I.
Dagger met wall with an expensive-sounding thunk. The arena was assailingly sunny, and Vinara had to squint to see the lords’ reactions without being blinded. They presided over the arena from what would have been the finest seats, if the grand court of Kalentos was hosting the traditional tournaments of old. But right now, the lords and the heirs to the Dragonwing throne were the only ones there.
The dagger had belonged to Maven, Vinara’s older sister. Vinara’s other sister, Kassia, threw and hers stuck just above the previous knife, blades reflecting each other just like the twins. Vinara approached. Her knife’s bejeweled hilt cut into her palm and made her hand distressingly sweaty. She rolled up the sleeve of her scarlet vestments, hoping they didn’t look like pajamas on her mean frame. She aimed, threw, watched with anticipation as the knife rippled through the air, caught a few inches above her sisters’…and then slid.
It squeaked down the wood, knocked the other blades into the dust, then fell itself. She stood there a beat in the still, charged autumn air, then went to retrieve it. She felt out of place in the clammy heat, in these baggy robes, in this insufferable grandeur, in this foreign city she was expected to find welcoming? Slap the root kal onto the front of its name and suddenly I’m supposed to be its gracious protector, when I can’t even throw a knife!
Mutely, she handed Maven and Kassia their weapons. It was late afternoon. Today’s trials were over. This their third round of knife throwing alone and their esteemed judges were packing up.
“Wait,” Maven said, “Can you tell us the scores? Or must we wait?”
“Yeah…” Kassia began to speak, but Vinara wasn’t listening. She murmured her agreement, trusting her sisters to lead her back to their rooms deep within the labyrinth of Kalentos.
But they stood there talking awhile as the light greyed around them. She half listened, disinterested, as they discussed which one of them would inherit the throne. Neither of the twins would mind if the other one was the successor; Vinara knew all their misgivings lay in herself. Her sisters’ debates were honed like a sharp mind, but when she became involved, they were sharp like a thistle instead. Small. Annoying.
“I mean, who does she think she’s kidding?”
“Sure she was the one visiting Dad while he was sick, but really?”
“We all know that was because she didn’t have anything else to do.”
“Thought she could spin herself as the good girl, but guess what? No one even liked Dad anyway? She’s not doing herself any favors by mimicking him?”
“Shh, Kas, what would Mother think?”
“Something sour. Well, if she were alive, that is,” Kassia said.
“Honestly? I’d have pitied her if she was, wearing those filthy somber clothes widows have to wear.”
“I never want to get married.”
“So just hand me the crown then?”
“Better than ending up stuck with that toad of a Lytian, urgh.”
“What was up with that anyway, it was like Hana Lyta was trying to set us up, like who would ever?”
“She’d have better luck with Vinara.”
Pair the weak with the weak, yeah, that was it. Vinara snapped out of her reverie and rounded on her sisters.
“I would never.”
They ignored her.
“He’s gross!”
Silence.
“What were you doing when Dad was sick, anyways,” she said, lamely. They finally turned around.
“I was in Mykhos,” Kassia answered, as if it was obvious.
“And I was at the Redmire,” said Maven. “Kas, you remember? The fish smell was absolutely atrocious?”
“Who cares about fish, we were talking about Dad,” said Vinara.
“We’re talking about Daaad,” Kas mimicked.
“Shut up!”
“Would you say that to your queen, little sister?”
“Would you say that to yours?”
Kas laughed. Vinara wished she could laugh that laugh, dark and rich as molasses. The knife was still sweaty in her hand, and she felt herself poise somehow.
Like she used to when her father’s siblings would crouch down to her level as a child and she’d draw herself up because the stakes were so much higher, now that she knew they could see her. She’d bloomed into adulthood like blood blooms under bruised skin, shaping her face into a thousand expressions of disdain, exploiting her poise and prettiness to obscure all violence, but that didn’t hold water with her sisters. Composure had no value here.
“Are you threatening me?”
“What, here, in the grand court of Kalentos, under the protection of our esteemed lord of Lyta? You’re crude.”
“As if Hana Lyta cares. She’d throw a festival if we killed each other.”
When Vinara’s expression didn’t relent, Kassia moved closer with a swaying step, reminiscent of drunkenness. Vinara shuddered to imagine her sister drunk, that much power lurching around hitting things and bellowing curses even royalty weren’t allowed to say.
“You wanna fight, little sister? Let’s fight.”
Vinara hadn’t been serious before. But the sheer boredom of Kalentos seemed to fall over her in that instant—one unending smear of sun and sneers and ancient weapons. It threatened to put her mind to sleep, so she wrested her words out: “Dagger or rapier?”
“Oh, she’s cute,” Kas said to Maven. “Dagger, we have them right here, why not?”
The dagger slipped with Vinara. Her boots skidded the dust, she fell in a hapless tumble. Breathed. Suffocated as weight dropped on top of her. What—?
She inhaled the expensive fabric of Kassia’s robe, now coated with dust. Colorblock of scarlet distressing her eyes. She wrestled herself free and stood over her sister, saw the slippery ruby hilt lodged in skin. Maven was calling, crying, a keening shriek across the grand court of Kalentos and there were the judges in their lordly grandeur. They pushed her away from her sister’s body.
“Did you do this?”
“Didn’t try to, just clumsy,” she said. What was wrong with her? Sarcasm, now of all times?
“Oh, own up to something for once!” Maven said. “You can’t please everyone and—it’s obvious you’d rather please yourself!”
The lords advanced on them. She pulled her limbs close to her body to avoid being touched. Her mind latched onto the rough folds of her ceremonial robes, fingers clutching the fabric, roving over it obsessively. The clothes were too baggy, she hated baggy clothes. She’d coveted Kassia’s skintight black leggings, her elegant silver-buckled shoes. She could steal them now if she wanted. Of all people, Lord Kaiona was lugging her unconscious sister away, and anyhow, nothing would have fit her. Not to worry. There were tailors in Velhaerys. Her thoughts jumped around that city for a while but couldn’t seem to land here, the grand distraction of Kalentos, city of the union of the four provinces, torn between those places, city of a thousand scrappy fighting dogs!
She was talking courtspeak to the lords without registering it. Buzzwords. Honorifics. Elegant posturing. The Lord Lyta put a hand on her shoulder that she hated, more than anything, more than her (dead?) sister! and she snapped out of her sweet nothings and shouted at him.
She, the diplomat of the family, snapped at the crown’s most tentative ally. She glimpsed Maven running after her sister’s body, and turned away, muttering apologies.
She went away. A long time passed, and she found herself in the shade under the spectators’ seats in the arena with Hal Mykhon. Her eyes returned from vacancy and she blinked at him with dilated pupils.
“So?” he said quietly.
“So.” Her voice was low and tempered. “Is my sister all right?”
