The Exalted

by Kaitlyn Sage Patterson

  Then a giant form appeared before us in the fog, and I stopped dead in my tracks. His back was to us, but as one of the people behind me cursed, the giant man whipped his shorn head in our direction.

  “Go!” Myrna shouted to Curlin and me. “I’ll hold him off. Get the others out.”

  I leaped into the next row, leading my group at a breakneck pace across the field. The thick, wet sound of an ax meeting muscle and bone floated through the smoke, stopping me in my tracks. A chill went up my spine, but Curlin pulled me forward, and I stumbled as fast as I could move in the thick haze. I kept looking back over my shoulder, hoping to see Myrna catching up to us. Knowing she wouldn’t. Knowing she was gone.

  A high-pitched scream echoed from the other side of the field. I swallowed hard. I couldn’t leave her. I broke away from Curlin and the others and ran back into the smoke, searching for Myrna. My boot caught on something, and I pitched forward, falling into the damp earth. I pushed myself up, looking back for what had tripped me. There, in the blood-soaked earth, lay Myrna. Her throat slit. Her broken limbs at odd angles. One arm torn entirely off her body.

  I stood there, disbelieving, until another scream broke me out of my reverie. My kerchief was nearly dry. I had to get out of the smoke or succumb to the poison, too. I drew my knife and ran, but moments later, I stumbled and went down hard into the outer ditch along the edge of the field. I flung my arm away from my body, only just managing to keep from gutting myself.

  Rough hands on either side of me pulled me to my feet, and I couldn’t help but howl with the pain of it. I sucked in a deep breath and choked, remembering the presence of the poisoned smoke too late.

  I felt wild. Out of control. Curlin pulled me forward, forward, until finally, I could see. I looked around and realized that, of the thirty-odd of us who fled together, only five remained: me, Curlin, Leera, Maz and Gret. The others looked as if they were holding tightly to the last shreds of their sanity, and I felt certain they saw the same struggle in me.

  As we ran, I yanked the kerchief down off my face, pulled the canteen off my belt and swirled water through my mouth, spitting over and over again. I wanted the smoke out of me. I needed to purge every last particle of that poison from my body that I could.

  It felt as though we’d been running for hours when I finally saw someone sprinting down the path toward us. A single runner. I stopped, took a deep breath and immediately began to cough. When the person stopped in front of me, I looked up, holding tight to my last sliver of hope that my people—our people—had somehow come out of this alive.

  Part Four

  “You need not harbor fear, for your bravery is a sacrifice at my altar. Your lifeblood is the truest testament of your love for me. There is no greater wisdom than the realization of your own insignificance that comes in the moment before you give yourself to me.”

  —from the Book of Dzallie, the Warrior

  “I am the power in the throne and the truth in the crown, and it is through my will alone that you will achieve victory. The pleasure you enjoy in worshipping me is the true cessation of sorrow.”

  —from the Book of Gadrian, the Firebound

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Bo

  “I find myself wondering what our lives would be like if we’d been brought up by Ina. I know it isn’t a pretty life—the one our siblings lived, and still live—but nevertheless, I find myself wishing we’d always had each other.”

  —from Bo to Vi

  It took three days. Three days of prayers to gods I hardly believed in anymore. Three days of fury, of breaking vases and screaming into pillows and crying myself to sleep. Three days of scaring my sisters out of our shared suite with my uncontrollable emotions.

  Three days for me to find my way back to the resolve that’d come over me after Runa’s death. I was heartbroken, furious and betrayed, but none of that changed what I had to do. None of my emotions excused the responsibility that rested on my shoulders.

  On the fourth morning, I pulled myself out of my lonely, empty bed, dressed and decided that, if nothing else, I ought to find a way to distract myself while I tried to figure out what to do next. Pem and Still were already gone when I emerged from my room, and Doctor Rutin didn’t so much as glance up from her book when I opened the door.

  “How is he this morning?” I asked in halting Denorian.

  She smiled up at me warmly before responding in Alskader. “Calmer each day. This afternoon, perhaps, we will take him for a walk in the garden?”

  I nodded. “Thank you.” I paused at the outer door of our suite and turned back. “Do you know if there’s a library I might access?”

  Doctor Rutin furrowed her brows and looked down at her book. “The queen decides who may use the palace library.”

  I waited, hoping she might give me something more, talk to me, even a little, but she was already absorbed in her reading again. It seemed that Doctor Rutin had very little to say to me if we weren’t discussing Swinton and his care. So I took her pointed disinterest as a clear signal and slipped through the door.

  I didn’t know where I was going, or what I was looking for, so I wandered the halls, hoping that inspiration would find me. Obsequious servants bowed as they rushed past me, all the while ignoring my subtle attempts to flag them down. Polite, but distinctly unhelpful. I heard laughter echoing from the atrium, but the thought of walking into that particular cave of bears made my stomach seize.

  Instead, I found myself heading toward the training ground where I’d spoken to Noriava’s troops. It had been ages since I’d practiced my swordplay or run through the conditioning exercises Claes and I had done every morning of our youth.

