Creatures of Light, Book 3

by Emily B. Martin

  My whole body trembled. “I made mistakes. I know I did.” I spread my hands. “But how could I introduce something that changed everything so drastically if I wasn’t sure of the truth? How could I push for something that would change the foundation of our country if I didn’t know for certain what they said?”

  “A scholar through and through,” Celeno said flatly. He finally dropped his fierce gaze from the ceiling down to me. “You idolize research to a fault. Relying only on primary sources, keeping everything hushed up until a hypothesis is upheld—maybe that works in a scientific study, but it doesn’t work like that in the real world.”

  I let my balled fists drop to my sides, and I looked at each one of them in turn. Celeno and Mona, ironically, both wore the same look of angry betrayal. Ellamae and Valien were grave and focused. Rou drooped, tired and sad. Arlen—poor Arlen—still looked pale and frightened.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I tried to make the right choices, but clearly it all went wrong.” I nodded to Mona. “But don’t punish Colm for it. His information didn’t fall into the wrong hands, and he was only trying to find a path to peace.”

  “By keeping secrets, and misleading me,” she said. “After everything, he chose you over me.”

  “He didn’t chose me, or Alcoro. He was only—”

  “He did,” she said firmly. “And it utterly baffles me, and I refuse to let it go. Because when it comes right down to it, Gemma—I notice he’s conveniently left this out of his letters—when it comes down to it, you killed his wife.”

  Chapter 15

  The storm had left the terrace outside Blackshell covered with a crisp blanket of snow eight inches deep. The pale blue sky was streaked with milky clouds that reflected in the lake, but I barely registered the sight. I gazed up instead at the stone statue, carved in the image of a woman with a kind, gentle smile and thick waves of hair. On her head, fixed into the stone, was a crown identical to Mona’s, set with real pearls.

  “Her name was Ama,” Mona said behind me. “They got married the year before your folk invaded. When your ships attacked, and Arlen, Colm, and I fled the palace, she took my crown and went back. She’s the one you executed instead of me.”

  My whole body was numb as I stared up at the Lumeni heroine I’d casually wondered about. I dropped my gaze to her feet, where there were dozens of tokens scattered around the pedestal—a little wooden fish, a pearl brooch, a child’s shoe. Below these was a list of names five columns long—the names of the dead.

  “It happened right here,” she said. She pointed out into the lake. “We were treading water out by the deepwater docks. We watched.”

  I closed my eyes. All this time, all those letters, each one becoming more fuel to fan that spark of hope . . . somehow I had managed to consider myself absolved from the events in Lumen Lake. It had been a policy mistake, but it was over and done now, and we could set things right. Folk had been lost on both sides. The popular report was that the only Lumenis killed during annexation had been those who had chosen to fight. Never mind the report of councilors being executed for refusing to work with our installed government. Never mind the realization, upon the resurfacing of Queen Mona, that we had somehow killed the wrong queen.

  I rubbed both my hands over my face. With a great deal of effort, I turned to face her. She stood at the edge of the water, a cloak wrapped tightly around her shoulders.

  “It divided us,” she said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t really realize it at the time, but losing Ama drove Colm and me in two different directions. For me, it was a constant, burning reminder of the sacrifice she had made to give Lumen Lake a chance—it meant I had to get back. I had no other choice. She had bought me that opportunity, and to pass it up would be to let her die for nothing.”

  She looked up at the statue behind me. “But for Colm, she and the lake both became ghosts. He never wanted to talk about coming back. Oh, he went along with everything I said and planned, but the thought terrified him. I thought he would settle back into it, that he would somehow find his feet again. But he hasn’t, and now I realize he never planned to. He’s had his eyes set down the river since we arrived back on the shore.”

  “But he’s stayed,” I said. “He’s stayed because he’s loyal to you.”

  “He’s stayed because he has no other choice,” she said. “He’s stayed because he’s too afraid to leave.”

  “That’s not true,” I said quietly.

  “How would you know?”

  I had no answer for her. My lips moved soundlessly, full of wordless protestations. She gazed at me impassively.

  “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know him. And you can pretend to understand what happened here, Gemma—you can pretend to understand the crimes of war, the loss of culture and economy, the personal loss to families and individuals and me and my brother—but you don’t know.”

  Wrapping her cloak a little tighter, she turned and began retracing the two lines of footsteps in the snow.

  “May I go see him?” I called after her, knowing the answer.

  “No.”

  I held back the please that rose in my throat, watching her trudge back to the palace, leaving me alone by the silent statue of Ama Alastaire.

  “Arlen.”

  I’d caught him at a corner, and he stumbled over his feet as he reeled backward. “Gemma!”

  He still had that bloodless look to him, his movements furtive and quick, like a creature who knows it’s under the eye of a hawk. I added another layer to my guilt—his brother and sister were perhaps the only two rocks in his life, and I’d torn them apart. I felt guiltier, though, for exploiting his shock for my own ends.

  But not guilty enough not to do it anyway.

  “I need to see your brother,” I said. “But they won’t let me in without permission.”

  “What does Mona say?” he asked automatically.

  “She’s busy,” I lied. “Please—won’t you give me a note, or a token?”