“I’m afraid…”
Her body went stiff as glass.
Hal said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, I did it myself,” she said. This time she struck a businesslike tone. She found that it fit her, made things sound neat, like they were divided into a thousand tiny boxes.
“Yeah, but still, I’m sorry.”
Half an hour ago, she would have said So am I, what a tragedy, I acted rashly. Now, only brutal, unflinching silence. In the dark, despite obvious grief, she smiled.
Locked in her rooms in the tower, Vinara looked out on the bleary city of Kalentos. Bluish smoke rose from chimneys in the morning, casting a smoggy haze over the city by noontime. Sometimes she talked to Rona, her dragon, but mostly she was content with sensing the latent power of that other mind as it subtly overlapped with her own.
Downstairs, she sometimes heard the lords’ arguments. But she preferred to listen to the currents that lay beneath their words. She noted that the Kaiona always sounded a little too eager to win the others’ favor, but she knew they never would, so long as they put off choosing between the Lytians and the Mykhons. She observed the Lytians’ sharp curtness when speaking to the Mykhons, and how the Mykhons liked to draw their words out when they spoke to the Lytians, as if they had all the time in the world. She heard snatches of defense and prosecution, pieces of accusations and denials—and through it all, the voice of her surviving sister.
Its instability rattled her: Petulant, bloody, girlish, vengeful. She couldn’t follow it so she gave up listening. She had the nagging thought that there was something Maven could see or feel that she was missing, but confined as she was, she couldn’t decipher it. I want to go to the morgue, take Maven there and see if the twins are still identical. She found herself thinking as her curiosity curdled into bitterness. Maybe she’ll get sympathy pains…decide to die as well. Her thoughts turned inward, and there she found a deep-seated fear, as shocking and inescapable as burning liquid downed in one gulp. It had started in those seconds in the arena with Hal Mykhon and it seeped into her like disease.
She ruminated, felt her thoughts eating at each other, rootlocked and restless.
A week went by.
Then Hal Mykhon unlatched her door and handed her her father’s old crown.
The next day, Hal and Vinara walked through the acres of overgrown gardens that surrounded the castle of Kalentos, cut through with dilapidated stone walls and bridges. They were going to meet the council of lords that had presided over the trials. This was the last time the council would meet as a ruling body before Vinara’s coronation—the last opportunity for opposition.
Vinara and the lords stood in a ring inside the Kalentine eyrie. It was hushed, lit with candles, and dim like that of Velhaerys.
“If there you have any remaining counsel, speak it now,” Vinara said, following the customary etiquette.
“No counsel, but an offering,” Kaiona replied in turn. He stepped forward. “A finely crafted Kaiona palanquin awaits you in Velhaerys, lord, befitting your status. We hope it will remind you of our longstanding willingness to serve. And from my dragon to yours, the mind of the node of Kaiona.”
And of your unfortunate lack of judgment, Vinara thought. A palanquin befits no status but a Kaiona cult leader.
“Nor I. No counsel, but an offering,” said Hal. “To be brought to Velhaerys, Mykhos’s finest node, to teach you as your father could not.”
There’s a fitting gift, she thought, admiring Hal even more than she already had.
“No counsel, but an offering,” echoed Hana Lyta. She came forth hesitantly, and Vinara scrutinized her. She proffered a small wooden box, looking away with furtive eyes. “Here, the rings of the office of Lyta, daughter of Kalador, kept too long in your care. We know you will receive your own, but give these in hopes they’ll be a testament to the unity of our two provinces. And…from my dragon to yours, the mind of the node of Lyta.”
Typical. Trying to call attention to the fact that her province is named after my relative, not hers. Does she want my protection? Or my blessing to secede from the kingdom?
Then a fourth voice rang out: “I have counsel.”
They all looked to the doorway.
Maven stood there smiling unsteadily. She’d smeared on Kassia’s makeup as if she’d been playing dress-up. Vinara could practically see the spots swimming in front of
her sister’s eyes. She looked poisoned, as if death was draining from Kassia’s corpse into her own.
“Oh, the counsel isn’t for you, baby sister,” she said sweetly when she saw Vinara staring. “All I wanted to say was—look at the girl in the morgue; have you done that yet? Or just went on and replaced her?”
“Our sincerest consolations for your loss, my lord,” Kaiona murmured.
“Consolations! Ha! None of us are children here. None of us are so ignorant as to be consoled.”
“I thank you for your words of consolation,” Vinara cut in. Paint herself as the sane one, and they would overlook what she’d done. Her sister would make a fool of herself and everyone would forget she was telling the truth.
“Again, I wasn’t speaking to you. So self-centered. You should win an award, sister.”
“I think I already did.”
“Oh, not yet,” Maven said tipsily. “Our esteemed lords have yet to give the final order, remember?”
“Tell me to summon the dragons,” Vinara said to the lords.
“One of us is insane already and the other just became so. Give me the order instead.” Maven ventured a step further into the eyrie.
“If you wished to contest our decision, Maven, the time was days ago,” Kaiona said.
“If you want to spare all our lives from this deranged child, the time is now!”
There was a beat of silence.
“Vinara,” Hal said, “Summon the dragons.”
“Maven,” Hana said, “Summon them.”
Maven ducked out of the eyrie, shouting and calling as she backed into the courtyard. Vinara and the lords flashed furtive glances at each other for a second before following. Vinara screamed to Rona in her mind, feeling the latent power surge up. She burst through the double doors into the courtyard just in time to see Maven’s great turquoise dragon landing in a dust cloud and the deranged girl taking flight. Rona was pushed out of her mind and the only thing Vinara could think was that her sister fit here. Treason notwithstanding, this was a place for ghosts, a fitting insane asylum.
There was no reason for it, no politics, no strategy, simply Maven’s wild self. Her sister’s dragon twisted in the air, rounded the castle, and was gone to the west.
“Should we follow her, my queen?”
Maven had dipped into the clouds. Finding her would not be easy. Vinara’s instant of whimsy had been costly, and she felt a tense urge to leave this place. She fled back into the eyrie, ran up the winding stairs. At the mouth of the tunnel to the outside, the pivotal feeling, the sense of consequence, rushed up to her again. But she shot through the tunnel on dragonback, locked her mind into the double-awareness of the mind-bond, and looked back to see the lords streaming out behind her. She relished the flash of thought that burned into her then: If she fell now, the world would suffer for her succession.
IV.
Later, the queen Vinara would have only fragmentary memories of her earliest days in power. She remembered the light in the room she took as a study, perpetually dappled in cool grays and swatches of yellow. It made her face look bruised, her movements hushed as she moved through what seemed like a flood of paper letters from minor lords and army commanders, condolences, subtle threats, requests for orders and for the truth of what had happened. At this point, she didn’t even know what they were referring to when they hinted at their worry for their queen’s stability, and by extension the kingdom’s.
