by Anna Holmes
I can be. “Yeah, lad,” I say. Only as far as he can see, hear, it's his brother hovering over him. “I’m here.”
His hand grasps at the air. “Gav, I’m scared—”
I close his hand into mine. A few seconds later, it slackens.
I struggle to my feet and whirl on her. She looks neither pleased nor angry. She lifts her hand and grimaces. “Blood. I detest blood.”
“Why,” is all I can get out.
She looks back at me quizzically, and I feel my fingers clench of their own accord, though what spell I'm preparing, I have no idea. What I can possibly do now, I have no idea. “Alain,” she says soothingly. “The complication has been removed. All is as it should be.”
“He was a child.”
Nuthatch turns abruptly. She glances in his direction. “Good, yes, get us moving again. In fact, we should all repair upstairs. It stinks down here.”
She pushes past him and begins her way up, leaving Arrow and me standing in the hold. He covers his face with a hand. “I—”
“Do not,” I snarl, following after her, trying not to look back at August.
He is not the first child I've held until he didn't hold back. But I swear to gods, he will be the last.
I find the cabin empty once I arrive. Moments later, Mother makes her way from the room, wiping her hands free of water. I watch her balefully. “Complication. You called him a complication.”
Mother settles herself in the chair. “We don’t need any other competing claims to the Seat if we’re to get you set on it. Even if he was a failed candidate. Someone would have found a way to legitimize the whelp again.”
All the rage knitting my muscles together releases at once. “The Seat?” I shout. “This is about the Seat?”
She crosses her legs primly, folding her hands on top of her knees. “What have we been working toward all along, Alain?”
“We.” Bitterly, I shake my head. Mother always did want me to be Archon. I always thought I wanted to, too. “Perhaps you’ve missed the events of the last year or so, Mother. I’m sure the Kings haven’t.”
“Yes, well,” she says, waving a hand. “We can handle that.”
“I don’t—I have been branded a traitor. I took up with Queen of Elyssia months ago, whom you just forced me to leave in a heap on the ground.”
“I’ve noticed,” she says dryly. “But given enough time, you’ll forget her.”
That magic inside me shoves at the boundaries of my body again, threatens to force its way out. Not yet, I tell it. Not until I know what to do with it.
Well. She wants me to be Archon. I will make her regret that.
Now the magic crackles between my fingers, flows from me into her, and I force almost everything I have into convincing her. “I don’t think you understand,” I say forcefully. “You just forced me to leave months of work before anything came of it.”
Her head bobs forward momentarily, but she picks it back up, not a hint of suspicion in her features. I’m not sure I even believe that, but I will do what I have to. ”Whatever do you mean, dear?”
“Do you think I enjoyed that?” I spit. “Months spent on the arm of that monarchist demon. I was this close to finally gaining her trust, making her think….”
It’s too hard. Lies have always come easy, but this one stabs like a knife. I almost stop.
But he was right. Someone has to start doing something about it. I take a shuddering breath and I finish, “That I’d changed. That I supported her. That I loved her. She was all ready to marry me. And then—well. You know what then.”
She leans forward and looks at me, and it's all I can do not to heave. She’s smiling. She stands and grasps my face between her hands. I shudder. They are cold. “Alain,” she tells me. “I’m proud of you. But this is where you need to be now.” She moves my hair from my forehead. “Elyssia will fall, but first—first you need to be in place.”
She bends and sets her lips to the top of my head, and I try to keep from recoiling. She starts away toward the room again. “And here I was worried,” she laughs. “I thought I’d need to lie to the Kings. But you’re still my son after all.”
I wait for the door to shut, then finally yank my wrist free of the manacle, tangling my fingers in my hair and forcing a breath.
Archon. I have to be Archon.
Another shuddering breath. I’ll do it. For August. He was right. Someone has to do something.
Except I won’t fix the Legion from its Seat.
