by Bree Barton
“But then, after a while, I knew I couldn’t stay at the House, either, with everyone tiptoeing around, judging me, waiting for me to fall apart. My brother was doing better, he was thriving, and I knew he could survive without me, while I was growing less stable by the day.
“So one night I took the bag I’d packed for Prisma . . . and I went to Pata Pacha instead. I steered Maysha all the way to White Lagoon. I found a potter’s wheel. My pieces were good, it didn’t take long to find patrons. I did what I loved, and I was happy. I had romances, friends. Away from the House, I felt like I could hold on to who I was, maybe because I got to re-create who I was. No one knew me. In Luumia I had a fresh start. I could make space around me, which I’d never done. If someone needed too much, I could take a step back. But since being here . . .”
She shook her head.
“I thought I was stronger. That I would be able to maintain my own boundaries and, if I needed to, pull back, step away, take care of myself. But the opposite has happened. It’s like I’ve turned into the person I always was. Worse, maybe, because now the four kingdoms are crumbling down around us, everyone is so afraid. I can’t hold on to myself, can’t feel my own emotions anymore, because I’m too busy feeling everyone else’s.”
Mia struggled to process all this. “But Stone seems so happy. They all seem so happy.”
“I know you think we’re this big, happy, perfect family. But there are no perfect families. We have wounds and failings and betrayals, just like you. But also . . .”
Nell took a breath.
“I’m not just talking about them, Mia. I’m talking about you.”
All the saliva in Mia’s mouth evaporated. She stared at Nelladine. Stupefied.
“Since the moment you stepped onto Maysha,” Nell began, “I’ve done nothing but take care of you. I’ll admit it’s partly my fault. I’m always so ready to take on someone else’s suffering, to make myself responsible for their pain. So I brought you to Mumma here at the House. To Pappa in the Curatorium. I tried to help you taste and smell and feel all the things, even let you come in here and watch me throw. It made you happy, and it made me happy that you were happy, even though sometimes I just wanted to be alone. I didn’t need the ointment, Mia, my hands are fine. I’ve been throwing clay for a long time, I know how to take care of myself. But I took it from you, because you needed to give it to me. I’ve taken all your joy and hope, but also your fears and disappointments. And somewhere in there, I stopped existing.”
Nell’s brown eyes filled with tears.
“I’m tired, Mia. So tired. I just can’t do it anymore.”
“Please.” Mia groped for the right words, panic rising inside her. “Please don’t go to Prisma. I’ll be better at listening to you, seeing you. I know I’ve been selfish. But I promise I won’t fail you again, Nell. It’s what I’m best at: taking care of the people I love.”
The word had come out in spite of herself. Love.
“Great sands, Mia. It’s not about failing me! It’s not about failing at all. That’s part of the problem, how you see everything in terms of failure or success. I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t want to lie to you, either. I should have said all this weeks ago. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
Nell forced the air out of her mouth.
“You say you take care of people, and in a way, you do. You threw yourself into protecting Angie, but you never really saw her. Now it’s happening again with Pilar. You think if you can fix her, save her, then it’ll give your life purpose. But in saving them, you expect it to save you. It’s not really about the person: it’s about being needed by them. You don’t recognize yourself unless you’re ‘saving’ someone—which means you don’t really know who you are.”
Nell’s eyes locked onto Mia’s.
“That’s not love, Mia. Not real love. If I’m being honest, I’m not entirely convinced you know what love is. At least not the kind that’s freely given, freely shared. Love is what happens when two people come together as equals, each with their own painful history and gifts and failings, neither of them needing to be saved.”
Silence clotted the air between them. Mia was folding in on herself. Soon she would collapse onto the wheel, flattened. Cracked.
The sound of footsteps echoed through the Creation Studio. Someone was running down the corridor.
Fine. Let them come. Anything would be better than this.
“Rose?”
Pilar materialized in the doorway, silhouetted against the glass. She was panting.
“I ran all the way to your sfeera. Should’ve known you’d be here instead. A courier just came from the river kingdom.”
She held out a piece of parchment, clenched tightly in her fist.
“He brought a letter for you and me. It isn’t good.”
Mia stood. Heart racing.
“A letter from whom?”
“Quin.”
Chapter 25
Disappeared
IN THE END, IT was shockingly easy.
“Tell everyone what you’ve seen here,” Quin told Tobin, as they left the library. The acrid reek of scorched piano filled the castle corridors: burnt wood, burnt ivory, burnt books. “I want all the Embers in the Grand Gallery within the half hour.”
Tobin nodded stiffly. He’d said nothing since Quin ordered half a dozen Embers to douse the raging flames. The piano was ruined, of course, reduced to a pile of smoldering ash, as was a considerable portion of the Kaer’s library. It gave Quin a perverse satisfaction to know that the plays he’d devoured, not to mention the histories he’d once found comfort in, were gone. Vestiges of a life he’d rather not remember. A self he’d rather not remember.
“Do not defy me,” Quin said to Tobin, his voice low. “Or you will pay the price.”
“Liar.”
