Then the Thereal rookery went up in flames.
The screams became a chorus, the screech of crows rising like a wave. One by one, the rookeries in each wing erupted with fire.
I stood rooted to the spot, the acrid smoke scorching my lungs, the light of the flames almost too bright to look at. Yet I couldn’t tear my gaze away, my mind refusing to process what I was seeing.
The city was burning.
The words dropped through my mind like jagged stones, too heavy and sharp to hold on to.
The crowd closed in, people slamming into carts and each other, all attempting to flee in different directions. Kiva pressed into my side, her sword half drawn. The familiar screech of metal snapped me from my trance, and I seized her wrist. “Too many people!”
Scowling, she grabbed my arm and barreled through the writhing mass. She was head taller than nearly everyone, and the crowd parted to avoid her elbows and snarled threats. We pushed until we broke through the edge, gulping down open air drowned in smoke.
“Come on!” Not stopping to rest, I raced along the street and back toward the castle, Kiva at my back.
Fire fell like rain.
It dripped from buildings, clinging to crumbling stone and smoldering wood, spreading from the Thereal rookery like a flood. The bushes lining the road blazed like torches, trees heavy with fruit turning to ash and filling the air with a sickly, burnt-sugar scent. It mixed with the smell of seared flesh.
A burst of fire cut across our path, forcing us to stop. As an earsplitting scream tore past me, I realized it wasn’t a fireball: it was a man, engulfed in flames.
My stomach turned, and I choked on the poisoned air, desperate to get it out of my lungs. Kiva seized my arm, hauling me along. The image of the flaming man cut through my mind over and over, until it felt like I’d never see anything else again.
As we turned up the castle road, I stumbled to a halt. Black smoke billowed from the royal rookery, darker than the night. Fire writhed, reaching out the open windows with hungry claws. A crow leapt from one of the windows, feathers alight. It barely had time to open its wings before an arrow pierced its heart. Another struck its throat. It dropped four stories to the earth with a sickening crunch.
This didn’t make any sense. The eggs were in there, and the crows… My thoughts ground to a halt, unable to venture any further. Unable to think, unable to breathe.
I only became aware Kiva was shaking me when she nearly knocked me to the ground. “Move!” she screamed.
Slowly, I looked at her. She’d drawn her sword, and the firelight cast strange shadows across her pale skin. For an impossibly long moment, my smoke-riddled brain could process only her bright, unbound hair. It was white as bone.
She pushed me again, and I stumbled. “Anthia, move!”
I blinked. Guards were sprinting in every direction, shouting orders. Some had their swords drawn, dueling pale-skinned soldiers in black leather. Still others simply stood and stared at the rising column of fire and smoke. Slowly, I understood. I recognized the golden horse head emblazoned on their uniforms.
Illucia was attacking Rhodaire.
Illucia was killing the crows.
Someone moved behind Kiva. My mother appeared, gray eyes wild and face splattered with blood. She held a dagger in each hand. “Get inside the castle!” she ordered, but I didn’t move. She sheathed a blade, her hand falling on my shoulder. “Anthia, you have to go inside. Please.”
I felt warm. Too warm, but oddly calm. Like something had reached inside me and wiped away all the fear, the confusion, and the horrible, horrible understanding. My skin hummed, the sound filling my ears, my chest, my bones.
My mother cursed, said something to Kiva, then hesitated a second longer, her fingers digging tight into my shoulder. Something shone behind her eyes, a forgotten emotion threatening to break free—then she bolted toward the rookery. I lurched after her, but Kiva’s strong arms pulled me back. My mother disappeared into the column of flames. Then Kiva was gone, and I forgot to blink. My vision filled with fire.
Swords clashed, metal screaming against metal so close to my ear that I turned. Kiva dueled an Illucian soldier inches away. Had that attack been meant for me? The thought barely registered. All I could think about was the growing heat and dying air, the screams of crows and people indecipherable in the night.