  He wavered at the corner.

  “N . . . no,” he said, as if trying out the word. It hung in the air between us. He stepped backward. “No. I’m sorry, but—no.”

  He made a wide berth around me and continued hurriedly down the hall. I could have called after him, tried to tug at his heart, asked him to do it for his brother’s sake—but I didn’t have the courage.

  And besides, I was a little proud of him.

  “Good for you,” I murmured, my eyes tearing.

  My boots flapped loosely around my ankles, making my footsteps echo off the stone walls. They were wet from the trek in the deep snow to the prison, and the guards at the door had stripped the bootlaces off after a thorough search of my person. They’d been reluctant to let me in, but they couldn’t doubt the seal carved into the mother-of-pearl ring I clutched in my frozen fist. They let me pass.

  The cells were built of burly fieldstone blocks, with bars blocking the sides buffering the narrow corridor. Oily lanterns guttered, and the place was as cold as the cave had been despite a fire smoldering in a central hearth. But what was more startling was the low ceiling—Colm had surely had to keep his head ducked as he was brought through. Between that and the narrow corridor, and my own inner feeling of entrapment, my body was tight with suppressed claustrophobia. I passed a long row of empty cells until I came to the one at the end. Taking a breath, I stepped into view.

  Colm was sitting on the cot along the back wall, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his hands in his lap. He looked up.

  “Gemma,” he said. My name released in a cloud of breath in front of his face. “How did you get in?”

  I held out the mother-of-pearl ring. He squinted at it in the dim light.

  “That’s Arlen’s.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s Sorcha’s. I saw her wearing it in the shipyard. Arlen must have given it to her as a token of his affection.”

  He looked up at me. “How did you convince her to give it to you?”

>   “I offered to put her in charge of the board overseeing Alcoran reparations,” I said. “She made me sign three separate statements saying I would.” Carefully I tucked the ring back in my pocket. “She’s a smart one.”

  He gazed up at me, his eyes flicking over my face. “Did you show them the letters?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And then Mona told me about Ama.”

  In a slow motion, he turned his head and rested it back against the stone wall, letting out a long breath.

  We both spoke at the same time, and we spoke the same words.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I . . .” he began.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t . . .”

  A short pause followed.

  “Let me go first,” he said.

  “No, let me,” I said. “Don’t apologize to me for not saying anything about Ama. It wasn’t something I had a right to know.”

  “Then you don’t get to apologize for her death.”

  “I do, and I will.” I curled my fingers around the cold metal bars. “I’m sorry, Colm, in every possible respect. But it doesn’t matter, because no apology will ever, ever be enough. So here’s what else I’ll apologize for—I’m sorry for not giving adequate thought to my own role in the invasion of Lumen Lake. I’m sorry for relying on your goodwill to solve the problems caused by my country. And I’m sorry for ruining things so badly—for taking the opportunity you opened and turning it right back in to more suffering.”

  “By the Light, Gemma.” He swung his legs off the cot and crossed the cell in two strides. “Do you think I don’t take equal blame? I made plenty of mistakes, too. If my transcription had been better, if I had thought to make rubbings, we might not be in this mess. I thought I was keeping the petroglyphs from Mona in the interest of national security, but if we’re being honest, it’s because I was afraid. I knew I was betraying her, and I was afraid to tell her.”

  I blew out my breath and leaned against the edge of the cell door, struggling against his corroboration of his sister’s accusations. Afraid.

  I closed my eyes, the cold stone biting through my cloak.

  “I wonder,” I said, “if there is no such thing as bravery—if it’s just fear coming from a different direction.”

  “You were brave to come here.”

  “No, I was just afraid. Like you. And I’m still afraid.” I rubbed my eyes. “I’ve always been afraid.”

  He curled his fingers around the metal bars. “But . . . the thing is, at least you moved forward anyway. I don’t think bravery is the absence of fear. Bravery is being afraid and taking action anyway. You’ve done that.”

  “Your letters made me less afraid,” I said. “They made me feel like I could make decisions again, like maybe the Prophecy doesn’t give divinity to his actions and nothing to mine.” I closed my eyes. “But that must not be true, because every decision I’ve made has only made things worse.”

  Colm didn’t answer, and when I opened my eyes, he was staring into the middle distance. I looked around in the corridor for a bench or stool but found none, so I crossed my legs and sank to the floor. He did the same on the other side of the bars.

  I leaned my head back against the stone. “Your cells are very small,” I said softly.

  He looked wearily around. “Yes, they are, aren’t they?”

  “I hate small spaces,” I said.

  He turned to me again. I ran the back of my sleeve over my nose.

  “My mother was arrested for treason when I was eight,” I said. “Did I tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she was. She was part of a group of political dissenters who would meet and discuss the Prophecy. One of them was caught setting fire to a banner of the petroglyphs, and he panicked and ratted out the whole group. The soldiers questioned them one by one and found most of them guilty only of verbal dissension. They got fines and a warning. My mother got word they were coming for her—she assumed, since she hadn’t been involved in anything beyond just talk, that her sentence would be similar. But she didn’t want them to see me—I’d been around for a lot of their meetings. What if they questioned me? What if they took me away? So she opened up a cupboard and told me to hide and not come out until she told me it was safe.