Maybe the lords were running the kingdom, because she most definitely wasn’t. They must have had faint memories of watching her toddle around the palace in gaudy dresses that scraped the floor, of servants bowing to her, even kneeling, overshadowing her little girl’s height, because they greeted her like she was still a fragile child. I’m not Maven, she thought: They won’t find me crying, incoherent, in the servants’ dumbwaiter. So they didn’t. She kept to herself.
When she looked in the mirror, her eyes were like pieces of matte metal, her limbs languid, but due less to grace than to atrophy. She’d taken to not finishing her food. She found it an exacting measure of control, a tether to reality—wake up, you’re still hungry. It didn’t work. Since nothing that the gaggle of lords said mattered, she had
nothing to believe and nothing to care about. When she tried looking after herself, she found only the ever-present pit of danger that resided within. Repulsed and afraid, she turned away from it, answered the lords’ questions with brittle composure that she could never quite convince herself was real.
One day she escaped to the eyrie, taking refuge within the mind of her dragon Rona. Busywork was waiting for her in her chambers, and while it wasn’t unmanageable, it was so unnecessary that she had trouble making sense of it. Her mind whirled between a thousand unimportant tasks with nothing important enough to provide the slightest bit of gravity.
She let her thoughts unwind, casually prodding Rona to cast her telepathy across Velhaerys. Through the dragon’s mind she saw Velhaerys, a glittering plain where each mind appeared as a blink of light. The sight relaxed her as it often did: to see her city spread out before her, all its problems smoothed away when it was reduced thus to a simple patch of land. Rona’s attention skimmed over the city and pulled toward a sort of knot at its outskirts. This confused Vinara at first; Rona viewed the Dragonwing capital with mild interest at best. To focus on anything specific was uncharacteristic for her.
What is it? Vinara asked, but she realized before the dragon could answer. The new node! Suddenly she remembered Hal’s gift. Get closer, she urged Rona. Rona insinuated her thoughts into the node’s mind. The person sat in a dome-shaped hut a few miles outside Velhaerys, part of one of the poorer villages on the outskirts of the city. The humble residence shocked her at first, but given that nodes were any sensible enemy’s prime target, it made sense to hide amongst the commoners. The node was seated on a cushion on the dirt floor, with rigid posture and closed eyes, their dark blue dragon stretched out against the curve of the wall. She recognized the posture as the same one her father had assumed whenever he—a node himself—was immersed in faraway happenings.
Try and see what they’re watching. Rona’s thoughts blinked into those of the node. Vinara felt an abrupt falling sensation. Afterimages flashed behind her shut eyes, as if she werestaring at the sun. A black tunnel with flashes of gold. She realized she and Rona were jumping across the connections the node had strung together to get to wherever they were: from the node’s mind to that of their dragon. From the dragon all the way across the kingdom to the Icthe. The dragon of a Mykhon soldier at the Icthean
border. And into the mind of the soldier herself. A scene wavered into view.The soldier sat on dragonback, silhouetted against a small village. Tall grasses waved around her, revealing an approaching group of people, then obscuring them again. She watched as the group rose from behind the bluff. Moonlight reflected off the tin rooves of the houses, glinted on the blades and armor of the soldier and her two companions. She sensed the way the soldiers were utterly in control here, and a resentment towards their presence that emanated from the few waking villagers.
“Hold!” said the soldier as the people approached.
“Is this the village of Lete?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s there?”
“This is the commander Shasta, sworn to the service of Lord Hal Mykhon, vassal of the queen. And you?”
Silence resounded. Vinara repositioned her mind, perceiving the itch of the soldier’s armor, the shifting weight of the dragon she rode. The Ictheans emerged from the brush, forming a semicircle around the soldiers. She perceived the soldier’s nagging thought: Negotiations shouldn’t be over so quickly.
And suddenly the scene exploded.
“Melusine!” the Ictheans shouted. “Melusine, for Melusine!”
For a second, the chaos of the attacking soldiers’ minds whirled Vinara into a sort of vortex. A dozen new mental connections sprung up, and her mind was flooded with a a myriad of adrenaline rushes. But the node’s mind flared in alarm, and they seemed to acknowledge Vinara’s presence for the first time, snappinginto action, and severing the mental links. Each time one was broken, she felt a little quake, a series of short falls. Finally the node severed the last connection and Vinara fell back into place. Not the eyrie, where she was, but inside the node’s little hut.
The node’s eyes opened with a wry smirk. They were a startling stormy blue.
“Greetings,” they said aloud to the empty air.
And to you, Vinara said through Rona.
“The Lord Mykhon told me to expect you. That’s why I’m here, after all. But I did not mean for us to meet there. Sincerest apologies, your grace.”
“What just happened?”
“A group of Icthean rebels attacked a Dragonwing village.” The node’s voice soured. “An all too common occurrence these days, I’m afraid. Ever since…well, ever since your coronation.”
“Are you saying that I…”
“I am just stating my observations. I have no idea what they want or why this upsurgence is happening now, as opposed to two months ago, or two centuries.”
“We need to find out what Melusine means,” she said, ignoring the node’s odd phrasing.
“Yes, I suppose that would be prudent.”
Their detached manner alarmed her. “It’s their rallying cry, it’s something I haven’t heard, which in itself signals we’re disturbingly out of touch. They were Dragonwings, so I’m guessing it’s probably something out of the book of Kalador, or else something directly opposed to it, if they’re one of those cults. If not those, something from a dead Silent dialect. Barring, of course, the fact that one of the soldiers could have gotten a look at their minds. We should ask them when this is over. And ask the dragons as well—they sometimes have information we don’t.”
When she finished speaking, the node looked thoughtful, perhaps implying that she was treating the matter much too seriously. Am I? But a village was just attacked.
“Well?” she said.
“Have you trained as a node before, your grace?
“No.”
“You are remarkably coherent considering what you just witnessed. Most people take months to come around after such a jarring first experience.” The node spoke curtly, their uninflected voice carrying no admiration, nor any surprise. Vinara didn’t feel praised, only observed.
“I’m the queen, it’s my job to think quickly,” she said.
“Even queens get vertigo.”
She fell silent. Was being exhilarated instead of overwhelmed by her first conversation with a node not normal? She simply didn’t understand the practical value of sitting around recuperating, especially from something so far away that it barely felt real.
Could it be then that everything else she’d called pointless was, in fact, the normal way of things? The busywork, the condolences toward which she’d thought, Everyone knows my sister died. No need to drag it out.
The old confusion-fear was returning, this time with a strain of thrill running through it. She could warp this to fit her needs. She was free if she didn’t care. Yes, she could manage a kingdom if she knew very little of it actually mattered. The node wasn’t making her ability to be practical sound like a superiority, though. She made the quick and impersonal decision not to trust them from now on.
