“So be it,” Zan said. “Achlev’s Wall, however embattled, still stands, and our city remains safe. Better this path than the one that would have it fall and all my people with it.”
Toris’s eyes glittered. I knew then that he was a part of all this, probably from the very beginning. If his daughter married Zan and then died alongside her husband and father-in-law, without heirs, there would be only one person left in line to assume the Achlevan throne: Toris himself.
“Go to your exile, coward,” King Domhnall hissed. “So that I can be rid of you. Just as your mother wanted to be rid of you . . .”
“My mother,” Zan thundered, “loved me. She gave up her life so that I could have mine. And you know what? For the first time in my life, I’m glad. I’m glad that because of her sacrifice, I now have the chance to look you in the face and tell you that as long as I live, you will not win.”
I slipped out before any more was said; I had an appointment to keep.
Zan’s kisses lingered on my lips. Waterfall. Midnight.
30
I had not returned to my hut since Forest Gate had fallen, and the earthquake had left it in a shambles. It was as if someone had lifted the structure and vigorously shaken it. The window was dashed to pieces, the brick fireplace was nothing more than a pile of rubble, and bits of broken tonic and herbal bottles covered the scene like colored glass confetti.
I searched the mess by candlelight, finding Kellan’s blue cloak first, then my empty satchel. Beneath it lay the ribbon-tied parcel that held my wedding dress. I pulled the ribbon and watched it flutter out one last time, marveling at how faint the bloodstains were, and how very like Kate it was to attempt to clean it. She was always trying to save the unsavable.
I kept the black ribbon from the parcel—it could still prove useful in communicating with Conrad—and laid the dress out in the center of the pile of debris I’d once called my home. Then I tossed my candle onto it and watched it go up in flame.
The fire spread rapidly, climbing up the curtains and into the thatch roof in a matter of minutes. I watched it start to cave from several yards away, with a near-empty satchel on my shoulder and Kellan’s cloak on my back. But despite the heat from the burning hut and the warmth of the cloak, cold crept slowly up my neck and across my limbs. A feeling of dread came over me as a mist began to form between me and the fire, knitting itself together in slow, fitful lurches. The cold deepened.
When the apparition was fully formed, she was almost unrecognizable—a haggard shade of herself.
“No, Aren. Not now. Please, not right now.” I begged her. “It’s almost over. Dedrick is dead; the collusion between Domhnall and the Tribunal has been uncovered. I’m going to get my brother, and then he and I will escape with Zan . . .” I twisted Zan’s ring around my finger. “We’ve almost won. If someone is going to die, I don’t want to see it. Please don’t . . .”
She dragged herself closer, clamping her frigid, bony fingers around my wrist like iron shackles, sucking every last scrap of warmth from me and plunging me headfirst into a sputtering, shifting vision.
An exchange of rings.
The flash of a knife.
A girl in a swirling snowstorm, sobbing—me. Leaning over the broken body of the boy I so desperately loved.
Blood on the snow.
My head on his chest. A ring on his finger, his ring on mine. His dark, dark hair stark against the terrible white storm.
Blood on the snow. His blood.
“No,” I said, tearing my hand away. The storm and the snow and the blood disappeared. “I’ve been misled by your visions before. I won’t let you take this—take him—from me.” I tried to dismiss her with a decisive turn on my heel.
I didn’t get far. The ground groaned and convulsed beneath me, forcing me to my knees. Another aftershock, timed as if to remind me of my insignificance. When it stopped, Aren was advancing on me again. I shrank from her expanding shadow. Gone was the regal queen I’d grown up with; in her place loomed a twisted wraith, an unholy amalgamation of vein and vine and bone. She reached through the black ribbons of her hair with thorny fingertips, which skittered spider-like across my cheek and around my skull. When she had my head cradled in her hands, she drove her thumbs into my eyes.
I cried out, first from cold and pain and then in anguish as she forced me to watch it all again. Over and over. Rings. Knife. Death. Rings. Knife. Death.
Blood on the snow.
