“Presumably, right before she explained that we could never see each other again,” my mother said, wiping her hands on her trousers. She hooked a finger under her sleeve and pulled it back to reveal her prison tattoo. “The initial sentence was five years. The judge was reluctant to give more than that for my somewhat insubstantial charges. At some point, and with little warning to me, the term was doubled.”
The M for Mesa was flanked by a row of ten small crosses—the vertical lines would have been tattooed at the beginning of her sentence, while the crossbars would have been added each year to show how much she had served. There were ten of them—the second group of five was darker and less blurry, as if they’d been done more recently.
“They must have found more evidence against you,” Celeno said flatly.
She crooked a half-smile to him and slid her sleeve back down. “I can assure you that they used every scrap of evidence they could find to scrape together the initial sentence.”
“But there was evidence,” Celeno pressed. “You confessed to instigating and conducting treasonous activities.”
“I’m flattered that you’re so familiar with my political pursuits.”
“You’re my mother-in-law,” he said hotly. “It was considered my duty to know.”
“Well, whatever the motive, you’re right,” she said. “There was absolutely, decisively, one-hundred-percent evidence against me. I was a dissenter then, and I am now. I met with other dissenters every month to parse out and debate the discrepancies in the Prophecy, which, I might add, is the same thing my sister does with impunity. But five years is the sentence given to dissenters who have actually gone beyond just philosophizing, and ten years necessitates irrefutable harm against Alcoro or its citizens. And I can guarantee you there was no proof of my involvement in such activities.”
“Are you suggesting they extended the prison sentence without proof?” Celeno asked. “I would like to think such corruption would be noticeable, at least given enough time.”
She rummaged for the bag of corn biscuits. “Not if it’s the Prelate orchestrating such events.”
His brows snapped down. “That’s a bold assumption to make.”
“Is it?”
“Why would the Prelate manipulate the laws of justice in such a way against you?”
“I’ve always assumed it was to be sure my—frankly minimal—presence in her life was negated even further to counter any issues that might arise with her nomination to Prelate,” she said, selecting a biscuit.
“You’re saying she locked you up so she could rise to Prelate?”
My mother shrugged. “The previous Prelate was getting old by the time I was arrested. And he died around the same time my sentence was extended, along with all those acolytes during the fasting. I think with things in such disarray, she didn’t want me ruining her chances.”
I pursed my lips. I had forgotten about the three acolytes who had died in the transition period between Prelates, each overcome by one of the secret, potent tinctures they drank to purge themselves during the nomination of the next Prelate.
“Were you involved in Shaula’s thesis?” I asked, finally breaking out of my thoughts.
They both looked at me, bemused at my change of subject.
“What thesis?” asked Celeno.
“Her thesis on millipedes,” I said. “Done back before she joined the acolytes.”
“I did her illustrations,” my mother said. “My name is credited in the text.”
“And do you have a copy?” I asked.
“No. I made two copies—one for her and one for the academic library.”
“I imagine you had sketchbooks from that time, though,” I said. “With rough sketches, trial-and-errors?”
“Naturally,” she said. “That was a tricky technique, trying to convey the bioluminescence. That’s when I started using wax to mask parts of the illustration. I’ve used it again on my sketches from the cave.”
I gazed into the middle distance, my lips pressed together. “Hm.”
Celeno shook his head at my drifting thoughts and turned stiffly back to my mother. “I still maintain that something must have been found against you to extend your sentence. Shaula wasn’t even Prelate when you were imprisoned. How could an acolyte falsify such an action?”
“Don’t ask me to fathom the machinations of your inner circle,” she snapped. “Overestimating your dissenters and underestimating your closest advisors is a steadfast tradition of our beloved monarchy.”
“I disagree,” he said sharply. “Who makes the Ferinno Desert all but impassable to even the most heavily armed travelers?”
“Bandits and thieves,” my mother said. “Not political malcontents. You forget that even among dissenters, there’s a huge range of beliefs. Most disagree with the official interpretation of the Prophecy, but almost no one agrees on what the real interpretation is. Some demand an absolute literal transcription, that the Prism wasn’t a person but an actual shard of broken light that carved the petroglyphs. Others think ‘the Seventh King will rise’ means that we lost track of kings somewhere and that a past one will rise from the grave. And many think the glyphs forming ‘a thousand years’ are more accurately interpreted as the length of a good growing season. To put it simply, you’re protected, in large part, by the fractiousness of your own rebels.”
“Well, we can only hope it stays that way,” he said, clearly intending to end the conversation. His gaze passed over me as he unbuckled his bedroll from his pack. “Though I don’t deny I’ve overlooked treachery in my own midst before.”
My mother sent a poisonous look at the back of his head, but I barely saw it. I had too much to think about. My mind wheeled and turned long after the lantern had been puffed out and we’d lain down to sleep. I lay listening to Celeno’s breathing grow more and more labored as the night deepened. When I finally slept, my dreams were thick and nonsensical—lilies growing on a white sand beach, a dark sky above spotted with pinpoints of crawling light.
“What do you remember of Shaula’s thesis?”