  A familiar pang of grief came with the thought of Claes, the first person I’d ever been infatuated with, the first person I’d ever kissed. At the time, I thought I’d never love someone more than I loved Claes. I’d loved him so much that even in the face of his deathbed betrayal, even though I knew it wasn’t what he wanted, I’d clung to the hope that he might recover from his sister’s death. But now, when I thought about love, it wasn’t Claes’s face I saw, but Swinton’s. My relationship with Claes had been as shallow as a stream, whereas what I felt for Swinton was as deep as the ocean.

  Gadrian’s ears, Swinton, I thought. What have you done to yourself?

  It still wasn’t clear to me if Swinton had, in fact, volunteered to taste the poison himself, or if Noriava had forced it on him. Pem and Still had been with me, and none of us had seen what’d actually happened. Once—or Hamil forbid, if—he recovered, Swinton would have to tell us himself.

  I eased open the door to the practice grounds and entered as unobtrusively as possible. The soldiers were sparring in pairs, grappling barefoot in the grass as officers strode between them, correcting their positions and demonstrating grips and throws. I scanned the field, looking for a familiar face, someone I could connect with, when I spotted her.

  General Vittoria Okara was a short, though formidable, woman in her early fifties. Her legs and arms were corded with lean ropes of muscle, and her face was grim as she made her way over to me.

  “Your Majesty.” She greeted me with a bow. “You know you really don’t need to come and inspect the troops every day.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Quite frankly,” she said, her words stepping over mine in a way that would have been unspeakably rude coming from virtually anyone else. But from her, it felt right. Comforting, even. “It’s a waste of my time and yours. If you have a question, or if you need something from me, I attend the queen in the atrium most evenings. You may find me there.”

  “Actually—”

  “The gardens are lovely this time of year, as is the queen’s art gallery,” the general said, pointedly interrupting me again.

  I clenched my jaw. I knew that she just wanted me gone, but something inside me railed agai
nst the idea. “I came to see if I might be allowed to train with the troops.”

  General Okara’s mouth tightened. “There’s no reason for you to risk your health in such a way. That’s the whole reason we have soldiers, Your Majesty. To protect you.”

  “And I, personally, have found that it’s better to be prepared than caught with your pants around your ankles.”

  General Okara looked shocked, and then, a moment later, snorted a quiet laugh. “Fair enough. But these are professionals, Your Majesty. They’ve been training their whole lives.”

  “Please call me Bo,” I insisted. “And I’ve had lessons in swordplay and hand-to-hand combat since I was a boy. If I can’t keep up, I’ll tap out. But I need to do something, General Okara. I can’t just sit around all day.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and looked up at me. “Fine. But here, on this field, you aren’t a king. You’re just another one of us, and we don’t use first names. You’ll be—What is it? Gyllen? I can’t have it any other way.”

  “Gyllen is fine. I don’t need someone to kiss my wounds when I fall in the dirt,” I told her. “I need someone to tell me when I do something wrong. I want to learn to be a real leader, not just some ninny who sits on a throne and plays with his jewels all day.”

  General Okara clapped me on the back with a grin. “Then shuck out of that ridiculous jacket and those boots, and let’s get to work. You can call me General Okara, General or just Okara. Like the others.”

  I spent the rest of the morning sweating my way through exercise after exercise. I wrestled. I climbed walls and crawled through the dirt and pushed my body beyond what I’d thought were the limits of my capability. And not for a second did I think about Rylain, or Noriava, or the Suzerain.

  It was glorious.

  When Okara called a break for the midday meal, the soldiers led me down a long set of stairs carved into the cliff face to a shallow beach, hidden from the harbor by a wide, jutting rock formation. There, on the small beach, one of the men started a fire, a woman hauled a grate from behind a rock and someone else produced an enormous sack of oysters. My offer of help was waved away, so I perched on a rock next to General Okara while the others prepared food for all of us.

  “Do you always come down here for the midday meal?” I asked.

  She smiled, as if remembering something particularly happy. “Not always, but in light of the fact that we may soon be leaving here with you, I thought I might remind the troops of the things we love about our home.”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” I said, feeling slightly self-conscious. “To leave your home and defend a foreign king in a foreign land.”

  The general shrugged. “We follow Queen Noriava’s orders. Even when they make little sense to us.”

  I dragged my big toe through the sand, staring down at the furrow I made. “I doubt she’ll follow through, in any case,” I said bitterly. “I’m sorry. I know she’s your queen. It’s just...”

  Okara patted my knee. “She doesn’t tend to honor her agreements in exactly the way one might expect. I know.”

  Over by the fire, the soldiers had tucked root vegetables in among the coals and were toasting bits of bread as a pot steamed on the corner of the grate. Then, as if acting on some unspoken cue, two people began tossing oysters onto the grate by the handful. The wind shifted and brought the scents of smoke and brine and the rich tang of cooking wine to my nose. I inhaled deeply, savoring the aroma.

  “I wouldn’t have come—wouldn’t have asked—if it weren’t for what it would mean for my people,” I explained. “The person who sits on the Alskad throne will determine the lives of thousands of people. You must know what it is to have that kind of responsibility, to have all those lives in your hands. I can’t let them down. I won’t.”

