“You steal our people from their beds!” a new voice shouted.
“Kill them!” I heard Calix shouting at his guards.
“You hunt and kill those of us with power!” This was another voice.
I was breathing in short little gasps, trying to suppress the threads pushing at my fingertips, and Skies Above, it wasn’t working.
Now several voices joined in. “You have no power, you have no might, and you have no dominion over the Resistance!”
My eyes roved over the crowd, trying to find who was doing this. Everyone was moving, turning, talking, searching, but there was one face staring straight at me.
Unmoving.
Smiling.
Rian winked, and I couldn’t tell if he truly saw him or not, but I watched Calix stretch out his hand toward my brother.
Instantly, my control on my power snapped and I felt it rush out, a wave of crushing, numbing relief sweeping through me.
It was as if someone took a hammer to the side of the cliff the castles were built on, and one hard jolt threw my husband to the side, swaying the platform.
The ice around me cracked, and a moment later it shattered, a barrage of sharp crystals that melted as they moved.
I screamed as I fell, dropping toward the ground in the shower of ice shards.
Arms caught me, but the force was too much and we crashed to the ground in a heap. The fall slammed the breath out of my chest, and Galen was under me, gripping me tight, every inch of his body against mine.
I couldn’t open my eyes for long moments. I could smell him, like sweat and salt and something I wasn’t used to, that I vaguely knew from the ride here as the scent of forest. Green. Free. I was surrounded by his body, safe and sheltered, and I dug my fingers into his chest, trying to claw out a breath.
He touched my face, and I heard him calling my name, his chest heaving so hard that it pushed me up and down. “Shalia!” he said.
I opened my eyes. My hands on him curled tight, and I drew in a hard breath.
Galen held me as he sat up, then managed to get his legs beneath him to bring us to our feet without letting go of me. I stood and my knees sank as if I was standing in sand. He held me close.
I was vaguely aware of him checking me over in his soldier’s way, the touches quick and light and impersonal, but my head was buzzing and I was still struggling for deep, even breaths.
“Shalia?” he asked, holding my arms now. “Shalia?”
I nodded belatedly.
It was like all the noise around us rushed back in at once; Calix was yelling and pointing, and people were screaming, trying to rush out of the courtyard, but the gates were closed.
There was a keening sound, and then a terrible crack as the platform buckled.
“Clear the platform!” Galen shouted, and he pulled my hand, rushing to the stairs and tugging me behind him. “Jump!” he shouted at me, and I obeyed him, leaping from the stairs as the platform collapsed in a cloud of dust. His hand in mine anchored me, guiding me close to him.
“Kairos!” I called, seeing him in the rising dust.
Galen let go of my hand. “Get her out of here!” he told Kai.
Kai pushed me in front of him as we ran up the walkway. I felt weak and disoriented, but I kept putting one foot in front of the other, glancing back to see his scimitar drawn and gleaming in the sun.
When we were in the archway, I looked back and saw the madness. The gates were shut, and the guards were trying to control the terrified people. I watched them use their shields like weapons, battering people and pushing them back.
Hurting people.
At the center of it all, my husband was barking orders for the guards to search the crowd by any means necessary, very nearly condoning their brutality, but somewhere in the melee, Rian was there too. Which one of them was more to blame for the people’s suffering?
“Shy, come on,” Kairos growled.
“Rian will be trapped,” I told him, my voice hushed.
“Rian wouldn’t come into the courtyard without more than one way out,” he told me, his eyes flinty. He wasn’t surprised. He’d seen Rian too—maybe he’d even known Rian would be there.
I moved forward, and we rushed through the halls. We made it to my bedroom, and Kairos ordered the guard not to let anyone in without his explicit approval. He brought me to the bed, and I sat with a sigh.
“Are you all right?” he asked. His head swept around the room carefully, and he asked, “The shaking—was that you?”
I swallowed and nodded slowly. “But not the rest.”
He shook his head. “No. That was the Resistance. From what I can gather, that is the bulk of their forces—recruiting people with elements that need protection. That and some farmers and dissenters.”
“But they seemed so organized,” I said, drawing my knees up.
“They are,” he said. “More than I can give Rian credit for too. Whoever Rian’s working with has a strong eye for that sort of thing.”
“Why would Rian do this?” I asked, shivering. “He’s attacking me.”
Kai sat beside me on the bed, his shoulder pressed to mine. “No,” he said gently. “I think our brother is a damn fool, but I can see, at least, that he was making an effort to do it in a way where you wouldn’t get hurt. Except for being dropped from the sky, but at least Galen saw to that. And as far as I can tell, he’s doing this to protect people from Calix’s injustice. Especially the Elementae.”
“Does Rian have an ability?” I asked.
He sighed. “Not that I know of. But Rian was in the islands during the massacre—do you remember that? Whatever he saw while he was there, it changed him.”
I drew a deep breath, uncomfortable with the idea that there were sides of my brothers I didn’t know at all. “I think Calix saw Rian.”
