by E. J. Beaton
“Lysande.” Derset’s voice wavered, raw.
“And the time you saved me on board the ship.” She took a step toward him. He was still standing on the flood-slicked stone, his blade pressed against Luca’s. “Those weren’t your people attacking us. You didn’t know the fire was coming. When you pulled me out of the path of a speeding fireball, you were acting of free will.”
He looked as if he was about to speak, but she plowed on.
“Oh, you tried to use it against Luca, later, to drive a wedge between us, but in that moment, you weren’t thinking about maneuvers or what the White Queen might do to you, were you? You were listening to that part of yourself that says you care about me every bit as much as I do you. Just as you did that night in Rhime . . .” When you lay beneath me and made paths through the coppices of my hunger. “That’s why you’ve stopped fighting to listen to me, now.”
The top of Derset’s head dipped almost imperceptibly. His hands remained fixed, one on his rapier and one holding Luca’s arm, yet for all the strength of his grip there was something softening in his demeanor. She willed herself not to see it.
“You should be at my side,” he said. “The way I’ve been at yours. Don’t fight the wave that is coming, Lysande. Let it carry you to higher ground.”
“And submerge everyone else?”
“Not everyone. Not a single elemental who doesn’t deserve it.”
They stood opposite each other, and for a moment there seemed to be nobody else in the room, just Derset and Lysande, the two of them calling to each other in a language that had no letters, no words. They might have been in the Oval again, after everyone else had left, or in her bedchamber, while the fireplace crackled and sparked, and the touch of her lips against his collarbone and his fingertips against her thigh blazed—into something that a fireplace could not have held—the force of his belief in her flaring, nourishing the stalks within her. The world had dissolved, leaving them alone, and the breeze died as she took a step toward him, the air welcoming her.
Derset’s rapier scraped as it moved.
Lysande’s eyes flicked to Luca. The prince lunged at once, and she could not help but admire how smoothly he took the signal, forcing Derset’s blade back an inch or so, both arms pushing Derset’s sword-hand down. Derset struck Luca’s rapier and sent it flying with a triumphant shout, but Luca held his palm up, almost lazily, and a flood hit Derset in the face, knocking him backward across the shards of crystal and wood and bloodied bodies to the end of the room. He landed against the wall, gasping.
The flash of satisfaction across Luca’s face did not escape her.
A slapping of boots sounded and a few seconds later, Litany burst through the doorway. Lysande held up a palm and her attendant skidded to a halt.
She turned back to Derset, in time to see him sit up and scoop something into his hand. It was a ball of gray feathers, Lysande saw, staring as he whispered something to it. At once, she remembered the purpose of the dove.
“Stop him!” she screamed. “He’s going to bring the White Queen here!”
Everything seemed to occur at once, across the room, in an odd and contemporaneous balance: Litany drew a dagger; Luca channeled his powers, wincing; and Lysande stumbled forward, her legs as hollow as the rest of her. She could see it all occurring in a motion that had slowed to a crawl, even as something stirred inside her. It rose and sprouted and wrapped its tendrils around her bones, this thing, and it told her that in a second, she could reach the target before any of them.
Derset had tossed the bird into the air, yet it stopped, mid-flap, to dangle like a puppet between acts of a show. She could hear its heart beating inside her head, a quick beat that sped faster by the second, and the thing inside her said that she could stop that drum with her will, could make it silent once and for all.
She looked over to the dove and focused her gaze on its body. The black eyes flickered, and the wings slowed.
All she had to do was stare, hold it in place, and reach out with her mind.
This is dangerous, a voice in her head told her, and another voice replied: Yes. I know.
With a hand she could only feel, not see, she reached into the suspended bird’s chest. The dove’s black eyes darted from side to side. She grasped the heart and squeezed it in her invisible hand. The animal shivered.
In a fraction of a second, she stopped the heartbeat.
