Creatures of Light, Book 3

by Emily B. Martin

  “It started out for his sake,” I said. “But I’m becoming more convinced there’s a bigger one, too. All this talk about your sentence, about Shaula, about the Prelacy . . . little pieces are starting to fit together in ways I didn’t realize before. It could be all coincidental. But, the more I learn, the more I can’t shake the feeling . . .” I let out my breath. “What’s a millipede’s defense mechanism?”

  “Acid,” my mother said.

  “Cyanic acid,” I said.

  She frowned. “Cyanide.” She said the word as if testing its plausibility.

  “That’s right.” I looked back down at the soldiers as they turned the switchback. “It’s going to sound far-fetched, but when I inquired after my lead councilor, I was told he was confined to his bed, close to death from a bout of stomach virus.” I glanced sideways at her as she pursed her lips. “He often votes in my direction and can generally convince some of the others to, as well. Without his vote, I have no doubt that the council will call for my execution.”

  She nodded up the trail. “Doesn’t the king have to approve your execution?”

  “He already has,” I said. “He signed the document a few days ago.”

  “Bastard.” The word broke from her, her mouth twisting in anger. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I’m not going to stay, Mother,” I said. “I’m going to get Celeno through the cave, and then I’m going to leave. I’m not coming back here.”

  She released her breath in a frozen cloud and stared down the mountain at the distant line of soldiers, her fists on her hips.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I’ll wait for you outside the cave, and when you come out, I’ll leave with you.”

  “No,” I said. “I need you to do something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to go back to Callais. Go to Izar, if you can secure an audience. If you can’t, go to my old tutor, Ancha—she remembers you from lessons. Get a warrant to have Shaula’s rooms searched. She’s keeping a cage of millipedes in the alcove in her bedroom. I saw them when I was getting the key.”

  She turned slowly back to me. A few beats of silence passed.

  “You think Shaula poisoned your councilor.” Again she seemed to test the statement’s validity.

  “Not only him,” I said, and then I stopped, reexamining my thoughts for the hundredth time. I glanced back up the trail.

  My mother instantly read my mind. “You think she poisoned the king?”

  “I don’t know,” I said quickly, turning back to her. “I don’t know why she would. Except . . . well, it’s certainly made running away a challenge, hasn’t it? Only a few years ago, he and I used to spend whole days walking into the canyon and along the rim. We’d hike up the caprocks with all his astronomy gear. And now he can barely stay on the mule’s back. Dealing with his title always made him nervous and ill, but this . . .”

  She pursed her lips. “Far be it from me to try to clear my sister’s name, but I thought he didn’t take his tincture before you left? Or does she slip it to him some other way?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I know it’s questionable at best, but I can’t shake the idea. But that’s why I need you to go back.” I gestured down toward the distant soldiers. “Shaula clearly isn’t sitting idle, and if she’s still in power when Celeno comes back, I suspect it won’t matter what the petroglyphs say. And even if I’m wrong about his tincture, there’s still my councilor, and that string of other poisonings around her nomination to the Prelacy—the previous Prelate, and those three acolytes. And now I learn that your sentence was extended without evidence and without anyone’s knowledge—what if she was afraid you would come forward with information about her work? You were the only one who had the knowledge and courage to connect her to those events.”

  My mother stared at me, her face lined and hard.

  “It is far-fetched,” she said.

  “I know.” I swallowed. “Do you doubt it?”

  “Not for a second,” she said.

  I sagged in relief. “Thank you.” My throat tightened with the onset of stress crying. “I know I’m asking a lot from you, putting you back in Shaula’s path, but if she has truly done these things—if they can be proven, and then if Celeno’s title is made clear . . .”

  “I don’t care about Shaula.” She looked up the trail again, her brows knitted. “But I don’t like leaving you with him.”

  “He’s not dangerous, Mother.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to attack you,” she said flatly. “I think he’s going to continue being an entitled ass, and that you won’t do a thing to stop him. Gemma, honestly, addled by drugs or not, he signed your death warrant . . .”

