by Anna Holmes
“I don't see what ore has to do with this,” he replies, his thick brow furrowing.
Alain finds a reason to study the toes of his boots very intently. I sigh, my breath curling into a cloud in front of my face. “Let’s…get out of the middle of the street. All of us. This way.”
Now Alain picks his head up as I take off across the forecourt. Is my presence helpful?
I look back at him and nod subtly, grateful that Daryon’s wide strides carry him past the point where he can see my face. I’m not sure exactly what my expression conveys, but Alain quickens his own step to take my hand, so I’m guessing it’s somewhere between desperation and mania.
Two of the bodyguards position themselves at the opening in the hedges that serves as the entry to the training grounds. I lead Daryon on through the verdant tunnel. This is as good a place as any. There’s no one from the Academy here this early, no accidental eavesdroppers apart for the dummies, and they’re not talking.
The other two bodyguards close ranks at the entrance, and Daryon turns to look down at me, impatient. He’s much more practically dressed this morning, bundled into furs. His chest, of course, is still prominently on display. “What is it you’d like to know?”
“What it is you’re doing paying a bunch of pirates for Elyssian cryst when you have perfectly good mines of your own.”
His lips purse, and he folds his arms and stalks in wide circles. “I had no idea they were stealing from you.”
“Not from me, Daryon. The pilots who depend on the cryst to make their deliveries. The miners who depend on the sales to feed their families. My reports tell me that this is not the first time, either.”
“I cannot retroactively decide not to hire them, Caelin.” I whip my head around and fix him with a stare, and he concedes, “Your Highness.”
“No, perhaps not, but you can assure me that you will no longer be paying them.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I hired them to do something, and I still need them to do it.”
“Why?”
He sweeps a section of his long hair from his face in annoyance. I almost want to offer him a tieback for it, but I get the feeling he’ll refuse. “Look to your country’s own history. The first move the Legion made once they had their claws in Elyssia was to secure the cryst mines. The places they fought the bitterest were the mines, and before they went—”
“I remember,” I snap. Alain, too, stiffens. Just before the surrender was finalized, the Legion soldiers made one final sweep of the mining towns. The worst civilian casualties of the war.
“They’re stockpiling,” he tells me.
“They can’t,” I answer. Rosalia has very few cryst deposits, and my territory was the only they had access to with abundant supply. Hence the displeasure.
“They can,” he replies, his voice low. “Folgia resists, but every day my father weakens. Every day, the local lords draw closer, jackals with the scent of blood in their nostrils. The local lords, whose purses cry out louder for sustenance than starving people do. Suddenly our hauls are sparser and sparser, while reports grow that the Legion takes large shipments from unspecified lands.”
I frown. Their airship fleet is flightless unless it moves overland, and that’s not what they want. At my side, Alain drops to a bench, his eyes wide and fixed on the ground. I set my hand on his shoulder. Through his shirt and my glove, I can feel an uncomfortable heat. He lifts his face to me now, and the crease to his eyes sends a javelin of ice straight through my chest. “Daryon,” I say slowly. “You were paying the pirates.”
“Yes, we have established this,” he huffs.
“Do you have a way of contacting them?”
Alain’s hand grips my wrist. I set my other hand on top of his, wishing I had his ability to talk to him silently and ask him to trust me. Daryon looks at me uncertainly, and I lift an eyebrow, waiting. “Yes, but it isn't easy,” he answers.
At the entry, raised voices pull our attention. Two of the bodyguards shout in Folgian, and Riley strains to see past them. “Let me through,” he blares. “You have no jurisdiction here, and furthermore—”
I look at Daryon, who sighs, lifts a hand, and barks something at them. Immediately, the women step back. Riley straightens his cloak, glowers a bit, and stalks through. He bows his head incredibly briefly to Daryon, then looks to me. “We lost her.”
I expected as much. “Casualties?”
“None, thank goodness. I've sent Tressa to see if she can pick up a trail.”
