“What are you looking at?”
“The Pales. Sometimes, when the world is dangerous and uncertain, I just like to… look at them.”
His palm pressed against the stone wall. Something in me leapt at this small, familiar gesture. I do that too! a childish part of me wanted to say, as if to cling to every thread of similarity between us.
I cleared my throat. “It is a great honor to serve them. A great, great honor. Thank you.”
My father glanced at me, and I could have sworn that I saw a flicker of pity in his gaze. “Contrary to what you might think, Aefe, I do believe you have… potential.” His stare fell to my exposed forearm, and the topography of dark X’s. “You just fail to utilize it.”
“Do you ever think that things could be different?” I asked, quietly. “Do you ever imagine what it would be like if they were?”
I cringed as soon as I spoke. As always, I had asked a question I shouldn’t have, and I knew the answer would hurt.
“There is no use in dreaming of realities that do not exist.”
“I am still your daughter.” I wrenched my sleeve up on my right arm, the one covered not with X’s but ink and raised scars that told the stories of my ancestry. “I wear your stories on my skin just as they are in my blood.”
“If only that was the only thing your blood carried.”
I flinched. There it was. Just as I knew it would, just as it did every time, it hurt.
But only because it would always be true.
My father turned to me. There was an odd expression on his face, something I could barely read but was so much deeper than his typical cold dismissal. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought it was affection. Or… regret.
“I do wish that things weren’t as they are,” he said. “But the gods have tainted you. You know why you cannot be the Teirness—”
“I do not want to be the Teirness,” I whispered. “I want to be your daughter.”
My father looked away, as if my words had encroached on something too personal, and I regretted them immediately. When he spoke again, his voice was measured and distant, and I hated my honesty for shortening that brief moment of connection.
“We stand at an important juncture, Aefe,” he said. “The crossroads of so many bloody pathways. Your mission is important, and it will decide whether this one leads to blood. I do not trust the Wyshraj. Watch them. And beyond that, watch for the truth. The Sidnee are relying on you.” He paused, then added, “I am relying on you.”
I couldn’t help but savor those words. I never thought I would hear them.
He placed a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Show me all that you could be, my daughter.”
Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the heady excitement of the day. Maybe it was the rush of his hand on my shoulder, the kind of familial touch I had not felt in so long. But I found myself fighting tears.
“Yes,” I choked out. “I will. I will.”
Chapter Fourteen
Tisaanah
“That,” Zeryth said, “was not what I had commanded you to do.”
He was pacing the length of his office. This seemed unusual. Zeryth was not the type to pace. I stood there in my soiled clothes, my jacket stained red, Il’Sahaj still in my hands. I had been summoned straight here from the battlefield.
“I did exactly what you commanded me to do,” I said. “You wanted victory, and I gave it to you.”
“You let them retreat.” Zeryth whirled to face me. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes. The look that glinted there reminded me of an edge of broken glass. Rawer than I’d ever seen them before. Stranger.
“Did you want me to kill all of those people, Zeryth?”
“They need to understand the consequences of what they’ve done.”
“They were certainly afraid.”
“Not afraid enough.”
The pacing resumed.
I watched him carefully. This was not the behavior of a man in control of the situation.
“Did you expect me to hand you a mountain of corpses, Zeryth?” I said, quietly. “What makes you think they would appreciate that from you any more than they appreciated it from Sesri?”
His mouth thinned. For a moment, I saw conflict war across his face. Fear. Gone as soon as I could identify it.
“You should know better than any of these other people here,” he snapped. “Do you think if you stood in my place, they would ever respect you unless you forced them to? You, a foreign slave? Do not patronize me, Tisaanah. You know as well as I do that they won’t get on their knees in front of a no-name bastard unless I force them there. Just like they forced me.”
His voice rose until it was nearly a shout, then echoed in the air, sticky with something resembling shame. He turned away.
All at once, I understood.
This was the real reason why Zeryth had chosen Max, of all people, to lead his armies. It was because Max had what Zeryth wanted most: not just a military mind, but a family name respected by the Aran upper class
Max had told me about the competition for Arch Commandant, all those years ago. Now, the memory returned, clicking another piece into place. There had been four candidates, he had told me. One had been killed in the war. Max had withdrawn after the deaths of his family. And Nura had been unable to continue while she recovered after Sarlazai.
And that had left Zeryth, and so he became Arch Commandant. Not because anyone chose him. But because he was the only one left standing.
The whole world shifted a little as I realized exactly how perilous Zeryth’s position was.
“You’re dismissed,” he said. He didn’t turn around, as if he didn’t want to let me see his face. Maybe he knew that I saw the truth.
By the time I got back to my room, blood was pooling in my footsteps. I’d been careful to remain steady when I was in the halls. But as soon as I closed my door, every seam snapped at once.
I didn’t even make it to the bed. I hit the floor in a heap.
