Tears welled in my eyes, and my father must have noticed them. “Don’t cry,” he said. “This is a time to celebrate, not to cry. I know that you think this move will be painful. But the people you are leaving behind are servants. You don’t have any real friends, so it won’t hurt to move the way you think. At the palace there will be more appropriate friends, and your life will be better.”
That didn’t make me any less sad, but I knew my father would be happier if I held back my tears, so I did. I didn’t want the last thing he saw as he walked out of the house to take on his new responsibilities to be the crying daughter he left behind him.
Chapter 3
Sperrin
Powder River Campaign: Ten years before the Loss
After the massacre at Powder Gap that all-but ended the Powder River Campaign, Nemias and I were both decorated again, and put on the short list for promotion to captain-general. But that battle had burned the killing out of me—or at least that’s what I tried to convince myself. It let me pretend that I wasn’t on the edge of becoming a monster. I hadn’t lost my love of killing, or the enjoyment I got from it, but what I felt it was doing to me terrified me in a way no enemy ever had—the kind of husband and father I was afraid I was about to become. Nemias was the only one I told about my conversation with Khemme asking her to request my transfer away from the front.
I didn’t really expect him to understand, and he didn’t. He told me he thought I was an idiot and why he thought so. Then we got gloriously drunk, and he told me he’d support whatever I decided, idiot or not. “Go if you need to,” he said. “You’ll be back.” We were both drunk, but the words stayed with me. Then we didn’t say another word about it over the next few months of mopping up, while I waited for the Empress’s decision. When I went on leave to see my family I dreaded my homecoming, but I had no idea I wouldn’t be coming back to my command again.
Nemias and I didn’t meet again for ten years. I think he kept his distance out of respect for my choice. Mostly what we had in common was killing, and I think he knew it would be too easy for him to draw me back into that life, despite everything I had given up to get away from it.
Besides, he had already told me he knew I would be back.
As it turned out, he was right.
* * * *
The last night before my leave began, I received an unexpected visitor. The junior officers had thrown me an unofficial “sendoff party,” knowing that I would be leaving in the morning, and that the extended victory celebration of soft duty that the campaign’s end had become would be over. Nemias had left early, pleading morning duties, but I had stayed to the end.
I stepped into my quarters, a little tipsy, definitely more relaxed than I had been in some time.
Immediately my blade was in my hand. “Who’s there?” I said.
“It’s me. You know me.” A familiar voice.
A light came on without my touching it, illuminating the room.
Nolene, my sister-in-law, sat in one of my two chairs, leaning against the back wall of the small room. “We need to talk, Sperrin,” she said.
“Why?” I asked warily. I lowered my blade, though.
“I think you know,” she said. She didn’t look angry, exactly. Disappointed. Her eyes darkening like a storm waiting to break. “You are about to destroy my sister’s life. Maybe mine as well. Isn’t that something that merits a conversation?”
“Destroy?” I said. That didn’t sound anything like what I had done. “I am trying not to hurt her. All I asked is to leave this place, with her, and to heal. Together.”
“And what makes you think she would want to leave with you?” asked Nolene, one eyebrow arched.
Again, the question baffled me. “We’re married. We go where the Empress orders. Together.”
“Just like that. Has it occurred to you she might be happier when you are away?”
It hadn’t occurred to me. How could it? Since the day I had opened the first leaf of the engagement token, I had never thought that we would do anything but spend our lives together. Weren’t we meant for each other? That was exactly why the violent impulses I felt toward her disturbed me so much.
“Oh, come now,” she said, seeing my disbelieving expression. “You can’t be that naive, can you?”
I continued to stare.
She laughed bitterly. “You really are that naive. Brilliant soldier, toy of the Empress, able to read the enemy’s mind. And you honestly believe Sefa loves you.”
“But...how could she not? How could anyone not? We were engaged.”
“You were. I made the tokens myself—a special honor from the Empress, because she favored me and my sister. Not for much longer, after what you’ve done. Something you may not know: There’s a charm on the tokens that makes the person they’re intended for want to open them. Only, if the person doesn’t want to open it and she’s the person you love most in the world, maybe you don’t put the charm on.” Her eyes grew stormier as she talked, though the anger still didn’t show on her face, only in her voice and eyes.
“She never opened the engagement token? How is that even possible? Don’t they check?”
“They check if the token has been opened, of course. But I made it, so of course I could unmake it. It was easy enough to discharge the magic. Who would question me when I said my sister discharged it herself? They heard what they expected to hear.”
That stumped me. “Why wouldn’t Sefa want to be married?” I asked.
“Because she already loved someone else, you idiot. You think she wanted to forget the love of her life just because some soldier-of-the-week has won a few battles and caught the Empress’s attention? Sefa already knew her heart. She married you because she had to, and pretended to love you because you weren’t home very often and didn’t ask for too much. And every time you went back to battle she could be herself again.” Nolene held up a hand to forestall a response. “She didn’t hate you, if that’s what you’re thinking. She even came to like you a little, I think. Respect you at least, which is more than I would have. And as long as there was no hope, she could act the part well enough that you believed it.”