A Rhodairen soldier intercepted Kiva’s fight, and I turned back to the rookery in time to see a shape fall in the doorway.
My body reacted. I sprang forward, screaming for my mother. The shape rolled, crawling toward the exit, the flames moving like a serpent preparing to strike. It wasn’t my mother.
“Estrel!” I seized her arm, not processing that her clothes were on fire, that she was on fire, and pulled with all my strength. The flames leapt onto my sleeve, but I pulled harder, her form toppling out after me onto the damp grass. I rolled her over and over again, then Kiva was there, smothering Estrel with her cloak.
Kiva yelled something at me, but I couldn’t hear her through the blood pounding in my ears. Then she seized me and flung me into the grass, slapping my hand, beating at it with the edge of the cloak to extinguish the flames.
I stared at the ravaged skin, now a patchwork of scalded white and red flesh. Red. Red as the fire raining down around me as it consumed the royal rookery, consumed my mother, consumed everything.
I felt Kiva beside me like one felt their shadow at their heel, an intangible presence. She spoke, saying so many things. Things that didn’t make any sense. Things like my mother was dead, the crows were gone, the Illucian soldiers were coming, there were many were already here.
It took me a moment to realize I was staring at something in the sky. Bright as a miniature sun, a crow blazing with fire from beak to tail soared across the night, wings spread as if the flames had become a part of it, a flickering coat of smoldering feathers. Then the fire seared through feather and muscle and bone, and it plummeted to the earth like a falling star.
It struck the ground before me, erupting like a funeral pyre. Only my raw throat told me I’d screamed the entire time it’d fallen.
“We have to move!” Kiva yelled.
I had just enough of myself left to look at her. To see the tears streaming down her ash-stained face and to feel my own sliding hot against my skin, before my burns flared with pain, and the world went white.
One
The crows were gone.
Every day, I said those words to myself, but they didn’t feel real. The world didn’t feel real. Each breath felt like a lie, as if I’d climbed out of a cocoon into another realm, one of ash and shadowed memories that tore at me like talons.
Without the beat of a crow’s wings, the air stood still. Silence smothered the castle garden, the charred royal rookery standing like a headstone in the distance. Even the sunlight looked wrong, rebounding sharply off the castle as if afraid to get too close.
I sat at the patio table, tracing a finger along where the red and white splotches of months-old burn scars met my skin, and tried desperately to ignore the man standing across from me.
The Illucian messenger wore rich, finely cut blues lined in gold, the material too thick for the Rhodairen summer sun. He wasn’t a soldier, but he carried a sword nonetheless and would know how to use it. He’d been allowed to keep it, since asking an Illucian to give up their weapon was akin to asking a wolf not to bite your hand while you pulled out its teeth. As a compromise, two castle guards stood within easy striking distance.
The Saints must hate me. It’d been nearly six months since the Illucian Empire destroyed my life. I’d barely left my room since. I’d hardly gotten out of bed. Even now, I wanted to burrow beneath my blankets and disappear into the darkness. Then the one day I managed to drag myself downstairs, convinced it could be a decent day, I got stuck watching an Illucian.
His gaze bore into
me, and it took everything I had not to look at him. I was afraid of what I might do if I did.
A spark of fury rallied against the prison of grief and pain that had grown inside me layer by layer over the last few months. I hated that he’d been allowed into Rhodaire, allowed onto the castle grounds. Hated that we had to hear out his queen’s demands, that I didn’t have a crow to seize him by his perfectly manicured uniform and lift him high, high into the air…
“Will the queen be here soon?” he asked for the second time, his accent light.
It sounded like a crow’s talons on stone, and the back of my neck prickled with a chill despite the sun. We’d been waiting for my sister for nearly ten minutes.
“If you ask again, maybe I’ll suddenly know.” Not the diplomatic response, but politics had never been my strength.
“Will the queen be here soon?”