The but is heavily implied. I know. There wasn’t much of a trace of her last time, and there won’t be this time, too. What’s more, his eye is twitching. I doubt the scuffle with Daryon’s guards would be enough to set that off. I tilt my head questioningly, and he gives me the smallest of shakes of his head. “Daryon, you were about to tell me how you can contact the pirates.”
He sighs and reaches into the depths of his fur-lined cape to produce a small iron box. Both Alain and Riley seem to lean forward. “This box will allow me to signal their ship. Whether or not they’ll respond after the confrontation, I cannot say, and even if they do, it may be a trap. They’re…what is the word….”
“Pirates?” Riley suggests, his voice dry.
“Well, yes. It would be wisest to signal away from the city. I doubt they’ll indicate a meeting place if the hail comes from here.”
I hold out my hand for the box. “It would go a long ways toward reparations with me, at least.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Riley mutters. “It needs his blood.”
“I will do this,” Daryon says seriously. “If it mends the bond we once shared. For the good of our nations.”
I nod. “We leave tomorrow. Travel light.”
He bows deeply and turns, drawing his bodyguards away. Alain looks up at me. “Do you know what you're doing?”
“No,” I answer. “But so far, Crow is the only link between Rosalia’s deep and ongoing interest in cryst, you, and the pirates. I need to know what's going on, and you even more so.”
Riley nods slowly, and Alain spreads his hands in disbelief. “Am I to believe you approve of the Queen leaving the city to chase down the most ruthless caster I have ever met?”
“I don’t have much of a choice,” he answers grimly, holding out a piece of parchment to me. “And neither do you.” I unfold the paper and read Pollock’s urgent hand. Rosalian envoy en route requesting prisoner exchange. Sent by Pell. Ship arriving at Northern Shore in twelve days.
“Shit,” I blurt, combing the three clipped lines again in case I misread. I hope I misread. I didn't.
Alain leans forward. “Caelin?”
I look down at him, my mouth dangling open, half-formed words on my tongue. “War room,” I get out at last. “Now.”
Chapter Nine
Alain
I sit on a hard wooden chair with my arms clamped around myself, trying to hold in the dull vibration of my nerves as the war room moves around me. Guards come and go, diplomats, the airfolk advisor—Jarven, I think—who gesticulates widely with his writing tablet, but in the end, it’s Tressa, Bannon, Caelin, and me locked into this room. The protectives buried deep in the stone walls thrum with our anxious energy. I wonder if the others notice, or if my slow-burning case of cryst poisoning is giving me special insight.
I let my head hang forward to try to pull the tension out of my neck. “No, I never met him,” I tell Bannon for what has to be the thousandth time.
“I find it hard to believe a prince wouldn't have anything to do with a general,” he returns.
“Riley,” Tressa says, a hint of warning in her voice. Her eyelids are heavy and I can see the dark circles under her eyes, even past the fine hide that usually masks her complexion. Tired and frustrated enough at coming up empty-handed for insubordination, it seems.
For his part, Bannon takes that well. He takes a breath. “Surely you must have heard about him.”
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“Just rumors, and wild ones at that. Half of us weren’t even sure he existed. A glorified boogeyman with braids of rank, as far as we were concerned.” By the shadows accumulating around Bannon and the way Caelin has become extremely interested in the air just above my left shoulder, I take it my past affiliation has once again left me in possession of a different recollection of events. I look at Tressa, who sways and rubs at her arm in discomfort. “What don’t I know?” I sigh.
Her shoulders climb up her neck by inches. “I don’t know, either. Only that lots of people wanted him shot on sight and put that on the hunters’ lists.”
Bannon turns his head, frowning somewhere in the depths of all the shadow. “That doesn’t make sense. My reviews found that most of the prison camps that generated those lists were Legion-run. Why would they want to kill their greatest merchant of death?”
Tressa’s shoulders now sit just below her ears. “I thought it was batty that they wanted to imprison their own people in the first place!”
“It was a convenient subterfuge,” I mutter. “The Legion loves a convenient subterfuge.”
