The Csestriim nodded. “We were . . . not friends, but something analogous.”
“Prove it.”
Kiel considered him awhile. “That will be difficult. You’ve been with the Shin since you were a child.”
“I remember him well enough,” Kaden said, suddenly resentful of the idea that this inhuman creature claimed to know Sanlitun better than he had himself.
“All right then,” Kiel said. “Do you remember what he used to say about ruling his empire? The strongest leader is the one who does least.”
Kaden had heard his father voice that idea or something similar dozens of times, but, after a moment, he shook his head. “All that shows is that you were in the Dawn Palace. Or that you knew someone who knew someone in the Dawn Palace.”
Kiel cocked his head to the side. “Fair enough. How about the formation that he kept on the ko board in his study whenever he wasn’t playing. The Fool’s Fortress.”
Kaden’s mind filled with the tiny cluster of stones.
“He kept it there,” Kiel went on, “to remind him of the weakness built into any perception of strength, to remind him that confidence sows the seeds of its own destruction.”
“I never heard him say that,” Kaden said.
“You never heard him say a lot of things,” Kiel replied. “You couldn’t have been more than ten when he sent you away.”
“It still doesn’t prove anything, doesn’t prove that he knew you, that he trusted you.”
For a long time the prisoner remained silent, staring out through the bars of the cage at a life Kaden could neither see nor comprehend. Finally, he focused on Kaden once more, a smile tugging the corners of his mouth.
“Your leg,” he said, “there is a small mark shaped like a crescent moon on the inside of your right thigh.”
Kaden resisted the urge to reach down and touch the small, dark spot.
“How do you know that?”
“I was there,” the prisoner replied. “At your birth. You burst from between your mother’s thighs with plenty of vigor, but for a long time you were silent—you didn’t cry, didn’t scream, just stared at the world around you with those burning eyes.” He shook his head at the memory. “The midwives were terrified that you were going to die, but your father calmed them. ‘This child understands the road he must travel. He is already practicing silence.’ And, in time, you began to cry in the way of all human children.”
Kaden stared, dumbfounded. He had never heard the story, not from his parents or his sister. Certainly not from the Shin. He had no way of knowing if it were true, but he did bear the crescent mark on his thigh. All his life it had been there.
“Why were you at the birth?”
“As historian,” Kiel replied. “It is what I do, what I am for. It is how I came to know your father in the first place.”
Kaden tried to make sense of the claim. All he had heard of the Csestriim involved war and slaughter, with a few vague references to their cities. “You were a historian?” he asked. “A Csestriim historian?”
Kiel nodded. “Your language is imprecise, but I believe you would say The Historian. I chronicled my people’s age-long war with the Nevariim, then the war with your kind. I was there for the reign of the Atmani—both the brilliant beginning and the tragic end. And I’ve been there for the centuries during which your own family has ruled.”
For a while Kaden just stared, then shook his head. “Still not good enough. There must have been half a dozen people at my birth.”
“There were eight,” Kiel said.
“Any one of them could have spread the story of the mark on my leg.”
The prisoner shook his head quietly. “At some point, Kaden, you must trust. It is this ability that the Ishien have lost. You must have realized already that they are nothing like the monks among whom you were raised. They found a different path to the blankness, one that has broken them. We showed them how, of course, inadvertently, when this was still a prison and we were still testing your people. We showed them how, but they perfected the technique.”
Kaden’s memory filled with Trant’s account, the tale of men gouging eyes, cutting off fingers, ripping out teeth, all in the awful cold and darkness, all to achieve their twisted version of the vaniate. This was the place to which he had dragged Triste. The horror of it settled on him like ice while a distant part of his mind, one untouched by either Kiel or the Ishien, continued to count, measuring out the heartbeats, cataloging them, keeping the dark passage of time.
“Your way out,” Kaden said. “Can we take Triste?”
Kiel hesitated, then nodded. “If you can break her free. And me.”
Kaden took a deep breath and ordered his thoughts while the Csestriim watched, silent, through the thin slot in the door.
