The Exalted

by Kaitlyn Sage Patterson

  Noriava’s foot, in its delicate sandal, tapped once, twice, three times on the floor before her skirt swished and she stood.

  “Very well,” she said. “Come with me. King Ambrose, use the second chamber on the right. Be sure to take your guards, darling.”

  Bo stood, and three guards formed an arrow around him—one in front and one on either side. After they swept by me, I hurried to follow in Bo’s wake. As we walked out of the hall and down a short corridor, I surreptitiously opened the box in my pocket, and my fingers closed around the object inside. Once the door to the small chamber closed behind us, I pulled my hand from my pocket.

  “Duck!”

  The guards whirled on me. I took a deep breath, aimed the bottle at the nearest guard and pressed the top of the antique atomizer Mal’d dug up for me. The scent of flowers filled the room, the last of the perfume in the bottle having mixed with the sedative Pem’d stolen from one of the labs. I spun on one heel and sprayed the other guard in the face just as the first dropped to the ground. The third managed to land a punch on my ribs, but I was too quick for her, and as soon as the spray hit her nose, she was down.

  As an advancing guard reached for my neck, Bo grabbed him from behind. He struggled to hold the squirming man as I carefully aimed a spritz into the guard’s face, and he went down, taking Bo with him.

  Feeling a bit woozy myself, I pulled Bo to his feet. “We have to go. Quickly.”

  “But Swinton—”

  “Pem and Still have him.”

  “What about Mal?”

  “He’ll delay the queen as long as he can and then slip out through the kitchens. He’s got a scullery maid hooked around his little finger and a uniform already waiting for him in one of the pantries.”

  Bo nodded and squeezed me into a tight hug. “Thanks for coming to get me, sister.”

  My jaw tightened at the sudden affection, but the genuine warmth of his feelings came over me in a wave, and I hugged him back ever so briefly.

  “Come on. They won’t be down for long.”

  I shrugged out of my long jacket and handed it to Bo. As he dropped the heavily embroidered robe he wore and traded it for my jacket, I pulled my hair loose, then removed the Circlet of Alskad from Bo’s head and mussed his hair. I tucked the circlet into one of the deep inner pockets on his jacket and scrutinized him carefully. The fabric was a bit tight around his shoulders, and no one who looked carefully at us would be fooled for a minute, but the disguise would have to do.

  Opening the door, I glanced quickly up and down the corridor. Thankfully, it was empty, and we sprinted away from the palace hall. We slowed around corners and kept our heads down as we passed servants with piles of linens and trays of food heaped in their arms, and in a matter of minutes we were out a side door and blinking in the unusually bright light of the late winter afternoon.

  “Dzallie’s tits,” I hissed, scanning the grounds around us. We’d somehow managed to emerge on entirely the wrong side of the palace—opposite the main gate nearest the stairs that led down to the harbor. On the queen’s audience days, that gate was left open, its portcullis up, and the guards were lackadaisical about scanning the people coming and going. Here, there wasn’t any way out that I could see.

  Bo raised an eyebrow at me.

  “We have to get out before the queen notices you’re gone.”

  Bo nodded. “I know a shortcut to the front gate through the gardens. Follow me.”

  We raced through the lush green gardens, crashing into bushes and sending flocks of small songbirds whirling into the sky. When we finally burst through the last clump of trees and into the wide outer courtyard, dozens of people turned to stare. Before they could get their bearings, we sprinted through the gates. Behind us, I heard a cacophony of angry voices yelling in Denorian.

  “Faster, Vi!” Bo gasped. “They’re calling for me to stop.”

  As we dashed through the city, my feet kept slipping on the cobblestones, and I felt like I was always one wrong step away from losing my balance and crashing to my knees. I half raced, half stumbled down the first flight of the stairs leading to the harbor, but skittered to a stop on the landing, Bo crashing into my back. A startled pair of guards stared blankly at us for a moment and began to step aside, but then the enormous brass bells inside the castle clanged.