Maev accosted Quin as he strode into the Gallery. Tobin had gathered the Embers; he now sat among them at the low slab tables. They were silent, watchful, so different from the raucous horde Quin had met when he first returned to the Kaer, carousing around their makeshift bar.
Maev, however, was not seated. She stood in the center of the Gallery, fuming. Strands of thin white hair had come loose around her face.
“Tell them,” she said, pointing at the Embers. “Tell them how you lied.”
“I am not the one on trial.”
“I should never have let you come here. We fed you, treated you like one of ours.” She shook her head in disgust. “I swore on my mother’s grave that if I ever met a Killian face to face—”
“You will be silent.” He looked coldly out at the room. “The Kaer is my home. The crown is my birthright. I am Quin, son of Clan Killian, the uncontested king of Glas Ddir.”
“We don’t want your bloody crown,” Maev spat. “It’s crowns we’re fighting against!”
“You will be silent.”
With a flick of his fingers, a red flame appeared in Quin’s palm.
A chorus of gasps rippled through the room. It sent a bolt of lightning straight into his veins. How often he had wished for a captive audience, a crowd to gape and shiver at his performance.
He pooled all his attention into his fingers—and sent a sphere of crimson fire into the makeshift bar. Instantly it ignited. Flames licked the wood plank, spewing sparks onto the barrels below. The bottles heated up, spirits seething inside, a dozen paroxysms waiting to explode.
From the farthest table, he heard a whimper. He turned his head.
Brialli Mar.
He hadn’t seen her in days. She was watching him intently, unsmiling, a small black dog tucked under her arm. It was not Brialli who had whimpered, he realized, but the pup.
For a moment, Quin’s love for Wulf and Beo knocked into him so fiercely his breath caught. They had been a comfort to him during his darkest days. His dogs had reminded him of his humanity, even when humanity at large seemed brutally bleak.
He swiftly cauterized the wound.
His dogs were lost to him.
And rightfully so. Only when a man was free of love was he free to do what he was meant to do.
“I trust you will not need another demonstration,” Quin said.
Maev had gone lily white. She shrank backward, fumbling her way to one of the stone benches without ever taking her eyes off his face.
“My forebears would punish you all for gathering here in Kaer Killian. For plotting treasonous acts within my walls. I would be well within my rights to kill you.”
He turned to face the rest of the Embers.
“But I am not my forebears. If you swear fealty, I will forgive your transgressions. I order you to return to your homes. Rebuild. Focus your efforts on resurrecting Glas Ddir from the ashes. But if you oppose my rule?”
He let the threat linger.
“Then you are a traitor, and therefore not welcome in the river kingdom. If you stay within our borders, you will live to regret your choice.”
“And what of the sisters?”
It was Tobin speaking. His silver eyes glittered with scorn.
“Did you not say that you had invited the Twisted Sisters back to the river kingdom so you could ‘stand against the tyranny of magic’? Evidently that was never your plan. I assume you will join them in tyranny and dark magic?”
“I will not join with the sisters. Not for anything.”
“Why not? They’d probably be more effective.”
Tobin rose from the stone bench.
“I believe, of everyone here, I have known the prince the longest. I have seen the full extent of his fear and his cowardice. I bear the marks of it.”
He held up his right hand.
“These are also the marks of his father’s hate. Every person here paid the price for Ronan’s tyranny. We lost our families. Our bodies. Sometimes our lives.”
“I am not my father,” Quin said angrily. “I seek justice. Peace. And I will do what needs be done to achieve it.”
“Peace.” Tobin laughed. “You seek the power you have always been denied. The power you now believe your magic has granted you.”
He gestured toward the fire blazing in the corner.
“But even this is a performance. At heart you are still a coward, unable to commit any true acts of violence. Admit it. You’re desperate for the love and admiration of your people. So you, son of Clan Killian, are doing what you have always done. You are playing a part.”
He straightened. “I, too, have been playing a part. But it is time I step off the stage.”
Tobin stooped. Pressed his fingertips to the black stone floor. Closed his eyes.
A deafening crack echoed through the Gallery.
The room erupted.
The gray slab tables jutted up, then split apart, fracturing down the center. Onyx floors ruptured like glass. The Embers were screaming. People staggered and fell as the earth shifted beneath them. Walls and ceiling splintered. Quin watched as a giant shard plummeted from above, crushing a girl and a small black pup beneath it.
Brialli.
“Did you really think,” Tobin shouted over the din, “that it was only your suffering that bred magic? That after what your father did to me, my body would not rise up in mutiny?”
Quin’s heart was in his throat. He stumbled toward Brialli Mar. But he couldn’t reach her. He was back under the snow palace, facing the Twisted Sisters. Cave cracking open, snow rushing in. And the avalanche, the endless white, drowning him, suffocating him, ravenous for his useless body, hungry to make him disappear. As if he had not disappeared long ago.
“Quin.”
A voice rose from the chaos. He spun, unsteady on his feet.
Domeniq du Zol stood behind him.
“I’m sorry to do this,” Dom said.
In one swift move, he clapped manacles of blue uzoolion around Quin’s wrists.
“This, too.”
And then Dom’s fist was moving quickly, too quickly, a blur of knuckles coming straight for Quin’s face.
The world went thick and black.
