by Callie Bates
“Jahan isn’t a traitor! He’s been trying to accomplish peace!” Elanna shouts.
“Silence her,” the emperor orders.
Alcibiades slaps El across the face. I flinch as if the blow struck my own skin.
Silence echoes in the Hall of Glass. No one speaks out in protest. No one tries to stop this, or even passes me a kind glance as the imperial guards march first Elanna, then me, from the room.
We are entirely alone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They lock us up in an attic in the east wing, depositing Elanna and me at opposite ends of a cramped hallway. We’re above the quarters where the imperial guards are barracked; Aexione doesn’t contain anything as distasteful as a prison. I step into the room and the door slams shut behind me. Guards murmur on the other side.
I stand in the stuffy dampness of the storage closet, my ears ringing in the sudden quiet. My heart still pounds.
El’s at the other end of the hall. I could walk through the walls to her.
No. I need to be clever about this. I don’t know what—or who—occupies the rooms between us. I don’t know if she’s alone. This is Aexione; there could be a spyhole anywhere. And I need a plan—a way to get not only out of Aexione, but out of the empire. Back to Eren and Caeris, which now seems our only recourse.
It is our only recourse—because I failed to secure an alliance. I should have known the emperor was never going to cooperate. He was never going to listen to me. I saw that, but I still stupidly persisted.
Elanna deserves better than this. She deserves someone who would remain by her side and fight with her against witch hunters and black ships and Tinani guns. Someone with the courage to stay, not go.
But I had to come back. For Rayka, and Lathiel.
A racket at the door startles me. I turn. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. Male voices rumble outside—the guards—but a woman murmurs under them. I scrub my hands over my face, trying to wake my dulled brain, just as the door flies open.
“Go on,” a guardsman says.
A maid edges into the room, clutching a tray full of food and a swaddled pot of tea. She eyes me dubiously and props the tray atop a stack of paintings, as far from me as she can get, as if my treachery might contaminate her.
“Compliments of Her Imperial Majesty,” she says, bobbing a curtsy. Then she flees.
The guard tramps in and examines the tray, lifting the lid off the tureen of soup and peering underneath the teapot.
“What an unexpected kindness,” I say drily. “Empress Firmina doesn’t wish me to faint en route to the scaffold.”
He just eyes me, as if speech might associate him too closely with me. Then he tramps back out.
I wait until the door is securely closed before approaching the tray. The celery soup smells divine, and the bread and meat cuts are fresh. But even though my stomach rumbles, I pick everything apart first, starting with the lid of the teapot. The guard was right to be suspicious; I can’t imagine the empress sent this merely from the goodness of her heart.
Finally, I find the note, tucked neatly between two slices of ham. It’s greasy, but legible. It contains a single word:
Midnight.
Is it a promise of rescue? Or a warning that the imperial guards will come for us then, instead of waiting until morning?
I eat everything on the tray, and by the time I’m done, I decide the note must mean rescue. Surely Firmina wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of sending it just to tell me my hour of death.
So, clutching a cup of tea like a thin hope, I settle down to wait for midnight. Alone, for once, in the silence of my own thoughts, without Madiya’s incessant whisper. Maybe I’ve waited her out—maybe she’s gone for good. Maybe I will be that lucky.
* * *
—
THROUGH THE WALLS, I listen to the distant clock tower chime nine. Then ten. Eleven. Finally, twelve.
Nothing happens. Even Madiya remains silent.
I sit, listening, hardly daring to breathe. There’s a thump down the corridor. The guards mutter to each other. Footsteps creak. Surely this is them. I stand up, electrified, ready.
But the footsteps fade. Everything goes quiet again.
I wait, though each passing minute seems to detonate a small firework in my chest. At last, the distant bell chimes, just once.
Perhaps they’ve been delayed. It’s tempting to stay put. To wait for someone else to solve this.
But perhaps they’re not coming at all. Perhaps they’ve been discovered.
