“I’m sorry about Celeno,” he said, his voice deep and quiet. “I’m so sorry.”
My throat worked. “I miss him.”
His big hands pressed mine, warming my fingers. “You’re going to miss him for a long time.”
I let out my breath. We shared a silence together—a thick silence, but not an awkward one. My eyes stung behind my lashes—I let the tears fall without trying to keep them back. His hands remained wrapped around mine, comforting in their simplicity and the full depth of his understanding. That he intimately knew what I was feeling, that he had suffered and struggled with the same horrific loss and still come through with the ability to forgive and to love—nothing could have consoled me more.
When my tears had slowed, I blotted the remnants from my cheeks with the edge of my sleeve.
“What did the letter say?” I asked, opening my eyes. “The second to last one—the one I never got?”
“Oh.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It was . . . mostly asking you to come to the lake, for your own safety.”
“I don’t believe that’s all it said.”
“No.” He cleared his throat. “I wrote it just after Mae and Mona came back from Cyprien, and I wasn’t . . . terribly sensible. I thought I’d killed you, Gemma. And I realized I hadn’t just wanted you to come to see the petroglyphs, but I wanted to meet you, too.” He shook his head. “I overstepped my bounds . . .”
“What words did you use?” I asked.
He colored slightly. “Something stupid and asinine, I believe . . . I’ve come to care greatly for you just from our short correspondence and pray for your safety both for our countries’ sakes and mine . . .” He shook his head. “Don’t laugh at me.”
I took my free hand away from my lips. “I’m sorry. But they’re nice words.”
“I was in the wrong—I wrote too freely.” His gaze dropped to our enjoined hands. “And now I feel horrible—I feel sick, like I had been hoping . . . like I’m glad that he’s . . .”
I squeezed his hand. “I know that’s not the truth, Colm. You were kinder to him than anyone else, and I’m grateful for that. And . . . I’m glad I didn’t get that particular letter, in a way. I wish it hadn’t fallen into Shaula’s hands, but . . . it would have changed things for me. I’m glad I didn’t know how you felt, or it would have been difficult for me not to answer back in a similar way.”
The corners of his mouth flickered as if he were fighting back an impulsive smile. He brushed his thumbs over my palm, studying the curl of my fingers, the dark tan of my skin against his paler color. It was my left hand, and the sleeve of my nightshirt was loose. He ran his fingers up my wrist, brushing them gently over the beginning of my wine stain. I closed my eyes, my heart fluttering.
He looked up suddenly.
“May I kiss you?” he asked. The words came quickly, like they’d tripped out before he could think about them.
My pause made him flush, bringing a pink tinge to his cheeks and ears, smothering a few of his freckles. I smiled slightly—it made the gold of his hair shine just a little more.
“No,” he acknowledged. “I’m sorry.”
I settled my head back against my pillow. I shifted my hand so my fingers linked through his.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Can I open them now?” I asked.
“No, no, keep them closed—just sniff.”
“Am I going to regret this?”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
I inhaled through my nose and was flooded with the most glorious scent of roasted coffee beans. My knees almost buckled in response. I peeled my hands away from my eyes to find Rou grinning with the bag held out before him.
“I brought back two eight-pound bags,” he said. “So we should be good for a few days, right?”
“Oh,” I sighed, taking the bag from his hands and cradling it. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I have a multi-step plan to get Mona drinking it—then she’s sure to include it in her trade manifestos.”
My smile widened and then slipped as two people entered the room behind him, talking quietly together. One was a woman with umber skin and black hair held away from her face by a hammered gold band. The other was a tall man with earthy brown skin closer to Rou’s color and hair in long twists down his back, the black streaked here and there with steely gray. They both stopped speaking as their gazes fell on me.
I drew in a breath, aware I was still cradling the bag of coffee. “Senators,” I greeted.