“No, you’re right, that was harrowing,” she said, and meant it. It was just that harrowing didn’t bother her.
The node’s mouth curved into a small smile, but they said nothing.
“I have duties to attend to,” Vinara said. “But I’ll be back soon. Unless you don’t think I need to be trained?”
“Oh, you still need training your grace.” They closed their eyes again. Vinara sensed their mind sinking back into a myriad of scenes from across the kingdom, a million simultaneous events. “Vertigo isn’t something to get used to.”
V.
She remembered those words again when she decided to travel to Mykhos. A month had passed, and the last three times she had visited the node; they’d told her to come another time and sunk back into the depths of the Icthe to coach her soldiers through yet more negotiations at the border.
The Mykhon castle was set on the hill that overlooked the city of Mykhos, but it seemed much further away. The east Icthe’s signature dry grasses surrounded it, and she waded through them to reach the gates. The castle was made up of several long, expansive buildings, and once she passed through the thick stone fortifications, everything was elegant—made for beauty, not strength. The inner gates were a strange, smooth, bluish metal shaped with ornate curlicues.
Hal greeted Vinara there and led her inside, where figures out of Kalador’s mythology soldiered across the walls in murals faded with age. His voice was quiet, pacifying her urge to ask the most pressing questions as soon as she could. He directed
her not to their throne room, but to his family’s personal chambers, and when they reached the rooms of his mother, the Lord Regent Anastasia, he gave her a Good luck look and left.
Vinara tiptoed through the maze of opulent rooms inside until she found Anastasia, slumped behind a desk in a little room with a mural of a golden dragon.
“Vinara. Thank the Savior,” she said. “I fear we’ve committed a grave mistake.”
“Tell me.”
“Where to begin? You didn’t know the state of the Icthean villages, it turns out the asvir are much more lenient about mixing than we are. Your father dampened an enmity that had lasted upwards of two centuries by simply leaving alone a frankly useless strip of land. You’re sending soldiers into said land for reasons which I’m not saying aren’t justified, but do the Asvir think of it as putting a stop to Dragonwing infighting? No, they see it as the first step in a plan to take back the Icthe. We’ve got protests in a dozen cities for a dozen reasons. The High Elders are being disconcertingly quiet. The Icthean asvir were happily minding their business in their little city states but now they’re claiming they’ve been putting up with us Dragonwings for decades, they’re tired of it, they want the Icthe back, they say if we get to break contract, so do they! Tell me, Vinara, when were you born?”
“A year after my father made peace.”
“Of course. You grew up with everyone afraid they’d break some new law, even in places where it didn’t matter. A Velhaereen wouldn’t marry a Kalentine, for Kalador’s sake. All up in arms, claiming the city states were blasphemy because of course it would lead to sick mixed-breed asvir-Dragonwing abominations…”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, of course you find the mixed cities repulsive.”
“Do you not?”
“What I find repulsive, Vinara, is the idea of that kind of uproar gripping my people again.”
It would be no use trying to convince Anastasia of the necessity of Dragonwing purity right now. She changed tactics. “Tell me more about the Ictheans.”
“I fear we left the Icthe alone for too long, my queen, the city states were supposed to make it impossible for them to unite, but it looks like they’re all united in
one thing. They hate us, they hate you, they’re all going back to the asvir or to that stupid Melusine thing. Silly renegades.”
“Where does Melusine stand?”
“I don’t know. But Ictheans, they’re starved for a sense of patriotism. Nothing whatsoever to believe in but their own little lives. And if you start sending soldiers in? It’s not just the asvir you’re provoking, it’s the Ictheans in their little mixed towns. So of course they’re going to rally for the poor little band of renegades your soldiers killed.”
“But Melusine attacked us first. Why?”
“Again, I don’t know. From what I can see, they’re mixed, skewing slightly Dragonwing. But the Ictheans are seeing them as revolutionaries, regardless of how they started.”
“If there’s a revolution, there’s an opposition,” Vinara said. “Something they’re revolting against.”
“True.”
“There must be Dragonwing purists in the Icthe who would turn their nose up at such riffraff as Melusine… If we paint the asvir as leaving them behind—abandoning them in their little mixed towns—that’s sure to reinstill them with some kind of enmity.”
“No!”
“Anastasia, you swore to me the mixed cities were an abomination. Do you stand by that?”
“Not particularly,” the lord said miserably.
“Then what do you stand for?”
“Pulling back your troops. Sending a few soldiers undercover to eliminate Melusine. Leave the Icthe alone like your father said you would.”
“You said it yourself, the city states were doomed to failure anyway. People don’t like not knowing who to fight for! So who does the Icthe belong to?”
“I…”
“Who does it belong to? If you had to choose, who?”
“It belongs to us.”
“Good,” Vinara said.
“So…?”
“So, I’m sending in the army.” When there was an uncertain pause, she added, “To assist any Dragonwings who want to cross back into the kingdom.” To gather our forces.
“And nothing else?” Anastasia said with the air of a child asking for a pinky promise.
She tilted her head: We’ll see. And I won’t tell you you’re wrong. But between me and myself, you are.
Because unlike Vinara, Anastasia had nothing to prove. Her reputation was secure, so she could make sensible decisions. Ones that would protect the kingdom, but wouldn’t catch anyone’s eye, wouldn’t endear the people to her in a moment of giddy patriotism. She extended her mind to Rona’s and then to the node’s, and alerted them of her decision.
VI.
Velvet upholstery enveloped her slender frame as she sat back, peering at the lords who had turned out for breakfast. It was late summer, the season of the Festival, and the lords had congregated in Velhaerys.
“The Seinzha have too much Silent blood,” the Lord Regent Anastasia said. “You know what I mean.”
“I don’t, actually.” There was the lord Hana Lyta, cold but demure with her gray-white Lytian curls and a commanding darkness in her eyes. Vinara scanned the table for the other Lytians, finding that they stuck out a little uncomfortably.
“So learn, lord,” said Anastasia. Early-morning light filtering through the stained glass, accentuating the rose-crimson of her robes. She looked nearly kindly, nearly wholesome, nearly motherly, but she had this look to her that said: My family is one of war, and therefore I will be the incarnation of war. Never mind that it’s not in my nature. Vinara leaned forward to better scrutinize her fellow lord, caught the impression of a sparkle in Anastasia’s eye: Tears? Or the unfettered joy of believing that she was her queen’s favorite and therefore had nothing to worry about?
“With pleasure,” Hana said, taking a bite of the sugar-encrusted pastry on her plate. Vinara reflected that Hana would have done well as a Mykhon, and Anastasia as a
Lytian. Well, better for Vinara, at least. Hana could play the role of the humble ice wastelander well, but her animosity toward Anastasia was enough that she let the natural edge creep back into her voice.