Blood on the snow.
Blood on the snow.
Firebird.
It was just a fleeting glimpse, a mere flash in the procession of more frightening pictures, but it was unmistakable: at his death, Zan is wearing my charm.
I hardly noticed when Aren removed her spiny thumbs from my eye sockets and withdrew; the awful images continued their cavalcade without her. I slumped where she left me, racked by full-body shivers despite the waves of heat rippling from my hut.
She wanted me to see, and now I could see nothing else. When I tried to imagine Zan’s eyes now, there was no more green clarity to them; they were vacant and staring. I couldn’t think of his lips without envisioning them blue and breathless and cold. I wouldn’t be able touch him again without revisiting the way his body looked as I knelt over it in grief. I’d burned my hut to raze my past, but as it was eaten away by flame, it was my future I saw crumbling in the embers. My future with Zan.
Blood on the snow.
Aren had made her message clear.
Leave him, or he dies.
* * *
I waited on the wall for three hours, pacing and practicing what I was going to say, but when I turned and finally saw Zan approaching me in the dark, lit by a shard of moonlight, my composure cracked.
“This is where I first knew I loved you,” he said as he drew near. “Watching the lengths you went to for my people, for me . . . feeling the strength of your spirit in that spell . . . How could I not?” He reached out and tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I never dared to let myself hope that you might . . . that you could ever possibly . . .” He trailed off, flushing.
Stars save me. I wanted to kiss him, cling to him, melt into him and into this wall and become stone so I’d never have to let him go. But the minute I let those thoughts into my mind, I was confronted again by gruesome images of his death.
So instead of leaning into his touch or returning his confession with one of my own, I pushed every ounce of emotion into the coil inside me. It twisted and tightened, so taut now that if I so much as breathed wrong, it would snap and I’d shatter, torn apart from the inside.
“Emilie?” Zan asked.
“My name is not Emilie,” I said emotionlessly, not daring to look at him. “My name is Aurelia.”
“What?” He stepped back, as stunned as if I’d slapped him.
“Emilie is the name of a girl I knew in Renalt. And the Aurelia you know . . . her name is actually Lisette. We’ve been friends since we were small. I used to read your letters to her and we’d laugh at them. Made it something of a game. Whatever responses you got back from them, they were all from her. She thought it was great fun. We both did.”
“I don’t understand.” Zan leaned heavily against the battlements.
“I never wanted to come to Achleva,” I said, pinning my lies to a plausible truth. “I resented being wed, without my consent, to a man rumored to be afflicted with such a wide variety of infirmities. So I came up with a plan to make it so I didn’t have to.” I could hear Zan’s breathing become more painful and labored, and I almost lost my nerve. To keep from faltering, I plunged forward. “I offered to pay Lisette to take my place. I arranged everything. She wasn’t too keen at first, but the amount I offered was substantial, and the prospect of becoming a queen was quite appealing as well.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Zan demanded. “Why now?”
“Things didn’t go quite as I planned,” I continued. “I didn’t count on the Tribunal�
�s takeover. That made things a little more difficult. I didn’t expect to have to bring my little brother along, either. He believes that I’m an Achlevan spy and that he’s helping Lisette uncover my treachery, poor thing.”
“Was any of it real?”
“I have grown . . . fond . . . of you. And I thought, when we talked this afternoon, that maybe I could make it work after all . . . but then I followed you into the hall and hid. I heard everything that was said there, and I . . . I just can’t.” I thrust his mother’s ring back into his hands. “You and your father are the only Achlevan royals left, which means the instant you marry someone—anyone—she becomes a target to bring down the wall. It’s a risk I can’t afford.” I thought of the rings Aren showed me. “In fact, you should just never marry at all. If you die without blood heirs, the wall will stand forever.” And you will live a long, full life.
“You think I should die alone?” Zan was so astounded, he almost sounded amused. Then his expression changed. “No.” He came to me suddenly, putting both hands on my face, eyes feverish. “Emilie, Aurelia . . . whoever you are . . . I love you. And despite everything you’ve told me, I think you love me, too. Please, please say you do.”
