“Wouldn’t your people have died in the fire, too?” Ellarion asked, which, kind of rude.
“Oh yes,” Trell said. “The fire destroyed the forests, leaving only the scorched red sand. And many, many Izterosi died, martyrs so their children would live. And live they did.” Trell reached up and placed a palm against his chest. “For all the Izterosi that survived were kissed by the flame of the sun. And we carried that flame deep in our hearts. With the fire of the Sunfather burning within us, we built our benns and learned to thrive in the heart of the Storm. With that flame, we made this land ours.” He paused for dramatic effect. “And that is how we came to be. The People of the Storm, the Izterosi, the children of the Sunfather, the protectors of the flame.”
A thoughtful silence hung over us, and I gave what I hoped was an appreciative nod.
“That’s a nice story,” Ellarion said at last.
Trell scowled. “It’s not a ‘story.’ It’s our history.”
“Sorry, I…I didn’t mean to…”
“You stillanders think you know everything,” Trell said, and it was pretty clearly that Ellarion had struck a nerve. “You’re so sure that your stories of ‘the Titans’ are true, when you have nothing to go off but the words of some gray-haired old priests. Pah.” He spit to the side. “What I told you is the real truth. I can feel the Sunfather’s fire burning within me, see his face in the sky above. I’ve seen the Black Prison with my own eyes and—”
“Hang on,” Ellarion interrupted. “This Black Prison is a real place? You’ve physically been there?”
Trell nodded. “At the furthest southern border of Izteros, there is a place called the Ghostlands. The sand there is black and brittle, the air tainted and vile. Spirits roam it at night, howling in pain and fury. And lying at the heart of that place is an ancient prison of the darkest stone, a monument that keeps the Nightmother trapped within. It is forbidden to set foot in the Ghostlands, the greatest of all crimes. But I’ve stood at the edge. I’ve seen those evil sands! I’ve been there!”
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said, and I shot Ellarion a glare that he hopefully understood meant Not another word. “I believe you.” And I mean, I actually did. After everything we’d been through and seen, after every shocking revelation, why would I doubt this?
Trell could tell, I think, because he nodded appreciatively. “Thank you. I apologize for my outburst. It’s just…a difficult memory.” He leaned back on his hands, his youthful features looking sunken and haunted in the light of the towering flame. “Some elders teach that the prison is weakening, that our flame can only guard it for so long. One day, they say, the walls will shatter, and the Nightmother will be free, and she will unleash Zastroya.”
“Zastroya,” Lyriana repeated. “The Storm That Will Consume the World. Syan was telling us about this. How your people have been dreaming of it.”
Trell blinked. “What is this now? I don’t kn—”
“Enough,” Syan said, so sharply that we all turned to stare at her. When she turned around, her brow was furrowed deep, and her eyes were furious narrow slits. I pulled back, surprised. I hadn’t seen her like this before, this visibly angry and upset, not even when she was talking about her brother. Something had really gotten under her skin.
“Syan, I apologize,” Trell tried. “I was just telling them…”
She ignored him, pacing over to the supply pile. “I can feel a storm coming. Tomorrow will be a difficult day.” She pulled out our sleeping mats and tossed them down onto the sand. “We should all be sleeping, not sitting around blabbing our tongues.”
Her tone was so harsh I didn’t even bother telling her that that wasn’t an expression. She took her mat and stalked off toward the outskirts of the camp. Trell wandered over to check on the pillars, and Ellarion shook his head. “What in the frozen hell just happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Lyriana replied, her eyes on Syan. “But it worries me.”
It pretty much felt like we had to go to sleep after that, so I slid my mat alongside Zell’s and curled up in his arms. “What’d you think of all that?” I whispered, my lips just inches away from his ear.
“I think the world is bigger and stranger and wilder than any of us have ever imagined,” he replied, dark eyes staring up at the stars. “And the more I travel it, the more certain I become of how little I know. I believe in the Twelve. Lyriana believes in the Titans. Trell believes in this Sunfather and Nightmother. But what’s true?”