  They exclaimed something in Denorian and lunged for us. Bo grabbed a handful of my sweater and yanked me back up the stairs and away from them. When we reached the top, I heaved a juice cart away from an unsuspecting Denorian merchant and sent it hurtling down the stairs. The tumbling cart caught one guard in the leg, sending him sprawling backward. Bright, sticky juice sloshed out onto the white stone steps, staining them bright red and purple. The other guard looked between us and his partner and yelled what sounded like curses as he dashed down the sticky stairs to rescue his partner.

  “This way,” I panted, grabbing Bo by the hand.

  A plan was beginning to form in my head. A stupid, dangerous plan, but a plan nonetheless. I fled away from the stairs, weaving between the vendors with their carts, the baffled Denorian citizenry and the street performers that traced the line of the stone wall at the top of the cliffs, looming over the Salemouth harbor. The guards, having gathered their wits, raised the alarm behind us, but it did them more harm than good, as curious citizens peered after us, impeding the guards’ ability to give chase.

  When we were close to running out of wall and would soon be forced to turn back into the city, I slowed and turned to Bo.

  “Do you trust me?” I wheezed.

  “Are you about to do something particularly stupid?”

  I nodded, clambered onto the wall and looked down. The cliffs sheered away below us, and though it might have been an illusion, it looked like they angled slightly inward, giving way to deep water below. I offered Bo my hand.

  “No,” he said, gasping for breath. “The drop will surely kill us both, and even if it doesn’t, I’m a terrible swimmer.”

  “You’d rather stay and marry Noriava?” I demanded. “Give her the keys to the empire and sit in her lap for the rest of your life?”

  Bo’s face was pale. He pressed his lips into a tight line, then sighed. “I suppose if I have to die doing something breathtakingly risky, it stands to reason that I’d do it with you.”

  He took my hand, and as I pulled him up onto the wall, I saw a squadron of the queen’s guards just a few strides away, their white coats flapping as they ran.

  “Stay as straight as you can, take a deep breath and start kicking as soon as you hit the water,” I told him. “Get to the surface and I’ll take care of the rest.” I took a deep breath. “On my count. One. Two...”

  A guard’s gloved hand grabbed the collar of my coat, and I squirmed out of it while pulling us into the open air.

  “Three!” I yelped.

  The wind whistled in my ears, and beside me, Bo screeched as we fell to the ocean below. The water hit me like a wall of ice. Even with my long years of experience in the frigid water of the Penby harbor, panic threatened to send me reeling as the black water closed around me like a coffin. I forced my feelings aside and treaded, keeping myself suspended in the water until I managed to catch sight of the column of bubbles where my brother had crashed into the water. He was completely still, sinking fast. Pushing away the panic that threatened to steal my breath and my focus, I launched myself through the water toward him. Fool hadn’t kept his arms by his sides. He’d be lucky if he’d only broken an arm.

  By the time I reached him, we were deep under the waves, and the current tugged us out and out toward the open ocean. I grabbed Bo around the chest and kicked us to the surface.

  The moment our heads broke above the waves, Bo coughed, and relief washed over me like a crashing wave. Thanks to the strong current, we were already far from the base of the cliffs, and the guards were like ant
s on the wall.

  “Can you swim?” I asked, treading water for both of us.

  Bo coughed some more before he replied, his voice tremulous with pain and perhaps a little fear. “I can manage.”

  “Don’t be a hero,” I scolded him. “If you can’t, just tell me. I’ll do for us, but you’ll have to lose your shoes and jacket.”

  I’d already kicked my boots off, but the heavy Denorian wool sweaters I still wore were weighing me down. “Float on your back, and I’ll pull your jacket off. Can you manage your shoes?”

  “The circlet,” Bo panted. “We can’t lose it. It’s been a symbol of Alskad’s power for as long as the empire’s existed.”

  I pulled the jacket off Bo’s shoulders, ignoring his whimper of pain as the sleeve caught on his wrist, and shoved my hands into the inner pockets, but came up empty-handed.

