“Sorry,” Simon replied. “Can’t have you tearing off into the countryside before you fulfill your end of our bargain.”
Only days before, she had been the Dread—queen of her own bloody world. Unstoppable and unchallenged.
Now, she was in danger of losing everyone she loved, and she could do nothing to stop it. Nothing but leave the only home she had ever known and trust her brother’s life to a stranger who would not answer her questions.
Her unraveling patience snapped.
She accepted Simon’s outstretched hand, climbed up behind him, and brought Arabeth to his throat.
“Tell me where we’re going, Wolf, and why,” Eliana murmured, “or this ends right now.”
Navi urged her horse slowly toward them. “My friend,” she said to Eliana, “I swear to you, he is not our enemy.”
“Navana is a princess of Astavar,” Simon answered, “and we are taking her home.”
“The Empire’s invasion is coming much sooner than we had thought, and in greater numbers.” Navi looked out from her hood, her gaze grave and earnest. “I must warn my people in time, or Astavar will fall. This is not information we can trust to the underground.”
Eliana stared at the girl. It was impossible: a princess, posing as one of His Lordship’s concubines. An invasion.
Astavar will fall.
And if it did, so would the world’s last free kingdom. The Undying Empire would rule all.
“Will you please lower your damned dagger?” Simon snapped. “We’re wasting time.”
Eliana did, and Simon threw her a murderous glare over his shoulder before adding, “Try not to fall off.”
As they fled through the eastern hills, leaving the city of Orline behind them, they passed the crest of land where the statue of Audric the Lightbringer had once stood. Now there was only bare land, scorched and gray from war.
Still, as they passed the spot, Eliana felt the old pang in her heart for the dead king and thought a prayer she had not allowed herself to say in years:
May the Queen’s light guide us home.
13
Rielle
“From sky to sky
From sea to sea
Steady do I stand
And never will I flee”
—The Earth Rite
As first uttered by Saint Tokazi the Steadfast, patron saint of Mazabat and earthshakers
The mountain was falling down around her.
Rielle hoped it was a dream. Maybe the last few days entirely had been a nightmare, and now she would wake up, and everything would be as it once was.
Open your eyes, Rielle.
Yes. She knew she needed to open her eyes, to move, to run, but the dumbwort coursing through her veins made movement feel impossible.
They’d drugged her.
The damned Archon had decided on it, so that when she awoke at the site of her trial, she wouldn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten there. As though throwing her into these trials the day after her testimony, with no time to train with her father or study with Tal, wasn’t enough of a punishment for her many lies.
Indeed it was not, according to the Archon.
“Perhaps, Lady Dardenne,” he had told her blandly, his watery dark eyes fixed unblinkingly on her face, “if you had chosen to reveal yourself immediately following your mother’s murder all those years ago, things would be different now.”
“And as a five-year-old child,” she had snapped, unable to keep quiet, “such a choice had been solely my responsibility, I suppose?”
The Archon had folded his hands in his lap, seven rings glittering on his soft white hands. “Even children,” he had said, “know it is wrong to kill.”
Open your eyes, Rielle. Her brain was screaming at her, or perhaps someone else was nearby. Maybe one of the council members overseeing the trial. Maybe Tal.
Maybe that strange voice had returned.
Open your eyes!
She forced herself upright, her limbs clumsy and leaden. Her vision rocked violently back and forth. She placed a gloved hand on either side of her throbbing head.
Then she sensed the heavy press of something rising high above her, cold and unrelenting.
Stone.
Be prepared to move as soon as you awaken. Tal’s instructions from earlier that morning drifted through her mind like sticky fragments of a dream. They won’t give you time to recover.
He had refused to look her in the eye, and she had refused to beg him for it.
A rumbling from behind and above snapped her head around. Like a series of gut punches, her senses crashed back into place:
The clean bite of ice.
The air, thin and freezing.