A hitch of breath was Anton’s only reply. The silence deepened between them.
And then: “Jude…”
A tension that sounded almost like pain wracked Anton’s voice. A staccato breath punctured the air. Then silence again.
Jude turned away from the wall separating them. There was nothing Anton could say that would change the truth. Jude had failed. It didn’t matter what happened to him now.
46
HASSAN
Hassan led the procession from the steps of the Temple of Pallas to the site below the agora where they’d dug the grave. The refugees and other acolytes kissed their palms and held them out as they passed along the weaving path.
Earlier, Hassan had stood in the temple as they washed Emir’s body in the scrying pool. Just as every squalling baby was washed in the temple scrying pool, so was every still and silent corpse. The First and Last Waters.
When the washing was done, an acolyte with the Grace of Blood drew the patterns of unbinding on Emir’s body with sweet-smelling chrism oil. The others dressed him in the traditional lilac robes of the acolytes, and tied the sash into a special knot that symbolized the flow of esha from the body back into the world. They cut a lock from his gray hair and sealed it in a bottle of chrism oil.
“He would have wanted you to have it,” the acolyte said as he pressed the blue jeweled bottle into Hassan’s hand.
Hassan didn’t deserve this reliquary, the last token of Emir’s life. He took it nonetheless, slipping it into his breast pocket, beside his father’s compass and his heart.
The sun was high and hot above as they reached the grave and laid Emir inside. Seven torches were lit and planted in the ground beside it.
Hassan wiped the sweat trickling from his brow as one of the other acolytes faced the mourners and began to speak.
“We bless this esha, the sacred energy that was Emir, and pray for its release and safe return into the earth. May it be guided by the Grace of the Prophet without a name, who wandered the Earth, the protector of all the forgotten, the nameless, the lost.”
The blessing had been spoken in some form at funerary rites all over the world for centuries, but today Hassan felt like it was meant for him, too. What was he, besides lost? He thought he’d been following a path, one laid out for him by the Prophets a century ago, only to find he’d been led astray.
He thought he’d seen his destiny before him, clear and vivid, but it had dissolved like smoke. Emir was supposed to stand beside Hassan when they took back Nazirah from the Witnesses. Instead, he was in a grave. He’d been wrong about Hassan. And it had cost him his life.
Afternoon deepened into twilight as they filled Emir’s grave with earth. Those who’d followed the procession to the gravesite slowly departed back to the agora. Hassan remained. The Guard kept their distance, perhaps in deference to Hassan’s grief. But it was guilt, not grief, that kept him beside the grave. Guilt and shame.
The scent of earth and citrus perfumed the air as someone drew up beside him. Khepri. They stood for a moment in silence, faces to the disappearing sun.
“I know it’s hard,” Khepri began haltingly. “I cared for him, too. But Prince Hassan, please—now is not the time to lose sight of what we’re doing.”
Hassan didn’t look at her. He knew what was coming. He’d avoided her and everyone else as much as he could over the past few days. He didn’t know what to say to any of them. How to unravel the things he’d set in motion with his hope and hubris and lies.
“You’ve missed strategy meetings,” Khepri said. “You’ve barely spoken to the soldiers, even though now is when they need to hear from you most. The Order has already set sail, and your aunt’s ships are ready. As awful and as cruel as it is, we don’t have time for you to grieve, Hassan.”
“I know.” His voice came out hoarse, unfeeling.
“Emir believed in you and in our cause. He wanted us to fight. He would still want that now, when we’re so close to the future that you saw. You can’t—”
“He was there,” Hassan said. “In my vision. Emir was there. Beside me, on the lighthouse. He was there.”
Shock and disbelief flickered in her eyes.
“I saw him there, with me, watching our forces take on the Witnesses,” he went on. “But now he is gone. How can the vision be true if I saw myself standing beside a man whose body we just buried?”
“That—that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean that none of it—”
“It does!” Hassan roared. Everything he’d been hiding since the Witnesses’ attack came bubbling to the surface. Every thought that had chased through his mind. Every doubt he hadn’t allowed himself to have before. They poured out of him, soaked in days of guilt and shame and rage. “I believed that what I saw was the future, my destiny, a way to stop the Age of Darkness. But it was a ridiculous, naive dream. Lethia was right. I wanted so badly to believe that dream, but I can’t any longer.” He closed his eyes. He knew what he had to do, but it meant giving up everything.
“What are you saying?” Khepri asked, her voice trembling in desperation.
“I am not the Last Prophet, Khepri,” Hassan said. “I don’t have any answers—not for you, not for the Guard, and not for the people who stand behind me. If I were the Prophet, I would know it. If I had a Grace, I would feel it. But I don’t. There’s nothing powerful in me. It’s time I stop pretending there is.”
“You want to give up on fighting the Witnesses?” Betrayal cracked through her words. “Hassan, you can’t. The Order is the key to winning Nazirah back. If you tell them this, it’s all over. They won’t fight for us, not if they don’t believe it will fulfill their prophecy.”
“I know. I know what I am giving up.” Without the Guard behind him, without Khepri at his side, without their army standing before him, he had nothing. “But I can’t lie to them and send them into battle in the same breath.”
