This was awkward. Very awkward.
Instead, Henna grabbed Celadon’s arm and threw him toward the door.
“You! Out!” she snapped. Freed from Naples’ hold on him, Celadon was gone in seconds.
Naples began to prepare his explanation, but he hadn’t even drawn breath to speak when Henna said, “I will refrain from blistering your hide for exactly one reason: your mother needs you.”
So, it seemed Henna had learned of his plans with the Terra. Well, now was as good a time as any to have it out with her. “My mother is an independent and strong woman, who is perfectly capable of functioning without her grown son. She already knows I’m leaving the Order.” Shaking off embarrassment in exchange for defensive anger, he lifted his head and met Henna’s gaze without shame. “Terra Sarcelle has officially offered to take me on as her apprentice. I’m moving into the palace next week.”
“Terre Verte is dead.”
The words—so bluntly and flatly said, so unexpected in this conversation, so utterly impossible—at first failed to process. When they did, after a very long silence, all Naples could say was, “That’s absurd.”
Henna cringed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you like that. I was—Please, Naples, just come downstairs. I don’t want to leave Maddy alone.”
She turned away. What Naples had at first taken for smoldering anger, he now realized was nothing but a veneer of fragile self-control. Henna’s dark skin made her pallor less obvious, but now that he was looking for it, he saw the tight pinch of her mouth and the fine tremble in her body.
“Henna, are you . . .” Okay? Of course not. “I’ll be right down.”
She left. Naples tried to take a few moments to ground his power and stop his head from spinning, but he couldn’t, because it wasn’t just power making his body shiver and his thoughts race. It was shock. This had to be a mistake. With all the power in the royal family, there was no way Terre Verte could be dead.
Downstairs, he found his mother, Henna, Dove, Helio, and several other members of the Order clustered together in one of the parlors. Henna was going back and forth between the kitchen and the sitting room, making and delivering tea and cocoa with a vacant expression in her eyes. Naples hovered in the doorway, overwhelmed by the pain in that room.
“How did it happen?” one of the novices—Lassia, Naples thought her name was—asked.
Everyone looked at Henna for answers.
“My fault,” she said. She didn’t seem to know she was speaking out loud. “It was my fault. I knew . . . I saw it. That vision . . . how could I have been so wrong?”
Maddy reached an exhaustion-trembling hand toward Henna as she passed, but the seer jerked away.
“The water’s boiling,” she said before ducking into the kitchen.
Naples braced himself, then stepped into the room.
“Nana!” Clay asked, from their mother’s lap. The toddler’s eyes were as red and swollen as everyone else’s, though his tears probably had more to do with the disturbance in his environment. He couldn’t understand true grief yet.
“Oh, Naples,” his mother cried, lifting her hand toward him while the other stayed wrapped around the sleepy, sniffling Clay. He went to her; she folded her arm around his waist to hold him close, and he put an arm across her shoulders. Her body was cold from the overuse of her magic, and she was shivering from both that and power exhaustion.
“What happened?” he asked.
“The Osei,” Lassia whispered, in a voice breathy with shock.
“The Silmari,” Dove spat. “Without them, the Terre would have—”
“I thought she might kill them all,” Lassia interrupted. “I’ve never seen anyone pull that much power, so fast, without even ritual.”
The whispering continued and Naples stood dumbly, unsure what to do. The knowledge that he had been upstairs, playing with that damned preacher, while . . .
The thought made him bolt to the door, needing fresh air. He heard his mother shout his name, but he couldn’t stay there any longer. He needed to breathe.
As soon as he stepped outside, the slap of lingering power stole the air from his lungs.
His foxfire orbs in the fountain had absorbed some of the spilled magic; they were bloated and heavy, now burgundy in color and so hot the water around them simmered and steamed. The market cobbles were stained with foxfire, magic, and blood.
Some of that blood cried out with a Terre’s magic. Some of it was thick and dark, spilled from an Osei in natural form.
And some of it, Naples realized with equal parts awe and horror, was violet-black, and still hissing like acid on the stone.
What in the three realms did she do?
He knelt by one of those last stains. It wasn’t blood, he realized, not really. It was made of almost pure power; someone without magic might see nothing at all.
He had to check on the Terra.
“I’m sorry, she isn’t receiving,” a guard at the palace doors told him.
“I work for her.”
“The staff has been sent home.”
To the Abyss with courtesy. The Terra would see him.
The palace guards were normally chosen from men and women with some resistance to enchantments, but they weren’t true sorcerers, and there was so much raw power in the air—and blood, and agony—that it barely took a thought to turn, “Let me in,” into a command no one could have disobeyed.
No one was in the front hall, not even the ever-present Sepia. There was only the miasma of pain, which had surely driven even the least magically sensitive servants out of the building. Naples needed to continually force it out of his awareness in order to search the building.
The Terra wasn’t in her parlor or her library, and knocking boldly on the door to her private quarters received no response.
He had expected that. Where else would she be, after all, but in the temple?
Naples found the temple’s hidden doorway, closed his eyes, cleared his mind, and focused his power to open it. The archway appeared, but the sight that met him as he stepped through made him stagger back against the wall.