“All right,” Anastasia said as if speaking to a child. “In the beginning, after their father’s death, Kalador’s children created the four provinces—”
“Three, dear.”
“Would have created the—”
“And didn’t.”
“Three provinces, then, if you’re determined to dredge up old feuds.” Anastasia waved the point away, continuing. “The lords Mykhon prospered. And-”
“And the rest?” said Hana.
“We prospered! We prospered!” one of the Kaiona brothers shouted.
“What say you, Lytian comrade?” said Anastasia.
“I don’t know,” Hana said. “Did closing off Skael mean the prestige of my lineage, or did it mean dozens of lost ports? Did cutting out the Silent mean purity or scarcity? And now the kingdom comes back to the same decision. I’d heard such good reports from the west! Trade with the Silent cities! No profits for us, of course, but it was nice to hear. And now all those happy rumors—poof! Gone away!”
Something shifted among the lords, like they had all just grasped the subtext of Hana’s words. Vinara scanned their faces, and realized with alarm that Hal was staring the Lytian boy down. The Lytian looked bizarre and alien in his cold blues, while Hal’s face was saturated in effervescent gold by the light coming through the stained glass windows. The seating was a disastrous mistake; they’d been placed directly opposite each other! She hadn’t known the Mykhon-Lytian enmity spanned generations. But her attention was wrested away: Hana Lyta turned her bristling gray stare on Vinara herself, and Vinara quailed. What is it that she meant? What am I missing? she thought.
Hana had been saying that it was wartime again. And Lyta would have to decide whether to back the kingdom that had called it a wasteland and given it nothing.
Vinara broke her gaze away from the older woman’s. She inhaled. Her leverage as host could end this sudden knot of silence.
“Come now,” she said in a voice full of warmth. “These are no subjects for a festival.” One more sentence, one more treacle sentence will do it. She forced herself to speak. “Let us enjoy the little piece of summer we have left.”
VII.
After the lords dispersed, Vinara led Hana Lyta away to the hunting grounds. Sun filtered through the thick foliage and illuminated patches of the soil, but as they rounded the keep to the back of the palace, the grounds grew darker and more shaded. A perfect cloister for hushed conversation. Vinara bent closer to Hana, preparing to speak, but Hana cut her off in an urgent tone.
“Your grace, I despise Anastasia Mykhon, but the truth is we’re of the same era. We saw what your father was handed when he became king. Half the Icthe in flames, cultists lying to the Silent about our regime, cultists defecting to the Silent, the mixed cities whining about hypocrisy—and we’re of the same opinion on this one thing.”
“How very unusual,” she said. She wasn’t used to speaking like this, and her breath caught in her throat every time she found she realized what she needed to say in order to make her lords listen.
“I know. Tells you how dire things are, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what exactly you mean…”
“It’s this war, Vinara. Look, at the rate you’re going, you’ll turn out like Kalador before long.”
“Hana!” Vinara donned a face of exaggerated shock. “Is that blasphemy I hear? If I was to be the next Savior, I’d welcome it.”
“Kalador’s conquests weren’t good for the east, and it’s not blasphemy because Kalador isn’t a god. Just like you aren’t.” Hana took a breath and put up a hand as Vinara started to protest. “No. No, forgive me. I simply meant, you both took power so young, and with such remarkable…vigor.”
“Well, you’ve won me over with that,” Vinara teased. “But I won’t be forgetting that first bit.”
“The fact remains,” Hana said, trying to move on. “When Kalador’s war began, Lyta was fiercely independent, and afterward it was called the ice wasteland for a reason.”
“So what do you want short of a truce?” Because that wasn’t going to happen.
“Lyta cannot die again.”
“Again? But you benefited from Kalador’s war.” Kalador had been the Regent Scorpio’s benefactor before the feud, so the Regent wouldn’t have even had the opportunity for power if not for the conquests.
“Doesn’t mean it was right,” Hana said matter-of-factly. “But I know you won’t have a truce, so I’m proposing a marriage pact. Else Lyta secedes. Better to die on our own terms, don’t you think?”
A marriage pact?
A memory pressed into Vinara’s mind. She had been listening to her sisters gossip in the arena at Kalentos. It was like Hana Lyta was trying to set us up, Maven had said. Who would even consider something so ridiculous? And Kassia had responded, She’d have better luck with Vinara.
Vinara held back a laugh. The thought of actually becoming queen, so that Hana Lyta could marry her to that simpering son of hers, had seemed impossible then. And even after her coronation, even when she began to think about the most strategic alliance she could make via marriage, she had never considered Feizan Lyta. She was about to laugh with her newfound abandon, the kind of laugh that said she was young, yes, and her lords might not understand her, but she was still their ruler. But the second part of Hana’s arrangement stilled her reaction.
Else Lyta secedes.
That thought was even further from reality than the long-ago conversation with her sisters. It was of such magnitude that she couldn’t hold it in her head and wanted to laugh just from that, it was hard to take seriously, this uninflected statement of her lord’s, this piece of treason spoken so matter-of-fact-ly that she had missed it at first.
The old fear seeped into her. She had a mental image of leeches set under her skin, drawing her blood further inward.
What if Lyta seceded?
She had been able to imagine war with the asvir. But with the Lytians? She suddenly remembered the edge in Hana’s voice over breakfast, the coldness playing under her casual words. We’ve only costumed them as our weak spot. They’re more ruthless than Kalador himself. They know war, and they don’t take it lightly. So when they play with the idea, it really isn’t playing at all.
“I accept,” she said numbly. It didn’t even feel like a hard choice. She’d been shocked out of considering anything else. Feizan’s lack of appeal—O Savior! His hair was white at age nineteen, his skin was pale and clammy, he looked fourteen! And the way he talked with a curdling pride about his homeland, picking at the dirt under his fingernails—No! It didn’t faze her in the face of his mother’s catatonic power.
VIII.
Everyone left but the Lytians: a minor disappointment, but her mind was still faraway from the threat of secession. The vague thought that plagued her was how her first festival as queen had been stolen out from beneath her with all the patriotic ceremony gone. The thing about threats was that once they were gone, once you had given in, the rest was quite underwhelming. Hana had meant this as a power play, but it felt oddly like charity, which made her reject it even more wholly. In the weeks preceding the wedding—because all the lords would of course have to be summoned back from their respective abodes, among other arrangements—she found herself wandering parts of the palace Feizan didn’t even know existed.
