Too impatient to hold back, I reach for her face and hold it between my hands, tracing the freckles on her cheeks with the pads of my thumbs. A small smile curves the corners of her mouth, but it’s the hope in her eyes that really makes me catch my breath.
“What if we lose each other?” she asks.
“Let’s not,” I say firmly.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Esmae
Princess Katya passes my transmission on to Alex. It’s just a place, a time, and the word please. It’s difficult for me to say that word to him, when I’m still so angry and bitter, but I do it for the memory of a man who, in the end, loved us both.
Even so, as I wait on the bank of a hot spring, while warm water nips at my boots and yellow trees make hush-hush noises above me, I’m not sure he’ll come. Maybe he’ll think it’s a taunt, that I asked him to come back to this place on the edge of the ruins of his city. Or maybe he’ll see it for what it is: an echo of a time when we were happy together here.
His footsteps crunch in the snow behind me. I turn to see him, thin and wary, just a boy in the woods.
“Why am I here?” he asks. His voice is steady but carefully blank. The last time I saw him, he was about to pack me away into oblivion and I jabbed him with stasis serum.
But he came.
“If I offered you what I once offered before,” I say, biting each word out. “The throne of Kali, shared between you and Elvar. Would you accept?”
He makes an incredulous sound in his throat. “Why would you be okay with that?”
“I’m struggling to think of reasons,” I admit. I make an effort to unclench my fists and say, “No matter what either of us does, it’ll never feel like enough. I don’t think I’ll ever feel like you’ve paid enough for Rama, or Sorsha, or the fact that you would have put me back in stasis and left me with a woman you know would have killed me—”
“I didn’t want that,” he protests. “I didn’t want any of that.”
I smile ruefully. “You say that a lot. You didn’t want it. You didn’t know. You didn’t mean for it to happen. But it still keeps happening, doesn’t it? Because you never say no. You never stop her.”
“This isn’t about our mother,” he says wearily. “And if we’re going to talk about how we’ve wronged each other, Esmae, I have a whole list for you, too.”
“I took Titania from you,” I say, nodding. “I destroyed Arcadia right after you told me you loved it. I know. That’s what I meant. Nothing we do will ever be enough. We’ll always hurt just a little more than we can bear, so we’ll keep lashing out until there’s nothing of either of us left. Don’t you want it to stop?”
“You swore you’d destroy me,” says Alex.
“I said that to our mother. She just happened to look like you at the time.”
Alex lets out a breath that puffs white before fading into the air. He takes a step forward, but his shoulders are stiff. “It’s not enough,” he says. “I won’t come back and share something with Elvar that was never meant to be his. It’s not just you, Esmae. It’s him, too. He exiled us. He would have killed us if it hadn’t been for Max. I can’t let that go.”
“What if it was me?” I ask. “What if I had the crown? Would you let this end then?”
He sputters a laugh. “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“But you want what’s right, don’t you?” I point out. “And I was born first.”
“So was Elvar,” says Alex. “It doesn’t mean anything. Queen Vanya chose her heir. Father chose his.”
At that, I laugh. “Did Mother tell you that? It sounds like something she’d say.”
Alex doesn’t deny it. “She also told me not to trust anything you said to me. When she found out I was coming here to speak to you, she warned me. She said you’d probably try to trick me into some kind of truce. She said it’s the only way you can win, now that . . .” He trails off, his cheeks flushing like he regrets saying it.
Rage makes my ears ring. “You think I’m here because I’m afraid I can’t beat you in battle? You think I’m doing this, trying to end this, because I’m scared that you’re better than me?”
The pity on his face is worse than if he’d gloated. His kindness is worse than cruelty. “You lost your thumb,” he says. “You know what that means.”
“Do you ever think for yourself?” I snap. “Or do you only ever do what our mother tells you to?”
His face hardens and he turns away, clearly finished with the conversation. “She’s the only one I can trust.”