“But...?” None of this made any sense, but why would Nolene lie? Why would she tell me she’d lied to the Empress and cheated on her orders? Why ask for a death sentence?
“But last fall, her true love finally managed to leave his wife behind and move near Whitmount—near enough for a channeler whose husband only came home twice a year. I had made his engagement token too, you see. And I discharged it the same way I did with Sefa’s. Once he lived nearby her duties let her travel a lot”—duties that Nolene arranged, as the senior channeler in Whitmount, I knew—“and she was finally happy again. And then last winter you came home and you knew. I don’t know how but she could see it in your eyes, in the way you looked at her. You knew and you never said anything, just glared at her like you wanted to kill her.”
I did want to kill her, I thought, but didn’t say it. “I didn’t know.” Which was true, as far as it went.
Nolene looked at me disbelievingly.
“If you didn’t know, why send what you did to the Empress? And why send it through some regimental half-channeler instead of through me so I could make sure it never got any farther? Because of the way you sent it there will be an investigation, and everything will come out.”
“Why would it?” I asked. “And why should I help keep your secrets if you’ve been lying to me for all these years?”
Now she smiled, like a feral cat looking at its intended prey. “Because,” she said, “you don’t know the official reason I’m here. And if you say a word of what I’ve told you, it won’t just destroy Sefa and me, it will destroy your favorite comrade in arms.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Empress’s order that brought me here. The order that will already be carried out when she hears what you did. The order that will save my life. Tonight I was engaged to the most recent unma
rried war hero to catch the Empress’s fancy. Your friend Overcaptain Nemias opened the engagement token when he returned from your going away party.” She didn’t even try to hide the disgust in her voice.
Neither did I. “What happened to your token?” I asked.
“I still have it,” she said. “Channelers are given a lot of latitude—it’s assumed no one needs to fool us into looking at the tokens, as long as they’re discharged afterward. And I’ve had practice at discharging one undetected. I’m sure if Sefa can fool you for so many years I’ll have little difficulty fooling your dance partner. Especially since he’ll love me as completely as you loved Sefa, and be home just as little.”
“You’re right,” I said. “He will believe you. He will love you utterly.”
I lifted my arm swiftly. The dark edge of my blade touched her throat. We both held utterly still. A trickle of blood dripped down her neck and onto her shoulder.
“Now, very slowly, take out the token,” I said. “I know how magic works. I am very good at killing enemy channelers, and right now, you are an enemy. Try to use your magic and this blade finishes you.” I applied the tiniest pressure. More blood flowed.
Slowly, she took the token out from the folds of her tunic.
The storm had passed. I saw real fear in her eyes.
“Now take the first leaf,” I said. “You know how.”
Her face widened in shock as what I wanted her to do hit her. More blood touched her shoulder.
Slowly, she lifted the first leaf.
Involuntarily, she relaxed.
“Now the next one,” I said.
After the third one, I didn’t need to say anymore. Nolene never noticed as I withdrew my blade and wiped the edge clean of her blood. She was too caught up in her blossoming love for my friend, my friend who could never, ever know that I had done this, or that his wife’s love was anything but willing.
He deserved that. She—I wasn’t sure what she deserved, but I felt no sympathy for Nolene. Especially when she left my quarters filled with love and excitement at the thought of marrying the man she now knew to be her soulmate.
In spite of everything, in spite of the secret about my own wife that I would have to pretend not to know for Nemias’s sake, I slept better than I had in months.
Chapter 4
Ketya
The Drowned City: Ten years before the Loss
Much of the Drowned City hadn’t survived the Holy War. It had another name then, Seacliff, but people stopped calling it that after gods sunk the great cliffs into the ground in an attempt to shorten their siege. They summoned great waves that swept walls away, and massive sea creatures that ravaged the city’s fishing fleet. Still, the Drowned City continued to fight. When the war ended, the city, still half-submerged, was named capital of the Ananyan Empire as a last act of defiance to the withdrawing gods.
The sea creatures never left, so the city’s residents fortified the harbor, and replaced the fishing fleet with a seaborne hunting fleet. They built great levees to hold back the tides from the remaining neighborhoods, and built massive walls to withstand storms and sieges. Bounded by ocean and river, they built upward instead of outward: The city’s heart became a sea of towers and tall houses, in the shadow of a massive palace—built on top of the half-ruined structure that had withstood the worst the Holy War could throw at it.
The series of wars Ananya had fought with the surrounding nations since the Holy War had taken place far from the Drowned City. Over the years the empire’s capital had prospered, had been made as beautiful as a half-submerged, sea-monster-infested city could be made.
That much, every kid my age in Ananya knew. Before my mother died, the capitol had been a faraway, exotic place. Now it would be home.
* * * *
As it turned out, my journey to the palace in the Drowned City took a lot longer than my father’s. Cable-carriages carried people quickly throughout the developed part of the Ananyan Empire but an almost-ten-year-old girl accompanying a household worth of possessions had no need to travel fast. I took a flatboat downriver to the sea, where my guards and I became the sole passengers on a refrigerated vegetable transport ship traveling between the vast farm belt on Ananya’s eastern coastal plain and the capital city at the edge of the jagged cliffs to the north.