I will tear it down.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Caelin
Consciousness is fleeting and painful. Every time I blink, the light on the pillow under my face is different. Even at its dimmest, it still sears my eyes and whatever lies beyond them in my head. I burn in this bed, too big for just me, too warm without the other occupant who should be here cooling it down. My pillow grows wet.
Next time I blink, someone’s arms are wrapped around me, familiar and strong. Snatches of song make their way past the stuffing that the fever seems to have put in my ears. Songs that filled this room when it wasn’t just mine, when I slept in a cradle on the other side of it. “Mama?” I croak.
“Shh, darling,” she answers, her hand moving over my hair. “I’m here.”
I blink again, the morning sun finally bearable. My mother isn’t here any longer, but someone’s pacing around the room. “Alain?”
The figure stops. “No, Caelin, it’s me,” Tressa answers.
She comes into better focus now, and I try not to look too crestfallen. I see why I thought it was him— her dark hair is braided up today, and even with her human lower body, she's still tall. “Sorry,” I say, wiping at my eyes.
“No, it’s all right,” she says gently, easing herself to the chair next to my bed. “I was just…practicing, I guess. Two legs still don’t make a lot of sense to me. How are you feeling? Should I call for the physician?”
Being poked and prodded and questioned right now sounds like hell to me. “No—no, I’m fine. Just tell me what’s going on.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. “You were very hurt, and you’re bound to feel, well, not great.”
“Honestly, I’ll feel better when I know what’s happened. Did anyone recover Alain?”
Her eyes lower. “I’m sorry. He insisted on going. She took Elle hostage.”
Involuntarily, I swing the fist not bound to my chest into the bed. The shock sends the raw nerves in my shoulder into a frenzy, and I close my eyes around hot tears again. “Damn it!”
“I’m so sorry.”
When the blood stops pounding in my ears and my face cools down again, I force a breath and look over at her. Her face is in her hands. “It’s not your fault.”
“If I could have just killed his mother like a proper human—”
“She isn’t. Human.” The dead space where my left eardrum should be can attest to that. I clear my throat. “The prison.”
“We managed to contain all of the escapees— except one. Kelvin.”
Well, that's dangerous. “And the insurgents?”
“Dead, or imprisoned, except for who went with Orillia.” She sighs deeply, tenting her fingers in front of her face. “Including, apparently, my brother.”
Despite the raging fever, I suddenly feel like I've gone for a run through the snow in only my nightgown. “Oh—oh no.”
“He left a note,” she says dully. “Said he was sorry, but he had to. For his kids.”
“I believed him,” I groan. “I believed he didn't want that formula in their hands.”
“Did the earring…?”
I pluck the traitorous thing from my ear, stare at it. “No. No, it didn’t.”
“He must have meant it at the time.” At the time doesn’t help us now. Alain in their hands doesn’t help us now. Us, or any of the rest of the world. Tressa knows. Her face is sallow. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “We failed you. Both of you. And now the world.”
My brea
th, until now arrested in my chest, escapes. As best I can with one hand, I fold the earring back into a ring. “You haven’t. You did everything you could. Above anything I could have ever asked. It’s easy to think that every battle can be won if we just—try everything. It’s not always true.”
The silence that hangs between us may as well be us both screaming that this was a hell of a battle to lose. “I’ll try anything,” she says, her voice going thick, “anything to get him home.”
I can’t answer, or I’m going to start making noises unbecoming of a person, let alone a queen, so I just nod, mopping at my face until I feel the unattractive sobs subside. “Figuring out how to go about that will take some doing.”
“There’s…something else.”
Whatever's in her fist clanks against the wood. I turn my head. “What’s that?”
She holds up her hand. From it swings a pendant—somewhat familiar, though I can’t put a name to it. “I’ve been rather unsuccessfully questioning Crow,” she says. “But I did get this from her.”
“What is it?”
She sighs. “Yet another complication.”
“As if it could be anything else with her. Just rip the bandage off.”