“Lady Queen,” replied the woman evenly. She held out her hands, and suddenly recalling that the Cypri shook two-handed, I thrust the coffee bag back to Rou and placed my hands in hers.
“Senator Eulalie Ancelet, the Lower Draws, and First on the Assembly,” Rou said. “And Senator Arnau Fontenot, Alosia. Senators Dupont and Garoux stayed behind, and we couldn’t make contact with the other two in time.”
I shook Senator Fontenot’s hands. “So the reign of the Seventh King has ended,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, trying not to make my voice sound small.
“May he be blessed in the Light,” he said a little dryly.
“Thank you.” I looked between them. “The state of Cyprien?”
Senator Ancelet smoothed some of the fringe on her elegant green traveling dress.
“We’ll rebuild,” she said finally. She looked up at me with a spark in her eye. “But we do have stipulations.”
“Of course,” I said.
“We would like to begin negotiating as soon as possible.”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe Queen Mona had plans for our first session this evening.” I took a breath and glanced first at Rou, and then over their shoulders, as if she might walk in at any moment. “Before we join the rest, however, I have something to ask you—something I would appreciate your guidance with.”
Both senators raised their eyebrows. Rou tilted his head, curious.
“I would be very grateful,” I said, my stomach knotted but my hands steady, “if you would assist me in planning a transition in Alcoro to replace the monarchy with an elected government. Something similar to the one in Cyprien.”
They all three stared at me—Senator Ancelet actually leaned back, as if to scrutinize me more completely.
“That means you would not be queen,” she said. “Or hold a title at all, potentially.”
“Yes. I am very much aware.”
The silence persisted.
I fought against twisting my hands. “I understand if you don’t wish to be a part of it, and I can try to do it on my own, but I thought you would be able to—”
Rou’s grin broke across his face. He dropped the coffee bag with a thump on a side table, took a step toward me, clasped my face in both hands, and kissed me smack on the forehead.
I gazed up at the rock wall, the cold air stinging my cheeks. Scribble Cave could almost have been a hob in the canyon, with a slightly curved rock ceiling that sloped to meet the floor. A windswept copse of trees even stood guard near the edge, like in Whiptail Hob. The major exceptions were the frozen waterfall that curtained one end, and the petroglyphs carved into the wall—not faint and scattered, like those over my mother’s house, but bold and precise.
We are creatures of the Light, and we know it imperfectly.
During the reign of the seventh king of the canyons, one will rise to bring
the wealth and prosperity of a thousand years.
Wealth shall come from wealth. Peace shall come from peace.
I am a prism, made to scatter light.
Syrma
My gaze traveled over them again and again. They were tall and narrow, like the ones in Callais, and worn with age despite being well preserved by the overhang and relatively harder rock that made up the Palisades. It must have hurt, I thought, for the Prism to carve these here. It must have taken forever. I looked down at her signature again, next to the figure crowned with the three stars over her head. Had she really bee
n driven by the Light to secret these words in pockets across the Eastern World? Did she have her own private agenda? Had she simply been insane, as Mona probably thought?
Did she know what her words would wreak? Did she stop once to think about the dissolving of human lives into mere marks in stone, or did she carve without pausing to wonder about the cost of fulfillment?
I moved forward and placed my hand on the frigid rock—something that was strictly not allowed on the weathered cyphers in Callais lest they wear even more. For months I had fought to find a way to be right here, doing exactly what I was doing now—reading these marks that changed so much. From Alcoro to Cyprien to the caves to Lumen Lake, this had been my one goal. But now I was here, and things had already changed. The whole world had changed, shifted so dramatically it seemed to tilt as I walked, as if I was a ship that had broken a few of her moorings.
It could also simply have been my ear. It had grown less sensitive, but sounds on my right side were still fuzzy and faint. I seemed to be constantly turning in circles in conversation, trying to face the person speaking. I’d cried about this once—of course I did—but in the past few weeks, I noticed it made me listen harder, focus more. It made me lift my gaze and make eye contact. Which was good.