“And how do I do that?” Kaden asked finally.
“The guard has the key. You start by killing him.”
20
The heavy cloud shoved up out of the south, blackening the sky over the lake, hazing the horizon. A few small, broad-beamed lake boats raced in front of it, heeled over, sails filled with the wind, canvas bright with the lingering light. Fishermen, probably, trying to get back to port before the rain. Trying and failing. One by one, the storm overtook them.
Adare watched it from the deck of the crumbling building, the remnants of a once-proud palace, the cellar of which housed Lehav’s war room. She stood in the full light of the sun, watching the storm come on like a wall, blackening the waves, stippling the dark waters. The morning sun shone on her face and shoulders, so warm she felt like she was looking at the painting of a storm, distant wind and fury a matter of clever brushstrokes and perspective. As she stared, though, it drew closer, closer, and then, in a moment, it was upon her, raindrops heavy as coins beating against her scalp, her shoulders, hammering the slate roof behind her. The air went limp and sodden. A wool blanket of muggy cloud blotted out the sun.
It drenched her clothes, whipped Adare’s sodden hair against her cheeks, but the storm was still easier to face than what waited inside. She watched the lightning lance down, forking out in jagged inverted trunks to strike the waves, wondering for the hundredth time if there was a way out. Cloth clung to her skin. She started to shiver. If there was a way to avoid the killing to come, she couldn’t see it.
They might be guilty, she told herself, trying out the tired line once more. They might be in league with il Tornja. The words, words she’d been repeating all night long like a fragment of prayer, failed to convince. With a sick slosh in her stomach, she turned from the roiling darkness of the storm to the still, vacant darkness inside the building.
Her captured Aedolians were in the same building, although the Sons of Flame had them chained and locked in a deep basement. For two days, Adare had been forbidden to speak with them. She had railed against the restriction, but the horrible secret truth was that beneath the fury and indignation, she was relieved at the enforced separation. If she wasn’t allowed to see the Aedolians, she wouldn’t have to witness her own deceit in their eyes, wouldn’t have to tell them what her allegiance with the Sons of Flame had cost. Wouldn’t have to tell them that they would be the ones to pay. In the end, however, her own objections caught up with her. Just that morning, Lehav had agreed to let her see the two men. Adare wanted to vomit.
The commander of the Sons of Flame met her on the rain-soaked balcony, glanced out at the storm, then gestured her inside.
“It’s time,” he said, when she stepped through the door. “Ivar will show you to their cell.”
She nodded, voiceless.
Lehav considered her for a moment. “A piece of advice,” he said finally.
Adare nodded uncertainly. She was shivering uncontrollably, the water from her soaked robes puddling on the floor.
“The less you talk,” Lehav said, “the easier it will be for everyone.”
“I owe them . . .”
“What?” He raised an eyebrow. “An explanation?”
“Yes.”
“You can explain a lot of things to a man. His own death is not one of them.”
Each Aedolian was wrapped in enough chain to hold a small bull, bound at the ankles, wrists, and throat, then locked to iron rings set into the stone. They looked as though they hadn’t slept or changed clothes since the day Adare fled. Their long traveling cloaks, usually so immaculate, had turned brown with kicked-up dust and mud. Weeks of hard travel had scraped away any spare flesh, leaving their cheeks hollow, eyes sunken in their sockets. Birch’s golden mane had gone brown and stringy, and Fulton must have lost twenty pounds. The room stank of spoiled food and rot. A small puddle that might have been groundwater or urine had collected in a lower corner of the chamber.
Birch blinked at the sudden light, then twisted against his chains to get a better look.
He managed an awkward nod.
“My lady,” he said after a moment, voice a weak rasp. “The yellow robe suits you. Brings out your eyes.”
And all at once, the grief and confusion that had stalked her for days on silent feet took her by the throat. She stood helplessly as the door swung shut behind her, staring at the two men who had watched over her since she was a child, horrified by what Lehav had done to them. No, a grim voice reminded her, what you did to them. Whatever role the Sons of Flame had played, it was Adare herself that had brought the two men to Olon. Tears mixed with rain on her cheeks.