  “It’s gone.”

  Bo clutched his wrist to his chest and sighed. “I suppose it’s just a symbol. No reason to be so attached, really.”

  But his grief pulsed through our connection, and as I pulled us back to the Whipplestons’ ship, tears coursed down my cheeks, mingling with the salty water of the bay.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Bo

  Noriava’s few naval vessels gave us chase only as far as the outer islands just north of the Denorian border. I would undoubtedly be forced to endure some exceedingly uncomfortable meetings the moment her ambassadors got word of what I’d done, and I expected that the concessions I would have to make in the inevitable negotiations to follow would be dear indeed. My leverage—that she’d withheld the cure from Swinton—was nothing but conjecture, after all. But for the moment, at least, I was free of her clutches and on my way home with an army at my back and my sister at my side.

  Vi was quiet and distant during the voyage, and as the ship sailed into the harbor at Penby, I found her leaning over the railing at the back of the ship, staring into the water.

  “Scared or nervous?” I asked.

  She gave me a half smile, tracing a curving line of the tattoo etched along her wrist. “Both?”

  I waited for her to continue.

  “I just don’t know where I fit in the scheme of this world,” she confessed. “I don’t know the rules. I won’t get the jokes, and I’ll surely be the laughingstock of court. And that’s even if they accept you with me tagging along.”

  “Gerlene says—”

  “I know she says that the paperwork is all legal and in place, but wouldn’t it be easier if I weren’t around? If I weren’t an everyday reminder of how strange this whole thing is?”

  I studied her as she gazed out over the vast expanse of the gray sea. She’d grown leaner in the months we’d been apart. The hard lines of her cheeks and jaw cut against her freckled skin, and her mouth seemed to be perpetually frowning. Vi moved with an athlete’s grace now, muscles rippling under the plain clothes she wore, and she was never without a weapon. A cloud of wariness hung around her like a fog. Her black curls, having escaped from the thick plait that hung over her shoulder, whipped around her face, the only piece of her that hadn’t been transformed during her time in Ilor.

  “It might be easier,” I conceded. “But I haven’t spent these last few months cultivating allies and pushing against the Alskad gentry’s ideas about the temple and the throne just to maintain the comfortable ignorance of the Alskad people. I don’t plan to land a foreign army on the shores of my own country just for the sake of my vanity. Our grandmother wanted to shift the ideas of rulership in our empire, and I see it as just that, Vi. Ours. I want you to share the responsibility and power of the throne with me. I thought you knew that.”

  “But I never said I wanted that. You just assumed that because you were raised to the crown that I’d want it, too, but you never asked me.”

  “Well,” I said, doing my best to make my tone measured, patient. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t bloody know,” Vi spit. “I’m fair certain I’ve no business stuffing myself into silks and jewels and pretending to be royalty, when everyone and their mother knows well and good that I’m not.”

  I bit my lip, irritation building in my gut, and reached out to touch the gold cuff, so like mine, that she wore around her wrist. “But you are. At least as much as I’m royalty, you are, too. If I have every right to be king, you have every right to be queen.”

  “It isn’t about my right to anything, Bo. It’s about who I am, who I’ve become. You’ve grown more and more a king through all this, and I’ve become more...something else. But I don’t feel like a queen. What’s more, I think you have to love a place to rule it, and I don’t have any love for Alskad. Nothing good has ever come from my being here, and no part of me yearns for it. I’m not driven by the will to make it better like you are.”

  “But you’re here. You’re fighting for these people.”

  Vi furrowed her brows, her frown deepening. “I’m here because of you, Bo. I’m fighting because I think that you’ll protect Alskad from the temple, and because I think you should be the person making decisions for the empire.”

  “But it’s not just about me, Vi,” I insisted. “If it were just about me, you wouldn’t have stayed behind in Ilor when I came home. You would have kept yourself out of danger.”

  Boots clicked on the deck behind us. As I turned, one of the Denorian soldiers gave me a salute and said, “We’re approaching the docks, sir. Would you like to speak to the troops?”