“To what end, though?” Caelin wonders aloud. “We assumed it was to foment dissent after the treaty, keep the region unstable, take advantage of their people’s discoveries in the meantime.”
“Caelin,” I say with a start. I edge toward the massive mahogany slab against which she leans. The table has a map of Elyssia scorched into it. A symbol, I suppose, of the intent that Elyssia would only ever defend herself, since there are no other nations on it. Stone markers sit in a tray to the side. I grasp one, run my thumb over the smooth rounded top, and set one over the little strand of islands where I was held. Then another on my first home, then another off the Western Coast.
Bannon’s breath catches at my side, and he takes up a marker of his own, placing it over the camp at the Eastern Coast where Caelin took her arrow wound, and another to the southeast. Two more are scattered over the Winding River, one more on the aqueduct in the northeast. My final marker settles on the mountain in the dead center of the island. The Great Forge. Caelin peers around me. “Cryst deposits.”
“All places where we found either slave camps or Legion Wanderers,” Bannon says. “Except the Forge.”
My stomach wrenches. Hiding it will do no good, but the words still resist my efforts to speak them. “Which I was ordered to collapse,” I confess.
It never gets easier. I feel Caelin tense at my side, and I know exactly why. I helped destroy one of my country’s greatest natural treasures—the only site where cryst is—was—found above water. Tressa turns her eyes down, and Bannon all but disappears. “If I could undo it, I would,” I say quickly. “I know it doesn't help—”
Tressa finds her voice first. “Didn’t you wonder why? Did nothing about that scream ‘unrelentingly evil’ to you? Or were you swept up in destruction for destruction’s sake like the rest of them?”
“It was a war. It is all evil. We just thought our evil was for a good reason.” I feel myself clenching, the energy throbbing in my veins. I force a breath and remind myself. The Legion took much from Tressa, and like it or not, I was and still am its face in this country. Peeling off the mask they made me has been brutal work, but that's not Tressa's burden to bear. I lean a hand against the table to take some weight from my leg. “We were told Resurgence stalkers were using it to run goods, troops, and prisoners, and the cryst made it too volatile to monitor magically. It was—”
“Strategic,” Bannon finishes, his tone devoid of…anything. I pick up my head in surprise. I had expected judgment. “I would have done the same, if….” He glances to Caelin.
She shakes her head slightly. “Some of us were…more sentimental about landmarks and livelihoods than others.”
This is not unfair. The one word I would never use on the Legion is sentimental. I had thought it a good thing. Rule by logic should mean equitable treatment. That isn’t what we got. Tressa frowns. “And again, they’re sabotaging themselves! If they wanted cryst, destroying the easiest supply is the stupidest….”
“Convenient subterfuge,” I remind her tiredly. “I had no way of knowing if the cryst had been removed before the…before I led the demolition.”
Bannon's still focused on the map. “So you were embedded with alchemical engineers.”
“More than once, actually,” I say with a mirthless laugh. “Most of the other prisoners at the camp were….”
Lined up in front of me, wrists bound together with rope. I can smell the oil on the floorboards creaking under the alchemists’ feet. And the sickening scent of my own blood, splattered across that floor. My wrists are chained behind my bare back. The warden steps forward, the knotted end of the whip dangling very near my face a few inches from the ground. “Let this serve as your one and only warning,” he announces to his unwilling audience. “Do not think your silence will save you. Do not think pretending helplessness will spare you. There is work to be done.”
He plants a boot on my freshly scarred leg. I clamp my jaws to keep from screaming. Wasted effort. The whip cracks once in the air, and then again and again across my back.
“Alain?”
I’m not in the camp. I’m in the war room, and all of my companions are staring at me. The darkness starts swirling in the corners of my eyes, the tingling that will give way to full blown pain if I don’t take a second to breathe. Only this time, it doesn’t keep to my skin. Pulses of blue light radiate from me, falling and rising with my chest. I lift my hand. Blue ridges like scales or very new feathers are breaking out over my wrist. And all the while a tension in my chest, a band that’s getting tighter and tighter around my lungs. I grab at my wrist and hold my arm against my gut. Caelin starts around the table. I stagger backward toward a wall. “Stay back! It's going to—”
Every muscle I have yanks taut as the band around my chest snaps. My vision floods with white-blue light, all sounds subsumed by the quick thuds of my heartbeat and the high, plaintive ring of raw magic released. The heat is unbearable. I think I might burn away completely.
