Creatures of Light, Book 3

by Emily B. Martin

  “Oh,” he said, suddenly comprehending. “Wait a minute . . .”

  “You didn’t sign it,” I repeated numbly.

  “All this time—” he began.

  “But she had the document . . .”

  “You thought that I . . .”

  “She said she finally had it.”

  “Gemma, did you really think . . .” He straightened. “Gemma . . . you didn’t really think I would order your execution?”

  “Well . . . yes, to be honest! I was already at the Retreat. It didn’t seem a stretch . . .” I shook my head. “But do you know what this means? Shaula is forging your signature. She’s not just acting in your name, she’s falsifying your own orders. In matters of life and death!”

  He broke his gaze away from mine, staring again at the broken gypsum on the floor, his eyes flicking unseeing over the ground.

  “N . . . no,” he began hesitantly. “Why would she? How could she?”

  “Because you wouldn’t do it yourself,” I said. He hadn’t done it himself. He hadn’t ordered my death. “Because, in her mind, most likely, you were resisting the machinations of the Prophecy.”

  He twitched his head back up. “How does the execution of my wife have anything to do with the Prophecy? It doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “To Shaula, everything has to do with the Prophecy.” A thought occurred to me. “Did you order a military draft in Cyprien?”

  He spread his hands, his voice tinged with rising alarm. “This doesn’t make any sense—why would she do this?”

  “Celeno. The military draft in Cyprien.”

  “What draft?” he asked. “The only draft I remember was the one the Council was debating before we made the decision to meet Queen Mona in Lilou. But you convinced them to stall it—and anyway, that was months ago.”

  I closed my eyes. “In Cyprien, one of the reasons Rou gave for the rebellion was the impending draft. The order had been put through to the governor before we arrived in Lilou. It was the first I’d heard of it—I assumed Shaula had convinced you to sign the decree without telling me.”

  “When have I ever done that?”

  My eyes flew open. “Forever? My name never goes on official documents! Yours is the only one that matters! Your choices are the only ones that matter!”

  “But I’ve never not told you . . .” My words registered. “You can’t really think that?”

  “Your actions have the Prophecy behind them,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness from my voice. “Mine don’t, Celeno. That’s always been our truth.”

  “Gemma,” he said incredulously. “I tell you everything. What would I be without you? Every decision I’ve ever made, you’ve helped me make it. That’s how it was even back when we were students. I’d never sign something without asking you first. I never have.”

  None of this made any sense despite the pieces all lining up in a perfect row. I shook my head again. The lantern swung in my fist, making the crystals shudder and dance.

  “You took down our wedding portrait,” I finally said.

  He paused again. “I couldn’t look at it. I couldn’t pass by it every day with you gone.”

  The silence pressed in around us, threaded with the scents of damp rock and mineral and sweat. My mind reeled with this new information—he hadn’t ordered my death. Shaula had, and she’d done it without his knowledge. He’d been holding out—against the warrant, against the Cypri draft . . .

  Against what else?

  How many other things had he rejected and yet had slid through the Council anyway?

  How many things had he approved that had been quietly overturned?

  How long had this been going on?

  How had I missed it?

  My lips tightened. I hadn’t missed it. I had always seen it, and accepted it as part of my role. I had always assumed that I simply wouldn’t be part of everything. I’d always assumed I was an accessory to a monarchy that could just as soon operate without me.

  Celeno let out another long, slow sigh, rubbing his face.

  “We have to go back,” he said again, his voice bleak. “I have to go back into that rat’s nest, and figure something out. We’re right back where we started.”

  Except we weren’t right back where we’d started. We had made new discoveries. We had gathered more data. And we were halfway under the Stellarange Mountains, surrounded by glowing insect larvae and living crystals and fragments that somebody had carved here. Somebody—whether it was the Prism or one of his followers—had to trace a similar route that we had. Somebody had to squeeze their body under the same ledge we had. Unless the rock had moved and shifted that drastically in the last several hundred years.

  Or, unless . . .