“Well…something’s gotta be true, right?” I replied, and honestly, I’d been hoping more to gossip about Syan’s reaction than to get all heady and philosophical. “I mean, someone’s right and everyone else is wrong?”
“Maybe. Or maybe we’re all right and wrong,” Zell replied. “Maybe all of these ideas are our attempts sense to make sense of something greater, something bigger than we could really comprehend.” He breathed deeply, and my head rose and fell with his chest. “It’s like we’re all part of this giant tapestry, but we can only see our individual threads. You’re a red thread, so you think the whole tapestry is red, and I’m blue so I think everything’s blue. We’ve all taken our tiny little stretch of knowledge and imagined the whole world flows from it. But really, none of us have any clue what the whole is. None of us can see the tapestry itself.”
We lay there for a minute quietly, letting his words sink in. “Is there anything we can be certain of?” I finally asked.
I expected another heavy thought, but Zell just craned his head down to me and smiled. “I’m certain you’re here. And I’m certain I love you.” He kissed my forehead, his lips soft, and I squeezed him close. “Maybe we can’t ask for more than that.”
I drifted off there in his arms, and woke up a little while later, sweating and panting from a nightmare. Daytime was still a ways off, the sky dark and beautiful overhead. Everyone else was still asleep around me, the camp still and quiet save the snuffling of the terzan pile. I knew I should probably go back to sleep, but I had that middle-of-the-night restlessness, so I extracted myself from Zell’s arms and stood up, stretching my legs and fumbling for a drink of water.
That’s when I saw him. My father, sitting by the fire’s edge, his back turned to me and his head craned up toward the top of the pillar. A part of me knew that the right thing to do would be to just go back to sleep, but the part of me that was wired was a lot louder. So as quietly as I could, I walked over and sat down by his side.
He glanced my way, a little surprised, and by the Old Kings did he look like hell. His remaining eye was bloodshot and exhausted, his beard frayed, his hair tangled and messy. He looked so old, so much worse than he should have at forty years. This was the legacy of a life of scheming and ambition, a life of brutal decisions. You could win the world, but you’d still look like shit.
“Tillandra,” he said, and his voice sounded different, huskier, heavier. I could smell wine on his breath, and I noticed the skin, half-empty, at his side. Was this why he’d stayed up when we’d all passed out?
“You’ve been drinking,” I said.
“It dulls the pain.” He shrugged. “Lyriana’s magic might have saved me, but…it all still hurts.”
“Oh,” I said, and wasn’t sure really where to go from that.
“It’s funny,” my father said, leaning back with a little wobble. There were a lot of things I had a hard time imagining my father doing (like smiling, or saying “I love you”), but being drunk was probably at the top of the list. He was always so stiff and collected, every word measured, I figured his body was immune to alcohol, like it just burned up the second it hit his lips. But here he was, definitely at least a little tipsy. “My uncle Tobias Kent had an eyepatch. Did I ever tell you that?”
“No…?”
“Well, he did. As a boy, I always thought it made him look so impressive and ominous, so commanding. I dreamed of having one when I was grown up.” He laughed, a short brittle sound. “I can tell you now. It’s not worth it.�
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“You do look more ominous and commanding?” I offered.
He laughed again and offered me the wineskin, and I took a deep swig. This was too weird a conversation to have sober. “Can’t sleep? I never slept well, either. Too many thoughts colliding in my head.” He paused for a moment, turning to face the flame. “You know what I can’t stop thinking about?”
“What?”
“That girl,” he said. “The one from Tau Lorren. The little one we rescued from the rubble.”
“Uh…” I said, because what was there to think about? The last we’d seen of her, a group of Southlanders had rushed over to take her out of his arms. “I’m sure she’s okay….”