I was in Esmaris’s office, lounging on a velvet couch, butterflies twisting from my fingers. On the battlefield, they had been ominous — here, they were little wisps of silver. Merely decorations, just like me. Esmaris had his general by the throat, and the other slaves and I acted as if nothing was wrong, as if a man’s face was not pressed against the table, as if we weren’t trapped in a box with a monster that could turn its rage on us at any moment.
One day it would turn on me.
“What will I do with a thousand dead men?” Esmaris snarled. “Dead men don’t remember your name.”
I looked up.
Suddenly the room was empty. The general was gone, as were the women. Esmaris’s dark stare turned to me — as if, all at once, he had realized how carefully I had been watching.
“Do you find yourself clever, Tisaanah?” he said.
I smiled. “Only a little.”
“You are still a slave. You always will be.”
I stood and crossed the room. I could see every tiny wrinkle on his face, every freckle, every silver thread of hair. Even in my dream, I knew these parts of him. While he had looked at me and seen another decorative possession, I had been memorizing him.
“Dead men don’t remember your name,” I murmured, “but tell me, do you remember mine, wherever you are?” I tipped his chin up, the reversal sending a thrill thought me — I loved the way it felt to look down on him. “There was a time when I had been eager to show you everything I had learned from you. I thought you would be proud of me. Isn’t that funny?”
No, it had not been pride in his eyes the day he tried to beat me to death for exceeding his expectations.
“But I am still eager to show you, Esmaris,” I whispered. “And I hope that you can see it. I hope you can see it when I destroy your world with the knowledge I stole from you.”
And only then did he smile.
Suddenly it was Zeryth’s face cradled in my hands, dark veins beneath his eyes.
“But th
ey never told us the cost, Tisaanah,” he said. “What does it cost to climb from so low? Are you willing to pay it?”
Blink.
Zeryth was gone. Esmaris was gone. The estate fell away, replaced by a familiar embrace. The scent of ash and lilac filled my lungs, the sear of heat trilling across my skin — lips, on my shoulders, my breasts, my throat, my mouth.
“It wouldn’t be so bad, to burn together,” Max murmured, lips against my ear. “Would it? You want that. I know you do.”
He spoke the truth that I was too afraid to acknowledge. Exactly how much I wanted to give up for him. Exactly how much I feared losing him.
And I had already let him go.
A breath, and he was gone.
I was alone.
{Not alone. Never alone.}
I turned and saw a figure shrouded in the dusk. Reshaye, as I had seen it in the Mikov estate, a shadow of a shadow of a person. Its face was tilted away from me, to the dark.
I approached it.
What are you looking at?
And then I felt it. The reaching hand. The overwhelming feeling of being watched.
{It is not what I see,} Reshaye whispered. {It is what sees us.}
I reached out into the darkness—
“Breathe, Tisaanah.”
A shock of ice cold pressed to my forehead. My whole body convulsed and I blindly reached for... something, I wasn’t even sure what, but what I hit was the edge of the basin, into which I violently emptied the contents of my stomach.
When I finished, I blinked into dim lantern light. Nura leaned over me.
“What’re you doing here?” The question slurred. My tongue was not cooperative.
I hadn’t felt like this since… gods, since the beginning.
“You can’t be alone this way. Here.” Nura thrust a small bottle into my hands. “Drink.”
“How did you—”
“What you did out there was remarkable. Even compared to what I had already seen.” She gave me a hard stare. “You forget that I was there through all of it. I know the toll it takes, to do something like that. And forgive me if I didn’t want our best asset to die alone in her room because she was being a showoff. Drink. For your own damned good.”
I swallowed the contents of the bottle and immediately regretted it.
“Don’t throw that up,” Nura said.
“I am trying,” I muttered.
I lifted my head, or tried to. She looked different, her hair loose around her face. And she wore not her typical high-necked jacket, but a camisole that revealed more of her skin than I had ever seen.
Skin that was completely covered in horrible, disfiguring burn scars.
Even though I could barely keep my eyes open, I still found myself staring.
Nura gave me a humorless smirk.
“You and I and our scars. I suppose we both know what it’s like to pay for something.”
We aren’t the same, I wanted to say, but a wave of pain crushed me. Reshaye let out a hideous, wordless wail. The present and the past — mine and so many others — ran together, my senses assaulted by hundreds of fragments of memories all at once.
All of them drowning in white and white and white.
And pain.
When I came back to myself, I was on the floor. Shaking. Sweating. The cold cloth was pressed to my forehead.
“Idiot,” Nura muttered. “Was it worth it? All this to show off out there?”
Funny, how in the depths of agony, you find the most clarity.
If you were standing in my place, would you agree? Zeryth had asked me. You, a slave girl? How would you make them respect you?
Maybe Esmaris had been right. It was not enough to live like a human and die like one. I had to carve myself into their whispers.
Today, they had looked at me not like a slave, not like a woman, but like a god.
“Was it worth it?” Nura asked, as I sagged over the basin. An ugly smile lurched at my lips.