My eyes snapped up, locking with his. He smiled, and I gritted my teeth at giving him that small victory. Ignore him. Forcing my gaze out across the castle gardens, I exhaled slowly. I’d promised myself today would be a good day. I needed a good day. But faced with an Illucian, all I could think about was what they’d taken from us. What they still took. Terrorizing our borders, attacking our trade routes, sinking our ships.
Looking at the garden didn’t help. My eyes naturally found the spots where the flowers had started to droop, stains of brown spreading among the green. Without the earth crows’ magic, plants like the bright flowering delladon vine that climbed the latticework along the castle were a breath away from dust.
Rhodaire was dying.
I looked away, blinking slowly. Without storm crows to manipulate it, the hot, humid summer weather persisted unrelentingly. The sweet scent of fruit trees hung heavy in the air, pressing in on me from all directions. Only the messenger kept me alert. What did he want?
Voices filtered out through the open door. I straightened as my sister stepped onto the patio, a striking figure with her immaculate posture and dark hair loose to her waist. Kiva followed, the sun reflecting off the metal buckles of her silver-and-green guard’s uniform. The tension in my shoulders eased as she slipped to my side.
“Your Majesty.” The messenger barely inclined his head.
Caliza’s steel-colored eyes evaluated him quickly, her face an impassive mask. “We can speak inside.”
I frowned as the messenger followed her into the sunroom at the back of the patio. What didn’t Caliza want me to hear?
Kiva dropped into the seat beside me, her hand falling to its natural position on the crow-shaped pommel of her sword. “Sorry it took me so long. She was in a meeting.”
“Not your fault. Besides, we were having such a wonderful time.” I slumped in my chair, leaning my head back.
Not a day passed where I didn’t think about the crows. I couldn’t shut out the memories. Scenes of visiting the royal rookery to tickle storm crow chicks until they buzzed with lightning or walking under the glow of a sun crow in the dusky moonlight played over and over in my mind. Seeing the messenger just made it all worse.
A flash of red made me flinch, but it was only a pair of summer tanagers flying by, their feathers the rich ruby of a ripe pomegranate. You’re fine. Don’t think about it. I rubbed my scarred arm in an absent motion.
Kiva eyed me intently. I sighed, straightening and readjusting the silver bracelet on my right wrist. “I’m not going to climb back into bed, all right?”
“Good. I don’t have time to fetch a bucket of water to dump on you.” She smirked, and I glared flatly back. She was joking—mostly.
“You would enjoy that entirely too much,” I said.
Kiva’s smile faltered. “I don’t enjoy any part of seeing you like this.”
I clenched my jaw but didn’t respond. I’m just sad. I’ll get over it soon. I repeated the mantra in my head, ignoring the quiet voice that whispered it had been nearly six months. While I hid, the world went on without me.
Guilt prickled low and hot in my stomach. I hated knowing Kiva worried about me. Hated knowing I was the cause of her pain. It’d taken me months to confide in her, convinced the moment I told someone how I felt, as if the world had split apart and swallowed me whole, they’d call me ridiculous. Dramatic. Weak. Instead, she’d listened, and then she’d held me while I cried until my throat turned raw.
Kiva leaned back, flipping her braid of white-gold hair over her shoulder and lifting a hand to shield her face from the sun. She’d been born in Rhodaire, but her pale Korovi skin burned easily. “What do you think he wants?” She nodded in the direction the messenger and Caliza had gone.
“Nothing good.”
I hadn’t seen an Illucian since Negnoch. Since Rhodairen traitors helped Illucian soldiers set fire to the rookeries, their elite archers shooting any crows that escaped the flames.
Ronoch, people called it now. Red Night.
If the Illucian army hadn’t been spread so thin the night they attacked, they might have conquered Rhodaire then and there.
At first, I’d wanted revenge. Deep inside, the part of me that hated the defeated person I’d become still did. Now, I recognized we didn’t stand a chance. Illucia had conquered nearly half the continent for a reason—their army was unstoppable. Soon, they would have Rhodaire too.
The messenger’s voice suddenly rose from the sunroom. Kiva and I fell silent, leaning closer to listen.