Terre Verte’s body, encased in a cocoon of power, lay on the table in the center of the room. The ever-present stack of books was gone; it had been swept clean of all accoutrements but a new, white silk covering, and was now surrounded by the debris of Terre Jaune’s sorcery equipment: runes cast in gold and silver, herbs, crystals, and other supplies Naples didn’t recognize. The king himself sat on the floor, surrounded by dozens of open, discarded texts.
“Terre?” Naples asked.
Terre Jaune didn’t lift his eyes from his book, or so much as twitch to show he had noticed Naples’ intrusion. He was weeping as he read.
Naples walked past Terre Jaune and put a hand on the doorway of the Terra’s private sanctuary.
Naples? Her voice drifted to him on a trembling breath of power.
May I come in?
The barrier on the doorway disappeared, and Naples stepped into the thick haze of smoke and magic that filled the Terra’s temple.
The queen was on a velvet love seat. She normally posed there dramatically, perhaps what she would consider seductively. Now she hunched, exhausted, and bloodied.
“You’re hurt,” he gasped, falling to his knees beside her. He reached out to examine what looked like claw marks on her arms and breasts, as if something had tried to dig to her heart. The blood trailed through a fine coating of black ash. “Should I call a healer?”
He wasn’t strong enough to close such deep wounds, but he did what he could with the techniques she had taught him without waiting for permission or response.
“I’ll be fine.”
She didn’t protest as he next used a piece of scrap fabric to wipe ash, tears and blood from her face. At long last, she said only, “He fought me.”
“The Osei?”
She shook her head. “Antioch.”
He recognized the name from her journal, which he had ass
umed belonged to a midwife or healer of some kind. “Who’s—” Not who. What. He remembered the blood that wasn’t really blood in the market, and didn’t dare ask the next question aloud.
The Terra met his gaze for long moments.
I will battle the Abyss itself to keep this frail child.
He, stupidly, had thought the words hyperbole.
“Jaune is with our son,” she said. “He can heal him.”
“I’ve seen . . . Verte,” Naples said. He didn’t say the body, though that was obviously what it had been. “Do you really believe the Terre can bring him back?”
“Of course he can. Now run along, Naples. I need to rest.”
Her faith made Naples’ heart lighten. There was no rosy, romantic haze between the Terra and Terre. If anything, they constantly underestimated each other. If the Terra said her husband could do something, then he could.
When he passed by Terre Jaune again, the king had both hands pressed to the bubble of power surrounding his son. His eyes were shut, and the air around him writhed with glowing symbols and ripples of power Naples couldn’t clearly read.
Maybe it would take some time to close Verte’s wounds, but Terre Jaune was the greatest healer ever born to Kavet. He knew what he was doing. He would bring back his son, even if he had to storm the Numen and the Abyss both to do so, as he, perhaps, had already done once before.
Chapter 20
Dahlia
There was something intrinsically satisfying about the scent and texture of fine paper and the feel of a pen sliding across it, leaving behind a trail of color nearly as magical in its appearance as the foxfire orbs that kept the stationer’s shop lit. Dahlia had forgotten, in her frustration with teaching, how much she enjoyed the physical act of writing. Even more gratifying was the knowledge that this work for the stationer was something she had earned. Celadon hadn’t “put in a good word” and the Terre hadn’t twisted someone’s arm to get her this position.
The spiritual and emotional exultation were, perhaps, caused as much by exhaustion leaving her near giddy as they were by the task itself. Her entire body ached. It took a monumental effort to lift her arm, and she struggled to stay on task and not stare into space. Thankfully, the stationer was understanding. When Dahlia apologized for yawning as he explained her first task, he gave an indulgent smile and admitted, “I’m impressed you showed up at all.”
“I said I would.”
She spoke the words before considering that they might sound arrogant.
“I know you did,” he replied, “but late-night celebrations like the festival tend to ruin the best of intentions. Sit yourself down. Let’s see what you can do.”
Given her fatigue, copying meaningless lines about foxes and ducks using different inks, papers and pens, first in script and then in box-lettering, was soothing and hypnotic.
She looked up from her sampler as a woman entered the room in a frantic rush.
“I need to send a letter,” she announced. Dear Numen, was that blood on the hem of her skirt?
“Yes, of course,” Dahlia said, taking the initiative. “What do you—”
“How could this . . .” The woman sobbed. “I can’t even . . . The Osei, they . . .”
The stationer stepped forward to try to calm her.
A man entered moments later. Dahlia hadn’t been sure about the stains on the woman’s dress, but this man’s arms were most definitely red with recently splashed blood. His hands were clean, as if he had washed them hastily, but he had the tacky fluid in streaks on his face as if he had carelessly brushed away tears with bloody hands.
“What happened?” Dahlia burst out.
“You don’t know,” the new man said, hollowly. “Of course you don’t know,” he added, as if to himself. “I’m a healer. I did what I could. Please believe me, I did what I could.” He looked at his own hands, as if he could still see the blood Dahlia knew must have been there.