“You don’t know it’s a lie! Just because part of your vision was false doesn’t mean you’re not—”
“I know enough,” Hassan said. “Enough to doubt. Enough that I know I should tell them, rather than let more people lose their lives for the sake of a lie.”
Emir, who had given his life for a lie, who had believed in him, had told him he fit all the signs of the prophecy. Now when Hassan thought back on that conversation, he wanted to laugh. The lights in the sky. The prophecy of Nazirah. Had he really been so convinced by a handful of coincidences? Had he been so eager to believe it?
People believed what they wanted to believe. When it seemed like the Last Prophet had come at last, the Order of the Last Light had not questioned it. They had wanted him to be the Prophet, to believe their savior had come. Hassan had wanted it, too. And it had been so easy to convince himself it was true.
“Even if you aren’t the Prophet, you are still the Prince of Herat,” Khepri said fiercely. “We don’t need a vision of the future to tell us it’s our destiny to stand against the Witnesses. It is already our destiny. It was written when they took Nazirah. When they used their Godfire to torture our people. When they attacked us here. As long as the Witnesses have the Godfire flame, and the Hierophant walks the Earth, all the Graced are in danger. Think of your family, Hassan. Your parents. If you do this … the lives of every person with Grace living in Herat will be forfeited.”
“Do you think I haven’t considered that?” Anger burst in his chest. Anger was so much easier, so much simpler, than the grief that threatened to rend his heart in two.
But Khepri lifted her chin, refusing to be cowed. “I think you are still afraid. Whether that vision was true or false, I bound my fate to yours when I came here to Pallas Athos.” She reached out and cupped his face between her hands, the same way he had done to her after the Witnesses’ attack. “You may not be the chosen Prophet, but you are still the one I chose. So tell me—was that a mistake, too? Did I choose the wrong man?”
I don’t know, he thought helplessly, swallowing hard. With
careful, measured motions, he raised his hands to hers and pulled them away from him.
“I don’t know why you chose me,” he said. “I don’t know why you would choose me, even now.” He pressed her hands back against her chest and released her. “But the others deserve to have the same choice.”
Hurt and betrayal clouded her face.
“I want you to gather the army and the Guard outside the temple tonight,” Hassan said. “I will speak with them. We will see what they decide.”
He started to walk away from her, past the ancient stone markers that lined the graveyard. Ahead, a bright torchlight wobbled, picking its way through the gravesite toward him.
“I thought I would find you here.” It was Lethia. The light cast shadows on her long face.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lethia replied. “I came to tell you the ships are ready to set sail for Nazirah tomorrow morning. I’ll depart for Charis then, too, as planned.”
Tomorrow morning. There was no time. No time to think this through, any of it.
“Khepri, go gather the others.” He didn’t look at her as he spoke. “The army and the Guard. I need to speak with my aunt.”
Khepri didn’t move. “Hassan, think about what you’re doing, please—”
“Khepri.”
She stiffened at his brusque tone. “Yes, Your Grace.”
The honorific twisted in his gut, but Hassan didn’t let it show as Khepri stalked off into the night.
He turned to Lethia once they were alone. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“There’s been word from Nazirah,” Lethia said hesitantly. “A source inside the city.”
The words jolted through Hassan like lightning.
“And?”
Lethia’s expression was grave. “The Hierophant ordered the execution of the king. The sentence was carried out two days ago.”
Hassan’s heart stuttered. That couldn’t be right. His father was waiting for him, waiting for Hassan to free him from the Witnesses. Together, they would take their country back.
“Your father is dead, Hassan,” Lethia said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
The words echoed hollowly around him, drowning out every other sound. He thought of the Hierophant, of the Godfire burns on Reza’s body, of the flames licking at the Temple of Pallas. The image of Emir’s face swam before him—pale and still in death. The image morphed, and it was not Emir’s face that he saw, but Hassan’s father’s. The laughter and wonder in his eyes when he’d watched Hassan and his mother spar in the palace training yard. The crease of his brow as he’d shaped gears and wire and glass together in the palace workshop. The small, private smile that told Hassan he’d done something to please him. A smile Hassan would never see again.
Each memory made his blood burn hotter.
“Hassan?”
He looked up at his aunt, the stern set of her features made soft by wide, concerned eyes. Eyes the same color as her brother’s. As Hassan gazed into them, he saw his father looking back.
He touched a shaking hand to the compass in his breast pocket.
He knew exactly what he would do.
“I swear,” he said, “I will do everything in my power to make the Hierophant pay for this. We sail for Nazirah tomorrow. And he better be ready for us.”
47
BERU
The crack of steel striking wood split the air.
Beru’s eyes flew open. Inches from her head, Hector’s sword hung, half buried in the trunk of the sycamore.
She was unharmed. Shock and relief overwhelmed her, buckling her knees. She slid to the ground, shaking. Her eyes found Hector standing beside the tree, face turned away, body held in tension, breath coming in ragged bursts.
“I can’t,” he said, his voice wracked with pain. He, too, was shaking. “I can’t.”
Tears bit at the corners of her eyes. She could not speak.