“My lady,” Fulton began, then broke off with a hacking cough, body shuddering. When the fit passed, he spat onto the floor: phlegm or blood, it was hard to tell in the lamplight. “Pardon, my lady,” he said, “but just what in the sweet name of Intarra is going on?”
She had hoped, even prayed—though she was not given to prayer—that the two Aedolians were in league with il Tornja; it would be so much easier to see traitors fed to the flames. Facing them, however, the notion seemed ludicrous, petty, stupid. They weren’t the kenarang’s men, they were her men. Her guards. A part of her had known that even when she fled from them in the plaza by the Basin.
“You’re not part of it,” she said, shaking her head hopelessly, voice little more than a whisper.
“Part of what, my lady?” Fulton demanded. “Are you in danger?”
It all spilled out then, il Tornja’s treachery, Adare’s terrified flight, her need for an alliance with the Sons of Light. She crossed to them as she spoke, tugging futilely at the chains in an effort to make them more comfortable.
“You should have told us,” Fulton said, when it was all finished, shaking his head.
“I know,” Adare said, slumping to the ground, the life vanished from her legs. “I know. I wasn’t sure who to trust.”
“Although,” Birch said, raising his eyebrows weakly, “I’ve always wanted to visit Olon in the summer.”
“What now?” Fulton asked.
Adare trembled. The truth was a rusted dagger, but she owed them the truth. “Lehav, Ameredad—it’s the same guy—he wants you dead. Justice for the Sons you killed trying to rescue me.”
Fulton’s lips tightened, but he didn’t speak.
“Well, for a religious man, that’s just downright inhospitable,” Birch said. The joke was typical, but the words came out weak, as though rusted, corroded.
“I’ve tried to get him to relent,” Adare said, speaking fast, trying to drown out the guilt and shame with the sound of her own voice, “but he won’t. His people, the Sons of Flame and all the rest, they want you burned, and he won’t refuse them.” She fell silent. The words were useless. Worse than useless. Insulting.
“Without the Sons, I’ve got nothing. Il Tornja wins. Even if I refused Lehav—”
“No,” Fulton said, voice still as a stone. “You will not refuse him.”
“Ah, fuck,” Birch said, glancing away.
“This is what we are for, Alin,” the older guardsman said, turning to his companion. Adare had never heard anyone use Birch’s first name. She hadn’t even known it herself. “Our lives for hers. If she refuses this, there’s no saying what the zealots will do to her.”
“There’s no saying what the zealots will do if she agrees,” Birch pointed out. “We can’t save her if we’re dead.”
“That is a risk that the princess will have to assess for herself. Our duty is to serve.”
“I thought service meant fighting,” Birch protested, but the anger had gone out of him. Resignation thinned his voice.
“Sometimes, Alin,” Fulton replied, nodding. “And sometimes it means dying.”
Adare had Intarra’s irises, but the guardsman’s gaze burned. Adare could argue, fight to save them both, but she knew already that she was not going to argue. She had known, even as she spoke of confronting Lehav, that Fulton would refuse her offer, known that his duty would weigh heavier in the scales than her guilt, known that her suggestion was empty as air even as she spoke it. She had watched it all coming from a long way off, watched it just as she’d watched the black storm move in. She’d seen it all coming except for the sick pit of self-hatred that gaped inside her, that ate at her guts, that would never, ever heal.
For just a moment, the sight of the Everburning Well distracted Adare from the killing that had to happen there.
Over the last few nights of the pilgrimage she had stared at the column of light bisecting the horizon, white and pale as a thousand moons, blotting out the meager pinpricks of the stars to either side. For sixteen centuries, the Everburning Well had been a beacon for the faithful and a warning to unbelievers both, an eternal symbol of Olon’s sanctity, the origin of the faith, and the reason Annur’s pilgrims had chosen this crumbling city over a dozen others.