If they have, El and I might be dragged out of here at any time. And while we are taken to our execution, the emperor will put Euan Dromahair on a ship. He’ll sail to Eren. He’ll claim it again as a subject state for Paladis, naming himself vassal king. He’ll destroy Sophy and Rhia and Alistar and Victoire. He’ll end everything we fought for, with the massive sweep of Paladis’s power. The refugee sorcerers in Eren and Caeris won’t be enough to stop them, once they get a handhold. And they will.
Finn will have died for nothing. And so will Elanna’s father, and so many others. I will have lost my friends, my home, my place, for nothing. I will have put my aunt, who gave me so much, at risk for nothing at all. I will have failed both my brothers, for no reason.
I don’t have a choice. Not really. Not if I want to live, and Elanna to live.
I blanket the room in silence, shield my candle, and step through the particles composing the wall. Only a mouse. But there’s no need for my heart to pound. The next room holds nothing but piles of rolled-up carpets. I pause, listening, but the guards in the corridor are quiet. Bored, most likely, perhaps dozing on their feet. It’s past one o’clock now.
I pick my way across the carpets to the next wall. The chamber beyond holds piles of furniture; it reeks of damp wood and dust and mouse droppings. I successfully avoid toppling anything over, then slip into the next room. It, too, contains stacked chairs and tables and footstools.
I stop at the wall. The next room holds Elanna. I can feel the witch stones gently humming.
I swallow. The candle flame wavers. I pull in my breath and listen. Nothing. The guards shuffle in the hallway, then go quiet.
I press my ear to the wall. I can’t hear El.
Pressure swells in my chest. Carefully, I walk through the plaster.
This room contains chests and trunks. I stagger over one and nearly stub my toe, but I catch a curse before it can slip out. I peer around. At first my candle illuminates nothing but the trunks’ hard edges. Then I make out a shuttered window. And below it, the shape of a woman huddled on her side, her long curling hair spilling onto a rough blanket.
I crouch beside her. She’s sound asleep, breathing deeply. She won’t like being startled awake. I reach gently for her shoulder. “El.”
It takes her a long minute to come to. She doesn’t exclaim or swear or even whisper my name. She says nothing at all.
“What have they done to you?” I murmur. I help her turn over and sit up. For some reason, she’s wearing only a chemise, but there are no obvious bruises on her skin. No sign of pain inflicted or endured. But she just blinks at me, slowly, emptily.
“Elanna, it’s Jahan,” I say. I don’t know why I’m hoping. I know what happens to us at their hands.
She doesn’t even react.
Her mind can’t be gone this quickly. She shouted at Alakaseus in the audience chamber, cogent and ferocious as ever. Whatever they’ve done to her—and I hear the hum of witch stones, placed on the chests around us—I’ll find a way to restore her to herself. I will. I have to.
I stand, pulling off my coat. There don’t seem to be any other clothes—I can’t think about why they might have undressed her, not now—so I tug her into it. Her limbs are listless. Even her smell is wrong. She never looks me in the eyes.
At
least she’s moving.
“Let’s get out of here.” I take her hand. Her fingers don’t curl around mine. She stands, though, unsteadily.
There’s a noise at the door. I freeze. Have I not been careful enough? Did the guards hear something?
The door explodes inward, nearly ripping off its hinges. I dive instinctively in front of Elanna. Men pour into the room: witch hunters, followed by guards with bayonets at the ready. A racket of bells mingles with the cocking of the guns.
“In the emperor’s name, stand down!”
It’s Alcibiades Doukas. For a frozen moment, we both stare at each other.
“Jahan Korakides,” he says slowly. And then, terrifyingly, he smiles. “Well, well. It seems our little experiment proved fruitful, gentlemen. A sorcerer who isn’t sensitive to the bells and stones, is that it?”
I feel the muscles of my mouth push into a reflexive smile. “That’s my secret.” Still squeezing El’s limp hand, I take one step back, toward the shuttered window.
