Silently, I read my mother’s letter over and over, imagining her voice.
I hold her final secrets between my hands.
When we finally disembark, I know what I have to do, the power I hold. I may not be able to stop Dakar or Gawain, but I do have my own family. My own realm, and it revives me somewhat. The bright sun as well. As we walk off the blistering docks and towards the city, we enter a place I’ve only ever seen in sketches and newspapers.
Havenspur.
It’s exactly as Athan described. The busy promenade and old cannons. The colourful homes and seawater like a turquoise ribbon spreading down the coast. But it also holds the uncomfortable tension of war, soldiers on every corner, uniforms mingling with sundresses. Out in the harbour, dozens of warships await their orders and aeroplanes growl overhead.
Unease tinges the balmy afternoon. It must be thanks to the revolts so recently suppressed, here in Havenspur and beyond, and I focus on keeping up to Damir, who threads through the crowds. There’s no time to savour any of the views, and by the time we arrive at an apartment building far from the shoreline, the air hangs damp and heavy. No breeze able to squeeze down the narrow street.
Inside, an elevator creaks us up to the top floor and a stuffy hall.
He knocks at the last room on the left.
The door opens a crack and reveals a pair of amber eyes—so familiar I almost weep with relief. But then the door opens farther, and a stranger greets us. Heart-shaped chin, black curls. It’s like Tirza.
But it isn’t.
The stranger narrows her eyes at me, then glances at Damir, before hurrying us inside. I find myself hauled into a small, sparse home, an open window bringing a welcome breeze. There’s a desk, a couch, a kettle on the tiny stove. Only one thing is in abundance—flowers. They spill from pots and trays, a dozen more on the little iron balcony, cheerful in the sun.
“You’re staying here for a while,” Damir reveals, and I don’t protest.
My hopes for finding Havis vanished somewhere across the sea. And if I’m going to be kidnapped by the Nahir, I’d better learn why first. What my uncle wants from me.
“You can use any of this,” the girl says in accented Landori, pointing half-heartedly at the kitchen and couch, then at the closet-sized washroom. “But these are mine.” She pulls back a set of curtains, and there’s no window behind them.
Only a wall of rifles.
Now that I’m taking her in fully, she looks less like Tirza after all. She’s older and taller, with none of the repercussions of life under siege. Beneath her thread-worn red dress, she’s all muscle and strength, built for resistance—and not the kind that hides in a basement, typing reports.
But there are still colourful bands on her wrists.
“I know who you are,” I say, and she appears skeptical. She doesn’t see how obvious it is. Another thread crossing, tightening this strange web. “You’re Kaziah. The sniper.”
Her empty silence proves it.
Damir finally chuckles. “Tirza adored her,” he tells Kaziah, as if I’m not standing there.
The other girl appears deeply unimpressed by this fact.
“Take me to my uncle,” I say sharply, to remind them both who I am.
Having a crown no longer counts for something.
But being Seath’s niece might.
Kaziah only appears more annoyed by me. “No one sees him unless they’re trusted. And you”—she raises a thick brow—“are definitely not trusted.”
I stare at her, stunned, but she stabs deeper still. “Did you think your uncle would simply welcome you with open arms like a long-lost puppy? We all know what you’ve done, Princess. You’re not only a lazy Northern royal, but your bedmates are not ones we feel warmly about. A damn Safire lieutenant? Yes, Tirza told Damir all about your special friend. I swear to you, the next time you see him, he will be dead. I’ll make sure of it. Perhaps you could even trap him for me? Lure him right into my crosshairs?”
Her mocking words are expert weapons, slashing a tender wound. I believe this girl would kill Athan without question. Certainly if she knew he was the General’s son, but possibly even just to get under my skin.
Don’t you dare try to follow me, I tell Athan in my head. Don’t you dare this time!
Kaziah isn’t finished. Her bitterness towards me not yet spent. “You think you can come into this world and hold all the cards? You think you’re untouchable, because of your name? That’s only Northern arrogance, not yet cut from you. But it will be, because you are nothing here, and you won’t be seeing your uncle until you’ve earned the damn right.”