  I looked down the narrow hall to where the room was swallowed up by darkness.

  Unless there was another way in.

  Another way out.

  Celeno was still staring despondently at the bits of petroglyphs, his shoulders sagging. I noticed his hands trembling again—the muddy fabric of his cloak twitched with his movement.

  “Let’s get some rest,” I said. “Have something to eat, and get some sleep. We can start again when we’ve had a chance to think a little more clearly.”

  He puffed out his breath, but without any further comment, he folded his legs and sank to the ground. The walls were too thorny with crystals to rest against, so he simply slumped down on his side, his head clutched in his arms.

  He stayed that way as I moved about, parceling out some food and laying out our bedrolls. He moved only to take a few bites of jerky and a swallow of water, and then to wiggle into his bedroll. After that he rolled to his other side and pulled his cloak over his head, his breath labored and raspy.

  But I didn’t lie down. I sat on my bedroll, the crystals reflecting the barest light from the lantern, and spread out my mother’s map. I stayed that way well into our supposed night, thinking, staring, calculating, guessing. I traced distances with my fingers. I gazed at the petroglyphs. I ran my fingers over the warm, malleable crystals, my mind full of the machinations and implications of gypsum and flowing rock, astronomy and cultural history, millipedes and glowworms, and people, people, people.

  I looked at the nearest cluster of crystals. Despite what I’d said to Celeno, I reached for a fat, tapered one and broke it off. I gazed at it in my hand, the broken edge leaving a few specks of white powder on my skin.

  Maybe we did have to go back.

  But maybe we could go forward in the process.

  Chapter 8

  “Celeno, wake up.”

  He shifted under my gentle shake, his face slack with sleep. I hated to rouse him, but I’d given him as much time as I thought we could afford, and now I was anxious to get going. “Wake up.”

  He blinked blearily and coughed through his raspy throat. “Gemma? What time is it?”

  “I have no idea. But you slept several hours, and now we need to go.”

  He sat up, groggy. “Did you sleep?”

  “Some. But I also did some scouting. This isn’t a hall.” I pointed down into the shadows—even where the lantern beam faded away, crystals glinted in the light of the glowworms above. “The passage keeps going, and it’s marked with blazes. I’ve done some figuring with the map, and it should bring us where we want to go.”

  He peered owlishly into the gloom. “Are you sure? I don’t like the idea of going down an uncharted tunnel.”

  “I just told you, it has blazes. I went down it for about a half an hour, and there are Xs where the crystals don’t grow. My mother’s colleague must have mapped a little further.”

  “If there are blazes, why didn’t we come in that way, instead of squeezing under that blasted ledge?”

  “It’s a roundabout route,” I said. “It goes in a big arc—longer, but less tight.” I glanced at the ink-dark slice we had squeezed under the day before, and I took a breath. “I . . . I can’t go that way again, Celeno. I can’t make mysel
f go back in there. This way may be longer, but it looks bigger—bigger even than the passage along the River of Milk.”

  He sighed and raked his fingers through his grimy hair. “All right. I don’t relish the idea of squeezing anymore, either. But, Gemma, if things feel off—if it seems like we’re not going the right way, we need to turn around, okay? I’d still choose slithering under rocks over dying of starvation under the Stellarange.”

  “All right.” I held out my hand to him. “Let’s get going.”

  I bundled up his bedroll and fixed it to his pack, and then we set off. The way seemed especially bright now with the faceted gypsum crystals coating the walls, reflecting the beam from our broken lantern and the steady glow of the Arachnocampa above. The relative brightness helped me ignore my own nagging misgivings—they seemed to trail just over my shoulder, every now and then prodding me to rethink my decisions.

  But I had already done a lot of thinking, trying to plot out the most realistic series of events that might transpire once we arrived back in Alcoro. Even the best-case scenario—one where my mother had managed to convince the Council to indict Shaula—still carried the persistent threat of war. Removing Shaula might stem the free-bleeding wound of corruption within Stairs-to-the-Stars, but it wouldn’t undo the alliance of our neighboring countries, nor stop them from striking back at our forces already pressing further and further beyond our own borders. It wouldn’t provide the pause we needed to examine the Prophecy without the entrenched opinions of stakeholders, politicians, and acolytes.