“Stand down, Lord Jahan.” Alcibiades sounds amused. “Don’t you think we have ways of dealing with sorcerers like you? Don’t force these men to shoot.”
I could let them arrest me—again. But this time they would probably take me straight to the scaffold, and Elanna, too. Alcibiades might tell me to halt, but the truth is, we’re already dead.
I take another step back, pushing El behind me.
“Lord Jahan!” Alcibiades barks.
I smile and shrug. One more step.
A guardsman cocks his bayonet and fires straight at me.
I fling up my hand. Stop. The gunshot halts in the air. A hundred thousand motes of powder spin like dust.
The particles fall to the floor.
The other guards make to shoot, but I’m faster, dragging the life force from everything I can—from the witch hunters themselves, from me, from El. Even though my power slides off the stones and bells, there’s enough other power in the room to use. The guns crack as they break. The witch hunters ring their bells frantically. All except Alcibiades. He’s just watching me.
I throw my candle to the floor and command the fire to burn.
Then I seize Elanna, throwing her over my shoulder—her weight is horrifyingly light—and leap through the fabric of the shutters and the bars beyond them into the open night air.
* * *
—
WE FALL. EL’S face is jammed between my shoulder blades; the wind stings my eyes. The rosebushes rear up below through the dark. At least we’re on the garden side of the palace.
“Thicken!” I try to shout the word, but my voice is lost in the wind ripping through my mouth.
But the air obeys. It grows dense—but not dense enough. We’re still falling. String out! I command with my mind, and the particles that make up our bodies, like the particles that made up the gunshot, spread loose and light. The dense air carries us over the rosebushes. My feet skim the top of a reflecting pool, spraying droplets. Elanna’s almost weightless. The thought breaks my concentration, and suddenly the air becomes light again and our bodies become dense. We slam to the ground in a patch of tulips, startling a sleeping bird. I wheeze; the wind’s knocked out of my lungs. My body feels strange and squeezed and strained.
El rolls off me and lies there among the flowers. Slowly, I push myself upright.
Shouts echo from the attic. I think I see a faint smudge of smoke, black on the night air, curling out of the window. We need to go—now. I scramble onto my knees.
Yet Elanna doesn’t move. In the darkness, her hair mingles with the flowers, her limbs long and motionless. Too long. I reach for her shoulder but my hand only closes over empty cloth. I grasp her other shoulder—but it, too, is nothing more than cloth.
My heartbeat spikes into the back of my mouth.
Carefully, I turn the empty pile of clothes over. No—not entirely empty. Nestled within the coat and chemise is a long, slender tree branch topped with a bundle of rustling leaves. And wrapped around the branch, where El’s face was, is a thick twist of knotted human hair.
Elanna’s hair.
The stick and coat fall from my hands, flopping back onto the ground.
She was never anything more than a simulacrum. The appearance of a person, without the weight.
No wonder she was so light in my arms.
But this is impossible. Elanna was captured by witch hunters; she was herself mere hours ago. The witch hunters wouldn’t have made a simulacrum of her. They can’t have used magic…unless they did it to try to capture me. Unless they forced a sorcerer to make this magic for them.
Or unless this was Firmina’s plan—if she and Bardas are in favor of sorcery, they must know sorcerers. Pantoleon does. Maybe this is what they were trying to do, make simulacra of El and me both, then make us disappear.
But they never came for me. Did Alcibiades find them out, or did the guards just hear a noise within Elanna’s room and send for the witch hunters? Did I leave my room too soon—was the plan delayed somehow? Would they have come if I’d waited? Maybe I’ve made a huge mistake.
I stare back at the bulk of the palace. Is Elanna, the real one, still in there? Did the empress spirit her away to safety, or have they both been caught?
Somewhere inside the building, a bell is ringing. An alarm. A call to arms.
Should I go back? I scramble onto my feet, clutching the mess of stick and hair and clothing. But I don’t know what’s happened. It could already be too late. I don’t do any good to anyone captured or dead. And if the empress and Bardas used their connections with Ida’s sorcerers, Pantoleon will know.