But also exhausting.
Colm was standing off to the side, near the frozen waterfall, looking out at the lake. I turned to him now. Our talk in the last few weeks had been easy. I’d cried a lot. We’d talked about the university, hashing out timelines and preliminary budgets. But more often we were silent, usually sitting with a few feet of space between us, I with a cup of coffee and he with tea, appreciating the need not to talk or look or listen.
He heard me turn and nodded at the petroglyphs. “So?”
“They’re just as Celeno said,” I said. “If they’re not written by the same hand, then they must be an almost perfect copy. Either the Prism traveled here to Lumen Lake, or a follower of hers did.” I set down the case I’d brought and opened it to a pack of blank parchment and charcoal sticks. I planned to make four copies of rubbings, along with at least as many sketches. Colm helped me set up the materials, labeling the pages for rubbings while I shook the bottles of ink. I smoothed a brush, thinking back to my mother’s letter that had arrived a few days previously.
She’d been in equal parts stunned and horrified by the mere fact that I was in Lumen Lake, on top of the events that had happened here. The page was spotted with little ink dots, as if she’d paused with her nib on the page before writing each sentence. She had offered condolences that had a sense of shock to them. News had reached Alcoro before our ships had arrived back in Port Juaro, and already I could tell that rumors were spreading. I’d written back hurriedly, asking her to please set the most important facts straight before too much damage was done. But I knew there was only so much I could do.
She at least had managed to avoid capture by the soldiers in the mountains and seek out her old colleague Ancha, and together they had secured a warrant to have Shaula’s rooms searched. They’d found the millipedes and the cyanide she’d harvested from them, contained in neat little vials inside a box of decorative prisms. Councilor Izar, when presented with these findings and the purported cause of his own brush with death, had put out the warrant for her arrest, which slid through the council’s vote, five to two. But Shaula had already been dead by that time, and I was going to have a lot of questions to answer when I finally arrived back on our shores.
My mother had written her letter from prison. She was back inside a cell, under arrest for kidnapping the king and queen. But, she wrote, things were in such disarray that there was no trial or gallows sentence in place yet. Besides, she said, Councilor Izar had put a freeze on any action at the royal level until I had returned to set things straight. He was fending off petitions and had quelled rioting in the streets by proclaiming that the queen had struck down the alliance building against Alcoro and instead united the East to a common cause.
I’d groaned and clutched my head as I read these words. Oh, there would be so much to do when I got home.
I looked up, studying the petroglyphs, mentally sketching out my first brush strokes. Colm finished labeling the parchment in his neat hand, and he looked up at them, too.
He cleared his throat, glanced at me, and shifted slightly so he was closer to my left side.
“During the reign,” he quoted, a little hesitant. “One will rise.”
I uncorked a bottle of ink. “That’s what it says.”
He smoothed his parchment. “I suppose you’ve thought about . . .”
I stared at my page, trying vainly to picture my first marks.
“His reign is technically over,” he continued. “Which means, theoretically, that whoever is supposed to fulfill the Prophecy has already risen.” He cut his gaze sideways to me again.
I drew in a breath and looked up from my page.
“Colm, I’ve had a lifetime of speculation about the machinations of the Prophecy. I’m done trying to find significance in every minute detail to prove its words at work. I’m just going to keep doing the best I can. If it’s the Prophecy pushing me along, so be it. But I’m through with using it alone to measure my own worth and success.”
“No, I’m not suggesting you should,” he said. “And I don’t think the Prophecy is pushing you along.” He paused, turning a piece of charcoal in his fingers. “But I do think the university is going to be an incredible thing, Gemma.”
A little smile flickered at the corners of my lips. I dipped my brush and made my first stroke.
The hull of the Wild Indigo rocked slightly at the deepwater docks. In the five weeks since I’d found Colm working on it, she’d been fully finished and readied to sail. Her maiden voyage would be down the river and out to sea, around the coast of Cyprien and into the dock at Port Juaro in Alcoro.