“I’m sure you did,” she said, inanely, casting a desperate look to the stationer. He gave her a wave and a nod past the woman he was still trying to calm, which she interpreted as permission to act. “Sit down,” she urged the man. “Take a deep breath. What can I do for you?”
The man hadn’t responded before the door opened again, this time admitting a familiar member of the Silmari aristocracy. “Jade,” she said, greeting him with relief, “what is going on?”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “I wasn’t sure if this was the shop where you were working,” he said. Dahlia had told him about her job the night before when his flirting extended to asking her to join him for lunch the next day. He deserved to know she wasn’t who she seemed to be; she was a destitute shop-girl, not a fancy Kavet noble. “I didn’t want you to find out through strangers.”
“Find out what?” she nearly shrieked.
“Terre Verte is dead,” the healer cried. “The Osei killed him. I think . . .”
The rest of the man’s hysterical words bubbled away in a gray haze. Dahlia lost time, a bit, until she found herself sitting on a bench at the side of the room, sipping from a glass of water she couldn’t remember accepting.
“He can’t be dead,” she said. “I just . . .” She had eaten dinner at the opposite end of a table from him the night before. She had danced with him.
Besides, he was the prince. How could a prince die?
“The Osei,” she said, remembering what the woman earlier had said.
Another woman walked in then, looked around, saw Dahlia sitting at the desk and said, “I need to tell my sister what happened. Can you take dictation?”
“I . . . yes,” Dahlia answered, mechanically reaching for the paper and inks used for standard messages. The stationer was already busy composing something for the first woman, and their shop was rapidly filling with customers.
“Dahlia, you don’t have to do this,” Jade said.
She shook her head. “It’s my job.”
She could write the words, because they were meaningless. Focusing on the flow of the ink and the formation of the letters meant she didn’t need to think beyond that. It didn’t matter what terrible things the words said; they were only ink, and they went away when she sealed them with wax.
Jade sat beside her for a while, and then as more people crowded into the little shop, each person needing to send a message to some loved one, he started to help. He took dictation, looking away whenever a customer’s eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.
A Tamari noble entered the room. Dahlia thought they had been introduced the night before, but she couldn’t recall his name. Last night, his eyes hadn’t been wide with shock.
“Do you have birds?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Birds. Messenger birds,” he clarified.
Dahlia looked at the stationer, who took in the man’s garb and replied, “None that fly as far as Tamar.”
The man slumped against the wall.
“The Silver Nightingale will leave tomorrow for Silmat, via Tamar,” Jade volunteered. “She can carry a letter for you.”
It was the first time Jade had said or done much more than nod since he first arrived, and his clear Silmari accent turned heads and made the crowd around them hush, staring at him. People who had previously been too focused on their own grief to notice anyone else now took in the rich fabrics of his clothes and the jewels adorning his fingers and ears and realized he was no simple scribe.
How many times had Dahlia written the words—the Osei say this is vengeance; they claim the Silmari killed one of their princes—without considering what they meant?
“The Nightingale isn’t going anywhere,” the Tamari noble replied. “Except the bottom of the Kavet harbor, along with every other ship there.”
Jade shot to his feet, at which point the sailor lifted his hands in a gesture of harmlessness. “Not by my hand. The Osei took them out. Nothing will be sailing out of Kavet for quite a while. And once they do, there’s not many captains mad enough to sail thro
ugh waters owned by the First Royal and Tenth Noble houses.”
“But . . .” Jade looked around as if waiting for someone in the crowd to say “just kidding.” “The Silmari delegation . . . half of Tamar’s royal house is here!” he protested.
“They can swim home,” someone in the crowd grumbled.
Jade spun on the speaker. “There are men here with families back home! Some of them left behind wives, just to avoid offending the Osei—”
“If you were so keen to avoid offending the Osei, maybe you should have considered not killing one of them!”
“You two, out!” The stationer stepped into the middle of the escalating argument. “If you aren’t here to buy something or write a letter, you can leave.”
The Tamari took the cue and left, uninterested in writing a letter if no bird could carry it. Several other people looked at Jade, who hesitated, glancing toward Dahlia.
“You’re a friend of hers?” the stationer asked him.
“We only met recently,” Jade admitted, “but I can escort her home.”
“I don’t need an escort,” Dahlia protested instinctively. “And it isn’t time for me to leave.”
“Dahlia, please, go home,” the stationer urged. “I can manage here.”
“I said I would work the day,” she protested, her hands moving to straighten the papers that had been tossed out of order in the chaos, and cap jars of ink. “I should—”
“You should go home,” he said, firmly.
Jade touched her arm. “Come on, Dahlia.”
“I should—”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe afternoon,” the stationer said firmly. “I think we’ll open late.” He patted her on the shoulder and added in a fatherly tone, “Get some rest, and take care of yourself.”
At last, she let Jade escort her outside.
“I can walk you home . . . if you would like,” the Silmari said, hesitating when she tensed and pulled away.
Now that she didn’t have a task to complete, a focus to keep her thoughts away from the horrible truth, she couldn’t avoid facing reality: Terre Verte was dead. He had been kind to her, briefly. She hadn’t known him long. And now he was gone.