Much as I loved the sea voyage at first, it got monotonous after a few days of slowly churning along the coast. The soldiers and the ship’s sparse crew didn’t really want to talk, and the ship’s channeler, an ancient woman who crocheted endless pairs of mittens in the ship’s bridge while staring straight ahead into nowhere, couldn’t talk and keep the huge screws that propelled the ship turning at the same time. She would talk a little at dinner, after the ship had anchored for the night, but mostly she wanted to talk about how much I looked like her grandchildren. By the second day of the trip I had unpacked some books from one of the trunks so I could study them whenever the scenery faded from captivating to dull.
By the time we approached the great city the landscape had turned to bands of farms and orchards, and the seascape had become crowded. Freighters, warships, transports, and hunting ships scudded back and forth across the ocean in front of the distant towers that slowly grew against the cliffs on the horizon. Almost everything seemed to move faster than our slow churning crawl. I hadn’t wanted to leave home, but by now I was anxious to get away from the dullness of the ship and into the new city, even if it meant meeting a whole palace-worth of new people.
We spent most of a day lined up to enter the wide harbor mouth that fronted the Drowned City. Towers on either side of the harbor and interspersed in the harbor channel itself bristled with war-engines, and each ship had to stop and be inspected by guard-cutters before being given a path into the harbor. Bouys would flare magically along the path that had been temporarily cleared and then wink out in the ship’s wake. Each ship was given a different channel through the harbor defenses, not in any pattern that I could figure out in an afternoon of watching.
Apparently, my father had come to regret my slow journey with his household baggage: When the officer on the cutter who boarded us realized that the ship contained me as well as vegetables, he sent for two channeler-powered tugs, and we were escorted directly into the harbor before a dozen ships lined up ahead of us. Crew members lowered my father’s luggage onto one of the tugs even as the ship entered the harbor, and let me clamber down a rope ladder after it. By the time the vegetable ship turned to approach its assigned berth, the tug had detached and churned rapidly toward the palace docks.
The channeler who powered the tug looked decades younger than the one on the ship, younger than my mother had been even. She smiled and laughed as the tug cut smoothly through the harbor. She even let me stand beside her in the open-air pilot house, out of the way of the bustling crew, and pointed out the theaters and bathhouses and most famous towers to me. “Have fun tonight!” she said as I disembarked.
I followed the carts of luggage and the servants who’d been sent to fetch them into the stone-lined tunnels behind the docks that marked the seaside entrance to the palace.
Part of me hoped to see my father waiting on the docks for my arrival, but I knew how foolish that was. My father had an empire’s worth of responsibilities, and I was in the safest place in the whole empire, in the care of skilled palace servants. I followed the luggage through endless wide, stone halls filled with people scurrying everywhere, everyone seeming in a rush. Everything sort of swam together—I felt incredibly tired. I remember seeing some sort of blue streaks on the walls out of the corner of my eye, but when I tried to focus on them the streaks disappeared. I saw only polished stone walls illuminated by the magical glow from what must have been thousands of decorative wall sconces.
I arrived in the barely furnished chamber I’d been assigned and found a pair of maids not much older than me waiting. A formal tunic and trousers had been laid out on the bed for me. The maids seemed just as rushed as everyone else: I’d h
oped for something to eat and a quiet afternoon taking in the overwhelming new surroundings, but instead found myself being combed and cosseted and ornamented like a sheep at a fair.
“We have to hurry,” one of the girls said, in a tone that made it sound like her life depended on it. “We barely have any time before the ceremony!”
* * * *
It’s jarring to suddenly forget your father’s name, even if you’re expecting it.
This was the day I found out how much the Empress loved ceremony. The day I first met the Empress. As it turned out, she had thought I needed to be at the ceremony for it to be as special as possible. The Empress had made my father wait around the palace for more than a week until I got there and she could hold the accession ceremony. Until the ceremony, he wasn’t formally the chancellor, just another advisor getting to know the ins and outs of the palace. But there was nothing he could do about it since she was the Empress. And once she told him what she wanted, he was responsible for bringing it off without a hitch. So he got to plan his own accession ceremony, on the condition that I was there.
At the time I didn’t know he’d had a week to plan the ceremony, though. So the size of the crowd in the Presentation Chamber astonished me. Once they finished dressing me and preparing me, the two maids led me downstairs and more-or-less left me by the doorway. My father had probably appointed someone to make sure I got into the chamber correctly—it wasn’t the sort of thing he would leave to chance—but no one except the two maids actually knew what I looked like, and they only knew because they’d been waiting in my room. So I stood around near the doorway watching the crowd swirl around me, until one of the young channelers who acted as ladies-in-waiting to the Empress realized who I was and walked me through the throngs in the vast chamber toward the Empress’s throne.
Everything in the room glittered. I caught a glimpse of my father, resplendent in his formalwear, his face expressionless, his eyes taking everything in. I wanted to wade through the crowd to go to him and show him I had arrived, but palace ministers surrounded him and took all his attention. I realized I was being silly; of course he knew I was here safely, that would have been reported to him as soon as the ship reached the harbor.
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