Kai’s expression turned stormy and dark. “That Rian cannot risk. If your husband believes you have anything to do with this—even through Rian—” He stopped abruptly. “Skies,” he muttered.
“But I don’t,” I insisted. “We don’t. Right?”
His eyes flicked to me and away. “I don’t know if things like ‘reason’ and ‘responsibility’ really matter to your husband. If he wants to see a connection, he will.”
I shook my head, standing from the bed. It was growing foggy and dark outside, and it felt like this was finding its way inside my mind and smudging what I was certain of. “He wouldn’t. He’s my husband.” I stepped closer to the glass, but looked back at Kai. “What about Kata?” I asked.
He lifted his shoulders. “I haven’t heard more.” Standing from the bed, he sighed. “I’m going to find Galen. You need your own guard, and I’m assuming he’ll agree to it after today.”
“Will a guard help if it’s my own brother endangering me?” I asked. “If it’s my very hands?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yes,” he said, coming and kissing my temple before he left me alone again.
The Night the Three-Faced God Walked
I wasn’t shaking anymore, but there was an uneasy tremor deep inside me. I lay on the bed, but I couldn’t sleep, staring at the ceiling as my heart thudded in my chest.
I stood, pacing about the chamber, walking out onto the balcony in the thickening fog, but there wasn’t enough space to walk, and somehow the fog carried the green scent of Galen on it.
How could I be thinking of him now?
“Shy,” I heard, and I turned back toward the palace, but no one was there.
“Shy,” I heard again, and I turned into the heart of the fog.
Warm arms came out of the fog and wrapped around me, and Kata hugged me as the fog around us grew thicker still.
“Kata!” I cried, pressing my face into her neck. So many emotions rushed through me like pebbles tumbling down a slope, and I looped my arms around her shoulders, hugging her tight.
“I have you,” she whispered to me. “I have you. You must have been so frightened, but you’re safe now.”
“Was that you today?” I asked. “With the ice?”
“No,” she said. “That was another member of the Resistance. There are many Elementae who have joined us.”
“So it was true,” I said. “What they were saying about hunting and killing those with power?”
She drew back from our hug. “I told you that, before you were married.”
My chest felt tight. “I know,” I said.
“And you didn’t think it mattered to you,” she said softly. “Until now.”
For all I spoke of caring for my people, of wanting to lead and save, she was probably right. The weight of this stung, but she put her hand in mine.
I nodded. “I have the power you always thought I did.”
“I figured,” she said, her mouth tight. “I’m sorry it’s not what you wanted.”
I looked at our hands. “If we were back in the desert, this would just be one more thing for us to share. One more thing that makes us sisters in the way that birth didn’t. And maybe I was stupid,” I said, “but I married him. And I’m here. And these powers are illegal, and he hates the people who practice them. And I’m married to him, Kata.”
“You’re not stupid,” she said fiercely. “You protected your family. I would have done the same if I had the chance.”
“Can you fix me?” I asked her. “You can heal—surely you can heal this.”
She frowned. “You aren’t broken. You don’t need to be fixed.”
“Calix knows of an elixir that can take powers away from Elementae. If we can find that before him, I could drink it. I could use it—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Such a thing doesn’t exist. There is no elixir. Whatever errand he’s on, he won’t succeed. These powers are part of you; they are as essential to your body as your blood. They cannot be removed or rejected.”
“How can you know? You were so young when you left the islands—you barely know about your own power.”
She pulled away from me, crossing her arms. “I know enough! I’ve never heard of something that can curb elemental powers. Even the genocide didn’t destroy them.”
“Then close the Earth Aede. You opened it; you must be able to close it.”
An indignant huff came out of her. “The powers retreated to the Aedes because of the genocide, Shalia. Like a child who runs and hides when their life is threatened. Like I had to hide in the desert after my family was murdered. Like I still hide, because if your husband knew there was still a daughter of the high priestess alive, my life would be forfeit. It is not as simple as opening a box and closing it again. And even if I could—it would remove all the Earth powers. You would do that for your own gain?”
“No,” I told her, desperate, my hands beginning to shake. “But there has to be a way. I can’t control it. It just happens, and I can’t stop it. And soon someone will be able to tell that it’s me.” Visions ripped through my mind, of rage on my husband’s face, of blood and sharp things meant to punish me for this power I never wanted.
“Stop,” she said, and I looked up to her. “You can control it. You have to use it—that’s why it’s unpredictable now.”
“How do I learn to control it? How did you?”
“It’s different for me.” She held out her hand, and the mist curled to meet it in a thin, swirling plume. “Most of my kind show their gifts very young. My gift never arrived. Not that I could see. And then the night came that they say the Three-Faced God Walked, and I could feel my power. And then the powers of so many other people, rushing to me, overwhelming me. Using me as a conduit,” she said. “And—well, you remember when I knew the Aedes needed to be opened again.”
My fingers curled around hers. She had been so sick, and I’d never been more scared for her. We brought her to the lake at Jitra, and the water had healed her, but the search consumed her after that. That’s when she started to leave, and my parents refused to let me go with her. She left first for weeks, and then for months, and I had carried on without my best friend.