“Yes,” I choked out. “Yes, it was.”
I faded off again after that, reality melding with dreams in a grey smear of darkness. And perhaps I dreamed that, some time later, my eyes fluttered open under the control of another. Perhaps I dreamed that I rolled over to see Nura still in my room, reading, a glass of wine in her hand.
“You,” my voice creaked out.
Nura’s gaze slipped to me, growing colder. She set her wine glass down. “Hello, Reshaye.”
A smirk spasmed across my lips. “Are you not afraid to be here alone with me?”
“If you were going to kill me, you would have done it by now.”
“And yet, I have seen your fear. I know how deep it runs.”
The memories were shards of glass. Nura, her face contorted in hatred, falling to the ground for the fiftieth time. Nura, spilling her blood over an open, lifeless arm, in a room of white and white and white.
Nura, fighting again, and again, and again.
And now Nura, her face doused in moonlight, giving me a slow, cold smile.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But I hate you more than I fear you. And my hate is always stronger.”
“Hate.” I rolled the word over my tongue. My hand pressed to my chest. “She hates you too. She hates you almost as much as I do.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
Slowly, she stood and drew closer to me.
“Why her?” she whispered, at last. “Why did you choose her, when you rejected so many others?”
I let out a low chuckle.
“You envy her.”
“I don’t.”
“You do. And not because she has your former lover, but because she has me. And where would I have lived, in that mind of yours? Did you think that you would lock me in your palace of ice and steel, like everything else you fear?” I sat up, even though my muscles screamed. And I leaned close to her, so close our noses almost touched. “You did not truly want me, because I would have seen everything in you.”
Nura’s face went hard. Her eyes glinted in the darkness like two shards of metal.
“We are not done with each other yet, Reshaye. We can fester in our hatred and let it make us strong, or stupid, or both. And make no mistake, I do hate you. I hate you more than I have ever hated anything.” She pulled away and went to the window, gazing out over the mountains. “But you and I know that there is something else coming. And our paths are still tangled.”
A shudder ran over my skin. For a moment, I thought I could see it — a shadow looming, a silhouette with their face turned to me, far beneath the layers of magic.
Consciousness seeped away, the world fading back into my dreams.
And the last thing I heard was Nura’s voice. “The real fight,” she murmured, “has barely begun.”
Chapter Fifteen
Max
We were on Antedale’s doorstep when I received word of the attack on Korvius. The letter was nothing more and nothing less than a military report, the entire ordeal reduced to staid, factual words on a page. As if such bland words could capture Tisaanah’s incredible performance, and brilliant — stupid — brilliant bravery.
It was almost funny, to read it written so plainly:
Tisaanah Vytezic collapsed the cliffs and shielded the city with an illusion of wings. The display of power was enough to spur the Kazarans to retreat.
Oh, I didn’t doubt it.
The memory of her voice caressed my ear: We will find a way, she’d whispered. And she had. She used the weapon she knew best, the weapon of a perfect performance, to win a bloodless battle.
Brilliant.
But that moment of pride lasted only for a second. The report ended with tallies of military losses and damaged property. I flipped it over to find nothing but a blank page. There was no information on Tisaanah, or her state. A knot formed in my stomach.
I knew too well the toll that Reshaye’s magic demanded. And what was described here? It could have been enough to kill her.
I rea
d the report again. Put it down. Then withdrew a plain sheet of parchment and a pen. I hesitated — what would I write? What would I ask? I struggled with words at the best of times, and now, I had too many of them to capture in a stroke of ink.
Finally, I wrote:
Tisaanah,
Tell me you’re alright, you wonderful idiot.
Max.
I stared at the page. Then, I wedged one additional word in between the lines:
Tisaanah,
Tell me you’re alright, you wonderful idiot.
Love,
Max.
It would win no poetry awards. And the words were far too weak to describe what I felt. But I folded the letter up anyway, scribbled a Stratagram, and sent it away.
The city of Antedale was heavily fortified, surrounded by tall stone walls that were lined with golden spires. A wolf, the crest of the Gridot family, loomed over the gates. It was a disgustingly gaudy thing, large enough to be seen even from nearly a mile away, and polished with such verve that it gleamed beneath the waning late-afternoon light.
Gridot, it seemed, had been well aware we were on our way to pry his title from his hands. When we reached the city, we found that the standing army of Antedale was already waiting for us, lines of soldiers surrounding the gates.
Wonderful.
We halted, just far enough away to avoid being an immediate threat while making it very clear that we greatly overpowered them. That much was obvious even at a glance — our numbers were evenly matched, but I had hundreds of skilled Wielders behind me, while the Antedale forces were mostly volunteer militiamen.
This was not a comfort to me.
I sent a messenger to their head of guard bearing a letter, demanding their surrender and Gridot’s sworn fealty to (and here, I nearly gagged) the rightful king Zeryth Aldris. An hour later, my letter was returned to me, crumpled and smeared with what I chose to believe was mud. The reply was only one line:
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