She steps away from the couch, arms crossing, as if suddenly realizing she’s said far more than she intended. “I’m making tea.”
She retreats for the kitchen and Damir watches me suspiciously, as if waiting for me to fly back out the door and escape, but where would I go? Swim across the Black? No, I have another mission now, and I try to settle my racing heart, sweat sticking to every inch of my body while Kaziah works. Her movements are quick and precise. Tirza galloped everywhere, bright and feathery. Kaziah simply looks like steel.
“What do I have to do?” I ask her finally.
“Hmm?”
“To see my uncle. What do I need to do?”
She curses, accidentally touching the hot kettle. When she returns, she places a steaming cup in front of me, real tea, properly steeped. Not a drop of milk. When she sits, I inch slightly away as her hand reaches under the cushion, retrieving a hidden folder. Stars, not another folder. The last one from Lark changed my life forever. It killed him. It led me here. But Kaziah doesn’t know the disastrous mission I’ve already failed at, and throws a faded colour photograph on the table before us. I recognize the man there.
General Windom. The Butcher of Thurn.
“That’s your target,” she says.
“Windom?” I ask, confused.
She shakes her head, and her dark curls don’t bounce like Tirza’s. Hers are pulled back too tight. She gestures at the picture again. I realize she’s not pointing at him, but beside him, at a young woman with faintly red hair. She wears a dress to the knees, green against ivory skin.
It’s the girl who chased Captain Dakar in Norvenne.
“His daughter,” Kaziah says. “She has secrets we need, and you’re going to find them. I’ll help, of course. But you know their Northern ways, and you’d do better than one of us ever could. This man”—her finger jabs the photograph—“is a monster. Every retribution in Thurn comes from him. He needs to be destroyed.”
She means this, as much as anyone could, and Windom’s face taunts us right back, severe even in a photograph. Something clicks together. All at once.
“Was Windom in Beraya?” I ask.
“He’s everywhere, the bastard.”
Of course … The Commander has always protested the crime. When I accused him last summer, he denied it and said it was the Landorians. I thought he was lying. I knew he was guilty. But what just happened before the League? I confronted him and he denied it again. And when pressed, he said nothing, not a word. Perhaps because he couldn’t say who it truly was. Not with Gawain right there. And Gawain stole my photograph, because Gawain knew. He knew Windom was the true culprit I sought, ready to protect his own. He made sure the evidence disappeared. Forever.
A feral anger returns to my heart, familiar now, too many complicit in these crimes.
“Her name’s Rahelle,” Kaziah continues, “and she lives mostly here in Havenspur. If you do a good job with this, perhaps you’ll meet your uncle.”
I stare at the red-haired girl in the photo. “You swear it?”
“I wouldn’t lie.”
Her voice is blunt, but honest, like Tirza’s, and I believe it. This is my chance, then. I have to ignore my mother’s last warning to me. I have to go to Seath like I’ve always planned, except now I go with the dangerous awareness that he isn’t weary at all. No, he’s only getting started, and ne
gotiation isn’t his goal—it never was.
It was Lark’s.
“The old want to wage war, but we aren’t like them, Cousin.”
A sadness wells for my cousin who defied his own father, who came to create his own future. Who went against the very blood in his veins to chase peace.
“Have you looked out the window yet, Princess?”
Kaziah’s strange question startles me from my memories, and I glance at her.
Her gaze is a dare. “Go to the balcony and look.”
I do what she says, to prove I’m not afraid of her, and as I step outside, light stings my eyes, the bright and searing glare of noon. Then my vision clears. The shadows fade, the world opening up from this high point, the stretches of Havenspur tumbling out below me, touching distant plains and an azure sea.
My breath catches.
Far beyond Havenspur, past the city’s edge, a billowing cloud of dust hangs in the air, an endless line of tanks and trucks trudging in from the coast, aeroplanes splitting the sun above. Familiar grey steel with black swords.