Colm squinted up at the mast, where Lumen Lake’s banner snapped in the breeze.
“She’s a fine little boat,” he said with a hint of pride.
I smiled. He shifted, and the chains on his wrists clinked. My gaze dropped to the set of irons—they were merely symbolic, but I hated looking at them all the same. He didn’t seem to mind, gazing out at the winter-bright lake with visible ease, not at all like he was getting his last look for the next eight years.
I had a small trunk nearby that held little more than a few changes of clothes and reams of documents—mostly copies of the sanctions that had been drawn up against Alcoro and the plans detailing the withdrawal from Cyprien and the transitioning of our monarchy. I now faced the daunting task of bringing all these things back to Alcoro and setting them into motion, but the fact that our three neighboring countries all had identical signed documents made it easier to envision. Senator Ancelet had even promised to send an Assembly representative sometime in the spring to help firsthand with the installation of an elected government.
She and Senator Fontenot were making their goodbyes as well—they were joining us on the trip back down the river. As they saw their things boarded, the others made their way down the long dock. Ellamae and Valien had rejoined us—they had traveled back up to the Silverwood four weeks ago to mitigate their long absence. Ellamae had come back shortly afterward, bearing a cartload of juniper boughs, fragrant and ready for burning. She also brought a small, handsome box of solid Silvern chestnut, which had been inlaid with mother-of-pearl stars by the Lumeni smiths. That box rested on top of my trunk.
Celeno’s funeral had been quiet and small, not the hours-long affair usually given to Alcoran kings and queens. There’d been no lengthy Devotion or week of hushed, smoke-filled streets. It was just Mona, Rou, Ellamae, Arlen, Colm, and me gathered around the pyre. The senators had chosen not to come. Sorcha hadn’t come. Valien was still in the mountains. None of my folk were left at the lake. So the six of us merely stood, watching the flames overtake the shroud, the scent of juniper thick in the air.
Now they joined Colm and me at the end of the d
ock. Ellamae was still using a crutch to get around, but at least she could put weight on her leg again. She handed her crutch off to Valien and wrapped Colm in a tight hug. I heard his spine pop.
“You know what’s nice about Alcoro?” she asked, crushing his arms to his sides.
“What’s that?” His words were short and a little breathless.
“There’s no poison ivy there,” she said. “But there are rattlesnakes. Don’t get bitten.”
He smiled at some inside joke and let out his breath as she released him. His wrists still locked in place, he accepted a clasp of his arm from Valien and hugs from Arlen and Sorcha. They’d been married two days earlier, not wanting to wait until Colm could come back to be present. It had been a joy-filled day, with a stunning display of Lumeni singing and lanterns lit across the water all night. I’d attended the ceremony but had discreetly slipped away at the beginning of the celebration. I was still getting dark looks from the Lake-folk, and I didn’t want to take away from the festivities. I sat contentedly by the fire in my room, listening to the singing rising off the lake and reading The Diving Menagerie.
Now I was ready, more than ever, to get back home. But our goodbyes weren’t quite done.
Mona took a breath. She’d been quiet for most of the past day. Now she stood in front of Colm, straight and tall but a little pale. He gazed down at her with a small smile.
“Mona,” he said. “I’ll miss you.”
“Yes,” she said, struggling a little. “We . . .” She gestured between herself and Rou. “We’re getting married in the river.”
“Not in the river,” Rou said seriously. “I haven’t got the lung capacity.”
She pressed on, a little frazzled, as if she hadn’t heard him. “It’ll be during summer at the earliest—possibly later . . . I’ll send you the date when we’ve set it, so you can make arrangements . . .”
Colm leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I won’t miss it, not at all.”
She released her breath and gestured sharply to one of the soldiers standing by. “Unlock these irons—this is ridiculous.”
Creatures of Light, Book 3 Page 37