And in my ears amidst the ringing are muffled words—the sound of which I vaguely recognize. They were murmured just out of earshot while I drifted in and out of consciousness, bleeding on the warden’s floor. Still warped, but clearer now. He’s not ready yet. Tell the songbird and the raven.
As quickly as it ignited, my personal bonfire snuffs out, leaving me standing in a flurry of papers and maps, smoke curling up from my fingertips to meet them. Caelin emerges from under Bannon’s arm, rushing over to me. She grasps one of my hands in both of hers, eyes darting over my face. “Are you all right? What happened?”
I look down at my other hand. The veins stick out stark and blue, but the strange cryst-scales have receded, at least, leaving only fading blue marks as proof they’d been there. “I’m fine, love,” I manage shakily. She flinches, her hand flying to the earring. I laugh a little. “A fine present I've gotten you. Bannon, please. The cuffs….”
He looks at me uncertainly through the haze. “I don’t think that'll help, Northshore.”
“Maybe not, but do you want to take that chance?”
“What does that mean?” Caelin demands. I gesture to the mess around us, and she frowns. “No. I won't have you treated like some sort of— incendiary….”
I reach out and tuck the stray bit of hair that always escapes her braid back behind her ear. “I appreciate that, dearest, but that's exactly how I need to be treated. At least until we know what it is they've done.”
Her face flushes red, her gaze shooting back to the markers on the table. “Then I am going to figure it out.”
“By chasing down Jori?”
“Her, Aloysius Pell, the godsdamned Archon if I have to. I am done reacting. We are getting ahead of them and we are staying there.” She swipes her books off the edge of the table and stalks out, the heavy door falling shut with a resounding thud behind her.
The three of us left behi
nd exchange glances. At length, Bannon clears his throat. “I’d…best go find out how we're planning to do that. Tressa….”
“You know where I’ll be,” she says with a lopsided smile.
He nods, then heads for the door. I let out a tensely held breath, then lean over and start gathering papers. Tressa rounds the table and bows her front legs to help. “She’s not angry with you,” she tells me quietly.
“I know.”
“Neither am I,” she tells me. “I shouldn’t have…they’re the ones that…I’m sorry, Alain.”
It’s not often Tressa calls me by name. Usually it’s some affectionate derision based on my title or height or intellect or lack thereof. I’m somehow both touched and irritated. “Yeah, well, you weren’t entirely wrong. I should have known.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. You—you and Kai—are the smartest people I’ve known. How is it you didn’t know?”
“It starts slow. They get you good and resentful. Here it was the Resurgence. In Folgia I imagine it’s the aristocracy, and in the kingdoms Rosalia swallowed before we were born it’s been lost to history.” I pause a moment for a breath and to ease off my leg. “Tell me how familiar this sounds. Kai’s bright. Maybe the brightest in your town. But he starts getting angry and restless, nervous about the rebellions. They want to take his country and turn it into a place where his brightness will never be rewarded because he was born to the wrong people.”
Tressa freezes in place. “Have you been reading my journal, prince?”
“No, I’m paraphrasing mine.” I fish out the last few papers from under the desk. “So they start by picking the brightest, bitterest kids—and so many of us were kids—and giving a sense of hope, purpose. Appreciation. Confidence.” I stand and let the stack of papers fall to the table with a thump. “Or maybe it’s vengeance, or a chance to hurt people. You’re not wrong there, either. There are plenty who join to destroy for destruction’s sake. They turn those kids into shock troops. And then those kids grow up to be General Pell.”
She rises slowly and adds her papers to mine. “You said you thought he wasn't real?”