Oh, Empyrea! I cast the most fervid prayer of my life into the heavens. Help me!
I said, “I can’t.” I put my hands over his and pulled them gently down from my cheeks. “Nathaniel is camping tonight just off the southwest road toward Ingram. I think it would be wise for you to meet up with him. Maybe you can stay in Ingram for a while until you—”
My fingers grazed something at his wrist. I yanked up his sleeve, revealing a leather cuff. My firebird charm was sewn into the band like a talisman, exactly as Aren had shown me.
My breath caught. “Take it off.”
“What? No—”
“Take it off!” I snarled as I tried to wrench it off myself, fingers curled into claws.
He snapped his arm back, scrutinizing my face with disbelief and something akin to grief as the impact of my revelations finally landed. The Emilie he cared about didn’t even exist.
Wordlessly, he retrieved a piece of paper from his pocket and thrust it into my hands before he turned and was gone.
I waited until he was out of sight and then opened it carefully, heart in my throat.
It was a sketch of a girl absorbed in a spell book, one hand propped under her chin, the other turning a page. The drawing was in Zan’s dark, expressive strokes, and details were spare, but there was a sweetness to the curve of her neck, the delicate turn of her wrist. This was not the towering, terrifying witch of his other drawing. The subject here was just a normal girl in a quiet moment, as seen through the eyes of someone who loved her.
I sank to the stones and buried my head in my arms, my devastation complete.
* * *
I put one foot in front of the other. It was all I could do. I’d burned down my hut and my connection to Zan. Kate was dead and Nathaniel was gone and the last deaths required to bring down the wall were stayed, hopefully forever. There was nothing left for me in Achleva. I had only one objective now: retrieve my brother. Once he was safe, I would be able to return with single-minded focus to destroying the Tribunal. If I had to face my own oblivion to do it . . . well, all the better.
I went to the castle the usual way, past my smoldering hut and down the passage to the tower, where the water was still ankle-deep from all the rain. I had to put my hands against the walls to keep from falling in a few places, cringing at the slimy film now covering them. After climbing up from the alcove opening, I was surprised to find someone standing a little farther down on the rocky shore, staring out toward King’s Gate. It was too late to try to conceal my passing; the figure turned at the sound of my footfalls.
I shrieked and lost my footing when I saw his face, narrowly catching myself by snagging a bloodleaf vine before I could go over the edge and onto the rocks below.
King Domhnall was dead.
The spirit watched me climb back up with a snarl curled permanently into his lips, his throat hanging open below it, blood spilled all down the front of his golden doublet. I treaded carefully toward him; his was an ugly soul in life, warped by rage and greed. Dying did not seem to leave him much improved.
I reached toward him, tentative and slow, but he didn’t wait for me to gain the courage to touch him; he snatched my wrist in his fleshy paw, wrapping his cold and clammy fingers tight around my bones. I tumbled, headfirst, into the last moments of his mortality.
“The plan is still good,” the king was saying. He was standing beneath the gate bearing the visage of his ancestors. “I’ve fulfilled my side of the bargain. No reason to deviate now.”
“Still good?” Toris’s lip twitched. “Our executioner is dead. The prince has broken the betrothal and resigned himself to exile. I don’t know how things could possibly be worse. You’ve failed me, Domhnall. You almost had everything you wanted: forgiveness of your debts, freedom from your barons, and unquestioned rule over two kingdoms for the rest of your life.” He shrugged. “Too bad your brother Victor isn’t still alive. At least then I’d have another option.”
“Another day, maybe two, is all I need. I heard a rumor about a kid in the Canina District. Pretty sure it’s mine. I remember the mother—”
“We don’t have two days to wait for you,” Toris said. “The black moon is upon us. The deadline fast approaches.”
“You don’t have to kill me, Toris!”
Toris took him by his collar and said, “Ah, but I do. Because, you see, my mistress commands it.” He drew his knife.
