Give the lion its match. That was it. He never said he’d trap my people.” Rahian’s voice breaks completely. “Dear God, twenty thousand of them died when those bridges collapsed! Twenty thousand. I curse his mother’s memory! I curse his breath!”
He doesn’t say the name, but it shivers between us.
Seath.
This is Rahian’s confession. The true depth of his guilt, and my heart aches. For him. For this kingdom. “I can’t accept your apology,” I whisper. “I can’t accept it on behalf of the twenty thousand who died. Not for any of the ones who will never come back.”
“Oh, but Aurelia, you at least—”
The floor shudders beneath our feet, the chandelier’s jewels rattling, and I reach for the desk, bracing myself. Silence envelops the room. Then the walls shake again. Somewhere, beyond the open window, screams echo.
For a moment, I don’t move. Nor does Rahian. Perhaps we don’t want to know the truth. We want to stay here, hidden from it. But then I force myself to the window and glance outside. Smoke rises from the far edge of the palace, flames dancing orange. In the courtyard, the Safire tanks are on fire, one after another in a glowing line, a clatter of bullets and guns stammering too close.
I stare, fixated on the burning tanks. Safire men holler at one another, running about blindly in the courtyard, tiny shadows, and for some reason, some reason that makes no sense—I begin to laugh. A terrified, overwhelmed laugh as Rahian stares at me, stunned. But it’s funny. Can’t he see? Those Safire tanks came all the way through the treacherous mountains, weeks of painstaking journey, on bloody campaign, only to be destroyed along this beautiful palm-lined avenue. I laugh, because it’s not metal burning up—it’s everything this invasion represents. Pride. Arrogance. Conceit. The Commander isn’t so genius after all. His little toys are bursting to flames right in front of us!
This feels deserved.
This feels like justice.
And then from somewhere far below, a raging voice shouts, “Resya undivided! Resya eternal!”
I freeze.
Bullets clatter, more shouts
, and again I hear the words.
Resya undivided!
Resya eternal!
“Your uncle can’t do this to me,” Rahian whispers, truly terrified now. “Not like this!”
But this wasn’t my uncle. This was me—my writing, my words—and at once, my strange humour entirely disintegrates. The people are rising up. They’re becoming a mountain, refusing to let the Safire pass unscathed, and I know what happens next. Aeroplanes, guns, a nightmare. There are too many possibilities of where this will lead, and they all have a bad end. For us. For Mother.
Mother!
There’s no other thought in my head now. I abandon Rahian behind, bursting out into the empty hall, past the Safire guards with their guns raised, racing back downstairs. I nearly fall taking the stairs three at a time. Guns hammer, echoing up the marble stairwell, a familiar rhythmic, piercing sound, and I sprint for the reception. My courage is madness, but no one will touch my mother—no matter how much I despise her right now. To touch her is to touch me. To touch Reni.
I fly round a corner, right into Tirza.
I don’t think. I grip her shoulders, hold her alarmed gaze. “Get out of here,” I order. “Now!”
“Ali, I’m not leaving you to—”
“No, whatever power I have, I’m using it to send you away.”
She can’t be here. She can’t get taken by the Safire, her worst fear come to life. My protectiveness aches, reaching for her as another explosion rattles in the distance, machine guns ricocheting from the courtyard.
“Ali,” she says, “we did this. We gave this kingdom something to believe in—itself.”
It’s all happening too fast, and the words stick in my throat, the words I might say if I had more time. I want to tell her she doesn’t need to feel alone any longer. Because I’m here. I care, even if the rest of her family has disappeared forever. I’ll care no matter what happens, this love I bear for her birthed the night we held each other as bombs fell.
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