I pull and tug and peel and it finally separates. I remove the wooden shell from the top of the inside of the case and then I can see it, stuffed on all sides with fiberfill so it won’t rattle around in the frame.
Mom’s staridium ring.
The cause of this whole nightmare. Instead of putting it on my finger, I set it on my desk and change into the white tank top with the sigil and matching fitted pants. A knock at my door startles me, and I toss a throw blanket over the ring.
“Enter,” I say.
Edam opens the door, his eyes darting around the room. “Larena is here with the paperwork you requested.”
I sigh and wave them inside. Edam insists on standing next to her, as though Larena might suddenly attack me instead of boring me to death with paperwork.
“Here’s what I want to know,” I say. “Does this give the Five a mandate to step in if Judica violates these promises?”
Larena nods. “They’d have the excuse they need to consolidate their forces and move against your sister if she doesn’t honor them.”
“Good enough.” I sign the paperwork and stand up. It’s the best I can do. “I’m ready.”
“Not quite,” Larena says.
“Excuse me?” Edam asks.
Larena lifts the lid on a box underneath the paperwork. It’s solid glass, hollowed out in the center. “I need the ring. It will sit on a platform in front of the dais. Winner takes it. That’s your consideration for this contract.”
I shake my head. “I’ll place it in the box in the ballroom, in front of Judica.”
Larena shrugs, gathers her things and leaves.
Edam takes my hand. “Are you ready?”
“Accept the world as it is,” I say.
“Or do something to change it.” He takes my hands in his and squeezes them.
I look at Noah and he smiles at me. “No frowns and fear from me. You’ll make the right choice when it’s time. I have faith in you.”
Lark doesn’t say anything, but she pulls me close for a long hug. When she finally releases me, her eyes swim with unshed tears.
It’s nice to see that a few people, at least, have faith in me. I walk toward the duel, trailed by my strongest supporters. When I reach the room, I hold Mom’s ring over my head. “I hold Enora Isadora Alamecha’s ring, the largest shard from Eve’s staridium. I will leave it here, to await the winner of this duel.”
By rights, the current Empress should wear the ring for the duel, but if it makes Judica nervous, well, I can’t fault her. Besides, this isn’t about a rock, and it never should have been. Mom made a mistake there.
Judica stands in the center of the arena. “Well met, sister. Select our method.”
I can’t stomach a hand-to-hand battle to the death, so I name the only viable alternative. “Blades.”
Judica smiles. Mom gave Judica her own blade on her tenth birthday, and she had another made for her when she turned sixteen. I don’t own one myself, and I couldn’t bring myself to implicate Inara, which means I’ll have to use one of the unclaimed practice blades. I look at the rack and trail my fingers down the length of the hilts. They vary in length, weight, and style. Curved blades, double edged, blunt tipped, decorative, simple.
I walk toward the far end where the small, light blades rest. One catches my eye. It’s mid length, thin, double edged. It’s simple, but gilded Hebrew letters are worked down the length of the blade and tiny black stone chips run down the center line. The letters in the blade almost glow. “Failure is a choice,” they say, a motto I know well. Mom’s personal motto. I lift the blade and shift it from one hand to the other.
I turn to face Judica, but before I can step into the arena, Balthasar touches my arm. “Do you know that sword?”
I shake my head.
“It was your mother’s wedding gift from my brother.”
Of course. It would have been her motto, even then. It seems fitting, to slay Mom’s murderer with her own blade, like an act of vengeance from beyond the grave.
I ascend the steps to the arena, walk inside, and pull the half wall closed.
Judica salutes with her much larger, much nastier sword. “It’s a good day to die.”
32
“Accept the world as it is,” Judica says.
“Or have the courage to change it,” I say.
“Marks,” Judica calls out.