My mother looked up from the pot she was stirring over the fire. We’d made slightly better time that day, thanks most likely to several strategic administrations of ginger and sweet birch to help Celeno along. He’d spent the day bent in his saddle, silent, while we climbed farther up the Stellarange. Our shelter for the night was a wide, natural overhang that clearly had been used by people for centuries—an old rock wall rose waist-high at the front of the cave, and the ceiling bore traces of a few petroglyphs, though they were too faint to make out.
We’d lit a fire, both to prepare a meal and supplement the heat we would lose to the open air that night. My mother poked at the venison and sweet potatoes that were bubbling in the pot. “Not much. I was working on drafting my own thesis at the time, and I only read enough of hers to do the illustrations. She was interested in the function of the bioluminescence—was it a predator deterrent, or a way to attract mates? I remember her painting the things black to hide the glow, and then putting them in a cage with rats to see if they got eaten any more readily.”
“What was her consensus?”
“I don’t remember. In fact, she might have even dropped her studies before she had anything definite.”
“If she was so far into studying biology, why did she make the jump into being an acolyte?” Celeno asked, eyes closed. He was sitting against the wall, bundled in a blanket with his arms across his chest.
“She always straddled the line,” my mother said, poking at a sweet potato to determine its tenderness. “She and I often spent long hours debating the Prophecy—I thought she had a general dissatisfaction with its impact on our economy, like me, but turns out she had more of a religious obsession. By the time she was writing her thesis, she was already spending more hours reading the Prelates’ theorizing than she was on her experiments.”
“But she continued her experiments with the millipedes after she made the switch?” I aske
d.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not to my knowledge.”
I pursed my lips. Then why does she have a crate of the creatures in her closet? I almost asked the question aloud, but I silenced myself. I needed more time to think about it, more time to study its many strange angles.
A scholar through and through, Celeno would have accused.
Yes, and if we’re lucky, it’s going to save us both.
My mother clanged her spoon on the pot. “Stew’s ready. Get out the tin cups.”
Celeno groaned, gripping his stomach, and turned his head away.
“Oh, you’re eating tonight, Your Majesty,” my mother said. “I’m not having any more listless mornings. We have one more full day of climbing before we reach base camp, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you drop off the edge of the mountain. No, don’t look to Gemma to rescue you.” She held out her palm. “The cup. Now.”
I slept fitfully on the cold floor of the cave. When the wind finally died down, the night filled instead with the rich, soulful howls of timber wolves. I shivered under my blanket, pulling my fur cap a little closer around my ears. There were no wolves near Callais. We had coyotes, the canyon often ringing with their yips and twirling howls—a joyful sound, I’d always thought, a family of parents and pups all chorusing together. The song of the wolves was different, deeper and sadder. I knew they were hunting nighttime animals creeping from their dens, but my thoughts strayed to the stone wall along the lip of the cave and just how secure it actually was.
Celeno didn’t sleep well, either. I listened to him toss and turn, his breath ragged. He’d eaten a small cup of stew but had resisted any further ministrations from my mother. Short of shoving the food down his throat, she couldn’t make him eat any more. I’d warmed some water for him so he didn’t have to drink it ice cold and gave him another ginger pellet. I ignored my mother’s narrowed eyes as I settled him into his bedroll with an extra blanket.
“You let him call you a traitor, and yet you fuss over him like he’s a swaddled infant,” she said in an accusing whisper after he seemed to have gone to sleep.
“I need him to be strong enough for the cave,” I said. “We both do. He needs to be well enough to travel and think rationally about the Prophecy.”
More importantly, he had to be well enough to go back and face the problems in Alcoro without me.
She snorted in dissatisfaction. “Tell me, has he ever gifted you the same kind of emotional labor?”
I met her gaze. “Once upon a time, it was the only thing I could count on.”
She’d frowned but kept her silence as we settled in to our bedrolls.
I woke the following morning to her footsteps crunching over the snow. I sat up, my cheeks stinging from the cold.
“I smelled smoke,” she said. Our campfire was banked and barely burning. “I just wanted to check.”
“Did you see anything?”
“The firs are too thick to get much of a view. But I didn’t hear voices or see any signs of a camp.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s just a woodcutter’s stove, or my own imagination. All the same, give our king a poke, will you?”
Celeno was on his side with his back facing me, and when I squeezed his shoulder, he let out a low moan. I turned him onto his back. He was sweaty again, his hair plastered to his forehead under his fur cap. He cracked his eyes open.
“Gemma?”
In the fog of sleep, he said my name thoughtlessly, without the layers of bitterness now attached to it. My heart squeezed to hear him say it so gently, as if it was just another morning in Stairs-to-the-Stars. The illusion lasted for the span of a breath, and then his brow furrowed.
“Gemma,” he said darkly.
“It’s time to get up,” I said. “We need to go.”
He tried to roll back over. “I barely slept.”
“I know, but we think there are people somewhere down the trail. Best get moving quickly.”
He doubled up, giving a sharp groan. “My stomach.”
I heard my mother give an aggravated sigh behind me as she packed up our supplies.
“I’ll get you a ginger,” I said.