  “It’s only until the Prophecy, Mother. It’s only so he understands what his title means. Then I’ll part ways. I’ll go to the coast, and I’ll go to Samna. You can join me there.” The first tear seeped from my eye. “Think of all the insects we’ll find. We can illustrate them for the university scholars.”

  She let out the last of her breath, and she reached out to wrap her arms around me. “Oh, Gemma.” She squeezed me tightly, and I rested my forehead on her shoulder, my cheeks wet. The vellum packet containing my lost hopes for an Alcoran university crackled between us. “You can follow the map?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know which blazes I need.”

  She sighed. “All right, then. Keep yourself safe. Wherever you end up, I’ll find you.” She kissed the top of my head, just under my star band. “The path splits in about a quarter mile. You two ride ahead. I’ll try to cover your tracks and then lead the soldiers off. Don’t tell the king until you’re far enough away.”

  I nodded reluctantly. “All right. Be careful.”

  She huffed a silent laugh and released me. “No sense in being careful. Come on.”

  We headed back up the hill, where Celeno was still huddled under the fir tree. He cracked open his eyes.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said, holding out my hand. “Come on. If we cover good ground, we can stop for lunch before noon.”

  “Try to keep up,” my mother added. I winced. Perhaps it was for the best that we were separating—I wasn’t sure we could have continued without one of them killing the other before the end.

  While he mounted his mule, my mother and I exchanged a few items as surreptitiously as possible—the tin of fire capsules, the lantern, the map. Silently we negotiated switching places—me taking the lead, she taking the rear. Once everything was arranged, my mother nodded, and I guided my mule forward. Celeno followed silently behind.

  We continued up the trail. I tried desperately to keep from glancing over my shoulder every half-second, sure we were about to be ridden down. After a quarter mile, we came to the split in the track, where a little side trail meandered off into the firs.

  “Damn,” my mother said loudly.

  I swiveled my head. “What?”

  “I think Checkerspot picked up a stone.” She cursed again and swung to the ground. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll catch up.” She bent over Checkerspot’s foreleg and shifted him to lift his hoof. He heaved a sigh and patiently lifted his leg, unperturbed.

  Stomach in knots, I turned back around and nudged my mule ahead. Celeno followed without a word. We continued in silence for ten minutes, fifteen. Distantly I heard a crash of timber, as if an old tree had fallen conveniently into the path.

  “Should we wait for her?” Celeno asked.

  “She said not to.”

  “Must have been a bad stone,” he said flatly.

  I swallowed and urged my mule a little faster.

  We climbed the ridge, and despite my promise about lunch, noontime came and went. Celeno didn’t comment—the few times I looked back, he was bent over again, his fingers tight on his reins. Buried in layers of anxiety, I continued, leading us on. The track narrowed; the firs grew so close they brushed our shoulders and dumped s
now over our mules’ haunches. Occasional breaks in the forest gave us views of the dramatic mountainscape, but we were still well below the tree line, and the vistas were quickly swallowed back up by snowy boughs.

  In the early afternoon, as my mother had promised, the track crested a swell in the ridge and led into a small saddle between two peaks. At some point in history, a house-sized boulder had fallen from the cliffs above and made its resting place in the hollow. Propped against it was a two-sided lean-to, the rock making up its back wall. The front was open, revealing little more than a sleeping platform. A wooden crate served as both a worktable and a means to keep pests out of food supplies, and tucked in the corner was a stack of firewood. I led the way to the little holding pen of unworked logs and turned the mules into it.

  As I hauled the saddlebags into the shelter of the lean-to, Celeno stood looking down the trail we’d just climbed. Carefully, I began to pack the items from the bags into the packs we would carry into the cave.

  “Light’s fading,” I said, glancing up at the afternoon sky. “But given that we’re going underground, I suppose it doesn’t matter. I think we should get started right away . . .”