Chapter 26
Everything You Touch
“WE HAVE TO GO back,” Pilar said.
Mia stood in the Creation Studio, blinking at her half sister. Trying desperately to wrangle her spinning thoughts.
Dear sisters,
Let me tell you a story.
Quin was alive. Angelyne was alive. Quin thought Angelyne was with them. Quin had, in no uncertain terms, threatened them all.
The boy she had tried so hard to save.
The boy she had loved.
I’m not entirely convinced you know what love is. At least not the kind that’s freely given, freely shared.
The words lingered, even though Nell herself was gone. “I’m going to leave you now,” she’d said after Pilar appeared with the letter. A statement that left a painful, deeper echo. Nelladine was not just leaving her in the Creation Studio, Mia knew.
“I should’ve known he was still alive.” Pilar swore. “I just couldn’t imagine how he survived! But if he survived, Angie did, too. No wonder the volqanoes are erupting in Fojo. She’s out there picking the four kingdoms apart piece by piece.”
“Volqanoes?” Mia said numbly. The only word she’d managed to speak.
“Have you even been paying attention, Rose? It’s not just the Luumi glaciers that are collapsing. Here in Pembuk the glass cities are sinking faster than ever. Fires in your kingdom, volqanoes in mine. The smaller Fojuen islands have been completely wiped out. There were innocent people on those islands. Children. It’s the end of the fucking world.”
Till the glass cities sink into the western sands,
Till the eastern isles burn to ash.
Mia’s wedding vows to Quin mingled with the words from his letter.
Only when a man is free of love is he free to do what he is meant to do.
She felt a burst of anger. She wanted to be happy Quin was alive. But with his cold, hateful words, he had stripped that joy from her in the same moment he had offered it.
Mia was ashamed how wounded she felt by the letter. Maybe her feelings for him were not as inert as she’d assumed.
Pilar was right. Mia had been blissfully naive, floating on air between the Shadowess’s chambers and the Curatorium, feeling again, healing again. Oblivious to everyone but Nell, whom she had followed around the House like a lovelorn puppy. And in the end, oblivious to Nell, too. She had misread, misinterpreted, misunderstood.
“We have to go back,” Pilar repeated.
“What could we possibly do?”
Pil’s features twisted with disbelief. “We fight. What else?”
“Fight Quin?”
“Either that or we save him. Maybe those are the same thing. If we can get to him, we might be able to talk some sense into him. This?” She brandished the letter. “This isn’t who he is.”
“Maybe we don’t know who he is.” Mia’s voice was low. Resigned. “You said yourself we never really knew him.”
“And you said we couldn’t blame him for being enthralled. I don’t understand the sudden change of heart. You’re the one who told me to stop being angry at him!”
“I know you cared about him, Pilar. You’re letting that keep you from accepting the truth.”
“Trust me, I’m not going back so I can ride in on a white horse and confess my undying love. I’m going back because Quin’s hurting and needs help. If I had understood that sooner . . . if I’d been a better friend to him . . .”
“Maybe he’s gone too far off the edge for us to pull him back.”
Pilar kicked the potter’s wheel. It jerked, spinning halfway around before going still.
“Typical. Mia Rose refuses to get her hands dirty.”
“It’s not about getting my hands dirty. It’s about knowing when you’re defeated before you’ve even begun. Some fights you can’t win. I thought you of all people would understand that.”
Mia slipped a hand into her dressing gown pocket, searching for the bloodbloom tree. But her pocket was e
mpty. She’d left the charm in her sfeera.
“That’s right,” Pilar muttered. “Rub your little wooden tree. ’Cause that’ll solve everything.”
Mia’s eyes flashed. “You don’t even know what that tree is.”
“Sure I do. It helps you belly breathe instead of chest breathe. Or whatever they’re feeding you here at the House.”
“You should try it sometime. See if it helps with your chronic rage.” Mia could feel herself growing fangs. She inhaled, reminding herself that the bloodbloom was nice, but she could still breathe without it. “The Shadowess says we can’t heal the world until we heal ourselves.”
Pilar let out a half-mangled cry. “Please don’t tell me you believe that.”
“Why not?”
“Do you have any idea how selfish you sound, Rose? You’re in there with the Shadowess every day, breathing, chanting—whatever it is you do. Or you’re fawning over Nelladine. Meanwhile, people are dying. The whole world is crashing down around you, and you’re hiding from it all. Have you ever thought of standing up and taking responsibility?”
“Is that what you’re doing, Pilar? Taking responsibility? By teaching children how to punch sandbags?”
Pilar flinched. “At least I’m helping people.”
“Keep telling yourself that. Because I think you’re hiding, too. You’re doing what you’ve always done: using your fists to seal your heart off from the world. You think if you can be cold and cruel, flinging barbs at anyone who tries to get close, you’ll never get hurt.”
She glared at Pilar, readying her ammunition. Preparing to say everything she’d held back for the past two months. Mia had tried so hard to be patient and kind and understanding. What a colossal waste of time and effort. She was done.
“Maybe you’re right,” Pilar said.
Mia’s eye twitched. Had she missed something? Pil wasn’t the type to give anyone the upper hand.