Hector slowly raised his dark eyes to hers. “I can’t kill you. Why can’t I kill you?”
She shook her head. Hector pulled his sword free from the tree trunk.
“I have to do this,” he said, his voice quavering. “If I do … I can stop it.”
Stop what? Beru wanted to ask, but nothing came out of her mouth.
His eyes met hers again. “What was it you said? That killing you won’t bring my family back? I know that. You think I came after you for revenge. That’s what Jude thought, too. But you’re both wrong. The death of my family is what brought me to you, but they’re not why you have to die.”
“Then why?” she asked at last. She needed to know. Not why she had to die, but why she was alive. Somehow, she knew the answer was the same.
Hector took a shaking breath. “I was brought to the Order of the Last Light after my family died. They raised me, trained me, and when the time came, I took an oath and joined their ranks. I learned the secret they’ve been keeping for a century. A prophecy.”
A chill shivered through her, as though the heat of the evening sun had momentarily evaporated.
“There’s another prophecy?” The idea was too huge to wrap her mind around.
“The prophecy predicts an end to the Graced and the destruction of the world as we know it,” Hector said. “An Age of Darkness, brought by three harbingers. A deceiver. The pale hand of death.”
A gasp rose in her throat.
“And the last harbinger of the Age of Darkness,” Hector said slowly. “‘That which sleeps in the dust shall rise.’”
It was her. The moment the words left his lips, she knew. The truth of what she was obliterated all other thought.
She was a creature of darkness.
“I should do it.” Hector gripped his sword tighter. “I should end your life. Kill you to stop the Age of Darkness from coming.”
He moved suddenly toward her. Beru flinched instinctively. But when she looked back, it was his hand, and not the sword, he held out to her.
She took it, hesitant, and let him pull her to her feet.
He sheathed his sword. “But I can’t. I can’t end a life, even one that shouldn’t be here.”
Beru stood facing him, her hand hooked around her wrist, covering the dark handprint by habit. It was a moment before she found her voice. “I’m going to die soon anyway. It doesn’t matter if it’s you or…” She shook her head. “Ephyra was the thing keeping me alive. Without her, I’m going to die.”
His dark eyes were locked on hers, and Beru could still see pain and grief there. And something else.
“Then I’ll stay with you,” he said. “Until the end.”
Beru closed her eyes. She thought about the silent village around them. About the bodies marked with the pale handprint. About Ephyra—her loud bark of a laugh and the way they’d traded barbs and shared gripes, carving out a life together in the rotten, forgotten corners of cities.
She thought about her sister’s blood-soaked hands, her own bone-tired weariness, and the slow whittling down of their hope.
“Until the end,” she echoed.
In the village of the dead, they waited.
48
HASSAN
Hassan traced his finger over the map to the image of the lighthouse. “This is where we drop anchor.”
The others—Petrossian, Osei, Penrose, Khepri, and Lethia’s son Cirion, looked at him with various expressions of exhaustion. They’d been at this for hours now, and hours the day before, hashing and rehashing the plan. By now, they’d all grown tired of the cramped, seasick navigation room of the Cressida. More than that, they’d grown tired of the endless discussion. They’d gone over every detail of their attack a dozen times.
“The Artemisia will dock before sunrise. Yarik, Annuka, and Faran will wait for the Order’s ships to arrive, then lead the assault on the harbor,” Hassan said, pointing. “Meanwhile, we’ll be behind the lighthouse, so we won’t be visible from the palace. Khepri and I will go up into the lighthouse to scout the palace
and the harbor. We’ll signal you to disembark and make your way to the palace.”
“The Witnesses are either keeping the Godfire flame in the High Temple or somewhere in the palace, I’d bet,” Khepri added. “We can start there.”
Penrose nodded. “The Order’s ships will arrive at dawn. They’ll wipe out the Witnesses’ forces on shore and take the harbor while we search for the Godfire flame.”
“There’s no margin for error,” Petrossian said.
“We all came here for the same reason,” Cirion said. “Myself and my crew included. By this time tomorrow, Nazirah’s rightful ruler will reign.”
Hassan glanced at his elder cousin, whom he remembered from his visits to the Palace of Herat, when Hassan was very young. Yet Cirion—now Captain Siskos—had answered Hassan’s call for aid without hesitation and at great personal risk. He may have been only half-Herati, but he was as loyal as any countryman.
“We’ll be in sight of land soon,” Cirion went on. “We should all try and get some rest in the next few hours.”
Every muscle in Hassan’s back stiffened in protest when he straightened up from hunching over the map. He nodded farewell to the others as they shuffled out of the navigation room. Hassan stayed. Tomorrow, he would see his city again for the first time in over a month.
Departing Pallas Athos had been bittersweet. Many of the soldiers had bid farewell to their families, who had boarded the Order’s ship to sail for the Gallian Mountains and seek protection at Kerameikos Fort. It was difficult but necessary to part with them. If Hassan failed—and only he and Khepri knew how possible failure was—then it would be more important than ever for his people to have somewhere safe to go.
Azizi, his mother, and his baby sister were among the refugees who’d departed for Kerameikos.
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