Creatures of Light, Book 3

by Emily B. Martin

  None of that mattered, though. She could have been wearing a burlap sack, and she still would have radiated authority.

  She flicked her hand at the guard. “Leave us.”

  It was a mark of her influence that he gave a short bow and disappeared. When the clerk was here, even with her royal seal and badge, a small cadre of guards had shadowed her the whole time. Once he was gone, Shaula flicked her eyes over me, my gray skirt and bolero, my only slightly darker gray sash. Her gaze fell on the writing desk, and her lips tightened at the littering of charcoal sketches. She looked back to me.

  “So,” she said.

  So, indeed.

  “The guards tell me you sit and draw all day,” she said.

  It beat simply sitting.

  She looked at the nearest sketch—the tile fountain out in the courtyard. It had an interesting spiderweb of cracks radiating out from where the grotto behind it was pulling out of the adobe—probably why the clerk had inspected it so closely for structural weakness.

  “You always did take after your mother,” Shaula said.

  When my old tutor, Ancha, said the same thing, she said it with warmth, almost reverence. “You have your mother’s skill, and all her guts, too,” she’d say, poring over an illustration of burnished-gold hornets that I’d run the risk of catching in my aerial net.

  “I got stung,” I’d told her.

  “Obviously,” she’d replied.

  Shaula did not examine my work with the same admiration. “I should never have allowed this to continue.”

  That was a bit surprising. Sketching broken fountains was hardly heretical.

  She shifted the fountain sketch to a page of cicadas I’d detailed from memory—I’d illustrated enough of them for my thesis to be able to replicate them without a reference. “You’ve clearly had a closer connection to your mother than you let on in any of your audits.”

  That, on the other hand . . .

  Treason, treason, treason.

  I found my voice, usually so scarce in her presence. “I have no loyalty to my mother,” I said, falling back on my most basic line of defense, repeated with every accusation. “I haven’t had contact with her since I left home to come study in Callais.”

  Shaula shook her head. “Whether or not you’ve exchanged letters with Rana has never mattered less. Your own actions have betrayed you, not hers.” She set down my sketches and looked me squarely in the eye. The little study had never felt so small. “What do you have to say—what could you possibly have to say for yourself—regarding the events in Cyprien?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. The scene played out again—Lyle Roubideaux, dying on the riverbank. His brother, Rou, stricken. Queen Ellamae, unconscious. Queen Mona, enraged. Celeno, holding the crossbow.

  The flash grenade in Lyle’s pocket, and the way it lit the night like the surface of the sun when I flung it to the ground.

  “There have been four independent testimonies,” Shaula continued when my silence persisted. “Three from the guards, and one from the king himself. None of them provide a single shred of evidence to suggest you might have acted accidentally, or out of confusion. You intentionally released an incendiary grenade meant to blind your own folk and allow our enemy queens and the Cypri rebel to escape. We have failed to recapture them.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I had a feeling the queens and Rou had managed to escape up the waterways before my folk ever made it down to Lilou. Even if they hadn’t moved so quickly, Queen Mona could easily get past a blockade. That I knew for a fact. No wonder I hadn’t been tried and hanged yet, if my folk had been spending all their time hunting for them.

  “Do you have any inkling how significant your actions were?” the Prelate pressed. “Do you have any idea what it means not just to have lost such valuable captives, but to spur them to unite against us?”

  “I know more would have been lost by bringing them here,” I said.

  “Lies and treason, Gemma.” Treason, treason, treason. “With the queens of Lumen Lake and the Silverwood as leverage, we could have peacefully negotiated a treaty that would have ushered in the fulfillment of the Prophecy.”

  By subjugating the rest of the East, I left unsaid.

  “Instead,” she continued, “we’re facing an uprising in Cyprien. The king barely made it back across our border. Many of our folk are still in the country, unaccounted for. Paroa knows our intentions to take the coast. Queen Mona is forming an alliance unlike any the East has seen in centuries—against Alcoro. War could have been avoided. Lives could have been saved. Look at me!” Shaula yelled, and I looked up, startled. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  Silence flooded in. I sat frozen in the hardback chair, shivering from the penetrating cold and mute under her rage. She stared at me with steely, glittering eyes, and I was reminded, once again, just how little she looked like my mother.

  She drew herself up, her nostrils flaring slightly. “They’ve set your trial for next week.”

  I forced my tongue to work. “Is Celeno back in Callais?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will he come see me?”

  Her face gave a brief spasm of anger. “Will he come see you, Gemma? The king does not want to see you. The king has no reason to see you. Perhaps the only good thing that has come of this is that he finally has stopped believing you’re his personal savior, ready to swoop in and save him.” She shook her head. “I anticipated many ends, Gemma, but not this one. I thought you and he would be unstoppable.”

  I made myself brush aside the shame she was trying to bury in me—at least I had experience with that. “I need to talk to him—there’s something I need to tell him.”

  “And I’m sure you’ll be able to say it at the trial.”

  “Then may I speak to the council?” I asked. “At least Izar?” Izar was lead councilor, and consistently my closest political ally. He would be the most likely to listen to my case and fight for my plans, so carefully laid and so close to destruction now.