One day she had found a small room with high, arched ceilings, stuffed with old belongings from her sisters and parents. A harp with gold strings sat in one corner, as tall as she was, half draped in a white cloth. A rack of Maven’s blue and gold dresses. All was shoved into the corner with barely enough room to cross into the next room, from which emanated a low, musing tune. She crept into the adjoining room, found a round-faced man sitting in a moldering chair. Their curly gray head was bowed and their eyes were closed, not opening even when Vinara strode into the room. She knelt down before him and waited until his eyes opened.
“My queen.”
Their voice resembled that of someone she knew, but she didn’t know who. She only noticed the play of different tones, a deep sense that this person couldn’t be disturbed, coupled with an immediate panic—it must be on someone else’s behalf!
“I see my future husband has taken liberties,” she whispered, because this man was obviously Lytian.
“I am Rejan, head of staff in Lyta, most trusted adviser of the noble household. By my understanding, I am here to…supervise.”
She could think of nothing to say, so waited until he continued.
“Your husband has a message he’d like me to deliver you,” Rejan said. His tone was now almost amused, as if he was thinking a thousand private thoughts but condensing everything into a few, civil sentences. “He says he understands the way your family ran in the past, their dysfunction like a thousand minute civil wars, he says he’s able to speak on the subject because his province suffered for every one of them. I am not a temporary installment, I am tasked to curate this kingdom’s future because—well, because I happen to be quite good at it.”
“Are those Feizan’s words or yours?” she said. The poise that had crept into her voice over breakfast the other day hadn’t left, and she wasn’t sure it ever would. But the fact remained that she knew how to speak to her lords. Make a face and it sticks. She supposed this one had.
Rejan smiled.
“And how is my husband planning to keep you alive?” Vinara said. “For all he knows, you could be killed in the crossfire of one of my family’s…civil wars.”
They smiled again. Between the ashy hair and the sinister white teeth, their face seemed drawn in grayscale. They stood and looked down into the bassinet that held Vinara’s son, asleep. She looked away from it, but the only place to look was Rejan’s eyes: They had anticipated her action, moved so they’d be directly in her line of sight. Rejan’s eyes were black, round, and wide-set.
“You see, dearest queen, I happen to be a node.”
“I happen to be the same,” she said quietly, but she was thinking: I was right. Hana Lyta is fucking insane.
“We are not the same.” Like the Velhaereen node, Rejan spoke as if this was a simple fact, voice uninflected.
“No, I think that’s obvious to both of us. But—Rejan—your masters cannot just step in here thinking their queen is the same little girl who—”
“You did cave to my lord Hana remarkably quickly.”
“I responded to a threat so large it could destroy me,” she hissed. “There was no other choice.”
Rejan raised his eyes, looked at her, as if she were only a small nuisance flitting across his life, as opposed to being his god. Not like she was to everyone else. Or, how she hoped she was. “There always is,” Rejan said.
“But my lord node, you sabotage yourself. I made the choice you wanted.”
He shook his head. “When you become a node as I am, it matters very little who you serve or what you want. Yes, if you were to order all the troops of Lyta to the Icthe, I would raise a fuss, but you probably know that all that is very superficial. We deal in minds, my queen, surely they’re more complex than what others can see. And having operated for many people, I can say that none of you are ever as right as you think.”
“Even Hana?” she said.
“Yes, she is nothing special.”
Vinara laughed in surprise, forgetting herself. “My lord, she could execute you for that!”
“She won’t,” Rejan said with a shrug. “I don’t have to tell her, and you certainly won’t. After all, it wouldn’t serve your aim, you like that her most faithful subject does not love her. You still care about that sort of thing.”
Vinara looked up, hearing the bustle of footsteps and voices. The leader of the Velhaereen forgers’ union was scheduled for an audience soon.
“A pleasure talking to you,” she said as she stood to leave. The tone that Rejan had had earlier, that subtlety like words were the least of what she was saying, had entered her voice, and she coveted it.
“Yes,” she heard the node’s response, as she closed the door behind her.
IX.
Duties didn’t have to be duties a level further down. Lying was hardly lying if the subject would never find out, if it didn’t harm them, if she only lied to them as much as
they lied to themselves. A fact could be true on the level most people would pay attention to, but utterly empty upon closer examination. A sentence could be merely a container for a tone. The fact of speaking to someone could mean more than the conversation itself. And loyalty? Patriotism? Those were the most easily faked of all, and everyone did so. I was naive. I presumed people spoke honestly. But no one feels as much for their kingdom as they say they do…the only part they care about is their own noble house and hardly even that.
Vinara would wake to a dull gray light that barely filtered in past the thick red drapes. She had moved into new chambers, a branch of the royals’ tower she had conveniently forgotten to show Feizan when she gave the Lytians a tour. The new rooms were sterile, purified, but like every morning, the drive to leave entered her like poison. They weren’t meant for a real person. Quite literally, they had only ever housed dreams. She stepped quickly into the antechamber and called for a maid to clean the rooms—one of the new ones she’d hired, paid extra to report exclusively to her.
She let her servants style her hair until she was more product than person. Everyone treated the palace as this piece of finery, this relic, but it festered with Lytian corruption and Astei stubbornness. And the people knew it. The pristine exterior was only ritual, tradition; no one actually believed in it. But at the same time, breaking it would have been taboo, so she continued letting the servants apply powder to her face until it was nearly the cream color of the wall. She needed to lie to her audiences that she was still lying to herself, and then they would keep up the notion that yes! everything was under control! Otherwise, Hana would descend upon her with a sweet godmotherly smile and say, What is the use of living in a display case if you aren’t worth being displayed?
X: INTERLUDE
Two days after Feizan’s son was born, the Lytians still couldn’t find Vinara. Hana couldn’t believe the audacity of that girl, she reflected as she sat with her son and grandson in the hastily cleaned-up palace nursery. Vinara had glanced at the child, his big gray Lytian eyes, and gone with the bloody sheets still wrapped around her body.
Hana knew Feizan didn’t want to look for her. Her son told himself that it was because he respected Vinara, as much as he loathed her, as alien as she was, as far from the gentle manners of the Lytian court he was used to. He was used to people who spoke softly, deliberated before decisions. He was one of those people himself, and he hadn’t changed in the past year. It wasn’t that he refused to; rather, he felt he physically could not. He would always be a little too ragged, a little too coarse to be royalty.
But sitting in the nursery as his son slept, Hana impressed upon Feizan that the Lytian people were not really as unassuming, as docile as they first seemed. They were in fact cutting. Ruthless. In a quiet way, to be sure, but didn’t that make them all the more dangerous? He didn’t believe her at first. He needed examples. So she gave them to him.
“Well, what do you want to name him?” she said, standing over the bassinet that held Feizan’s son.
“I don’t know. It’s not my choice.”
“Yes, it is,” Hana said. “I arranged your marriage to the most unstable woman in the kingdom and she’s disappeared. If she is truly missing, you’ll have to act as regent.”
“She’s not gone.”