Lights flare in a doorway, jogging as witch hunters and guards run out onto the lawn.
I gather myself. There are too many to fight. I already feel hollowed out from escaping. I could break into the empress’s chambers, but if they’ve already found her out, it will be a trap.
I launch myself onto my feet, compressing the folds of space. I practically fly across the gardens. By the time the pursuit registers my presence, erupting with shouts, I’m already gone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
What have I done?
I used sorcery before a roomful of witch hunters and imperial guards. I threw myself out a window—through the shutters. The entire palace will be after me now. Soon all of Paladis will know that Jahan Korakides is a sorcerer.
The emperor will know I’m a sorcerer.
There’s no chance of peace now. Maybe there never was.
I stop deep in a vineyard, my chest heaving. My body aches from the impact of hitting the ground—everything feels bruised—and with each step my muscles seem to tighten further. I feel thin, shaky, the way I always do now after using so much magic, the consequence of Madiya’s damned laudanum.
I don’t trust the main roads to be safe, so I’ve been sticking to the back ones. The bulk of Mount Angelos glows, snowcapped, to my left. A faint, purring rumble stirs the ground under my feet. It’s the mountain talking, as everyone likes to say, the gods making their feelings known. Though whether they’re voicing approval or fury is hard to say.
I drop the bundle of clothing to the ground; I’ve been carrying it too long and I need to lighten my load. But still, it feels strange to leave it there, as if I’m abandoning Elanna herself. I’m not, I want to tell her, but she’s not anywhere to hear me.
I rub my face. Maybe she’s already dead.
But I can’t think that way—not if I hope to continue on.
Somewhere in the distance, a hound bays.
I throw down the stick, tuck the chemise like a scarf around my neck, and run.
My route takes me along rutted farming roads—I nearly break my ankle twice stumbling into potholes—and time drags on. Finally the city comes into view, draped like a behemoth over the hills. The walls funnel the city’s glow
up into the sky. But the sluggish gleam of the Channel separates me from them. I wasn’t thinking when I picked this route; the only bridge will be on the imperial road. Have the witch hunters reached the city yet?
If I can compress space on land, I should be able to compress it over water, even if I feel hollow and spent. I loosen my stride, running down the final slope to the Channel, and then grab space like a curtain. I pull it back with the green power of the last vineyard I ran through. My feet crash against the water. I can’t get a purchase—I’m going to fall—then the momentum of the magic carries me across. I stumble onto the far bank, breathing hard. My shoes are soaked through. A tremor runs through my body.
I’m among humped shadows—fishing boats. I don’t know where the fishermen’s gate is. I glance up at the wall. No one visible, but I still find myself whispering, I am a coyote slinking among the boats. A strange reflection of the moonlight. The breeze off Mount Angelos.
I approach the wall, then hesitate. I don’t know what’s on the other side here. But more than that, I don’t know what sort of reception Pantoleon will give me. I don’t know if he’ll even help. If I enter Ida, I don’t know if I’ll ever get out again.
It’s the risk I have to take. What choice do I have?
I walk through. It’s not a thick wall, and I emerge quickly into the dead space behind a row of sleeping houses. I creep over garden walls, trying not to stumble on children’s hoops and outdoor ovens, until I reach an alley to a street.
I look up and down. It’s deserted. Eerily so, but that might have something to do with the hour. Dawn can’t be far away. Neither can witch hunters and the imperial guard, if they’ve had the sense to guess I’d make for Ida. Since I went on foot and they have horses, even with my magic they might already be here.
I shake away the thought and hurry along the quiet streets until I find a familiar boulevard. I keep to the shadows, staying frozen in place when a night watchman passes by. The smell of baking bread rises from a bakery I pass. It’s close to dawn, then. The shoulder of Solivetos Hill nudges over the rooftops ahead of me. I duck down onto a winding street that brings me, at length, to Pantoleon’s street.