  And that was the best-case scenario. It was far more likely that my mother was still struggling to obtain clearance to petition the Council—something that could take weeks even without an army on the move. If her claims sounded deranged enough—and the suggestion of a Prelate keeping a case of shining bug-things to poison her enemies certainly bordered on ludicrous—she may even be imprisoned before she could make contact with my old tutor.

  Despite the significant possibility of this scenario, I tried not to dwell on it—it made my stomach roil to the point of retching. If Shaula had already extended her sister’s prison sentence once to negate her influence, what might she do if Rana popped up again with accusations of murder? My anxious mind started calculating the time frame for an expedited gallows sentence, but I forced myself to stop and focus on the route in front of us.

  Fortunately, the way was wide and mostly clear—the main obstacles were places where the gypsum grew in swaths over the ground, forcing us to pick our way on tiptoe amid the blooms and spars. More than once we both slipped, earning us painful sharp-edges bruises, but the crystals were soft enough that they didn’t slice our skin. In places where we had no choice but to step on them, we left a wake of crumbled shards behind like churned snow.

  We didn’t speak much during this point in our journey, and for this I was grateful. I was too tired to keep reopening the same hurts over and over with no remedy in sight. My secrets, too, were piling heavy on my shoulders. The vellum packet of letters in my shirt whispered and crinkled with my movements, reminding me that I still hadn’t given Celeno all the truth. Too much talk might have worn out the last of my resolve. It was still too early, I told myself. Still too many unknowns, too many unanswered questions and persisting obstacles. Better to wait until I had as much information as I could gather, and then I would lay it all out, clearly, chronologically, as straightforward as an academic abstract. Surely things would fall appropriately into place—data, discussion, recommendations. Action. That was how it worked.

  Please let it work.

  I didn’t know what Celeno was dwelling on—the petroglyphs, most likely, and the mess we faced back at home. He was quiet for hours, his breath ragged behind me, and quiet still after we stopped for the unchanging night. He only made one comment as I laid out a scant meal.

  “We haven’t reconnected with the passages we were in before.”

  “No,” I said. “But we’re heading in the right direction.”

  “I haven’t seen any blazes.”

  “There haven’t been any places for them,” I said, nodding to the fine carpet of gypsum that covered even the floor—we were perched gingerly on our packs to keep our seats off the prickly ground. The night would be an uncomfortable one, for sure. “But the glowworms are here, which means we’re at least not heading farther in. We’ll reconnect sometime tomorrow.”

  Whether he believed me or was simply too tired to argue, he swallowed down just two bites of food, lay down on his bumpy bedroll, and turned his back to me. Still gnawed and nagged by anxiety and doubt, I did the same, staring up at the Arachnocampa colonies until they seemed to be burned into my mind’s eye.

  Sure enough, a few hours in to our march the next day—flanked at first by white Xs I made sure to point out to Celeno—we scraped out a side passage to find ourselves staring again at the crisp edge of the River of Milk. Its course was wider than before, with a comfortable ledge to walk along. The glowworms hung thick and luminous a few feet above our heads, writhing a bit in the beam of our lantern. I’d led us at a decent pace for much of the morning, so at this junction, I settled Celeno down against the wall and scouted a little ways down the passage.

  “Good news,” I said, panting as I hurried back to him twenty minutes later. “The blazes pick up again. We’re heading in the right direction.”

  His eyes were closed, and the food I’d set out for him was untouched. “Good,” he said, exhaustion heavy in his voice. “I was beginning to have my doubts. It seems odd to be going down, though, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we be going up?”

  I looked down the passage, lit beyond our lantern by the Arachnocampa. “Nothing in here makes sense. We may have been going steadily upward without realizing it, and now we have to make up that elevation.”