  I gave Vi’s shoulder a squeeze. “We’ll talk more later?”

  She gave me a sly grin. “Let’s go talk to your soldiers, little brother. I’m not running off on you yet.”

  A small boat tugged the great iron ship into one of the many berthings along Penby’s great harbor, and after Captain Whippleston had a brief discussion with the harbormaster, the gangplanks were lowered and the work of off-loading the cargo we’d brought from Ilor and Denor began.

  We met Swinton at the ship’s stern. His long golden hair was neatly plaited and clubbed. He wore a new, dark wool jacket over close-fitted trousers and a Denorian wool sweater. In the simple, elegant clothes, he looked to me more like a prince than I felt, but his expression was somber.

  “Are you ready?” I asked.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a ‘go back to Ilor and let the rest of the world burn’ option, is there?”

  Behind me, Vi chuckled grimly. “If there were, I’d be on that ship with you in a heartbeat, Swinton. Especially if Bethesda’s cooking is at the other end of the journey. I have dreams about her meat pies.”

  “Don’t go telling her that. She’s got a big enough head as it is.” Swinton grinned. “But it’s the thought of her mango and lime tarts that keeps me up at night.”

  Curlin thumped Vi’s shoulder hard enough to make her snarl and gave a disgusted snort. “There are dimmys being rounded up in the streets and the temple’s set to poison half of Alskad to get their way, and the two of you feel like it’s all well and good to go on and on about Bethesda’s food? What’s broken in you? I, for one, am ready for the fight.”

  Vi stuck out her tongue at Curlin as I gently moved Curlin’s hand away from the hilt of her knife. “We’re hoping that we won’t have to fight, remember?”

  Glancing down the length of the ship, I saw Quill already halfway down the gangplank. He raised his hand and waved at us. The Ilorian troops on the deck were already in formation, and the Denorians were waiting to take up our flank. I’d not yet grown used to seeing General Okara out of uniform, but she’d insisted that, as the Denorians were operating outside the bounds of their official capacity in the Denorian army, it was inappropriate for them to wear the Denorian uniform. In hopes that it would foster a sense of unity, all of the forces—the former Shriven and the Denorians—wore a band of violet cloth, the color of the Alskad flag, wrapped around their upper arms.

&n
bsp; “I wish I had a more elegant speech to give,” I said. “But thank you. Thank you for being with me. Try to remember that the Alskader soldiers are my citizens, too, so the less we can engage them, the better. Ideally, Rylain will step down the moment we enter the palace, and we’ll be able to focus our attention on untangling the issue of the High Council. But in the meantime, I’m eternally grateful to you all for volunteering to serve with me as we take back Alskad, for the safety of her citizens.”

  “From your lips to Dzallie’s ears,” Curlin muttered.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Vi

  Before we took the troops to march on the palace, there was something else we had to do. Something I’d been dreading since Bo first brought it up.

  I had to meet the nobility.

  The singleborn who could either support or oppose my brother’s claim to the throne had made it very clear that their support of Bo’s ascension would depend a great deal upon whether or not I would be an embarrassment to the monarchy.

  I didn’t feel at all certain that I could hold my own in this challenge. For the first time since we’d left Aphra in Ilor, I wished that she was with us. At least if I bungled everything with her around, she could fix it. Plus she knew how to act around the fancy nobles.

  I sighed and stepped onto the gangplank behind Bo. We’d outfitted ourselves in plain clothes—though finely made—so as not to draw too much attention as we passed through the streets of Penby. Since we suspected Bo’s house was being closely watched, Bo sent word to the members of his royal council, instructing them to meet us at Gerlene’s.

  “How’s it feel, being back here?” Bo whispered as we slid through the crowds on the docks.

  My life had been turned on its head and rewritten so many times in the months since I left Penby, but somehow, the streets were the same, if a bit smaller than I remembered. The docks still smelled like fish and salt tinged with rot and smoke. The same vendors hawked their wares from the same carts.