The gray ball of feathers plummeted and hit the stone. It did not move after it landed, not even to give a last flap of its wings. Derset rushed over and picked it up, shaking the dove with both hands.
Her whole body was coursing with a thrill. It was charged with some kind of energy, and she reveled in it.
Litany dashed across the floor, kicking a sword over to Lysande, then grabbed Derset’s hands and pulled them behind his back. Luca joined her and wrestled Derset around to face Lysande.
“The owner gives a dog its mercy,” he said, wrapping one arm around her advisor’s neck. “Do you want to give the blow, Prior? Or shall I?”
Of course, Luca expected her to decide, as if she were merely snapping her fingers. Of course, he could do this kind of thing without thinking—without blinking—she knew that he could turn a weapon on someone in the hair-fine breadth of a moment, as he had by the fountain, when the attacker nearly ran him through. And she had seen the bodies swinging at Ferizia, from the arch. But she did not have a childhood in Rhime to prepare her for this circumstance.
She picked up the sword from the floor. It weighed heavily, the kind of blade that some grim warrior would use in a story to enact justice, and she could just see herself holding it up; pretending that taking a life was some kind of duty; teaching the world a lesson.
“No,” she said.
This was not a lesson for anyone but herself.
“Prior, I know you love to contradict me at every turn,” Luca said. “But now is not the time for mercy.”
“I didn’t say to let him go.”
The sword clattered onto the stone. Everyone turned to her. The thrill was still running through her body.
I killed the dove.
She focused her mind on Derset, in the same way that she had focused on the bird, and within seconds, she could hear his heartbeat. An ordinary sound, steady; a timekeeper’s rhythm. It would be so easy to snuff it out, like the beat of that little, gray, feathered thing.
“Give me one answer. You owe me one honest answer, for all the lies, Henrey. It was you who poisoned Sarelin, wasn’t it?”
Silence filled the observatory.
“You’re the closest of the White Queen’s servants. She wouldn’t trust it to anyone but the Umbra, would she?” Lysande said, staring into his eyes. “You’d planned and practiced for years . . . it was your hand that tipped the chimera blood into the jug.”
“I told you the day I met you, in the crypt.” Derset held her gaze. “There are assassins who know the ways of silence.”
“All this time you were working to bring us down, but did you feel any remorse? Just once, for the Council, or for me?”
He nodded, as much as Luca’s arm would let him. “For you?” he said. “A great deal.”
The look on his face told her all that his words did not. It was infused with the same melancholy she had glimpsed before, when he had asked her to choose whether to join him. It was full of the embraces that had transformed into shared notes, in the music of two bodies entangled in a foreign bedchamber, each of them learning the other’s breathing. She tried not to allow her response; tried to blot out the sentiment that swelled.
“And for Sarelin? When you tipped the vial into her medicine, when you unleashed the panther in the forest, did you feel any remorse for the woman who defended the realm?”
“That’s a much easier question to answer.” His smile returned now. “Never. The brute deserved to die.”
She was standing in the forest again with Sarelin, and the queen was sheathing her dagger.
Any soldier can kill something she hates, she heard Sarelin say. It’s only when you kill something you’ve come to love that you learn how to lead. One day, you’ll understand that, Lys.
The air was fresh on her cheeks, but Sarelin’s hands warmed her shoulders.
Then she was standing by the fire in the Painter’s Suite and Derset’s hands were on her—warm, too, like his words—holding her close to him. He was sitting by her side in the Great Hall as she navigated her way through the conversation, offering hints about the ladies and lords with whom she had never been acquainted. He was lying beneath her, his breath quickening as she ran a single finger along his left hip. He was letting his words melt into a gasp, which in turn became a half-voiced prayer. That’s when I realized: there’s more than one kind of queen. His body pressed against hers, holding her on the deck of the ship, as fire rained over them and struck the wood, and their chests merged into one. Even with smoke around them, he kept her beneath him, shielding her from the flames. Warmth. Nothing but his warmth, and the thump of his heartbeat, fragile and close.