  He puffed out a breath. “Well, if there are blazes, it must be all right.” He slit open an eye. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  Guilt quadrupled in my stomach. “It’s okay,” I said quietly. “I haven’t exactly earned your trust.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t pretend I fully understand where everything went wrong between us, but, Gemma, we’ve been partners for a long time. You earned my trust years ago.”

  I gnawed my lip. Maybe . . . maybe now would be the right time to tell him?

  “Celeno,” I began slowly. “I know things at home are a mess—”

  His response was a thick, deep-chested sigh.

  “—but,” I continued, “what if there was another option we could pursue?”

  “You mean the Prophecy?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean . . . what if we could solicit help from our neighbors? What if we could pull our armies back, withdraw from Cyprien—”

  “Our stakeholders would lose their minds,” Celeno interrupted with a hint of old frustration. “You know how many people have a hand in Cypri industry, as well as our military campaign.”

  “But,” I pressed, “what if we could reroute that support, instead of cut it off entirely? What if we could put it to use elsewhere?”

  “Where else?” he asked, spreading his hands. “There is nothing else. You know that. This is the problem we’ve always run up against, Gemma. Mining, agriculture, trade . . . nothing is robust enough to justify losing our hold on Cypri industry and shipping routes. And anyway, we’re too far into this campaign now. We’ve made too many enemies outside our borders. No one will ally with us without pressure or incentive to do so. A treaty is out of the question.”

  I chewed on my lip some more, gazing unseeing at the crisp white calcite. It sparkled in the glowworms’ light.

  “What if it wasn’t?” I asked.

  He sighed again and closed his eyes. “What if, what if, what if. What if the Light suddenly turns the Stellarange to solid gold and floods the canyon with silver? I can’t work with what ifs, Gemma. Who is going to ally with us? Lumen Lake? Queen Mona is more likely to hold my head under the water until all my breath is gone. The S
ilverwood? Queen Ellamae spent a week as our prisoner, hurling a different insult at me every half-hour. Winder? Paroa? Now bound up to Lumen Lake’s flag. Cyprien? Actively rebelling against us. Samna is the only country I can think of that might not hold a personal grudge, and we have nothing to offer them. We have no allies, Gemma. We have to rely on our own resources.”

  “But Queen Mona has—”

  “Queen Mona has the strongest personal vendetta against me of every ruling body in the Eastern World!” His eyes popped open again. “This is what I don’t understand, Gemma—how can you continue to come back to her as a possible ally? Any kindness she showed you in Cyprien was designed to win you to her side, to separate you from me! I can’t forget what happened when you had a choice to make in Dismal Green. Did she succeed, after all?”

  I stood looking down at him, my fists balled at my sides. His chest heaved at the effort his sharp words cost him, the sweat on his forehead glinting. I struggled to regain control on my urge to spill every secret. I leaned back slightly, the vellum packet shifted against my bolero.

  Still too early.

  More work.

  More time.

  “No,” I finally said. “She didn’t. I still want what’s best for you, and for Alcoro. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  He heaved yet another sigh and dropped his sweaty forehead into his hand. My resolve back, grimmer and sharper than before, I adjusted my pack.

  “Come on,” I said. “We should be getting close.”

  I held out my hand to him. He didn’t take it, rising unsteadily to his feet and hauling his pack back over his shoulders.

  We pressed on. A hundred yards down the passage we passed the first white blaze, and then the next several minutes later. I pointed them out to Celeno. He gave only wordless grunts in reply.

  The gypsum crystals didn’t grow here, and the way once again seemed darker despite the Arachnocampa overhead. These were growing thicker now, telling me that we were progressing more and more toward open air and my intended route. The path sloped steadily downward, and before long running water joined the dry River of Milk, at first running in its own channel next to the calcite deposits before eventually flowing into the powdery mineral. We hopped over rivulets that streaked the clean white with orange and red, and we slipped on slick rock as more and more water joined our route. Soon the precise edges of the calcite disappeared entirely, swallowed up by a broad, shallow subterranean creek.