  “I’m not stupid, Gemma.”

  I drew in a breath and looked up at his turned back. “I never said you were.”

  “Your mother went back,” Celeno said, accusation heavy in his voice. “Didn’t she?”

  I looked down at the tin of fire capsules in my hands. “We were being pursued. She went to lead them away.”

  “Soldiers?”

  “Yes. But she led them down a side trail. They’re probably well away from us at this point.”

  “No sense in me riding back hoping for a rescue, you mean,” he said.

  Great Light, I hoped not. “No.”

  A few moments of silence passed. He drew his cloak a little more tightly around his shoulders.

  “Lies, lies, lies,” he said.

  “Celeno . . .”

  “Why won’t you just tell me what the petroglyphs say?”

  “I don’t know! That’s not a lie—neither my mother nor I know what they say.” I tightened some of the buckles on my pack. “But even if I did, it would be irresponsible for me to tell you. What’s the first principle we’re taught in academic writing? In debate?” I watched as his mouth twisted bitterly. “Well?”

  “Leading language,” he conceded.

  “Leading language,” I agreed. “Leading language robs the scholar of the ability to come to their own conclusion. Our country has been ripped to tatters by folk trying to make the Prophecy mean one thing or another. We both have to approach this ready to accept what we see, not what we think we see.”

  “What’s the point, Gemma?” He spread his arms. “A bunch of fragmented, faded glyphs in a remote mountain cave—you think it’ll change anything? You think my word will change anything? You keep talking like they’re a full Prophecy in pristine condition, but what if they’re barely more than a few scratches? You’re talking about a belief literally set in stone, what makes you think this will change—”

  “Meteor showers, Celeno.”

  His words died in his throat. I hooked the field lantern to my pack and sat back on my heels.

  “Our folk have studied the stars as long as we’ve been carving into the canyon walls,” I said. “Our yearly calendar hinges around our biggest annual meteor shower—it’s been the subject of both art and science for centuries. And for all that time, how did our astronomers explain the phenomenon of Starfall?”

  He turned his head away, glaring into the distance.

  “Atmospheric aberration,” I supplied, if he wasn’t going to talk to me. “Some kind of reaction that took place in our sky, like lightning, or rain. We thought we had the secrets of a meteor shower more or less figured out. And then a scholar came along who said, wait, I think we’ve got this wrong.”

  His frown deepened, and he closed his eyes.

  “What did your tutor say when you proposed your thesis?” I asked. “Go on, what did she say when you suggested a cosmic source, instead of an atmospheric one?”

  “That I was wasting my time.”

  “Yes. And despite that, you pursued it anyway. Years of work with the optical engineers to develop the right lens. Months of sleepless nights at your telescope.” I could still feel the deep-set exhaustion as I slogged through my own lessons in the days after we both sat bent over his planisphere and squinting along his astrolabe, charting the exact angle and origin of the streaks of light flying through the sky. He’d been desperate to find an illustrator who would actually accompany him into the field, not just work from his notes, but I hadn’t needed the double fee he’d offered to accept. His energy was infectious. I’d had a dutifully Alcoran reverence for the stars before, but his fascination quickly became my own, and I wanted answers to his questions as much as he. We’d hiked up a hundred different hilltops in the dead of night and shared every emotion between us. Frustration, when the night of peak meteor activity was obscured by clouds. Grief, when we sat silently in his star courtyard for the first time after his father’s heart attack. Doubt, in our own eyes. Shock, when the evidence was undeniable. Joy, when his thesis was upheld.

  “You changed the understanding of our most important national event—not just in Alcoro, but across the Eastern World,” I said. “Lecture halls are filled now with astronomers detailing the cosmic origin of meteors—flying bodies from space, not in the clouds. You did that.”

  And I helped. After years of tiptoeing around my own losses, I helped him change astronomy books.

  He looked away. “The origin of a celestial event is hardly the same as an entire belief system.”