“It’s not going to help.”
Not wanting to delay and run the risk of discovery, I fetched him another pellet, which he took with continued complaints. My mother stomped around with more chagrin than necessary, making the mules cock their ears backward as she slung the loaded saddlebags over their backs. Finally, we mounted and proceeded uphill under a heavy gray sky.
We didn’t make it far, barely a quarter mile from the cave, when the sound of retching filled the air. Celeno lurched over his mule’s withers and vomited, causing the animal to sidestep at the sudden shift. I kicked my mount forward and reached out to grab his reins and a handful of his cloak. My mother turned around in her saddle.
“Sick again?” she asked.
I held him upright, sliding my hand under his sleeve. Despite the sweat still beading on his forehead, he was trembling violently.
“Are you cold?” I asked.
He bent over his saddle, drawing hoarse breaths. “I’m freezing.”
“I’ll get you one of the blankets,” I said.
“We need to stop,” he said, clutching his stomach, eyes squeezed shut.
“We can’t, Celeno.”
“I can’t keep going.”
I slid off my mule to get a blanket from my mother’s saddlebags. “We’ll go slowly. Do you want to try to eat something? More ginger?”
“I can’t.”
My mother pursed her lips as I approached Checkerspot to dig out one of the blankets, clearly unhappy with the feeble state of the king.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said to her.
“Why not?” she asked.
I pulled out the blanket and made my way back to Celeno. “Because it makes you look like Shaula.”
With the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, we started again, our mules toiling up the steep, zigzagging track. The land to our right dropped away, framing a rugged panorama of snowy peaks, but I found I couldn’t admire the beauty of our route as I had the previous few days. My gaze was fixed on Celeno as he wavered first one way, then another, sometimes stooping over his saddle, once even leaning his forehead on the mule’s neck. My mother grew farther and farther ahead despite constantly reining Checkerspot in.
When he vomited again, I didn’t quite make it to his side in time. He half-slid, half-fell off his mule’s back. He landed on his feet, but his knees buckled instantly, so he was practically kneeling under his mule’s belly. I jumped off my mount and hurried to lead the animal away while he threw up clear fluid into the snow.
With a string of curses muddled by the distance between us, my mother turned Checkerspot around and rejoined us.
“What’s the matter with him?” she asked. “Did you give him another ginger? Are you still sure this is all just nerves?”
Celeno answered before I did, his head still bowed. “It’s not just my stomach! It’s my head, my chest . . . my legs are cramping, my hands are shaking. We . . . we need to stop for a while.”
“We’ve barely made it two miles!” my mother said.
“Then you go on ahead and leave me here to die!” he snapped back. He wiped the back of his mouth. “Believe it or not, I’m not actually trying to make myself sick!”
“Let’s rest a moment,” I said to her. “Give him a chance to have some more water, and maybe some sweet birch.” Perhaps an analgesic would help his other aches and pains.
My mother ground her teeth but led Checkerspot off the trail with the other mules. She dismounted and snatched up her canteen. “I’m going back down the trail to be sure nobody’s riding up on our tails.”
She disappeared through the firs. I settled Celeno down with a canteen and measured out some of the herbs in our medical kit.
“I can’t do it, Gemma,” he said when I brought him the medicine. “I’m too tired.”
“Rest now,” I said. “Close your eyes, and try to rest a little.”
“We should never have come out here. We should never have done this.”
“We can make it, Celeno. We have to—we have to know the truth.” Samna, freedom, a new beginning—everything was riding on learning the truth.
He let his breath stream out, but just as he closed his eyes, they popped open again at the sound of hurried footsteps. My mother strode back into view—not running, but nearly so, her hands balled into fists. Her mouth was set in a stern line, and she looked between me and Celeno. Seeing him relatively incapacitated, she jerked her head at me.
“C’mere.”
I rose and followed her through the firs as she marched downhill. We made it perhaps fifty yards from where we’d left Celeno and the mules, coming to the tight corner of a switchback, affording a view over the tops of the trees and into the valley we’d camped in the night before.
I drew in a sharp breath. Nearing our morning’s campsite in the overhang, perhaps two miles below us, were five mounted soldiers, dressed in the russet and black of the palace.
A moment of heavy silence hung between us like a storm cloud.
“We can’t outrun them at our pace,” my mother finally said. “They’ll catch us by lunchtime. The only advantage I can see is that they’re on horses, not mules—they’ll tire more quickly, and they’ll be more finicky over the terrain. But it’s a weak excuse for hope.”
I watched the first of the neat line of soldiers turn the hairpin corner. “How far are we from the cave?”
“At his speed?” She jerked her head back up the path. “We should get there by afternoon, if he doesn’t get any slower.”
I thought carefully for a moment. My mother eyed me, as if expecting my answer.
“We’ll go in on our own,” I said.
“I thought you might say that,” she said. “How long have you been considering it?”
“Since your house in Whiptail Hob,” I admitted.
“I’ve seen you studying the map.” She shifted. “Tell me—is it just for his sake, to do away with the notion that this is all just dissenter’s rabble, or is there another reason?”
Creatures of Light, Book 3 Page 11