“How do you know? Does she disappear like this often?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, what would you do if you did get to be regent?” she probed. “Let’s say you were.”
“I don’t know,” he insisted.
“You hate this place. You’re scared of your wife. You don’t want your son to take after his mother. What do you do? You can do anything now, you know.”
“I…I would…I would move to Lyta.”
“Come on,” Hana said disdainfully.
“Fine… I would…move Lyta to here.” He paused, looked down at the bassinet. His face was a storm of dismay, almost babyish in its one-sidedness, its self-importance. Yes. An oceanic outrage played across his face, reflecting the thousand miniscule slights committed against him this past year.
“Oh, we already have,” she said with a wide smile. You just don’t know it, because you insist on acting so sheepishly all the time. I have brought Lyta to the royals, I have orchestrated our ascent, and not even for our own sake.
Feizan seemed to realize this, and his shoulders slumped a little as it dawned on him that he was the one who would have to usher Lytian beliefs in. She could see the puzzlement on his face as he wondered, And what beliefs are those exactly?
“Think. Vinara didn’t even know the myths about Lyta when we first met,” Hana said, infusing her tone with mournfulness. “I had to give her the children’s version of The General’s Daughter.”
“You gave Vinara…”
“She didn’t read it.” And no wonder. When an anonymous author had published it roughly a century ago, it had instantly been labeled as pulpy and sordid. “You know, Feizan, the only reason that book is a joke is because the Asteis said so. The premise isn’t that implausible.”
Feizan looked up from the bassinet, where he had been absently running two fingers through the sleeping child’s already-thick, tufty hair. “I have a name,” he said, grinning. “What about Scorpio?”
XI.
Vinara found herself kneeling in the dark of the Kalador temple. A floor of dark wood, gleaming with the reflections of flickering candles. A prayer had been on her lips, but she couldn’t say which one. She had only ever faked religious devotion before, and the knowledge that she’d been whispering prayers unconsciously unsettled her, before she realized that wasn’t the only thing that should be. Her son.
Something had happened. Something had broken. She’d been in that room and now she was here; she’d lost control. She exited the closet doggedly, walking like she knew where she was going. Her awareness of days and weeks had worn away and she felt like she was climbing out of a pile of rubble. Dirty, but new. She hiked up the hill back to the palace proper, through the gates, up and onto the battlements. A ragged breeze affronted her. She’d only a moment to look out on the gray city, sky pulsing with
a dull light behind an overcast shell. A new feeling burned into her like embers disintigrating a cigarette, and soon it was no longer new, but all-consuming. She felt adult, for all that mattered. And maybe she was, but now all she had was the false exterior she’d created for herself, and no substance within.
The immense double doors opened, and a figure joined her on the battlements. Feizan.
He caught her by the sleeve, and hugged her the way someone would hold a stranger’s child they had just found lost on a roadside. He was pale with a furrowed brow. He was a specter in the room at the birth of her son. He was the day after a ghost leaves to possess someone else: restive, daunted, and ungrounded. She understood that he was lost, that he hadn’t known what to do after the birth of their son, in other words, without her, but she reaffirmed, in her own mind, that she would give him no protection. She’d had to learn the ways of the palace and so would he…. He snapped his fingers violently in front of her face.
“Answer me, Vinara, do you know what you did after he was born? You wrapped the bloody sheets around you and fled like you’d committed a crime. He was lying on the naked bed. Does it run in your family, this…?”
“Oh I don’t know,” she muttered. A Maven-like insanity threatened the edges of her mind. She let it wash over her, a feeling dark as pine needles and gnarled bark oozing with sap. He was trying to embrace her again, hand on her arm. She stepped back elegantly. Her husband seemed on the verge of saying something, but she quelled him: “I think I shall see my son now.”
“He’s in the nursery.”
“Does he have a name?”
“I… called him Scorpio, after…”
Scorpio! What a clever little piece of defiance! Vinara let out a resonant laugh, yes, she was coming back to herself. Scorpio was the regent of Lyta, the one who had taken over the eastern province while Kalador’s youngest daughter, Lyta herself, was underage. Two small years of regency, but when Lyta came of age, the regent refused to leave his post. The Lytian line had descended from him, following a tense but near-bloodless political war that culminated in the girl Lyta retreating to the safety of
her family’s crown city. She was a spritely girl, a wraith haunting the bounds of family legend, romanticized to the point that no one knew where her true loyalties had lain.
“Well,” Vinara said, leaning close to the wall and to her husband. “If you were so desperate to brand him Lytian then by all means, he is yours to raise.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare impose,” Feizan said.
“You imposed by marrying me,” she said. “Now escort me to the nursery so I’ll look civil in case we pass your mother.”
XII.
At night in the gloam of the nursery, she’d recognize her father or Maven in the child Scorpio. They would flicker in his baby eyes, pulse in the tiny beats of those iridescent wings, still unopened, ever closer. But by morning, his skin would look milky-pale; his wide-set eyes would remind her of Hana, and the way he squirmed in the heat would make her wonder if he’d inherited the Lytian predisposition to cold weather. Her son shifted shapes a million times before his eyes settled into a dark color, his wings opened and he learned to walk. But even after that, he’d catch her off guard with a gesture or a look that was so terrifyingly Feizan. A question after she read him the children’s version of the book of Kalador: What about Daddy’s family?
She’d venture out of her tower to the library, clutching Scorpio by the hand. She’d never realized how long a walk it was from one end of the palace to the other, but came to the realization that when she carried him, when they were both tired but she had to make sure she was the one who answered his questions. And though she admired Rejan, and even trusted him to a point, she suspected that the node didn’t care that her son was impressionable. Even though she knew consciously that there were more important things than the play of power between lords, she couldn’t shake the press of reputation from her thoughts. Scorpio must be raised Astei, sans Lytian tampering. If she didn’t steer him the right way, he would become a sick conglomerate of the both of them. One or the other, that was her aim. She didn’t care about the boy, just about purity. This was just service to the kingdom, and wasn’t her son a citizen of the kingdom? This was serving her people, her person. So she took him into the city, so that
when he pleaded could he have a sweet from the street vendor, she could explain to him that that was dirty food.
After he was put to bed, Vinara would return to the library alone. There she learned when he would begin to form memories, and until he turned two and a half, she was counting down the days. Weaning him off her attention. Erasing any trace that she’d once cared for him.
Outwardly to the people, she let them see her newfound composure. Let them see her in the gardens with a crown on. In the skies with Rona. At the temple at the other end of the city, because of course, she’d always been pious. (And she found she now was, unironically, now that she’d woken up mouthing a prayer.) She made herself dutiful, so they might all forget her son had been named for the traitor. Painted herself pure, a cleansing of sorts. The dissent that had risen amid her controversial coronation had mostly been quelled by now, so this rebranding was primarily for herself. Forget the first two years. Forget who I am, what I did, how low I stooped. And please, for the love of Kalador, forget that little idea of secession.
