by Jane Kindred
“It’s Early,” she said.
In my muddled state I almost snapped, “I know it’s early! Now let me sleep!” until the events of the morning came back to me.
“What’s wrong?” I threw my feet over the side of the bed. “What’s happened?”
“He’s not breathing. And he’s so small… I don’t know how to do CPR on someone so small.”
I didn’t know what CPR was, but I knew Early was in trouble.
Still in my undergarments, I followed her through the cupboard panel into the other room to find Lively sobbing in the bed with Early in her arms. The tiny body was lifeless, and I knew there was no hope.
“He won’t wake up. I tried to wake him for a feeding because he needs to nurse to get his strength up, and he just won’t wake up.” When she raised her eyes to me, even the hardest heart would have melted at such anguish. “Please. You can help him. I saw you heal Kae.”
“Oh, Lively.” My heart was heavy as I sat on the bed beside her. “I can only heal a magical wound, and even then it takes both Vasily’s and my radiance to do it.”
“Please, Nazkia.” She clung to my arm. “I know I don’t deserve any kindness from you. I don’t blame you for hating me. I’m a wretched, wicked woman who deserves nothing but contempt. But he’s only a baby. Please don’t let him die!”
“Lively…”
“I’ll do any kind of spell you want.” Sobbing, she pulled my hand down to the tiny, lifeless bundle in her arms. “I don’t care what Helga does to me now.”
Early’s cheek was cool to the touch. The tiny infant had been dead a while.
“Lively.” I choked back my own tears. “He’s gone. I’m so sorry.”
“No.” She shook her head desperately. “Please.”
Margarita climbed into the bed beside her and pulled Lively and Early into her arms, and Lively sobbed with such grief I thought it would break my heart.
Something tickled against my leg, and as I looked down, a tiny rivulet of red slid toward me from the center of the bed. I stood and pulled back the covers. Lively was lying in a pool of blood, her gown soaked with it.
Margarita gasped, and in her arms, Lively seemed to slowly wind down like a mechanical doll, her weeping fading to a moan, and her eyes closing as Margarita took Early’s body from her slackening grip.
I ran to the door and pounded on it, not caring who knew of the secret passage. “We need help! Open the door!”
The demon guard unlocked the door and entered, taken aback by my presence, but he only noticed me for an instant before seeing the pool of blood now dripping onto the rosebud carpet and the white-stained floor. He sent the other guard for the doctor, and when he arrived, I recognized him as an angelic physician who’d occasionally treated Azel’s fevers. Like many of the working-class angels, it seemed he was now a supporter of the revolution.
He examined Lively and said her womb wasn’t contracting as it should to stop the normal flow of blood from the separation of the afterbirth. He was able to slow the bleeding by stimulating contractions with his hands, but she’d lost so much already he wasn’t hopeful. He took the tiny body of poor Early with him to embalm, and left us to “make her comfortable.”
Having determined how I’d entered and realizing there was little point in trying to keep me out, the guards allowed me to remain with her. Lively roused briefly a short time later, asking in confusion for Early, and then slipped back into a semi-conscious state. Margarita sat and held her hand while I monitored the bleeding and tried the massage technique the doctor had recommended a few more times. Just a day ago, I’d wanted to kill her myself, and now I was doing anything I could to keep her alive. After seeing her through such a difficult birth and nursing her tiny boy—I found myself filled with sorrow at the prospect of her death.
Late in the afternoon, we heard the sound of horses in the square; Helga and her army had arrived. My chest was heavy with dread as I wondered what this meant for Vasily and the Iriyans. I could only hope they’d retreated and fallen back to wait for our remaining troops.
Apparently informed of Lively’s condition, Helga came to see her straightaway. Lively became more alert as she entered, struggling to sit up in Margarita’s arms.
Helga perched on the edge of the bed and patted her hand. “My poor dear. You’ve had a very trying time. I heard about your little boy.” She shook her head. “So terribly unfortunate.”