She watches the purplish stone swing back and forth on its black chain. “This, according to your new head scholar, is a pendant bearing the mark of the Sanctuary.”
This name I know. A tiny region in Rosalia whose people managed to resist incorporation into the Legion and somehow, keep the soldiers out of their city. Rumors of something within their walls that could destroy Rosalia abound. I sit up slightly, trying to catch my breath. “The holdout?”
“The very same.”
Uncertainly, I put in, “That—no.”
She gestures to the necklace still hanging from my neck even though I’ve been changed into a nightgown. No one is able to take it from me, even from my dead body, unless I give it. “It apparently has a similar protective on it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” she says, frowning deeply, “That somehow, the pair of you were at least once on the same side.”
The dent in my side begs to differ.
It’s the last of a series of speeches I’ve given across the city in the last few days. They have so far all run roughly the same—thanking the citizens for their relative calm during the evacuation, praising the guard for their quick response, promising that though intruders might knock at our door, Elyssia’s walls still stand. And all these things are true. There was not a single civilian loss, and our casualties were very slim indeed.
But there’s an uneasiness that permeates the crowds at the Cathedral, the University, the Parliament, the town square, and now, the Academy. No one has said this to me directly, but looking out over the students' faces now, it’s plain in their somber faces. How safe can we be if we just let the Prince Consort get plucked out from under us?
I brace myself on the podium. I ache to tell them I know, that that question has destroyed so much of my sleep that our new doctor has started coaxing potions down my gullet to get me there. But I can’t.
I can’t tell my people the absolute truth—that we have no indication that they’re planning to execute him, that since Fran landed in Rosalia’s Sovereign City no one’s caught more than a fleeting glimpse of him. No one knows where August is, and none of us can figure out whether they have a new Archon or not. And Pell, as ever, may as well be a ghost.
So at each speech I’ve given, I’ve told partial truths. That Alain gave himself to avoid harm to the rest of us, including me. That I consider that brave, that I believe he will persevere no matter what they throw at him, that we’re evaluating our options. But here in this room, this dim and drafty stone chamber warmed by the hundreds of students and teachers packed into it, I can see that this is even less comforting than it has been the last few go-rounds.
Toward the front are packed some of the same students who started the song outside the tower. They returned, I’m told, alongside those who awaited my still elusive recovery, keeping their vigil. Some of their eyes are rimmed red like mine.
My pause has drawn Riley’s attention. He inches forward behind me, grasps my elbow. I wave him off, clear my throat again, and try to breathe around the layers of bandages holding me together. “I’m done,” I announce to the room at large. “I can’t pretend any longer to hold you at a distance.” I look at those front rows of tired students, swallow the lump in my throat, and manage an actual smile for the first time in days. “Alain loves you. He loves teaching you. And it’s a disservice to you for me to stand here and pretend that this isn’t difficult for you and for me. I meant what I said when I called his actions heroic, but I’m also plenty hacked off, and I am not just referring to my hair.”
I still haven’t found the time to get someone to even it out, and I know it’s been noticed. For my effort, I’m rewarded with the tiniest bit of a giggle from a mortified-looking student in the front row. I nod in her direction. “Thank you for that. Honestly.” I take a breath, the smile falling away. “He fought to save me, and before that, he fought to be allowed to teach here, and before that, he fought to live.” I shoot a glance to my advisors, seated at the end of the stage, made nervous, as always, by my deviation. “I am telling you now,” I say, rocking forward on the toes of my boots. “This may not be his last fight. In fact, it won’t be. But gods willing, it will be one of his last. Alain will return. He will walk these halls again. And when he does, I will marry him. On that day, the Prince Consort will be no more. Long live the king.”
A lot of things happen at once. It grows so noisy in here that my one remaining ear can't quite handle it. My advisors are out of their seats—and soon enough, most of the crowd follows. I move to the edge of the dais and wait for a moment, incline my head to the audience, and I leave.
