Creatures of Light, Book 3

by Emily B. Martin

  The last straggler veered off on a side road, giving us a brief moment out of earshot of anyone. I lowered my voice.

  “Ellamae told me about the petroglyphs on the Palisades,” I said.

  He glanced sideways at me. “She did?”

  “Yesterday,” I said. “She thinks we should tell Mona.”

  “Mm.” He looked ahead. “I wasn’t even sure I should tell Ellamae. But there wasn’t another way I could send that letter.”

  “I didn’t get that letter.”

  He puffed out his cheeks, his breath swirling in a thick cloud. “It was a long shot, and probably of no consequence at this point. In fact, it may even be for the best.”

  “I don’t know about that—but in related news, we found another set of petroglyphs,” I said. “Celeno and I, on the way here. It was why we took the cave route in the first place. We had reports of another Prophecy.”

  He swiveled his head to me. “And?”

  “And . . . they were nearly useless,” I said. “They were so faded we could barely make out any new information. On their own, they wouldn’t give us any way to change things in Alcoro.”

  “Aside from the fact that a genuine copy really existed, at one point.”

  “Yes, aside from that, I suppose. But it would be hard to drive cohesive change based on that alone. At any rate, I need to see the ones on the Palisades.” I eyed Arlen and Sorcha up ahead—we had nearly caught up to them. “I asked Ellamae to take me up to see them, as soon as possible.”

  Colm looked up at the ominous sky. “It might have to wait if this weather gets worse.”

  “It can’t wait, Colm,” I said. “Not if we want to keep Alcoro from sending troops into Paroa—or destroying Cyprien in the attempt.”

  Sorcha glanced back over her shoulder, her arm threaded through Arlen’s. I fell silent. We walked quietly behind the two, half-listening to the snatches of their conversation. The wall of Blackshell grew nearer.

  “The reclassification of cicadas,” Colm said.

  I twitched my gaze to him at the jump in conversation.

  “Were you ever able to see it through?” he asked.

  “You mean from my thesis?” I asked.

  “Yes. It ended with mere speculation—that cicadas should be assigned to a different order of insect than the grasshoppers and crickets. Were you ever able to get them reclassified?”

  “Oh—yes. They’re now considered a type of true bug,” I said. “A hemipteran, not an orthopteran.”

  “And that’s because of the nature of their song?”

  “Well, no, not exactly. But that’s what got me thinking about its classification. Grasshoppers and crickets stridulate their wings to produce their sound, but cicadas flex a tymbal in their abdomens to produce theirs. Different mechanism.”

  “I see,” he said, nodding with satisfaction. “How clever of you.”

  I warmed with a sliver of pride—it had been a clever find, and I’d made a well-built argument. I’d been up against several loud voices who were convinced the cicada should remain a kind of locust—but in the end, they couldn’t deny my evidence. I smiled as I remembered the joy of that victory—of seeing taxonomy change and new studies spring up, all thanks to my research.

  I struggled to smother my smile. “It satisfied my committee, at least.” I hitched up the hem of his cloak, which had started to slip. “I don’t suppose you ever wrote a thesis?”

  “We don’t have the same education system you have,” he said. “Children here get basic lessons from their parents, and then they attend school until they’re fifteen. Mona and Arlen and I had tutors, but our folk have no academic journals or publications. We only have two book binders on all the twelve islands, and a handful of scribes.”

  “What would you have chosen to study, if you could?”

  “Cultural history,” he said instantly. “The story of people. Bias and belief, why we do what we do over and over again. How perceptions change and behaviors shift, and yet how culture perseveres through it all.”

  “That’s incredible, Colm,” I said, and I meant it. “You’ve obviously already done a lot of work. What resources have you been working from? I might know some of them.”