“It’s just been so long since I’ve held a child. I’d forgotten what it’s like. How small they feel. How vulnerable. How important.” His voice was distant, his eye transfixed by the fire. “I don’t believe in regrets. But of everything I sacrificed for the people of the West, there’s none I regret more than the time I could’ve spent being a father.” He shook his head. “I was never there for you. For any of you.”
Any of us. It actually took me a moment to realize he was including his other three daughters, his legitimate children, my younger half sisters, Celyse, Kat, and Tara Kent. Holy shit. I’d spent a good decade wallowing in anger toward them, consumed by my bastard jealousy that they got to be legitimate, and now I actually had to stop and think to remember their names. It had been that long. “Are they back in Lightspire? My half sisters, I mean.”
My father shook his head. “I didn’t want them coming to Lightspire until I was sure it was safe. So I had them stay back at Castle Waverly with their mother. It’s only a matter of time, though.”
“A matter of time?”
“Celyse is the true heir to my throne, by law. Miles only rules as Regent because she’s not of age.” His expression hardened. “And we both know him well enough to know he’ll never let that happen.”
“Shit,” I whispered, my mind spinning with images of Miles’s soldiers storming the halls of Castle Waverly, hacking down their door as the girls screamed. I’d hated them when I was younger because their existence was a massive, glaring reminder of my bastardom. But they were still just three little kids, the oldest, what, twelve years old? “We won’t let them die,” I said. “I promise.”
“It’s not just about that,” my father said. “It’s about all of it. The choices I’ve made that brought us here. The choices I’ve made that have put my children in harm’s way. The choices I’ve made my whole life.” He leaned back on his hands, chin to the sky, and he’d never looked more human. “I sacrificed everything. I gave up the life we could have had. I gave up being a father. I killed so many people. I brought so much pain. And all of it, all of it I did for my people. For the greater good.” He breathed in deep. “But what if there is no greater good? If that’s just something we tell ourselves to justify doing what we want? If every solution just makes new problems? If intent and consequences don’t matter, and the only thing you can be judged on is the choice you made in the moment? If I was so lost staring off into the distance, I lost sight of what was always in front of me?”
“I don’t understand. Are you saying you feel guilty or something?”
“I’ve accomplished everything I ever dreamed of. I destroyed the Volaris. I freed the West. I was King. King. And none of it made me feel even a fraction of what I felt holding that little girl in Tau Lorren.” He turned to me, and his eye sparkled. “What I felt when I held you.”
I turned away, because I was not even remotely ready to deal with this. I just couldn’t. Not here. Maybe not ever. There was just too much emotion in me, too many years of yearning and hating and longing and loving, too many conflicting images of the same person. How could I feel so many things at the same time? Looking at my father was like looking at a reflection in a shattered mirror, the same image in a dozen jagged shards: the father who’d doted on me when I was a child, the distant Lord whose approval obsessed me, the ice-cold strategist who’d gotten my brother killed, the ruthless tyrant who’d bombed a ballroom full of innocents, and now this, this earnest troubled man, this sad drunk hounded by regrets.
How dare he be a person now?
“I can’t do this,” I said, standing up and trying to hide the quiver in my voice. I couldn’t let him see this, couldn’t let him see how he made me feel. He didn’t deserve that. “This was a mistake. I just…I can’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, still facing the flame. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
I knew I should have just kept walking and ended this conversation and left him there. But I couldn’t hold it in. “Actually, you should have,” I said. “You just should have said it years ago. When you still had a chance.”
“Tillandra, wait,” he said, and then I walked off, leaving him by the fire, all alone in the still night and the deafening thunder of his thoughts. He didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t need to, because I’d seen it in his face right before I’d turned away, a look of genuine honest hurt.
I’d spent a year dreaming of getting revenge on my father, of toppling his Kingdom and bringing him to justice, of holding him accountable for every last crime. But I’d never imagined I’d be capable of hurting him like this, of cutting him inside.
Of making him feel the way I’d felt for so long.