“I know …” I rubbed my fingers over her skin in our clasped hands, and she gripped me back, binding us tight, letting me confess my shame. “I never asked about the Night the Three-Faced God Walked. Your nightmares … I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know.”
“And I didn’t tell you,” she said, her voice rough. “Because I love you. Because I’ve always loved you, and I don’t want you to know.”
“But I love you too,” I told her, “and I want to know what you’ve suffered.”
She nodded, not looking at me but at the water. “I don’t remember much. I was eleven. I was a child. I was with my brother when the siege came. People panicked. I was locked in a room with my brother while my mother and sisters went to fight, and my father went to protect them. My mother’s gift was legendary. She could rule the oceans.
“I don’t know what happened. How it could have been. Rian was there, trying to help the Vis people in the war. My mother and all her court were there, in their full power, in their full glory. How could one man have fought them and won?” She looked at me like I would have an answer.
“I heard they surrounded the islands. He had so many men he just overwhelmed you,” I told her.
She shook her head. “It was more than that. They found me and my brother, and my brother started swirling the air into a tornado, trying to protect us. They stabbed him to death.”
I took her other hand, desperate to comfort her, desperate to forget what it felt like to watch my brother burn.
She drew in a short, unsteady breath. “And they spent hours hurting me. Trying to make my gifts appear, but they never came. So they bound up anyone who didn’t have powers—with Rian tied right beside me—and they said we would watch the unclean people be sacrificed to the God. As if they weren’t planning on murdering us too—as if there was any way they would have purposefully left anyone alive to remember.”
She was quiet for many long moments. “They were so fast. They built the structure in a day, and it took another day to fill it,” she told me. “It didn’t look like a man, not at first. It just looked like a cage of sapling and wood. And then they filled it, tying my people inside the structure. He made sure I could see my parents. And they stuffed the empty places with grasses and hay. When night came, they lit it on fire. The people—my people, my family—struggled so much, so hard, that the structure moved, filled with hundreds of screams. And then it fell like a man to his knees. And so they called it the Night the Three-Faced God Walked.”
She pushed a tear off her face. “When it fell, it shook the ground, and something within me broke. And water came in, so much water that the island flooded and pulled Rian and me away with it. And we survived, because the water was part of me. The water was me.” She sniffed. “My gift—it comes from anger. And hate. But yours doesn’t,” she said, and she looked around us.
Circling our feet, sand was building in small mounds, like an infinitesimally small desert. “I did that?” I asked.
She nodded, wiping another tear. “You’re incredibly powerful, Shalia. Your power begins with your love for people,” she said. “That’s where your greatest strength lies.”
I frowned. “But I didn’t—before, I could feel threads, like it was a fabric I had to tug on to get it to obey me.”
She nodded. “That’s common. It helps you focus; as you grow stronger, you may still have a sense of the threads existing—they’re the energy of the natural world—but you may not have to manipulate them to use your power.”
“But how do I grow stronger? I have to love people more?”
She shook her head. “No. You have to hold on to it,” she said, her voice rough. She leaned her head on mine, and I wished I could take away the things she had suffered. “Soon it will be easier, but when it’s difficult to control, you have to hold that emotion within you. Remember it and treasure it, and it will open your power.”
“But what can my power even do?” I asked her. �
��I don’t really understand.”
“Anything that is of the earth will do your bidding. In my experience, I can’t make water manifest where there is no water, like in the desert. But usually there’s water somewhere, and earth’s presence is endless. Her shoulders lifted. “We’re in a palace of rock; there couldn’t be a better place to try something.”
“Can I grow things?” I asked, suddenly wanting to see ilayi blooms in this foreign land.
She tilted her head. “In a way—if the seed is there, you can give it soil and the right conditions to grow, but you can’t grow something out of nothing. And it would be better if you had a fire element to give it heat, and a water element to nourish the soil. The elements are at their most powerful when they work together.”
Disappointment filled my chest.
“But remember,” she said. “Many things come from the earth. Metals, minerals, crystals, to name a few.”
I thought of the gold that Rian had stolen, killing ten men to do it. When did ten—or even one—become the number of lives my brother felt comfortable taking? I wished for the precious metal, curling my hand into a tight fist, willing it to be full of the gold he needed.
With a sigh, I let go, opening my hand.
“Nothing happened,” I told her, showing her my empty palm.
She just looked at me, patient. “Don’t focus on the earth. Focus first on yourself, on that emotion.”
“On love,” I repeated, the words rough.
She nodded.
I thought of Rian on my wedding day, my fear and confusion and joy as I saw him in front of me, the first of my family to give me a gift, to give me his hopes for my future. Even when it was a future he wouldn’t choose for me. He was the first to put a thread around my neck, and the gold in the foreign coins had a soft shine before the full sun rose.
I felt invisible threads now at my fingertips. Just like the ones my family had given me, these connected me to something greater. I felt it as little pieces of things—flecks, really—pulled up from the soil in the cliffs below, from other rocks, from all around me, rolling and jumping into my hand.
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