Safire.
“They want to take Masrah,” Kaziah says behind me. “To restore the throne.”
“That’s impossible,” I protest.
“No, that’s hell.”
She’s right, and I long for a radio address or a newspaper, something to explain this mad storm heading east, but what does it even matter? While I was stuck on that steamer sailing across the Black, these political stakes kept ticking and turning, marching ever forward, and now this spreads before us. Too many destroyers and cruisers dotting the sea, all designed to bring death. All of that firepower they marveled at in Norvenne. It’s before us now with fierce intent, Safire ships ready for war, Landorian ones watching with churning impatience.
Kaziah hovers at my shoulder. “Those Safire soldiers may be dogs, but even a dog can be useful.”
She shoves something at me, and I look down to find Damir’s cartoon.
The lion. The si’yah cat.
The shadow of a fanged dog.
A dog.
“The lion needs its match,” Kaziah continues. “A beast to fight another beast. Don’t you agree?”
Now I stare at the sea in rising dread. The Landorian ships with their lion ensigns, the Safire destroyers in the distance, and it all makes sense, at once. The truth I was too distracted to see, the truth Rahian warned me about—an idea that could scarcely be believed.
This was never about isolated city revolts.
This was never about pitting the Nahir against the North.
The paper in my hand begins to tremble, because the scope of my uncle’s ambition is far larger than they ever imagined. He’s too clever for any king. Well aware the Nahir can’t defeat their imperial occupiers on their own. It’s too slow, too bloody, too costly. It’s been going on too long.
But if Savient were to do it for them?
I’m horrified by the sheer mastery of it. A cunning maneuver that guarantees Southern independence at the end—because when these two mighty nations go to war, Norvenne and Valon will surely be decimated, unable to keep hold of the South. They’ll destroy each other, forced to battle across every corner of earth and sea, thousands upon thousands of graves to fill, and it won’t be over quick. It will linger. It will bleed out slow, the innocent trampled along with the guilty by these giants in their deathblows.
I realize I’m angry.
Wildly, desperately, righteously angry.
“What do you think, Princess?” Kaziah asks, hollow pleasure in her voice. “Are you going to help the cats?”
I hate the sound of “princess” on her tongue. Despise the very idea of it in her mind. It’s not me. I don’t know who I am anymore, but I’m not what she thinks, and as I look down at my empty right hand, where Athan held it last, I imagine his final promise captured in my palm, meant for a world that never was. I wanted that world. I believed in it. But they’ve stolen it from us, and now there’s a darker dawn on the horizon.
Feeling utterly alone, I look away from the steel-filled sea, to where the southern horizon stretches clear and gold, beckoning like the tangled thread slipping between my fingers, pulling me deeper, asking me to make a difference in the only way I have left.
Somewhere, my uncle lies in wait. Somewhere, an eldest brother still fights inside of him—an eldest brother who protects, dreams, defends—and I will appeal to him. I will fight with the same fervor, for the nameless thousands, for the scattered family that sings in my blood.
“Yes,” I say at last, mourning the beloved amber stone against my neck. “I am ready to help you.”
War threatens to tear this world apart.
But there might be another way to freedom yet.
62
ATHAN
Valon, Savient
Father announces his next war to the sound of fireworks. Flames burn through the evening sky, a continuous thunder as he speaks about Masrah, the grand liberation to come, and it’s far too easy. The crowd cheers. Faces shift with the colours and lights high above, the exiled princess Jali Furswana applauding him onwards. Everyone here is drunk on the promise of victory.
Savient.
The first nation in one hundred years to conquer a royal kingdom.
The first nation to take on the world, crownless.
To prove our triumph in the flesh, Father lines up heroes from the last campaign to be honoured with medals. Rahmeti soldiers who survived the cauldron. Brisali tank commanders who lurched through the deadly mountains. Even Evertal gives Leannya a special commendation for her feat with the cipher.
We air force officers are last. Garrick. Cyar. Thorn. Lilay.