And the words come out, raw and furious:
“She’s the reason our father is dead.”
He goes so still that even the snow goes quiet. When he turns, his face is white with anger. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“She did it for you and Bear,” I say, trying to be gentler. “He was going to come find me.”
The story spills out, all of it. Alex’s face turns whiter and stonier with each word. “You’re lying.”
“She didn’t tell you I existed,” I remind him. “She didn’t tell you I was born first. Why is it so hard to believe she didn’t tell you about this, either?”
“She would never have done that to him!”
“She cut my throat.”
“But she loved him.”
That shouldn’t hurt, but it does. “Meaning, of course, that she never loved me,” I say flatly. “So it was easier for her to cut her daughter’s throat than it was to fake her husband’s death and imprison him for twelve years.” I shake my head. “I know how much she means to you. And you must know how much you mean to her. You must know she’s capable of this.”
“It’s not true,” he says harshly. “She’s done terrible things, but not this. She told me you would lie to me.”
I thrust the letter at him, the last one our father ever wrote. “And this? Is this a lie, too?”
He spares the letter a glance before scoffing. “Samples of Father’s handwriting are easily available on Kali. You could have faked this.”
There’s not much more I can do. He’s not ready to see.
“One day,” I say, walking past him, “this war will end. And I don’t know how many of us will still be here when it does, but if you are, I think you’ll look around at the kingdom of ghosts you’ve inherited and tell yourself you never meant for that to happen.” I glance back once. “Sooner or later, you have to mean things, Alex. You can’t let gods and mothers decide everything for you forever.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Esmae
By the time Titania’s warning beacon reaches us on Kali, just days later, I’m ready. That is, if being ready means I feel sick about hurting an incredible, majestic creature who is pretty much blameless, and I don’t know if I can win, and I’m angry that it could have been my twin brother taking this risk instead of me.
He was, after all, the one who released her from a place she was safe. Like Titania said, he should be the one to die fixing that mistake.
Yet, for some reason, I decided I would carry the starsword into battle.
Just like Ash told my father I would.
Sybilla barges into my room. “Where are they?” she asks. Her hair is in a tight braid, her battle gear sleek and fitted and lethal.
“Titania says they’ll be on Winter in an hour,” I tell her, strapping the starsword to my back. I try to ignore how uncomfortable it feels in my left hand.
For a moment, the grim look on Sybilla’s face is replaced by mirth. “She could have picked some lonely, forgotten realm, but she picked Winter?”
“Titania has something of a grudge against King Ralf, my mother, Alex, and pretty much everyone else with any kind of power on Winter,” I reply. “I think it tickles her to imagine them watching the skies in terror. But she did promise she’d lure Sorsha somewhere deserted, so that nobody on the ground gets hurt.”
“Good.” Sybilla taps her foot against the floor, then adds, as though I wasn’t the one
to chart this whole plan in the first place, “now, remember, we’ll all be in ships. We’ll fire at Sorsha with everything we’ve got. It’ll be little more than a nuisance to her, but we just need to distract her so that you can get onto Titania’s wing and get close enough to use the starsword.”
I strap on my boots. “I know.”
“And don’t forget—”
“Sybilla.”
“Okay, I get it. You know.” She watches me work the buckles on my boots, slower than I used to be. And, because she’s Sybilla, she doesn’t tiptoe around it. “It’s not too late to change your mind. Just go down to Winter, hand that sword over to Alexi, and let him get himself killed.”
I stand. “You think I’ll fail.”
“You can’t do what you used to be able to,” she says. “That’s a fact. You’re disabled, and there’s absolutely no shame in it, but it is catastrophically stupid to act like you’re exactly the same as you always were.”
“I might not be able to fire an arrow into a fish’s eye anymore, but I can hold a sword in my left hand.” My anger makes my voice sharp, jagged, like a piece of torn paper. “I know I’m disabled. The fact that my own mother did this to me makes me want to spit nails, but I’m not ashamed. And I know I’m not the same.”