  “Mm, probably not,” he said. “I’ve only read so much on the subject. The rest of my rattlebrained speculation comes from three years of travel.” His voice carried no change that might remind me that I was the cause of his time away from home. “Listening to musicians and merchants all throughout Winder and Paroa, swapping origin stories with Mae, comparing ballads and nursery rhymes from place to place . . . it’s all given me quite a bit of fuel. We’ve had a smattering of historians and philosophers in Lumen Lake over the years, but a lot of our history is just preserved orally—through songs, mostly, and storytelling. I’ve added to some of our literature, but only a little.” He nodded to the gate guards as we passed through the Blackshell wall. “I always thought, in the back of my mind, that I’d go to Samna someday, and see the university.”

  I sighed in commiseration. “I always wanted to go, too. Celeno and I both did. We thought we’d have plenty of time.”

  But then his father died. His mother poisoned herself. He was crowned. We got married.

  Lumen Lake.

  “I’ve heard the island’s water is so clear you can see ten fathoms below,” he said as we approached the steps to the palace entrance. “And there are iguanas that lounge in the trees like roosting birds.”

  I smiled. “I’ve heard they grow five feet long and can dive like otters.”

  “Dive… in water?”

  “In water.”

  He jerked his head to me. “They can never!”

  I held up a hand in oath. “That’s what I’ve read.”

  “They’re lizards!”

  “So’s an alligator,” I said with a laugh. “And a lot of snakes can swim.”

  He shook his head, his mouth bent in a resolute grin. “Lake-folk have been romanticizing just about every animal that can swim since we first learned to do it ourselves, and I’ve never heard of an iguana diving.”

  “You don’t have iguanas!” I said, still laughing.

  “We don’t have alligators, either!” He caught the heavy door as it swung after Arlen and Sorcha and held it open for me. “I can say with almost absolute certainty that if an iguana could dive, it would be in the Ballad of the Diving Menagerie, which takes a trained choir six hours to sing, and I’ll bet my illuminated copy it’s not included.”

  I stopped in front of him in the doorway, my hands on my hips. “I will take that bet, and I hope you have a second copy of your book.”

  He looked down at me, a smile ghosting his lips—not in Mona’s censored way, but as if it was a genuine expression, quiet but real. “And if I win?”

  I thought for a moment. I hadn’t brought anything with me that could be bartered away.

  “I’ll illustrate an iguana for you,” I said. “Happily sitting in a tree, not diving.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “I think not,” I replied.

  He laughed, almost accidentally, it seemed—it bounded out of him, appearing to surprise him as much as it did me. He cut it off by dropping his gaze to the threshold under our feet. I was shorter than him by enough that I could still see his cheeks rounding as he tried to contain his smile.

  After a moment, he looked up.

  “You’re different than I expected,” he said.

  “I’m sure I seem much bolder on paper,” I said, thinking of my thesis.

  He cocked his head. “I don’t know if I’d say that.”

  “I feel much bolder on paper.”

  “As do I,” he admitted.

  “Sir,” said a voice.

  We both looked around—I realized we were still standing halfway in the open door to Blackshell. Snow flurried past us and over the tiles of the entrance hall.

  An attendant hovered in the hall, shielding a guttering candle against the wind gusting thro
ugh the door. “It’s just . . . the heat.”

  “Of course—my apologies.” Quickly, we both stepped over the threshold, and Colm pulled the door closed behind us. The entrance hall went dim—the attendant hurried on to keep lighting the lamps. Others passed here and there, some with shutter pulls to close errant windows, others with buckets of kindling to stock up for an unforgiving night.

  Back inside and surrounded by people, I put a sudden check on my carefree repartee just a moment before—where had that come from? I looked up at Colm, whose smile crinkles were gone as his gaze flicked around the dim hall.

  “Where can we talk?” I asked quietly. “Really talk?”

  He nodded to the main stairwell. “The library.”

  “Right now?”

  A pair of sharp-heeled footsteps echoed off the walls. Colm turned his head before I did—he must have recognized his sister’s step.

  “I wondered where you’d gone,” Mona said, approaching us. “Celeno is awake, but he won’t talk to me or Mae.” She looked me over. “Is that another one of Colm’s cloaks?”