Despite Adare’s flaming irises and the alleged ancestry of her own family, she had always been skeptical of the gods. Divine favor was too easy to claim, too difficult to disprove. Anything could be the work of the gods—a fallen sparrow, an unexpected flood, a single tree flowering earlier or later than the rest. The stories were all too old, the evidence too scant.
It had to be admitted, though, that the Everburning Well was no fallen sparrow. It was an actual hole in the earth, maybe a dozen feet across, and the light gushing forth from it, light so bright that to stare directly into the depth for any length of time would blind the observer, could not be denied. Even the surrounding stone bent to the brute fact of the Well, having sagged and crumbled in a circular crater, as though the earth itself were trying to funnel all that came near into that astounding brightness. Adare had heard tales of Intarra’s devout hurling themselves in, hoping to unite with her prophet. There were the other stories, too, of men and women shoved into the blazing depths as punishment for their heresies.
Even from just inside the round wall ringing the site, with the Well still a good thirty paces off, Adare had to squint, half raising a hand to block the heat radiating from the column of light. Then, realizing how such a gesture might look to the assembled mob, she lowered the hand and straightened her back, her neck, forcing herself to stare directly into the brilliance. Driving rain streaked through the light, a thousand falling stars. The stabbing lightning over the water looked wan, weak, beside that inexorable radiance.
According to the tales, the light had burned day and night for over a thousand years, fueled by the piety of Intarra’s first prophet. There were variations to the myth, but all agreed on the basic facts. When a virgin named Maayala appeared in the city—then the capital of an independent Kresh—Odam the Blind had her seized for peddling a new faith. The Kreshkan kings, Odam very much among them, worshipped Achiet—their name for the lord of war—while Maayala insisted on the primacy of the Lady of Light, arguing on the streets and in private homes that all light, that of the hearth, of the stars, of the sun, was one, and that one given by Intarra. She claimed that Intarra’s light animated all human souls, giving blood its heat, bodies their warmth. According to Maayala, mortals need not fear death, since the dissolution of the body frees the fragment of the divine hidden within, al
lowing it to join with the greater lights of earth and the heavens. Maayala absolved the Kreshkans of their martial duty, claiming that everyone, even the weak, even the crippled, so long as their skin remained warm to the touch, carried the divine spark inside. No fighting was necessary. No heroic feats in battle.
Odam declared the woman a liar, a heretic, and an impostor. He had her dragged to the courtyard of his fortress, tied to a stake, and, in mockery of her unflagging worship of light, he had her burned.
“If the Lady of Light loves her,” he famously said, “the Lady of Light can take her.”
And take her Intarra did.
Maayala burned, fitfully at first, with a great deal of smoke, then more readily as the fire below her truly caught. Her flesh turned to flame and that flame burned brighter and still brighter, red, then yellow, then purest white. The fire consumed the wood, then the stake itself, and yet Maayala still stood, incandescent, bright as the noonday sun, so bright that Odam and his soldiers were forced to look away, and when they looked away, they realized the flagstones of the courtyard were glowing, too, first red, then yellow, then white, burning, melting to slag, the entire ground sagging around Maayala the Undarkened as she bored into the earth, her heat and light creating the Everburning Well.
It destroyed Odam’s fortress, and, according to the chronicles, nearly destroyed Odam himself. The king barely managed to escape through a sally port as his walls folded inward, malleable as softened butter. The rock didn’t cool for a month, and when it did, the terrified and curious began to come, tentatively, to stare at the amphitheater of melted rock, at the column of light issuing from the Well at its center. Odam himself walked to the very edge of the pit as penance for his sin, staring down into the light until it blinded him.
“Ill-served I have been by these eyes,” he said when he returned. “Without them I can see at last.”
Adare envied the long-dead king his blindness and his clarity both. She could make out little more than shapes through the torrential rain, but she could see enough to know that the walls around the Well were filled to bursting. The Sons of Flame stood closest, but the faithful of Olon pressed up behind their ranks, faces fearfully bright but smeared by the rain to a nightmare of open mouths and eager eyes, all fixed on her, waiting for the promised justice. A justice that was starting to look terrifyingly like sacrifice.
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