For a moment, her face is unguarded and afraid. “Then don’t do this,” she pleads. “We just got you back.”
I wrap my arms around her, and her fingernails press hard into my shoulders, almost desperately. “I’m not going anywhere,” I promise her.
“Good,” she says, a catch in her voice. “Because someone needs to talk me through this whole romance thing, and Max just laughs when I ask him.”
Laughing, I step back. “I love you. And you’ll be okay. I’ll make sure of it.”
Down in the dock, Max and Amba are already getting the fleet ready. We’ll be taking a few dozen starships, small, powerful crafts designed for the most speed and maneuverability in battle.
Sybilla squeezes my hand one last time before climbing into the pilot’s seat of her starship. I see Radha already in the passenger seat, her eyes wide and anxious as she waves to me.
“Good, you’re here,” Amba says to me calmly. Too calmly. It’s a mask stitched carefully into place, to hide immeasurable grief and dread.
“Ready?” Max asks. I nod. I’ll be his passenger, with easy access to the wing so that I can jump over to Titania once we find her. As I watch him climb into his starship, the rest of the Hundred and One pair off into their own ships. The fleet is ready to go.
I hesitate before leaving Amba. I want to tell her I’m sorry. I want to tell her I wish there was another way. But I know she knows all that already.
Amba’s mask doesn’t crack, but I know her well enough to hear the pain pulsing in her voice as she says, “Be careful.”
“I will.”
“And tell her—tell her I—”
“I will,” I say again. “I promise.”
Then I walk away, so that she can fall apart where no one will see her.
The fleet leaves the dock in the Hive formation, each ship packed tightly around ours until the very last moment, when the hive will split apart and the queen will make her move.
As we head down to the pale blue orb of Winter, following Titania’s coordinates, I find it almost impossible to speak. A part of me wants to chatter, to distract Max and me both from what we’re up against, but I can’t make myself string the words together. The last time I went into battle, my mother cut my throat, I destroyed a city, almost got blown up, and was captured. This is my first time back in battle gear since I lost my thumb and whatever was left of my childhood and, frankly, this is not the fight I would have chosen if it had been up to me. I’d have picked something easy. Not a battle with one of the most powerful creatures that has ever existed.
It’s Max who speaks first. “Do you remember how you and I once stood in my tower and said we’d do anything to stop this war?” he asks. “Now I’m in celestial battle armor and you’re carrying one of the seven most powerful celestial weapons in the universe.”
“Too much went wrong,” I say. “We never stood a chance.”
“It’s not too late.”
I think of Sorsha, the collateral damage in everyone else’s wars. What’s happened to her isn’t fair, just as what happened to Rama wasn’t fair. In trying to give him some kind of justice, all I’ve done is wreak more havoc, but isn’t that better than letting it go? Wouldn’t it be more wrong to say “okay, this terrible thing happened to someone who didn’t deserve it, but it’s too much trouble to do anything about it” and just move on like it never happened? Don’t we all—Rama, Sorsha, and me—deserve better than that after everything that’s been done to us?
I know how circular that logic is. I do. Somewhere, Alex is making the same argument, reminding himself of all the ways in which he has been wronged. By me, by Elvar. That’s why I have to finish what I’ve started. All the ugliness I’ve seen and done has to be worth something.
“I have to see this through to the end,” I say quietly.
He hesitates, like there’s something he wants to say, but chooses not to. “But you can choose the way this ends,” he says instead.
“There’s only one way this can end. You know that.” I look down at my right hand, clenched into a fist, four fingers and a stiff prosthetic thumb. “It’s him, or me. Neither of us will let it end any other way.”
Max stares ahead, into the deep, fathomless blue of Winter’s seas as we coast over the water. His eyes, the impossible dark of a god’s eyes, look like they’ve seen a thousand cataclysms and are afraid that they will see a thousand more.