Riley and Tressa scramble to catch up with me once I’m outside, and once the quiet and the cold have seeped in, I turn. “Shit, I’m sorry. That has to be a nightmare for you.”
The corner of Riley's mouth quirks up even as Tressa eyes the building nervously. “What, you chucking the script and making unexpected emotionally charged announcements your cabinet highly disapproves of and then leaving without warning? No, not at all.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Tressa takes up my arm on my undamaged side and glances behind us again. “When did this…?” she asks cautiously.
I sigh. “About an hour before the airship got here.”
Her fingers tuck around mine and squeeze. “I don’t know whether to say I’m sorry or congratulations, and I feel awful for saying so.”
Gods love Tressa Nuthatch. I tell her not to treat me like I’m fragile, and she obliges. Riley’s hand finds my shoulder. “I think,” he tells me carefully, “if you just wanted to make an appearance at tonight’s banquet, people would understand.”
We rescheduled the holiday banquet. I understand it. Life goes on. People win and people lose and life goes on. That’s the way of it in Elyssia, or supposed to be. I must not be doing a good enough job of pretending not to have taken an apartment in my sadness. I give him a bit of a smile. “Oh, the hell with it,” I say. “It’s something to do.”
Four hours later, I wish I hadn’t said that. I’m sitting in my bedchamber, staring at the closed doors of my wardrobe. I should be rummaging through it. There’s a knock at the door, and Tressa peeks her head in. “Caelin?”
“Tressa,” I say a little too brightly. “What are you wearing tonight?”
“A uniform,” she says slowly. “I volunteered for guard duty.”
I gasp and hook her arm in mine, pulling. She twists awkwardly to avoid tugging on my side, and I twirl her into the room. “No more, Tressa. You are now on the arm of Lieutenant Riley Bannon, and that means feasts and parties and glamour.”
“At least until I grow my second set of legs back,” she says, grimacing.
“But until then, we feast.
” Does she know I pretend? Sometimes they seem to and don’t say anything so that I don’t yell, or start crying, or pretend even harder. No matter. I throw open my wardrobe. “What’s in here, anyway?”
She settles to my bed and sets her hands on her knees. “I can’t. I couldn’t! I’ve never worn a fancy dress before, let alone something made for a queen.”
I look over my shoulder and grin mischievously. “You can. You’re a bit taller than me, but I’m sure there’s something here. Oh! I was supposed to have this hemmed yesterday, but I forgot, because I was wallowing in my misery.” I pull a gray blue satin dress from the depths of my wardrobe and lay it on the bed with a flourish that makes my side twinge. It’s worth it. The skirt settles delicately into folds of shining fabric, like a painting.
She shakes her head. “Caelin, this was made for this evening. You should wear it.”
“Blue,” I laugh, and I turn away abruptly. “I—I’d rather not.”
I hear the bedclothes shift. “Caelin,” she attempts. I turn back, and her eyes flick cautiously to me. “You’re sure you want to go?”
What’s the alternative? Sit here all night and wallow some more? I fix my slightly manic smile back in place. “Yeah. But you have to come with me and you must wear that. He’ll lose his mind.”
The temptation is there. Longingly, she lets her fingers run over the material. “It’s beautiful,” she tells me hesitantly.
“It’s yours,” I say, the smile a little more genuine now. “I’m rubbish with hair, but….”
“Sit down,” she says. “I know a thing or two.”
Hers looks wonderful, tucked up in a beautiful spiral, scattered with pearls like stars. Mine is a lost cause. It falls just under my chin now, the uneven strands threatening to spring loose at any moment. The crown seems to improve things.
As anticipated, Riley is dumbstruck when he catches sight of her. I beam—a real smile. Of course he is. She’s gorgeous. She runs a hand along her forearm self-consciously, feeling for the hide that used to be there when she did that. He takes up her hand, lifts his eyebrows at me as if to ask if he’d stumbled into the Light of the Afterlands, and whisks her to the dance floor to give her her very first lesson.