The arena teems with Alamecha evians: men, women, and children. They murmur softly, shift from foot to foot, and glance flightily from Judica to me and back again. Many of the young ones have never witnessed a royal duel, but if this goes badly, there might be more as soon as this ends. The last royal challenge was when Melina fought Mom. Now, not even eighteen years later, the cause of that duel brings it full circle. Maybe Melina was right—Mom should have killed me.
I breathe in through my nose, close my eyes, and picture my mom. She’d be devastated to see her daughters killing one another, but not surprised. The first clap rises from all the evians gathered around me like the crack of a whip. Humans are always clapping, but evians only clap en masse for two things: beginning a duel and acknowledging a new monarch. I open my eyes on the second clap and exhale through my mouth on the third.
A millisecond after the third clap, Judica’s sword flies toward my neck. I drop below her swing at the last second and slash at her legs with mine. My sword arcs faster than any I’ve ever used, as it if were made for me. I’m surprised when I nick her leg. Judica gasps, probably more from shock than pain, and leaps back nimbly.
She circles me in the arena, buying time to heal her wound. I let her, because I’m not sure how to attack yet. I should be hearing her melodic line, but I’m not. My mind is blank.
I cycle through the videos Inara sent and close my mind to doubt, fear, and hate. I open it to the music around me, the slow beating of hundreds of hearts, the quick breathing, the shuffling of feet and the shifting of arms and hands.
I tune in to my twin, narrowing my focus to her breath, sucked in and released. I react to her movements reflexively, ducking and deflecting her parries, jabbing back to watch how she responds, and I finally hear it, her melodic line. Faint, but there. Clear, dire, straightforward in life, sideways in battle.
I think back to our childhood. She didn’t physically attack me when we were nine, but she tried to poison me. She acts forthright and then comes at you sideways when she means harm, almost as if inflicting harm shames her. But she baked the poisoned cookies herself. I should watch for attacks that come from her directly, but in unexpected ways.
If I’d had the thought a second later, I’d be dead. I named blades, but I didn’t specify the number. I assumed we were limited to one or I would have chosen a short sword as well. But I never stated the limitation. She pulls a short sword from behind her back and throws it at me. No wonder she was circling, biding her time. She didn’t need me close; she just needed to distract me.
I drop to the mat just in time, and my hand snaps out as the short sword flies over my head, my fingers closing over its hilt. It’s much lighter than my blade, and now I have the two I wanted. She couldn’t have known that I fight better with two weapons, because I didn’t know myself until a few days ago. Mom’s presence surrounds me like a balm, like even now, even here, she’s guiding things.
Judica scowls but recovers quickly. She leaps across the entire arena and lands inside my guard, her broadsword slicing downward like a hammer to an anvil. I twist left, under her sword arm, and slam the hilt of my mom’s blade into her elbow. I smile when I hear the crunch this time, until Judica’s blade slices down into my foot, pinning me to the mat, just like she speared my hand with that fork. It feels like that interrupted breakfast on the day the staridium responded to me took place a lifetime ago. Everything has shifted since then.
And I’m different, too. This time I’m not frozen by shock or fear or righteous indignation.
I pull backward with all my strength, forcing the blade through the bones, tendon
s, ligaments and muscles of my foot. Blood sprays the mat and the audience beyond, and I collapse to my knees as the pain rips through me. Judica thinks she has won. She tosses her sword into her other hand, her lip curling into a grin, sure that I can’t move well until I heal. I’ve never fought through the pain, because I never understood it. She was right. But she changed all that when she killed our mother.
This time, after years of giving ground, after years of playing defense, I’m done. I won’t defend any more.
I will attack.
When she comes for me, I fall back like she expects, but then I roll and come up with both blades out. I cross swipe with them, and my mother’s blade catches Judica’s shoulder. Her eyes widen and her face flushes, and she rains blows down on me. But I leap to my functioning feet and meet her blows in a staccato rhythm.
For the first time, I hear my own melodic line, and I revel in it.