  “Councilor Izar is ill,” Shaula said. “He’s been confined by a debilitating stomach virus. We’re not even sure he will be able to attend your trial.”

  My panic flared. “That would leave only six on the council.” Three of whom were fervent devotees to the Prophecy, and one who often swung their way with enough persuading. Izar had been my one hope—if not for a lenient sentence for myself, then at least for one last attempt at a diplomatic alternative to full-fledged war.

  “I have the authority to break a tie in trial, should there be one,” Shaula said.

  I managed to bring my whirling mind to a coherent thought and looked up at her. “Celeno still has to approve the sentence they decide.”

  “I expect to have his signature in hand by the end of the week,” she agreed.

  I stared at her. “Before the trial?”

  “He was a witness, Gemma—not just that, but a victim of your actions as well. He needs to hear no evidence or argument. He’s made his decision.”

  Her tone made her implications clear. My fingers clenched.

  “Let me speak to him,” I said. “Before the trial.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  She gazed at me silently for a moment, her lips pressed together in a thin line. “Once again, you assume that my loyalty is to you, Gemma. That was your very first mistake. My loyalty is to the Prophecy, as yours was supposed to be. You have always seemed to believe you could shape the world to meet your needs. It should come as no surprise that you’re reaping the consequences of your selfish beliefs now.”

  I cut my gaze away, my face hot, my throat constricting in a familiar way. I blinked several times.

  Shaula recognized the warning signs, too. She lifted her chin. “You have no right to cry.”

  That I had never been able to help when I cried had never made any difference to her. It was an instant, involuntary reaction to stress of all kinds, from everything as small as a botched illustration to as large
as the ruination of my country and my life along with it. I ran my knuckles under my eyes.

  “If I cannot speak to Celeno, and I cannot speak to my council, may I at least send a letter?” I asked.

  She turned, arranging her furred cloak around her with an air of finality. “Of course not.”

  “Has there been any mail for me?”

  Her face flickered with a look of disgust at my persistent and naive questioning. “Enough. You still cannot seem to grasp that you’re facing trial for treason. If you had any sense, you would dispel with the notion that you have any autonomy left to you, and you’d spend your next few days in sincere penitence. For my part, I am done with you, Gemma. Your mother’s heresy was a blight to our family, and your betrayal is no different. I consider you no more my niece than I would any other common traitor.”

  She left the tiny room with a sweep of her cloak. As she made her way back to the guarded door, she said over her shoulder, “A clerk will be in tomorrow to take your statement.”

  I looked up from my hands as the door swung closed.

  That made no sense.

  A clerk had already taken my statement.

  I woke to find myself falling out of bed.

  I thrashed, as one does, expecting the hard collision with the floor at any moment. But it didn’t come. It took me a few groggy seconds to realize that I had stopped halfway, supported from behind by something that felt alarmingly like a human body.

  “What?” I croaked.

  “Quiet,” whispered a hoarse voice, barely audible over the whistling wind outside—the snowstorm must have gotten worse. The person behind me hefted me to my feet, flung a cloak around my shoulders, and then clamped a hand over my forearm. Struggling through my muddled thoughts—was I dreaming?—I lurched forward as I was hauled toward the bedroom door.

  The hallway was freezing, which I quickly realized was because the door to the courtyard had been left open. A snowflake blew into my eye.

  I snatched at sense and dug my heels into the tile floor.

  “Wait,” I said. I gripped the person’s hand on my forearm. “Stop—let me go!”

  “Quiet,” the voice said again. Though muffled, it sounded like a woman. Her head was covered with a dark hood and scarf.

  I pulled against her hold. “Let me go!”

  She hissed at me. “Do you want out of this place or not?”

  “I—”

  “Then do as I say. Stop fighting. We’re going straight across the courtyard.” She jerked me out into the swirling snow. The wind sluiced over the wall to the compound, rattling the naked cottonwood tree. I stumbled in her grip, my feet sliding on the frozen gravel.

  “Did you put shoes on me?” I gasped.

  “You always were a sound sleeper.”

  We flew across the little space toward the cottonwood. She pushed me against the trunk, my back flat against the bark. I sucked in a breath of frozen air, still trying to sort out what was happening. Should I scream?

  She released my arm and took up a wide-legged stance. She cocked her hand back behind her head, and with a powerful lunge, flung something toward the wall of the compound. The moment it left her fingers, she dove to where I was standing, flattening herself against me and slapping her palms over my ears.

  The world went yellow-white. A grinding blast shook the air, followed by a wave of rolling heat. I yelped, the sound lost to the crash of a cottonwood branch as it plummeted to the ground just a few feet away.

  The woman pulled back and returned her grip to my forearm. Dazed, I followed her out of the lee of the tree to see a smoking hole in the compound wall, right where the cracked tile fountain had been.

  People were shouting somewhere behind us, but we were already at the pile of rubble. I slipped on the loose chunks of adobe and pushed her hand off my arm, preferring to climb out under my own power.