“The girl you were, the girl of stories and hope, is still here,” he says. “I loved her. And I loved the girl who wanted to set the world on fire. I’ve loved every version of you I’ve ever known, Esmae. And, you know, after everything we’ve both seen and done, all the cruelty and ugliness and rage up and down the galaxy, maybe the world deserves to burn. Maybe we deserve the girl who’ll burn it.”
In spite of myself, I’m captivated. “But?”
“But maybe it’s not about what we deserve,” he replies. “Maybe it’s about what we need. And at the end, I think we’ll need a different girl. One made up of both rage and hope. A girl who won’t swallow the stars but will light them up instead.”
When we find Titania and Sorsha, on an uninhabited part of Winter, they’re caught in a maelstrom of claws and wings and metal and scales. Sorsha dwarfs Titania in size, but Titania makes up for that in power and sheer indestructability.
I watch in both horror and wonder. In this desolate expanse of snow, sea, and rock, they are two behemoths defying the laws of nature.
I am an insect in a world of giants. The thought comes unbidden, an echo of the past, and it’s so unexpected that it stuns me. It’s the ghost of a girl I had thought was gone.
Titania must have despised every minute of it, but she had to have goaded Sorsha to lure her here, had to have said something to make her angry enough to follow her here and fight her like this. It’s a battle that can never end, because neither of them can harm the other.
Dread coils tight in my chest, but I unbuckle myself from my seat and push open the hatch.
“It’s time.”
Max’s jaw tightens, but he just nods and kisses my forehead. “I love you,” he says. “You’ll be okay.”
Maybe it’s a lie, but it’s one we both need to hear right now. The truth will make us falter, and we really, really can’t afford to falter.
“I love you, too.”
I fit my earpiece, climb out of the hatch, and brace myself against the left wing of the starship. As the rest of our fleet splits away from us and begins to fire on Sorsha, peppering her with gunfire that will distract and annoy her, Titania dives out of their battle and swoops across the water to me.
She slows down as she pulls level with Max’s ship, and I leap from the wing of one ship to the
other.
“I hate this,” Titania says miserably, her voice crackling over my earpiece, barely audible over the roar of the wind and sea.
I hate it, too.
As she dips away from Max and back in Sorsha’s direction, I get into position. There’s a shorthand we’re all taught when our teachers train us in wing war. Boots, balance, brace. Boots is a reminder to activate the magnetic pulse in our shoes that will keep us tethered to our ship’s wing. Balance is exactly what it implies. And brace is a reminder to crouch, to give us as much stability as possible until it’s time to attack. Without even thinking about it, I activate my boots and fall into place.
I pull the starsword out of its sheath on my back. It’s steady in my left hand. It doesn’t feel right in that hand, and I know I won’t be able to swing with the strength and agility I used to, but I can adapt. I can do this.
By now, Sorsha has batted at least three ships out of the sky, her enormous, beautiful tail swatting at them like flies. They’re on the ground below her, mostly undamaged because the snow broke their fall.
Then, just as Titania approaches Sorsha, their wings just a few feet apart, I see something on the horizon.
Ships. And these aren’t ours.
“Do you think Alexi came to help?” I hear Radha ask over our earpieces.
We all hesitate, waiting to see what’s coming.
An instant later, everything goes wrong.
The ships, my brother’s ships, fly straight for Max, Sybilla, and the rest of the Hundred and One. Gunfire explodes across the air, ugly and violent, as the starships scatter to dodge the attack and strike back.
“ARE THEY FUCKING JOKING?!” Sybilla shrieks, her voice piercing my ear with the precision of a spear.
I grit my teeth. I’d like to blame Alex for this, but I can’t. For all his flaws, I know he would never have attacked us, not here, not like this. It just isn’t in him to use an opportunity like this to cut down some of his enemies. This isn’t his work. And with both my mother and Leila Saka on his side, it’s not hard to guess whose work it really is.
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