When Judica slices at me, I block and launch an attack of my own. I feel her next move and wrap my own around it, dancing with her in a complex and undescribably beautiful interchange. We trade blows for several minutes, but I’m not gaining. She stays a few milliseconds ahead of me, which means I’m still missing something.
But what?
Judica’s angry, ambitious, and what else? Could the thing I’m missing be guilt?
“Do you regret it?” I block her advance with the short sword and jab at her left knee with Mom’s.
She frowns at me. “Do I regret what?”
“Killing Mom.”
Judica’s eyes flash and the intensity of her strikes deepens. I’m missing something. Something big. She slices my left arm, and then my right leg. “So you don’t.”
Judica roars, “I didn’t kill her!”
“You’re lying.” I practically spit the words. “You must be.”
Judica slams her sword against Mom’s and the clang reverberates through my right arm. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because Mom told me everything in her letter.”
“What does that even mean?” Judica pulls back and yanks a dagger from a slit in her sliced pants. She must have worn a thigh sheath. Now we’re both armed with two blades, except Judica holds her dagger in her right hand and I use my short sword in my left. “It’s not like you need to gloat about how much more she loved you. I know already. Everyone knows.”
Something about this moment seems surreal, as though I’m momentarily looking down on us from above. Mirror opposites locked in combat against our will. We look the same, but we’re different in every important way. How could she kill our mom? How could she kill our little sister in utero?
“I’m not gloating, Judica. It broke my heart,” I say.
“We lost the same person,” she says. “But you’re such a martyr about it.” Judica lands a glancing blow on my shoulder.
I jump backward. “I actually cared about her, even though I didn’t know her. She might have fixed things between us, you know.”
“What are you rambling about?” Judica straightens, pausing her attack momentarily.
“Our sister,” I say. “Mom was pregnant, and you killed her for it.”
Judica’s face blanks and her hand loosens on the hilt of her sword. Even the tip of her dagger dips downward.
She didn’t know.
She stumbles backward a step and opens a window. I could incapacitate her now, maybe even kill her. But I can’t do it, not like this, not using Sotiris’ existence as a weapon.
My voice is shrill and cold when I say, “You poisoned her when you found out.”
Judica doesn’t deny it. She’s too dazed to say anything at all, and I’m horribly worried it’s because she wasn’t lying. My heart aches at the thought, but what if she didn’t do it? Could Judica be hurting as badly as me? Or even worse, since Inara, Alora, and Edam all sided with me?
For the first time, her bone crushing despair, the soul-wounding sorrow that weighs her down becomes clear to me. In Judica’s mind, Mom never loved her. She never thought I loved her either, and then Edam dumped her. Finally, the one thing she had, Mom’s throne, was pulled out from under her feet when I reacted to a lump of black rock.
Then I throw Mom’s pregnancy at her like a bomb. Mom told me, not her. Mom loved me, not her. Mom chose me, not her. Alora chose me. Edam chose me.
Everyone chooses me.
I could hear parts of her melodic line, but I’ve been missing the most basic notes. The anger, the frustration, and the jealousy form a descant that rises above and surrounds a framework of aching, bone-crushing desperation. Judica’s not the dragon I always took her for, no. She’s a wounded animal, lashing out at her attackers. She’s taking on the entire world alone, and screaming her rage in its face.
Her song echoes all around me as we dance. Cross, parry, strike. I back in a circle while she rains blows on me, right and left. Finally she falls into a very predictable pattern. Strike, hold, strike, hold. I can almost hear my mother whistling with her little wooden flute. A simple run. C minor to an F minor triad. My mother’s phantom playing fills my ears. Instead of merely defending with my left arm, I begin to use it on offense, an intervallic relation to replace lone notes.
Judica falters.
She doesn’t understand why or how I leveled up.