  I quickly unfastened it and slid it from my shoulders. “It was my own silly fault. I went out without one.”

  “I’ll have someone fetch one that’s your size—I didn’t realize you meant to leave the palace.” She glanced at Colm. “How goes the shipyard?”

  “The yards on the Indigo are all stowed,” he said. “If we can get another clear week, she should be ready to sail by January.”

  “Good. Don’t forget about the solstice singing tonight.” She gestured to me and turned, clearly expecting me to follow. I hesitated, looking back at Colm.

  “After the feast and the singing,” Colm said quietly. “We’ll talk then.”

  I nodded and held out his cloak. He took it, and his fingers bumped mine.

  “Your hands are cold,” I said in surprise.

  He swept his cloak around his shoulders. “Are they?”

  By the time I’d wondered if he was teasing me—was that a joke? Should I laugh? Did I misjudge?—he’d given a short bow and turned to head up a different corridor.

  Mona was disappearing around a corner. I shook myself and hurried after her, a little puzzled, a little jumpy, and—strangely—in significantly higher spirits than I had been that morning.

  Chapter 12

  The conversation between Celeno, Mona, Ellamae, Rou, and myself that afternoon achieved little beyond aggravating everyone. Valien, Arlen, and Colm weren’t present—we’d decided on the smaller group to try to facilitate better discussion, but I soon realized the combination we’d chosen had all the even keel of a ship on fire. Mona and Celeno remained unable to give the other even the slightest leeway, which made Ellamae terse and lippy. Rou made one concerted effort to ease the mood, which backfired spectacularly—culminating in Celeno actually getting out of bed so he could stand eye to eye and return Mona’s shouts. Once we’d finally gotten them to settle down, Rou mostly stayed quiet. All this left me in the awkward position of mediator, trying to navigate Mona’s antagonism, Ellamae’s impatience, Rou’s silence, and Celeno’s persisting anger at me and the world in general.

  “I don’t care if you’re ready to hand them our country—I won’t let them bleed Alcoro to nothing,” he said vehemently as Ellamae stomped out after the others. She had left another mug of some herbal concoction on the bedside table, which he ignored.

  I sighed for the thousandth time that hour. “I’m not trying to hand them the country, Celeno—please stop insinuating I am. I’m just trying to find ways we can all compromise.”

  “They aren’t trying to compromise. They’re trying to wring out everything we’ve worked for to benefit their own countries.”

  “Everything we’ve worked for has come at a lot of costs to them,” I said tiredly. “I don’t like admitting it any more than you, but that’s what we’re dealing with. The only alternative to taking responsibility is pursuing war—and I thought we were trying to avoid that.”

  “To be clear, I’m only getting my head around the idea that was the goal here—remember, I didn’t have the truth of this journey until yesterday, and I’m still not so sure it’s the full truth.” I started to retort, angry, but he pushed on. “Regardless, I’m beginning to think war is the only realistic solution.”

  “It’s not, Celeno. And if you would just try to cooperate a little, we can find an option that benefits all of us.”

  He made a sound of disbelief and ran his sleeve over his sweaty forehead. He looked less haggard after a full night’s sleep and some decent food, but his skin was still sickly and his hands still trembled. He had the quilt pulled up under his chin to ward off the persistent cold seeping in from outside, where the winter snowstorm had only gotten fiercer—already the patio was covered in six inches of snow, and the lake was completely invisible. Mona had grudgingly allowed the soldiers stationed outside his windows to leave their posts. They’d come in blue-lipped and frosted white—the carpet was still drying where they’d trekked across the room to the hall.

  Celeno sneezed and pulled the quilt tighter around him.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Terrible. I told her valerian didn’t work.”

  “You slept,” I pointed out.

  “I slept, but I feel like I was rolled around a rock quarry while I did. I want my poppy tincture—there’s a reason my physician gives it to me.”