THE STORM CAUGHT US THE next day.
We saw it just after we rose, a speck of dark clouds hovering on the horizon, getting a little bit bigger every minute. From here, it didn’t look like much. It was still just clouds, right? A storm is a storm?
Syan and Trell didn’t seem to think so. The closer it came, the more concerned they got, and by the time they halted our train and huddled up, pointing and talking in hushed tones, I was starting to get worried. The storm was bigger now, a sprawl of darkness that filled the sky ahead, and I could already tell these were not ordinary clouds. The colors were all wrong, too vibrant and inconsistent: here was a patch of vivid purple, here a dark red, here a swirling miasma of onyx black and moss green. Bursts of lightning lit it up from within, hot flares of blinding gold and orange. And there was the sound, not the low rumbling of thunder but a relentless, growing chittering, like a swarm of locusts. The magic tainting the air here, that storm was full of it; my stomach twisted at the sight, and Lyriana wobbled on her feet like a drunk.
“Damn, that’s bad,” Trell said, squinting. “At least a four-fister.”
“And we’ve just got the two of us,” Syan replied, her expression grim.
“We could try to ride around it, see if it’s thinner at the edges….”
Syan shook her head. “Too risky. We have to hold fast here and hope for the best.” Her tone was confident, authoritative, and Trell didn’t argue. He looked at least five years older than Syan, but it was clear she was in charge here.
“Uh, sorry, not trying to interrupt,” Ellarion said, raising one hand, “but are we in danger?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything I can do to help? Maybe we could lend you our power, like when we were crossing the river?”
Trell looked confused, understandably, and Syan shook her head. “No. Protecting us from the storm will take total precision, which we can’t do with unknown power. Just…stay out of our way.”
So we did. I huddled together with the others as Syan and Trell worked, moving with the speed and finesse of experts. First they set up a perimeter, using their magic to summon pillars of flame all around, ten total, forming a circle fifty feet in diameter. Syan’s zaryas weaved from pillar to pillar, dragging strands of flame behind them like needles pulling thread, winding around the pillars to form a net of flame all around us. Trell paced the center of the circle, his zaryas spiraling in the sand to form sharp crystalline slabs that jutted out like fingers from invisible hands. He fished a bunch of thick ropes out of his pack and used some of them to tie up the terzans, then tossed the remainders to us. “You’ll wa
nt to secure yourselves to the slabs. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?” I demanded. I was scared, but a weird kind of scared where I didn’t actually know what I was scared of, which also made me angry. My stomach was fluttering, and my knees were shaking. It was hot in the circle of pillars, unbearably hot.
Trell ignored me, which was probably for the best. Zell picked up a rope and looped it around his hand. I looked to him for reassurance, and just found a little smile. “What?” I asked.
“Always figured I’d die at the end of a blade.” He shrugged. “Going out in a storm might be an improvement.”
“Is that a joke?”
He reached down and squeezed my hand, even as he looped the rope around it. “We’ll make it through this, Tilla. We’ve made it through so much else.”
Syan had finished whatever she was doing with the borders and turned back to us, her zaryas zipping to their usual hovering spot over her shoulders. Her fire-net was as good as it was going to get, I guess, with at least five or six flickering strands connecting each pillar. The storm was close now, and moving fast; the sky was dark overhead, the sun almost blotted out, and that chittering sound had turned into a deafening clatter, like the sky was full of thousands of chattering teeth. Next to Syan, the terzans were freaking out, snuffling and snorting, slamming into each other and biting the air with those big drooling mouths. I really hoped their ropes would hold.
“Listen here,” Syan shouted, her voice barely audible over the storm. Her face was slick with sweat, her breath hard and sharp, and her hands, always so steady, trembled at her sides. “We’re about to enter a very serious storm. Trell and I have created a barrier that protects this circle, and will hold it strong until the storm has passed. Your hope for survival—your only hope—is to stay in the circle. Do you understand?”
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