  “I don’t know, Celeno. Folk believed that what they knew was right. Now, I do wonder—would the consensus have been as quick to spread if it had come from a different scholar? One without a title and centuries of prophecy behind him?” I spread my hands. “I don’t know. Other modern ideas have certainly taken longer to be accepted. But that doesn’t worry me. You know why?”

  “Gemma . . .”

  “Because you’re still the Seventh King,” I said hotly. “Your words have a credibility no one else’s have. That’s something you’ve been running away from all your life. But Celeno, finally, right now, we have a chance to put that to actual use. We have a chance to find these petroglyphs, read them ourselves, and decide what they mean. And if the news comes from you, folk will believe it.”

  He had half-turned away from me, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He stared down into the snow, a sharp crease in his brow.

  “What are you not telling me?” he finally asked.

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “You’re still not telling me something.”

  My thoughts jumped to my worries about his tincture and the source of his persisting illness. But as I worked up the courage to tell him about Shaula, he turned his head to me.

  “What’s in it for you?”

  My mind scrambled, switching tack like a sail in the wind. “You already asked me that question, back at Stairs-to-the-Stars.”

  “Yes, and you gave me an unsatisfying answer,” he said. “Peace of mind. Enduring fame. What’s your real motivation? What are you really hoping to get out of this?”

  My mind flicked to Samna again, to the university. Building a new, quiet life in obscurity with my mother by my side—if we were lucky. It was a fantastical dream, one that relied on so many things to be fulfilled.

  “I just want answers,” I said. “I want a clear path for Alcoro—one that’s based on fact, not speculation. Nothing else matters if that’s not achieved.” The university wouldn’t matter if I left my country in ruins behind me.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “I assumed you were expecting some kind of pardon at the end of all this.”

  I fixed the last clasp on his pack and pushed it toward him. “A pardon? No. I won’t ask that of you. I have a hypothesis, and I want it answered.”

&
nbsp; He rolled his eyes toward the sky. “A scholar through and through.”

  I stood, slinging my own pack over my shoulders. “You know, at one time, I’d have said the same about you.”

  “It’s been a long time since those days.”

  “Not that long, Celeno.”

  His lips twisted mirthlessly. “I suppose not.” He sighed, stooped, and picked up the pack. He slung it over his shoulders. “All right then, in the name of science, let’s go on.”

  Chapter 7

  The air rushing out of the cave mouth felt like a spring breeze, though it couldn’t have been more than fifty degrees. Celeno and I stood before it, studying the squat, lightless entrance. It was just a hair shorter than my head and hung with trailing moss, the snow around the opening melted by the cave’s warm breath.

  I had checked and rechecked our supplies and settled the mules in as well as I could in preparation for our absence. I’d reviewed the route on my mother’s map, all the junctions to look out for, all the blazes that would bring us to our destination. But now, standing on the threshold, the nagging dread I’d been ignoring finally caught up with me.

  Days. In this lightless, enclosed space.

  Celeno was having second thoughts, too. “Gemma, are you sure going in without your mother is a good idea?”

  No, it was probably a terrible idea. I hefted my pack anyway. “It doesn’t matter now—she’s gone.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and stepped forward. “Come on. The sooner we start, the sooner we come out.”

  I hope.

  I ducked under the moss, the plants dripping water down my back as I moved forward. Fortunately, the space opened almost immediately, the ceiling arcing up and then down as the passage sloped away into the darkness. I heard the scrape of Celeno’s pack on the rock as he straightened beside me.

  I didn’t see any sign of the Arachnocampa luminosa, but my eyes were still adjusting from the brightness of sun on snow outside. I took a few steps forward, placing my feet carefully on the damp rocks, trying to ignore the feeling of being swallowed by the mountain. We inched down the incline until finally reaching a bend that would take us out of sight of the entrance. I looked back once over my shoulder at the bright circle of light, familiar and reassuring.