  Just then, one of the soldiers appeared with two wide steel plates in his hands, each heaped with a mountain of steaming oysters drenched in a buttery sauce and dotted with chunks of beetroot and sweet potato, the lot of it topped with a heel of toasted brown bread. The general dug in without a word, slurping oysters out of their shells and tossing the empty shells onto the sand. She used one of the oyster shells to scoop up the vegetables and dunked her bread into the remaining sauce. Stomach growling, I followed her example. The beach went quiet as everyone ate, savoring the meal in collective, contented silence. As the soldiers finished eating, they trickled down to the water, squatting to rinse their plates.

  Suddenly, a crack like thunder reverberated through the cove, and I looked up just as a cascade of boulders poured off the cliff face, crashing down to the water and sand below. I heard a scream from the waterline, but the only people I could see were looking around, confused.

  I leaped up, flinging my plate into the sand, and started running toward the pile of fallen rocks. The closer I got, the louder the screams became. I dropped to my knees at the edge of the rocks and peered into the heap, hoping to catch a glimpse of the person who’d been trapped. More tiny rocks poured off the ledge above, peppering my back like hailstones in a bad storm, but I ignored them. The only thing that mattered was making sure the soldier under those rocks survived.

  “Hello?” I called in Denorian. “Can you hear me? My name is Bo. I’m here to help.”

  There was another loud crack, and, instinctively, I covered my head and neck with my arms as fist-sized stones poured down around me. The scream turned into a wail, but I kept talking, murmuring words I hoped were comforting. As soon as the onslaught slowed, I peered into the gloom and saw the soldier’s fingers reaching for me. I grabbed hold and gave them a squeeze before standing to assess the new damage.

  Someone laid a hand on my shoulder, and I glanced up to see a group of soldiers gathered around me, seemingly waiting for my command. “Someone go get a doctor,” I said hurriedly. One of the soldiers nodded and took off at a sprint toward the palace. “The rest of you, help me. We need to get him out of there. But go slowly. We don’t want the rocks to shift and cause more damage.”

  Moving carefully, we shifted one stone after another. We heaved boulders the size of small dogs off the pile, and we had just uncovered the soldier’s face and legs when a team of doctors arrived, screeching for us to stop. I stepped back from the pile quickly, hands up.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “What would you like us to do?”

  One of the doctors, a woman in her late middle age, addressed General Okara. “We need to assess the patient before the pressure is relieved. It could be that those rocks are the only thing keeping him alive right now. We’ll let you know if we need further assistance.”

  General Okara nodded and steered me away from the rockfall by the elbow. “What you did, risking your life like that? It was extremely stupid.”

  I choked back a laugh that threatened to become a sob and gaped at her. “What do you mean?”

  “No prince or king should put his own life on the line to save a simple soldier,” General Okara admonished. “What’s more, the soldiers on this beach are more than capable of seeing to their own.”

  “They weren’t, though,” I protested. “No one was moving.”

  General Okara closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’m not making my point well. What you did was stupid and reckless and something I never thought I’d see from royalty. It was brave. It was selfless.” She opened her eyes and looked at me intently. “There’s more to you than shows up on first impressions, Gyllen.”

  I pressed my lips together and watched as the doctors extracted the soldier from the rocks and laid him gently on a stretcher. I didn’t know what to say to the general, how I ought to respond. I hadn’t thought. I’d simply acted as I would’ve expected anyone to do.

  When the doctors had carried the wounded man up the stairs and back toward the palace, I helped the Denorian soldiers clean up the beach and pack everything they’d brought for the meal. We worked
in comfortable, companionable silence under the watchful eye of General Okara. And for the first time since Swinton drank the temple’s poison, I felt a flicker of hope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Vi

  “I am lost. There was a time when I thought I knew myself to my very core, to the heart of my soul. But now, when I catch sight of myself in a mirror, the person I see is a stranger.”

  —from Vi to Bo

  Rain fell in cold sheets, smearing the mud that we’d rubbed over our skin into dirty streaks down our faces. My throat burned, and the hacking coughs that rattled my bones brought up globs of soot-black mucus.

  Someone handed me a flask, and the liquid was halfway down my gullet before the alcoholic burn filled my mouth. I gagged, and my stomach heaved, bringing up a mixture of burning liquid and bile. I collapsed onto my knees in the muddy path, retching again and again as horrible, bloody images flashed in front of me. Bodies left lying in the dirt, broken and empty.

  Myrna’s face. Oh, gods. Myrna’s face above her slit throat. Her mangled body.

  I threw up into the dirt again. As I knelt there, trembling and gasping for breath, I felt a hand on my shoulder, followed by Curlin’s voice.

  “If you’re finished, we need to move.”

  She was right. I knew she was right, but I still wanted to wrap my hands around her neck and squeeze until she stopped breathing. The thought startled me—it came out of nowhere. That violence wasn’t like me; didn’t make sense to me. It felt like someone else forcing thoughts into my head.