And me—Captain Athan Dakar.
I’ve accepted that Athan Erelis is gone. He served his purpose, but now it’s different. Now I’ve survived and returned, and it’s time for me to take the name that’s always been mine. My love for Ali is the closest thing that’s ever come to my decision, but she has her own choices to make. And I have mine. This isn’t about revenge or fear or guilt. It’s simply my life—born as a Dakar, and all that comes with it, an entire sky of possibility.
It’s frightening.
But it’s real.
Katalin’s in the crowd, and I’ve already promised her that I’ll save her brother. I have a plan. Father’s so distracted right now, it’s a good time to move. I’ve learned how to bend around the edges of his vision, and I think that’s the easiest part of my life now. The harder part is looking up.
Up into the sky I love.
I search for Mother in the colours, wanting to remember the last words she said to me, or even the exact shade of her eyes.
“Don’t forget them.…”
It was something like that, and I think I’m doing the right thing, like she asked, if only I could see where—
“Athan,” a voice whispers at my right.
I find Cyar looking at me. He’s trying to say something without speaking. I can’t read what it is. I should be able to, after all these years together, but I stare right back into his tense face, wondering, when someone stops before me. Father. Was he talking to me and I ignored it? Is that what Cyar was trying to warn me about? I don’t know, but Father smiles, pinning the medal on me himself. The Adena Shield. A piece of stamped metal with crossed swords for my role in the cauldron, and it goes onto my lapel, his hand pressed above my still-beating heart.
I want to believe in him.
The man who once showed kindness.
I’m not sure I can anymore, and the spotlight swings, briefly blinding, over to Arrin. He gets the real prize. A golden fox studded in diamonds, then he’s ushered to the podium, confronted by a sea of uniforms and civilians, all the drunken faces of victorious Valon.
Arrin wears his brilliant smile.
“The war in Masrah won’t be easy,” he declares. “We must—”
The sky bursts to flame again, far too low. Wrong timing. Someone hurries to stop the fireworks, and I star
e up, enraptured by every earsplitting explosion only a few hundred feet overhead. Slivers of light. Sparks. Fire in the black. The microphone whines, a metallic ring, and I realize no one’s talking.
Arrin’s also turned to the sky.
Frozen.
It’s been too long, an infinite stretch of nothing, and Kalt appears thoroughly mortified. On the other side of the stage, Father looks vexed. I almost laugh. Arrin silenced by fireworks. Then just as suddenly, it isn’t funny. It’s the exact opposite. It’s wrong, everyone ghostly in the flickering lights, like corpses, and Arrin just standing there, staring up at the sky in fear.
“You took my sister from me first. Then my mother.”
The memory lights up with a stray flash, like it’s been there all along, unnoticed. The name tattooed on my brother’s horribly scarred skin. The bitterness he spits. His unending devotion to only one person in this entire world—Leannya.
Sister.
Rozmarin.
That’s the name inked on his skin forever, our sister, and Kalt finally acts, since no one else is. He walks right up and nudges Arrin, Arrin startling at the touch. He shakes himself. Realizes he has an audience and he’d better damn speak before Father does something to make him speak.
He takes a breath. “It won’t be easy.” He said that part already, but it doesn’t matter. “We must not cower in the face of struggle, for struggle and sacrifice have given us a new world. We share the burden of Her Highness Jali Furswana, knowing she has lost her rightful home, knowing the ones who stole it now sow unrest in the South. Let us take it back for her. Let Savient and Masrah be united as a new sun rises across the sea. Freedom in the North—and in the South.”
As I look up, my eyes on the horizon, his words echo into the empty night sky. Somewhere up there is Ali. She’s waiting, wanting me to do the right thing until I can see her again. Until I can find her, hold her. Up there is Cyar and Leannya and Kalt and everyone else I need to protect. I’ll go into the sky for them. Better me than someone else, as Thorn said. Below is hell, but I have a chance to do things right, and I’ll do what I can even if it feels small, choosing this path, fighting for the peace this world desperately needs.
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