You are her Councillor, appointed on her authority, as a seal presses into wax and marks it out.
His fingers tied the double-woven riding-cloak under her neck. His gaze met hers with new appreciation as she walked toward him at the ball. A smile cracked his face as she attempted a joke about Classical Era homonyms, one night, and though she had not been sure that he understood her pun about lips and speeches, she had known that he was smiling to see her pleased.
Yes, she thought. I understand, Sarelin.
A movement brought her back to the observatory. Litany had picked up the sword, crossed the floor, and was holding it out to her, but she shook her head. Across the wreckage, Luca watched her with all the intensity of his stare.
“There’s a dagger in his pocket,” she said. “Throw it over here, if you please.”
Sarelin’s dagger whistled over the floor, and she picked it up and drew it from its sheath. The tip of the blade reflected her face: a determined mask that she scarcely recognized.
“This belonged to the queen of Elira,” she said. “She always faced her enemies and looked them in the eye. I want to kill you the way she would’ve done, Henrey.”
There was much less chance of veering off course if she threw quickly enough. The blade spun from her fingers, landed exactly under the rib she wanted, and sank through the doublet. Red blossomed on emerald. She stood, quite still, as Derset began to choke.
A hand nudged her arm. Litany was holding out three daggers, their hilts pointing toward her. Wordlessly, she took them and threw them, one by one, into Derset’s chest.
It was curious that she could not feel a sting of pain: nothing but the same energy flowed through her.
She put a hand to her face and wiped her eyes. Her fingers came away dry.
Fifteen
The colors of Lyria encircled the hill in a variegated quilt: here, the swathes of gold sand, and there, the brilliant, coruscating blue of the river, diverging into three paths as it rushed to the sea, while beside the delta, a ring of sandstone buildings teemed with a population twice the size of the capital. Scents of spice, sweat, palm oil, and crushed vanilla leaves mingled. Mosquitoes hovered in clouds, and the sun struck the bald peak, making a blazing crown where Lysande stood.
She unfurled her palm and let the fire sit in the air. The ball of flame wobbled, trembling at the edges. It flickered between almost-blue and almost-orange, and she inhaled and cleared the frustration from her head, watching the fire stabilize with her emotions.
This must have been the place where Oblitara perched, higher than them all, on a rock that afforded no shade. Kicking a stone over the edge, Lysande imagined the great chimera standing on the hill at the end of the Conquest: the queen of hybrid creatures, awaiting death, her scales mirroring the fury of the Lyrian sun.
Footsteps approached. She closed her fist, snuffing the fire out.
“Come on, brooder. They’ll be ringing the damned bells any minute,” Cassia said.
The palanquin-bearers bumped their way down the stairs. It was hard to avoid looking at Cassia’s eye-patch in such a small space. A bronze leopard gleamed on the leather, a badge of color where another woman might have preferred a plain overlay.
As they made their way south, she glimpsed figures through the gap in the curtains, darting into shuttered houses and shops. Black ribbons drooped from door-handles. She remembered Raden: his eyes, still closed by her own fingers, and his body, stretched out inside a coffin barely large enough to hold it; the Axium banner he had kept rolled in his saddle bag, now unfurled by his guards, laid out on his chest. How she had wanted to speak to him, but with the eyes of the Council upon her, she had settled for a whispered farewell. How her heavy feet had dragged her to the next coffin. The man who had served her closest wore a new robe, the dagger-marks on his chest now hidden, the fabric smoothed over; Derset’s hair had been brushed back from his face, and in death, he looked like her advisor again.
The surge of anger that she had expected did not come. She had taken out the chain that he had given her, fingering the silver. A pezzovita, the Rhimese called the tradition. It had taken some time to select an item to represent the life of the deceased. When she had reached the edge of the coffin, she had stroked the chain one last time before letting it fall onto Derset’s chest.