XIII.
Drunkenness had ravaged Ojinn Kaiona’s face. “They heckle the walls of castle Amzhade daily, the Seinzha. Those with no dragons. Screaming at the foot of the eyrie. Our node has to move houses every week, gray paint smeared on the statues’ wings, they come back from the war and turn to the Seinzha who think they’re holy messengers, just for having dead dragons. As if they’re cleansed from some sin. Sin that never was a sin.”
Despite her best efforts to placate her lords, they had all been on edge since their arrival for the festival this morning. Maybe, she hoped, it was how the Kaiona had narrowly avoided a storm on the flight over. Maybe it was Scorpio, two years old, recovering from a head cold and inconsolable. Or maybe, Hana Lyta’s voice in her head said, they’re afraid of eating dinner with a war criminal. She had done her best to appease them these past two years. She’d turned the commoners of her province into an army as devout as Kalador’s. Pray for the enemies to die, not for yourselves to live. Pray for peace, then fight in its name. She’d distracted the lords from her disastrous coronation with the matters in the Icthe. She’d distracted
from the Icthe with the immediate distress of the asvir. She’d distracted from the asvir by marrying a dim-witted ice wastelander. She’d distracted from her husband’s blundering by being perfect enough for the both of them.
What more? For the love of Kalador, hadn’t she done enough?
Vinara slammed her hand down onto the table. “We’ve been dithering on about some cultists for two hours!”
Hal touched her arm as if coaxing her to sit, and when she made it clear she wouldn’t be placated, he gave up. She sighed and quoted, because it had become instinct: “‘Those who rebuff protection on the sole basis of who the protector is, ought not to receive any.’ Kalador’s war treatises, my revised edition.”
“Your grace, what is your meaning?”
“We’ve let Amzhade rot in ungrateful bitterness,” she said, pitching her voice to righteous dismay. “The Fallen—and we all know the Seinzha are mostly Fallen—should be living a life of humility, grateful they’ve been spared, even if their dragons haven’t. Instead they flaunt their half-life status and call bonding unnecessary.”
By the Savior’s wings, how she loved religious mysticism, that ancient restive candor. She relaxed; her mind could lie for a little while in ritual and not have to think. Plus, it annoyed the hell out of Hana Lyta.
“I still don’t quite understand,” Hana said.
“We aren’t obligated to protect the Seinzha, she means,” Hal jumped in, looking around at their number.
Ojinn Kaiona fished into the pocket of his robe for a tiny green book, rifled through it, and handed it to Vinara. She skimmed the page he had indicated, and quoted: “My father mastered the land to make the very weather turn on his enemies. No, he did not force anyone to leave. He simply made them want to. This was his signal that he was the land now, that if you did not follow him, you might as well give up tilling the earth at the turn of the season.”
There was a sad, sobering moment of silence.
“Cast the Fallen out?” Hana said then with dangerous control. Vinara felt a flare of pride. You thought you were rid of me. You thought I’d gone soft. No, I tried making you worship me, but half of worship is fear. “Their dragons died for your teenage mistake of a war. All the Seinzha ever did was give advice to a broken noble family.
Maybe it’s time the line of Kaiona died. After all, Lyta did well enough without the descendants of Kalador…only now have we become sniveling drunkards.”
A commotion broke out like a land mine.
“Blasphemy!”
“Excuse me, I was twenty.”
“Cast her out instead, there’s an idea.”
“Mother, stop yelling!”
Hana’s eyes glittered; she creaked her chair back as if she were going to stand up. The silence thickened, and in that silence, the drunken Ojinn Kaiona began to cry.
“Where did this come from?” Anastasia asked. “Your grace, I thought your rash phase was over. Hana, I thought the same of your treason. Nothing has changed since two years ago, has it?”
“No,” Vinara said, overcome with a strange sudden affection for Hal’s mother. The one who had never seemed like she wanted to have been born a lord. “We’re wiser now. Aren’t we, Hana?”
“Perhaps the real wisdom comes from admitting one was wrong,” Hana said. She no longer tried to conceal her barbed manner.
Vinara stared back at her. “Yes, perhaps it does.”
“Then neither of you seem particularly wise yet,” a voice cut in; Vinara glanced toward its source in amazement. Feizan! Her husband stood up and pushed in his chair. “Mother, you know you’ll get nowhere with your points, not here. And Vinara… I urge you to reconsider.”
Something in his tone implied he knew she wouldn’t listen, and that cut deeper than any sneer of Hana’s ever could.
The evening had devolved from there. In pulpy historical novels, the scene always ended at the protagonist’s dramatic announcement, but she had to slog through the awkward explanations in real life. When Ojinn Kaiona fell asleep at the table, she took the chance to shake him awake and lead him out of the banquet hall, and Hal followed. They ended up in the opposite tower, in the study she’d had painted with a golden dragon just like the one in Mykhos. If he noticed, he didn’t show it.
They talked quietly. Neither knew how to chat properly, but they didn’t want to argue. She thumbed through the Newly Revised One Year Anniversary of Her Grace’s Coronation Edition of the book of Kalador, laughing sourly at how doctored it all sounded. Marking it up with passages she could use to justify anything and everything. If Hal had seamlessly quoted her book, surely so could the law. She looked up from the book, and he was still there. Eyes starry midnights. She realized then what had caused his outsized reaction at the Lytian marriage so long ago.
But she didn’t mention the topic. “Shall we announce the law tomorrow?”
In the morning, the queen and the lord rubbed hangovers from their eyes and furiously scrubbed smeared makeup off their faces. They felt very small, like children who’d woken after a sleepover and now had to be sent home. The queen’s servants dabbed a dot of scarlet at the corner of each of her eyes, sculpted her hair into glossy braids, and dressed her, the white doublet and the leggings, the flowing cloak over them, festooned in red-gold embroidery. Accessories that could be very militant jewelry or very underdressed armor, depending: dark-silver brooches and necklaces, an exquisite silver mesh that whispered across the skin of her neck and gloved her hands. And of course the gold circlet that had belonged to her father.
Guards escorted her to the battlements. She met Feizan there and glimpsed another figure, looking out on the city a few yards away: Hal? But she didn’t have time to muse his enigmatic appearance because her husband turned to her, looked her in the eye, and said quietly enough for the guards not to hear: I guess we’re both barbarians now!
The citizens of Velhaerys had gathered below, straining up to the royal gardens as close as they could get. She touched the corner of Ojinn Kaiona’s little green book, hidden in the pocket of her cloak. She tapped the mind of the node of Velhaerys, three miles across the city. And the people of the kingdom fired alive to her call.