  “So I got inside,” I said. Slowly I dragged my feet up so my knees touched my chest. “I sat like this. I heard the soldiers come. I heard them question her, though I couldn’t make out their words. Then it all turned in to shouting. I heard them struggle. Something broke. And then it went quiet. It went quiet for a long time.”

  I rubbed my knees, my calves. “My legs cramped and went numb, but I couldn’t straighten them. The air got hot and thick. I waited and waited for my mother’s voice, telling me I could come out. But it never came, and finally I couldn’t take sitting like that any longer. I reached up to push the door open.”

  I remembered that feeling, that anticipation of relief from my building pain, thinking I’d endured all I could endure—only to find it had just begun.

  “The door wouldn’t open,” I said. “The latch on the outside had fallen down. I pushed and pushed, but it wouldn’t budge. I pounded on the wood, I shouted, but no one came.”

  The day had grown longer—first the cupboard grew stifling hot, so that I pressed my mouth against the crack in the door, trying to reach fresh air, and then it grew cold and dark. The blood pooled in my legs—when I squeezed my feet, I couldn’t feel them. I grew desperately thirsty. I wet myself.

  “I was there for fifteen hours,” I said.

  “How did you get out?” asked Colm.

  “My aunt, my mother’s sister, came looking for me. She knew I should be there, despite the soldiers saying they hadn’t seen me. When I heard her come in, I used my last bit of energy to knock and call again. She unlatched the door.”

  Sometimes I wondered if that first glimpse hadn’t colored her opinion of me for the rest of my life. I’d fallen out of the cupboard, crying, at first unable to uncurl myself, and then unable to stand for another hour. I stank of sweat and urine. I was incoherent and inconsolable. She had gotten me a cup of water and a corn cake and waited while I worked on them, sobbing the whole time. Until finally, she’d had enough.

  Stop it, Gemma, she said. Great Light, you’re out now. Stop.

  “What happened?” Colm asked. “Did she take care of you?”

  I thought for a moment. “She took charge of me. I don’t know that I’d call it care.”

  Stop crying. Sit still. Be quiet. Pull your sleeves down. Do nothing to throw shadow on the Prelate or the Seventh King.

  “There was one quality, I think, that she valued in me,” I said. “And that was my tendency to do as I was told. More than anything, I think that was why she was so set on crowning me queen. Because she knew I wouldn’t get in Celeno’s way. She made sure I understood that his success was my entire purpose, and then she stepped back and let the rest fall into place.” I ran the heel of my hand under my eyes. “And I know it’s wrong, but I can’t stop feeling that way—that everything I do must be for his benefit. But now I’ve lost him, and I’ve set everyone else against me, and I have no idea what to do next.”

  Inside the prison, it was quiet. I rested my chin on my knees.

  “What do you want to do next?” Colm asked.

  Mona’s voice echoed in my head. “What I want doesn’t matter.”

  “It might not change anything,” he admitted. “But if you could do anything at all, what would you do? Would you go to Samna?”

  I gazed down the hall, my arms wrapped around my legs. White beaches. Warm sun. Iguanas that dove like otters, and scholars who consumed and produced knowledge like it was the very air they breathed.

  “If I could do anything at all?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d stay,” I said. “I’d go back to Alcoro, and I’d see her settled. I’d take a breath in my own country, at peace with itself—Prophecy or no. That’s still what I want
. Samna was a beautiful distraction, but I don’t know that I could actually get on the boat and sail away. I want my own life in my own country, not a salvaged life in another.”

  He gave a little sigh and rubbed his hand over his beard. I looked at him through the bars—we were sitting almost shoulder to shoulder on either side of the cell door.

  “A little far-fetched, I know,” I said.

  “It shouldn’t have to be.” He sighed again. “Has Mona given any indication that she’s taking action against you?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Then will you do me a favor?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Go to my room. It’s the second one in the royal wing. The letters you wrote me are in the trunk under the window, folded inside a copy of Our Common Origin. Take them to Mona—it might convince her that you’ve only been trying to help.”

  “All right,” I said. “If you think they’ll help.”

  “I do. But then . . . there’s something else. Something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but haven’t built the courage. At this point I don’t know that I will.”

  “What’s that?”

  He took a breath. “On the bedside table, there’s a little box. Wooden, with a fish on it. Inside is a ring.” He held up his pinkie. “It’s small, with five pink pearls set into it. It’s Ama’s. I carried it around with me all throughout our exile, and I put it away once I got back. I kept thinking I would dedicate it, but any time I went to open the box, I stopped. Will you take it out for me, and put it on her statue?”

  I ducked my head. “I don’t think I’m the right person,” I said.

  “Please,” he said. “I can’t do it myself. And at this point, under these circumstances—” He waved at the cell around him. “I’ve done her memory enough dishonor.”

  “She died to save the lake from Alcoro,” I whispered. “You’ve been working for the same thing.”

  “And I’ve managed to rip apart the monarchy she was trying to save,” he said. “Please, Gemma.”