Lively seemed to quail as Helga picked up her hand from the coverlet.
“Perhaps if his father had been a firespirit,” Helga said deliberately, “he might have been a bit more sturdy.”
I couldn’t believe she would chastise Lively for this now.
“I’m sorry,” Lively moaned.
“You have kept a number of things from me, Lively Ivovna. One would almost think you were working against me.”
“She was hardly working against you when she betrayed me and had all of my men slaughtered,” I objected from my corner of the room.
Helga regarded me as if just noticing my presence. “Why must you make everything about yourself? Spoiled to the end.”
“Don’t get too excited about the end yet.”
“And why not, Miss High and Mighty? Are you expecting a brigade of Virtues to come galloping down from the north by way of the Central Rift?”
I couldn’t hide my surprise. This had been our one advantage, that no one knew they were coming. “Damn it, Lively,” I couldn’t help murmuring.
“Oh, I wouldn’t blame Lively for that, my dear. That was one of the things she deliberately kept from me.” She turned back to Lively, holding her hand in a viselike grip. “You see the consequences of holding things in? They come out when you least expect them. I am very disappointed in you, Lively.”
“Please, Auntie Helga.” There was terror in her small, weak voice. “Please don’t.” She made a high gasp of pain, and Helga let go of her hand and rose as Lively fell back against the pillow.
“What did you do to her?” Margarita demanded.
“I have shown her the consequences. She will hold nothing else in.”
Lively moaned, and blood spread through the coverlet.
“You did this to her!” I accused.
“Lively has done this to herself,” said Helga tersely.
Margarita cried out as she saw the spreading stain. “Stop it! Stop whatever you’re doing to her!” She made a move toward Helga, who stroked her locket. Margarita stopped in her tracks as if she could go no farther.
“Come,” Helga said to me. “We have business to discuss.”
There was nothing I could do. I gave Margarita a sorrowful look and followed Helga out with reluctance, realizing belatedly I was dressed only in a cotton camisole and the men’s shorts I’d worn under my uniform, splattered with blood. Helga behaved as if nothing were amiss, leading me to the Malachite Drawing Room.
I stopped on the threshold. “I don’t care for this room.” It was here I’d found the bodies of my family and watched Kae plunge his sword into Omeliea before he’d buried it in me.
“It has the best view of the river.” Helga sat in one of the velvet-covered chairs. “I plan to set up my office here as regent to the young principality.”
“I understood you’d lost the young principality,” I said bitingly, still standing in the doorway. “Along with my daughter.”
Helga clucked her tongue. “That willful girl. Lively seems determined to let loose what she should withhold, and withhold what she should divulge.” She punctuated this with an angry press of her thumb against her locket.
“Don’t. Why can’t you let her be?”
“Lively isn’t your concern. What I wish to discuss with you is the terms of our alliance.”
“Alliance?” I laughed at her. “You really are completely mad.”
“And you are completely short-sighted, you spoiled little angel.” Helga sighed. “Take a look at the embankment.”
I went to the window and gasped at the
sight of Helga’s army spilling out around the palace onto Celestial Boulevard along the Palace Embankment. Demon peasants stood beside officers of the Arcadian army—and among them were the red-plumed helmets of the Iriyan Mounted Guard.
“What have you done?” I whirled to face her. “How did you get them to join your revolution? They were reluctant even to help us for fear of angering Aeval.”
“And that, my dear, is why an alliance is so sensible.” She gave me an infuriating smile. “We all want the same thing: Aeval ejected from Heaven. With our forces combined, we stand a far greater chance against her. And you cannot tell me you truly wish to rule Heaven. Let Omeliea’s child take the throne as he was meant to.”
Fury took hold of me. “Omeliea’s child! You violated my sister and left her to die, and you think you now have some right to the child you stole from her!”
“What nonsense. You’ve always had a ridiculously overactive imagination, and not the slightest grasp of logic. Of course I didn’t violate Omeliea. Your deranged field marshal did that.”