“I wanted to be the first to say goodbye.”
Cassia’s voice jolted her back. They were passing through the pleasure quarter of Lyria, weaving through a group of men in near-transparent robes, one of whom followed the palanquin, waving at Cassia and Lysande through the gap in the curtains, his bracelets jingling. “I know you’ve been busy, dispatching doves,” the Irriqi said, “but I wanted to check you weren’t plunged into despair. You know, after what happened with your—”
“I appreciate it,” Lysande said quickly. “I want to thank you, actually. For what you did in the battle. Taking charge. Jabbing your sword into the white chimera’s breast while I was kept from the fight. I imagine we’d all be cinders if it weren’t for you.”
Cassia took her hand in hers and clasped it, their fingers interlacing. The Irriqi said nothing, but she maintained the grip. When Lysande looked across and saw the compassion in that one gleaming eye, she was sure that she didn’t need to speak either.
For a long time, she had tried to believe that the livea branch would achieve its goal—that after she had breached the peace between them, a friendship could be rekindled. Even as Cassia had seemed to warm to her again, her doubts about the Irriqi’s loyalty had returned, worrying at her as an ice-bear worries at a bone. Now, she had finally sent them away, since fighting an army together whilst a chimera scorched bodies around you could heal the deepest rift. She was not the woman now that she had been weeks ago. She knew what she wanted.
The question was: what did Cassia want?
The palanquin lurched, and a scent of decay wafted to Lysande’s nostrils. She looked out into a square where a crowd surrounded a pile of bodies. They passed the makeshift pyre and snaked through the alleys that led to the dock, reaching the leaving party. Lysande’s gaze swept the small crowd for tufted brows or an aquiline nose, but she saw no trace of Gabrella Merez and knew that she had guessed correctly about the Bastillonians’ anger.
Cassia steered her down the middle of the group. “Swift sailing, my friend.”
“The same to you, my friend,” Lysande said.
Cassia smiled at the term. “For every mile that you put between us, I shall pray to Vindictus to strike any hand that comes near you.”
“I should like our hands to grip the same quill, in a happier state of politics.”
“Believe me: when I read your message, I had the will to accept the idea, right
in the moment. With that position? You might have handed me a letter I wrote myself. But all the good will in the world is no substitute for long hours of contemplation, Lysande, even when the matter concerns a friend. What one commits to, one must be sure of.”
Lysande searched for the right words and knew that she had them already. “I watched you wave soldiers forward and charge into battle while steel rained around you. I watched your eye bleed, crimson painting your face with a gory majesty. Already I am drafting a poem about it, and I do not lack for images—the lines leap to my quill.” She could hear her voice swelling. “Still you kept coming, swinging that sword, no matter how swiftly they ran at you. You did not seem to know you were invincible. Of course, you are right: what one commits to, one must be sure of. And I am sure of you.”
“Then we shall speak soon.” Cassia’s clapped Lysande on the shoulder. “You sound like a woman battle-forged. I promise, you will have my answer to your proposition when we meet in Axium.”
They embraced, and Lysande took a long time to let go, noting that Cassia’s grip had the firmness of Sarelin’s. The river of grief that traversed her body blended, now, with a rivulet of joy: the way Cassia faced her attackers head-on, the way she slapped her friends on the shoulder, the way she said whatever was on her mind, with neither trepidation nor shame; these things echoed painfully down the corridors of her memory. She was beginning to understand her instinctive liking for Cassia. If Sarelin’s life had been written in Pyrrhan ink . . . might it not have looked like this?
She turned away, and walked over to Dante and Jale, noticing that Jale stood as close to Dante as possible. The prince’s hand entwined with the First Sword’s, earning sharpened stares from northerners and southerners alike, but Jale pretended not to see them, gripping Dante’s fingers tighter still.
“Ah,” he said as Lysande arrived, appraising her garments with a sigh. “I see my new cloak was not to your taste.”