  I followed the hem of her black cloak, stumbling over snowy sagebrush. I knew the canyon must open up somewhere to our right, but it was invisible in the swirling storm. I hoped my liberator—kidnapper?—knew where she was setting her feet, or else our last memories would involve soaring downward to the River of Callais.

  We didn’t run for long. A tumble of rocks loomed up in the gloom, where a mule was tethered to a twisted old juniper, its ears flat against its skull at the commotion.

  “Up,” the woman said.

  I set my toe in the stirrup and slung my leg over the mule’s back. The woman loosened the mule’s tether and vaulted up behind me. With a sharp kick, she urged the animal into a canter across the open flats.

  I crouched low over the coarse mane, snowflakes stinging my eyes. The wind roared off the canyon rim, whipping my cloak and slicing through my nightclothes. It was impossible to make out anything beyond the buckled drifts of snow as they raced by, and I knew the mule couldn’t see much better than I could. My stomach flipped as the mule stumbled over a ditch, finding its footing on the far side.

  “Of all the nights!” I shouted, my fingers clenched in the mule’s mane.

  “. . . this is the one they won’t be able to track us!” she finished for me.

  I gritted my teeth—I supposed I couldn’t disagree with that.

  We circled away from the compound, heading toward the distant main road, though there must have been a mile of open sage flats between us and it.

  “Are we going to the coast?” I called.

  “Let’s hope they think so,” she answered.

  After thirty minutes of tense riding, we reached a gradual dip in the land. A shallow, rocky creek wound along its base, and the woman directed the mule into its course. We picked our way upstream, frigid droplets splashing my calves. My toes were just going numb when the woman nudged the mule back up the bank. I wanted to ask what the purpose of that uncomfortable activity was, but I could hazard a guess—if the snow didn’t succeed in covering our tracks, our pursuers would have to guess which way we had turned, and they would likely pick the direction of the main road. Instead, we climbed back out of the river’s hollow on the same side we had started, and with a nudge to the mule, we took off back toward the distant canyon.

  The night was later than I thought. By the time we were nearing the rim again, the sky in the east had started to lighten to a dull, sunless gray. The snowfall didn’t abate—a blessing and a curse. As we neared the canyon, the woman dismounted and led the mule among the rocks to prevent us from cantering right out over the rim. She stopped several times, occasionally scrambling up a boulder to peer into the distance. I shivered on the mule’s back, wrapped in my now soaked cloak. Finally, the woman seemed to find what she was looking for, and she took up the reins of the mule to lead it to the very edge of the canyon rim. A broken, narrow track led down, hugging the wall.

  “Right,” she said. “Off. If Checkerspot slips over the edge, there’s no sense in losing you both.”

  Numbly, I slid from the mule’s back. My boots were frozen and heavy as iron.

  The woman gestured down the little track. “You go first.”

  “No,” I said.

  She stood before me, her hood still up, her mouth covered by the black scarf. A patch of frost had rimed over the fabric from her breath. The faint dawn light revealed very little of the rest of her, washing out the colors of her skin and eyes and wisps of hair blown loose from her hood.

  “I’m not going any farther,” I said, “until you tell me who you are.”

  Not because I didn’t already know.

  Because I wanted to make her show me.

  She sighed. “Honestly, Gemma?” She pulled the hood away from her face and loosened the scarf from her mouth.

  I stared into the face of the prison clerk.

  Or, more accurately, my mother.

  Chapter 2

  Gone were the thick spectacles and woolen hat, revealing a dark gray braid shot through with silver. Her sepia skin was darkened and spotted by work in the sun, and a simple glass star band—not unlike her sister’s—per
ched on her head, in need of polishing. I couldn’t see the canyon-wall brown of her eyes, but I could see their angular catlike sweep—I’d gotten their shape, but not their color, apparently favoring my father’s dark blue instead.

  She let me search her face, and I wondered what differences she was noticing in my own.

  “I thought I might have to fake a scar, or a birthmark, to keep you from recognizing me that first day,” she said drily. “Turns out I shouldn’t have worried.”

  “I haven’t seen you in sixteen years,” I said, more defensively than I meant to sound.

  “I suppose not.” She gestured down the little track. “Shall we continue?”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “My house, of course.”

  She must have seen the struggle on my face, because she said, “Our twirly house is long gone, Gemma.”

  “No.”

  The word broke from me and hung there, childish and plaintive. She lifted an eyebrow, and there—there—was the echo of Shaula in her face. I cleared my throat. “I mean, no, I’m not going down the track. Why don’t you give me the mule, and I’ll ride to the coast?”

  “Because we want them to think you’re going to the coast. There’s a highly reliable source in Teso’s Ford who’s about to see you ride past on the main road, and first thing tomorrow, your name will appear on a register at an inn in Port Juaro.”

  “Not very bright, am I?” I asked.

  “My hope is that it buys us a few days,” she said.

  “Days for what?”

  She waved again at the track. “Come on, Gemma. I’m too old to be out running all over creation in the snow.”

  “What about blowing up walls and breaking out prisoners of the crown?”

  She gave me a push. “Hot fire. Hot coffee. I’ll tell you everything then.”