  To hobble you, to control you, to keep you functioning like a clockwork toy. I bit back the urge to delve into that futile conversation—in his mood, he would only rebuff it out of anger, and I didn’t have the patience to counter it. “Just keep taking what Ellamae put together for you. She said she added more sweet birch to help with the pain.”

  He turned his head away from the mug cooling on the bedside table. “Alcoro has made the greatest medical achievements in the Eastern World,” he said, “and she accuses us of being backward. Does the Silverwood even have analgesics, or are they still trying to pray sickness away?”

  I bit back another sigh, annoyed by his offensive mood. He looked back at me as I pushed myself off the bed. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to change for supper,” I said. The meal couldn’t come fast enough—not only was I famished again, but the quicker it was over, the quicker I could sit down with Colm and get the full story of the new petroglyphs. “I’m trying, Celeno—really I am. I’m trying to do what I can for Alcoro, and what I can for you. But it would be easier if you could try to reach out to Mona—she’ll be more likely to negotiate your sentence afterward if you do.”

  “Negotiate my what?”

  I stopped an arm’s length from the door. Oh, excellent. Had I just said that out loud?

  “What sentence?” he asked.

  My remaining fortitude drained away, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to crawl under the covers of my bed and stay there until the storm passed—the ones raging both inside and outside the palace. I rubbed my face.

  “Gemma?”

  It’d be nice not to tell him.

  “More secrets, then?” he asked sharply.

  I sighed again and turned partway back to him. “I spoke with her and Rou last night. They mentioned that we need to be prepared for . . . fallout from all this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Sanctions, reparations.”

  “Isn’t that what we just spent an hour arguing about?” he asked.

  “Was it only an hour?”

  “Tell me.” His eyes glittered angrily. “Stop lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying to you, Celeno. I’m just trying to figure out how to tell you this.” I spread my hands. “Mona and Rou said the Assembly of Six will probably want to press charges. Against you. They’re going to want to try you as a war criminal.”

  He stared back at me.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For subjugating two countries,” I said.

  “We took Cyprien thirty years before I was bor
n,” he said.

  I know. I know that it wasn’t your fault, that you didn’t ask for your title, that all these things have been done in your name.

  I know that none of that mattered.

  “What about you?” he asked in my silence. “Are they trying you?”

  I struggled against the reflexive urge to bite my lip. “No, they . . . they want to put me back on the throne.”

  “Of Alcoro?” he asked bluntly.

  “Of course Alcoro.”

  He stared at me. “So they hang me and prop you up on the throne alone?”

  “It’s a prison sentence,” I said hurriedly—not that I expected it to help. “Cyprien doesn’t have a law of execution, and Mona is deferring to the Assembly for the verdict.”

  “Prison for how long?”

  “Life,” I said, the word dry on my tongue.

  He continued to stare. Then, with a quick, angry movement, he wrenched aside the embroidered coverlet.

  “We’re leaving,” he said.

  “What? No, we’re not.”

  “Yes, we are. Unless Mona plans to keep me as a prisoner—which I will happily consider an act of war—we’re done negotiating.”

  “Celeno, please, you’re not well enough to travel . . .”

  “It didn’t stop you from hauling me over and under the length of Alcoro!” He planted his bare feet on the floor and stood, his eyes shadowed against the pallor of his face. He flung an agitated finger toward the closed door. “This is absurd—this is wrong. What about Cyprien violently abducting you and holding you captive? What about Queen Mona sinking our Lumeni fleet and murdering everyone onboard? What about King Valien and Queen Ellamae maneuvering a foreign power to supplant our own? Why am I the war criminal?”

  His final words rang in the guest room, each one bouncing around like the ricochet of shrapnel. I realized my hands were twisted together at my chest, my lips curled shut. I didn’t offer him any answers.

  I couldn’t, because I was still struggling with the same questions.

  After a long silence, he turned away from me and stalked to the wardrobe. “Come on. Put on your travel clothes, so Mona can’t accuse us of stealing.”