“I’ll call my guards,” the king blubbered. “They won’t let you hurt me.”
“Your guards?” Toris scoffed. “You pay them a few measly coppers and throw them a few scraps and think you can call them yours? If it weren’t for my plentiful gold, they’d have long defected and you’d have had none. They are mine, and they have been for a very long time. They obey you only because I ordered them to. No one is here to help you, Domhnall. And quite frankly, you’ve worn on my patience long enough.”
Domhnall tried to escape, but despite his size advantage, his fear made him clumsy. Toris had him quickly cornered. “Nihil nunc salvet te,” he said as he drew his knife—Dedrick’s luneocite knife—and deftly sliced Domhnall’s fleshy neck from one ear to the other. Then he shoved Domhnall over the edge of the wall and the king fell down, down, down through the mist, trailing blood, until he landed, splayed flat, against the water. It held him there on the surface, his eyes empty and staring, as the blood poured out around him in thin tendrils that grew and grew, lashing out across the water, turning it a milky, jewel-toned red, visible even in the dark.
With a cry, I tore my hands from Domhnall’s grasp and ran to the beachside edge. The inky, midnight-blue fjord was gone. Instead, scarlet waves were lapping the rocky shore.
The first seal of King’s Gate was broken. The king was dead, and where once was water, there was now only blood.
Part Three
The Wall
and
the Tower
31
The tree I used to first communicate with Conrad was now little more than a mess of naked, thorny branches; it was still dark, so the black ribbon from my dress parcel hardly stood out against the dreary grays of the garden’s squalid remains. I cast a sideways prayer to the Empyrea that my brother would see it anyway.
When I first heard the rustle nearby, I whirled around, expecting to find Aren. But it wasn’t the Harbinger. It was Lisette.
“I thought it was you,” she said. She was holding a pair of lace gloves in her hands, wringing them nervously.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to leave Conrad alone. Stop taunting him. Scaring him with your messages. He is a little boy, Aurelia. Just a little boy who doesn’t deserve to be dragged into your conspiracies, your treachery—”
“My treachery?”
“I
know you killed Kellan,” she said, eyes shining. “I know everything. And it won’t be long, mark my words, before you pay for what you’ve done. Father says we’re very close to uncovering the entire thing and then this nightmare can finally be over.”
She was scared; I could see that. She was scared of me, and she had come here to confront me because . . . she was trying to protect my brother.
“You have no idea,” I muttered. “All this time . . . and you have no idea.”
“No idea about what?”
“What has really been happening here. I didn’t kill Kellan. He was my truest friend.” I didn’t dare give voice to the idea that he might still be alive; I’d been keeping that possibility safely tucked away in my mind. “Your father threatened that if I didn’t give him the invitations to cross the wall, he’d kill him. I did what he asked,” I said through my teeth, “and he killed him anyway.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“You and that Achlevan, Simon Silvis . . . you’re in this together. You’re trying to sabotage Achleva and Renalt. Your own mother—”
“Is being held hostage by the Tribunal under your father’s direction!” Toris must have met Dedrick Corvalis through trade at the de Lena ports, just as Simon had been investigating. Toris recruited Dedrick, and then King Domhnall, into his plans. But even as the how was becoming clearer, the why was still a mystery. “All of this, every last detail, has been orchestrated by him, not me. Did you know, in the forest, he tried to kill me, too?”
“No. No. My father is a righteous man. None of this makes any sense—”
I grabbed her by her shoulders and looked directly into her pretty face. “We were friends once, you and I. You could have sent me to the gallows years ago, but you didn’t. I think you knew, deep down inside, that I didn’t deserve it. That I’m a good person, despite being born with magic in my veins.”
She opened her mouth and then closed it again. I’d struck a nerve. “Think, Lisette. Think. If our friendship meant anything to you when we were little, I beg of you to listen to me now. Has there been nothing that your father has done over the last months . . . years! . . . that has given you pause? That has made you stop and question yourself, even just for a moment?” I let her go. “There has been, hasn’t there?”
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