She steps back, resheathes her dagger, and grips her sword with both hands. She swings at me again, then feints and swings from the other direction at light speed, a key change. I catch her sword with both of mine, crossing my arms and throwing hers back in her face. She stumbles back and I’m on her, slashing with the short sword and striking with my mother’s sword intermittently. She falls back, blocking and turning to evade my attack. I press my advantage. Ambient sounds drop away and only our melodic lines, accompanied by Mom’s flute, every strike a note, every block and spin a run, envelop us. My opening appears when Judica’s pants catch on an outcropping of the arena I backed her into, slowing her slightly.
I jab with her own short sword and it slides into her ribs, impaling her a hair below her heart. One upward thrust and she’ll have catastrophic damage to repair. The kind of damage that would incapacitate her for a kill shot. And she knows exactly what I’ve done.
Her eyes flash. Not with anger, but with resolution. “Finish it, then.”
A flick of my wrist and I’ll slice her heart in two. She’ll finally feel the way she made me feel every day, every week, every year of our lives. The way she rent my heart when she killed Pebbles while intending to murder me. The way I felt when she stabbed me with a fork and laughed. The way I felt when she taunted and mocked me, belittling me and attacking me over everything that made me different.
I should end this. I should spare everyone in China, and everyone else she will threaten if she continues in her destructive, selfish, ferocious path. But if she didn’t kill our mother. . . maybe it’s not too late for her.
I can’t undo death. Nothing has become more clear to me since Mom died.
A scarlet tear wells in her left eye. “Stop prolonging this and do it!”
Is she begging me to end her suffering the way I’d put down a wounded horse? Has she been in unbearable pain this whole time? Was she lashing out because she can’t heal the injuries she has sustained? I stare into her deep blue eyes, eyes that remind me so much of our mother. My eyes are the same, but seeing them staring at me from Judica’s face, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Even if she killed Mom, even if she’s the devil everyone sees, I can’t kill my own twin.
Alora and Edam and Inara all explained why she must die. Even Noah, a human, understands why I should end her. I wonder how many people explained to my mother why I had to die. How many people did she ignore when she spared me? How much did that decision cost? When will the payment for her mistake end?
If I don’t kill Judica, the Five will see me as easy prey. They’ll attack Alamecha. Judica will remain a threat, maybe forever. And most of all, I know Judica wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if our
situations were reversed.
I still can’t do it.
I know me, and my strength is not in death or destruction. My power does not derive from hate. I want to build and heal. I want to right the wrongs of the world, not create more injustice and more devastation.
Judica sees my weakness for what it is.
Even with a sword rammed in her own chest, she brings all her strength to bear and swings her sword around and down on mine, chopping the short sword in two. The blow tears her chest open in the process. She reaches down and drags the end of the blade from her body, slicing her palms, but freeing her chest to heal. Her maniacal expression causes me to slide backward, putting some space between us. I throw the hilt of the short sword to the edge of the ring and bring mother’s sword up and around to protect me. Before Judica can heal her hands and grab her sword, I press the razor sharp edge against her throat.
“I don’t want to kill you,” I say.
“No, you can’t kill me. You’re too soft.” The effort of speaking makes her cough, and she sprays blood all over my shirt.
I shove Mom’s blade forward, slicing into her neck. “Yield.”
“Never,” she says. “I won’t, I can’t yield. I was born to rule.”
“You’ve chosen badly, Judica.”
She snarls. “What do you know about my choices? You don’t know me at all.”
I clench my hand on the hilt, trying to convince her that I can do it. I need her to cede the loss. It won’t keep her from challenging me again tomorrow, but at least for today, she must back down. I don’t realize how long I’ve delayed until I see skin spread across her exposed abdomen.
When I look back up at her face, she smiles again, but there’s no joy in it.
She leaps backwards and throws her feet up at the same time, knocking the hilt of Mom’s old blade from my hand. She catches the end of it, blood spraying outward. She slams it down behind her and it sinks several inches into the wooden floor of the room below, outside of the raised arena, out of bounds. Judica tosses her head at me and grins bitterly as she stands.
Displaced (The Birthright Series Book 1) Page 39