“My queen has given her answer, Your Majesty,” he practically purred.
My head snapped up at the mention of the Illucian queen, and I locked eyes with Kiva. Something flickered in my chest, a spark of anger springing to life. Then Caliza stepped onto the patio. The messenger loomed behind her with a smug look of satisfaction that made my stomach turn.
“We need to talk,” Caliza said to me, then looked at Kiva. “Privately.”
Kiva stood. “I have recruit training. Come see me after.” She bowed to Caliza before sweeping past her. The messenger made to remain, but Kiva looked at him expectantly. Her imposing figure made it clear staying wasn’t an option. Wisely, he went with her.
Caliza took Kiva’s seat, removing the silver circlet shaped like a garland of feathers from her head and setting it on the table. I eyed the circlet. She took every opportunity not to wear it, claiming the edges got tangled in her hair.
It makes her think too much about Mother.
I understood. Its matching piece—the bracelet of silver feathers on my wrist—had belonged to Estrel. They were both dead now. My mother, they’d ambushed in the rookery, but Estrel… Her death hadn’t been swift.
Caliza’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “Do you have anything productive planned for today?” My eyes cut to her, narrowing. She sighed. “It’s a fair question, Thia. You hardly talk to anyone, and you spend so much time in your room. If you’d try a little—”
“If this is what you wanted to talk about, I’m leaving.” I didn’t need this lecture again. Feeling this way—it wasn’t my choice. I couldn’t make it stop. I’d tried.
A vein in Caliza’s forehead twitched. She looked so much like our mother when that happened, an impression aided by the thin oval face and high cheekbones they’d once shared.
I looked like her too, except my black hair was curly where Caliza’s was wavy. The brown freckles speckling my face were absent from hers, and where she was tall and willowy, my body was hardened by years of rider training. Or at least it had been. Now my figure was a little less muscle, a little more curve.
We had the same eyes though, our mother’s eyes. Not the typical dark Rhodairen umber, but bright gray like storm clouds lit by lightning.
“You’re seventeen; you’re an adult,” she said. “You have to pull yourself together. You can’t spend the rest of your life in your room.”
“Pull myself together?” My voice broke. How could three simple words make me feel so sma
ll?
Her hand fell atop my unscarred one. I stared at it, feeling as though mine were someone else’s hand. “You’re alive, Anthia. Be thankful. Move forward.”
I flinched, jerking my hand away. “You don’t understand. I can’t—I don’t—” My throat tightened, locking the words inside. How did I explain something I didn’t even understand myself? This was just like Caliza, to think a problem could be solved with only logic.
This was why I’d hidden in my room, why I wanted to run there now. Alone, no one could make me feel like an ungrateful little girl, rejected and inferior. No one could look at me like Caliza was now: disappointed, impatient, accusatory. As if this were all in my head and it’d go away if only I tried hard enough.
Didn’t she understand that I would if I could?
I swallowed hard. “What do you want from me, Caliza? To marry some foreign prince and pretend to like him so our countries can get along?” She stiffened, and I regretted the words instantly.
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair,” I said. Caliza had married Kuren because Trendell’s support was helping keep Rhodaire alive without the crows. He was the second oldest prince of the eastern kingdom, a good man. Even now, he was in Trendell coordinating aid on Rhodaire’s behalf. “Have you heard from him?”
“This morning.”
I waited, but she said nothing more. The silence stretched. A familiar weight settled on my shoulders, the urge to crawl into bed and spend the day under the covers slowly growing stronger.
No. My hand found Estrel’s bracelet. I pictured the weight as a snake like Kiva had once suggested, imagining it slithering off my shoulders until it was gone. Except it never truly left.
Caliza worried at a few strands of hair with her fingers. She even had our mother’s nervous habits. They’d become more pronounced lately, though she still kept her emotions in an iron grip in front of other people. A skill I’d never mastered. Around me, she’d been snappier and more finicky than ever.
The Storm Crow Page 2