“You’re lying. Ola told me herself he had nothing to do with it.”
“Told you?” Helga toyed with her locket and I shook my head, trying to resist any influence she intended to send my way with the help of the stolen fern flower. “You mean she stopped to have a conversation with you as her husband chased her through the palace with a sword?”
“No,” I said angrily. “She came to me in a dream.”
Helga began to laugh and I blushed, realizing how foolish that sounded. “Oh, dear. My dear girl, sit down.”
I sat on the edge of the divan, though I’d had no intention of doing so.
“I understand how much you love your cousin, and how hard it is to accept what he’s done, but you mustn’t make up stories to excuse him. Kae Lebesovich murdered your entire family in cold blood—along with a number of palace servants of whom you probably weren’t even aware. I myself hid from him, and that is how I saw him carve Omeliea open and cut out his own child.”
“No.” I shook my head.
“I thought he was going to spear the infant on the end of his sword and I hid my head, but when I looked up, he and Omeliea were gone and the poor babe, not much older than Lively’s, lay there struggling to breathe.”
It seemed a very rational and logical explanation—far more believable than expecting Kae to have exercised any restraint in his madness. Still, my mind resisted. The surgical precision of the cuts that had taken my sister’s child were not the actions of a madman in a fit of passion, I reminded myself. Helga had the means and the motive—she’d already taken my brother Azel’s shade and needed a vessel for it. Even now, Helga tormented her own niece out of spite until she’d lost her child, and clearly meant to continue the torment. She wasn’t the sensible, caring woman she pretended to be. She was capable of terrible things.
I wanted to say all this, but I said nothing. Though the tug of my daughter’s element in my blood kept me from fully succumbing to her lies, I couldn’t keep it all straight in my head when I tried to voice it.
Helga gave me a patient smile. “It would be unjust to take the throne from Omeliea’s child after all he’s been through. He is the rightful heir. This alliance is best for everyone. Don’t you agree, Vasily?”
Confused, I followed her gaze. Vasily stood in the doorway. I blinked my eyes, trying to understand what he was doing here.
He came to sit beside me, taking my hand and kissing my temple. “I told her you’d understand.”
“Understand?”
“Why I agreed that we join forces.”
I stared, speechless, wanting to stand and shout at him, but so tired from the last hours with Lively. It seemed such an effort even to keep my eyes open.
He turned to Helga. “Where’s Ola? You promised I could see her as soon as we arrived. That was the arrangement.” He smiled at me. “Helga’s agreed to return Ola to us as soon as Aeval has been defeated. This will all work out for the best.”
“Vasily.” I struggled through the mud in my head. I needed to tell him something. Something urgent.
“What happened to your clothes?” He’d finally noticed my state of undress. “Were you injured?”
I looked down at Lively’s blood on my camisole and my head cleared in an instant. I pulled my hand away from him and jumped up. “Vasily!” I interrupted as he started to speak again. “Helga doesn’t have Ola. She’s lost the children.”
Vasily glanced to Helga. “That’s not true. Is it? Where’s Ola?”
Helga simply shrugged.
“You surrendered to her and turned our allies over to her for nothing, Vasily!” My exhaustion gave way to angry tears. “For a lie! She does nothing but lie!”
Helga motioned to her guards in the doorway. “Escort them back to Her Supernal Highness’s room. I suspect they have much to talk about in private.”
Vasily sat on the edge of the bed in my old room, staring at the floor. “I don’t know what to say, Nazkia.” He had the raspy tenor in his voice most noticeable when expressing strong emotion. “How can I even tell you I’m sorry? I’ve ruined everything. I’m a traitor and a fool.”
Standing before him with my arms folded, I bit my tongue to keep from agreeing with him. Helga had manipulated him. He hadn’t done it with malice.
“I’ve even given her the thirty-five hundred.”
“Oh, Vasily,” I breathed. “You didn’t.”
“I should never have made any decisions without speaking to you. I don’t know what got into me. I would never have acted so recklessly. I know the chain of command.”
“Helga used the influence of the tsvetok paporotnika on you. That’s what got into you. She used it on me. I’d almost been lulled into her web of deceit myself when you arrived. She’s becoming stronger the more she uses it.”
“But you resisted. You weren’t a fool.”
I sat down beside him finally. “She promised you Ola. I would have done anything to get her back. And I might have, if I hadn’t already known about them being gone.”
“And what does that mean?” He searched my face, his hazel eyes behind his spectacles beginning to crackle about the iris with the fire of the Seraph. “Where have they gone? Has she sent them somewhere?”
“I don’t think so. Lively told me Helga lost them. I thought maybe you’d made a secret night rescue when you reached Arcadia,” I admitted.
“I wish I had.” His face twisted with conflict between anger and sorrow. “But lost them? I don’t understand.”
“I think they’ve run away.”
Vasily looked skeptical. “Ola’s only two. Two-year-olds don’t run away.”
“And Azel is only three.” I tried to choose my next words carefully. “But there may be something about him that would make him do things we wouldn’t expect of a three-year-old.”
“What ‘something’?”
With a sigh of resignation, I told him what I’d learned from Misha of Azel possessing my brother’s shade.
Vasily stared blankly. “I don’t even understand how that could happen.”
“Helga must have captured the shade as he died. She told me once that when she found the vial containing my shade after I’d used the twinning spirits to sneak out, she’d meant to keep it and replace it with an empty vial to teach me a lesson. Perhaps that gave her the idea; I don’t know. However it happened, there was no body to return the shade to. He’d died in earnest.”
Vasily tried to absorb this. “So she… She somehow…”
“She forced a shade into a little boy. A little boy who already possessed his own spirit.” Both the shade and the boy had to have been forced. I couldn’t imagine what she must have done to accomplish it. I didn’t want to imagine it.
“So you think Azel—your brother Azel—is acting through the boy, and he’s run away with Ola.”
I nodded. “I was going to break out of here last night and go look for them. But then Lively—” I stopped, horrified. �
�Lively! I have to get back to her.” I crouched and opened the panel in the bookcase, while Vasily watched me, perplexed. “This crawlspace leads to the room next door. Lively lost the baby—he lived a few hours—and now she’s hemorrhaging badly.”
Vasily rose, his face stricken. “I had a son?”
“Oh, Vasily, no.” I stood and took his hand. “I’m sorry, I should have explained. He wasn’t yours. The father was a stable boy from that inn we fled on the way to Aravoth.”
“A stable boy?” Vasily looked relieved and sad at the same time. “When did she have time to—?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said ruefully. “But I need to check on her.” I got back on my hands and knees to crawl into the passage.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“I don’t know if you’ll fit,” I told him as I disappeared into the cupboard. The four of us girls had been perfectly sized for it. Kae, whom Ola had spirited into her room when they weren’t yet married, we’d once shuttled back and forth to try to keep him from being discovered by our parents, but he was smaller than Vasily, built more like Belphagor.
Vasily attempted to crawl in as I reached Margarita’s room, but called after me that his shoulders were too wide and he was backing out.
Margarita looked up from the bed, cradling Lively in her arms. Her hands were stained with blood, and Lively, in her soaked white gown, was limp and unresponsive.
“Is she—?”
“Not yet.” Her tears were falling onto Lively’s hair. “But she will be soon. She started to bleed again and I tried the massage, but it didn’t help. She’s lost so much blood, Nazkia.” Her voice broke and she was silent for a moment.
I sat beside Margarita and picked up one of Lively’s motionless hands, wanting her to know somehow before she was gone that I’d forgiven her.
As my fingers brushed the blood, something tingled along the tips of them. In the early evening light, I could barely see it, but my radiance had been sparked.
“It’s not a natural wound!”
“What are you talking about?” Margarita looked slightly alarmed.