I can’t speak. I can’t breathe. Time winds back to Max, his eyes dark and furious. You don’t see, he said. It’s going to break your heart.
And it does. My heart breaks.
“Why?” I croak, eventually. “You said you wouldn’t do this.”
“I’m proposing a formal duel,” Alexi says softly. “Swords. Whoever draws first blood wins. If I win, you give me Titania.”
Max knew. He knew Alexi would feel betrayed the moment he found out I’d suggested the truce. Max knew what betrayal would make my brother do. I believed nothing in the world would make my brother put any part of the gods’ vision into play, but Max knew better. He knew Alexi better.
“How can you even suggest this?” The words burst from my lips. “How can you risk what Amba and Kirrin saw?”
“First blood,” he says more gently. “Just a scratch. I can’t trust you to fight for me, Esmae, but I love you and I would never let that vision play out. I just want the ship you took from me.”
“I didn’t take her from you. I won her. I was better than you.” Rage floods my body. “I don’t accept your terms. There will be no duel.”
“If you win, our mother will see you,” he says.
I stagger back. The betrayal is so painful that I bite the inside of my cheek and taste blood. “How could you? How could you take the thing you know I want most and use it against me?”
“I’m sorry. I have no other choice. I have to go home. I have to take back my crown.”
Max is right behind me, so close I can feel the rise and fall of his chest, the rush of his heartbeat. “Just say no, Esmae.”
But that’s the problem, isn’t it?
“I can’t,” I say softly. “I need to see her. I have to, or I’ll never be free.”
“You can choose to be free of her. You can choose to put her behind you. Facing her isn’t the only way to leave the memory of the baby in the boat behind.”
“If you’re worried about Titania, you needn’t be. I won’t lose her. I’ll win this duel.”
“It’s not Titania I’m worried about!”
I look up at him. “I will win, Max. You said you believe in me. Believe in me now.”
“Then you accept?” Alexi asks.
“I accept,” I say.
Then I turn and walk away, past the water and back into the yellow woods, faster and faster so that they never see the tears on my cheeks.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
A duel. A broken arrow. Blood on the grass.
The duel is to be held in Gray Vale, neutral territory on Winter—a valley with harsh cliffs and grassy, snowy hills. It will take place just after dawn. We will each choose a sword from an identical set presented to us. No one else will be permitted to enter the marked area until the duel is completed, and that will only be when one of us draws the other’s blood.
This is what Max tells me when he returns to the ship. Then he hands me a honey cake from Bear. I can’t hold back my tears a moment longer.
The duel will be in four days, ample time for word to get around. By the day before, it’s as though half the star system is on its way to Gray Vale to watch someone win the world’s greatest warship. Again. We’ve come full circle; an endless, bitter cycle.
“Your mother will never be the person you want her to be,” Rickard tells me. “Kyra will always put your brothers first. She wants Alexi to win Titania. Offering to see you was the only lure she could use on you, so she used it without hesitation. She doesn’t think she’ll have to keep her promise. She’s sure Alexi will win.”
“That’s an assumption everyone seems to have made,” I say. “They will find themselves mistaken.”
Rickard doesn’t respond. Maybe he doesn’t believe I can win either. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to choose between Alexi and me. “Even if you win,” he says instead, “what good will it do to see her?”
“I still wonder if she cares. I still wonder if she hesitated before she threw me away. And if she wept. Truthfully, sometimes I don’t even wonder. I convince myself that she put me in that boat and cried bitterly until she worked up the nerve to send it out into space.” I swallow. “It’s a myth, I know, the dream of her love. It’s a lie I tell myself. But I won’t stop telling it until I see the truth in her face. That’s why I have to see her. I have to put the myth to rest for good.”
“Then I wish you luck,” he says softly.
I hesitate, then ask, “If there’s war, who do you hope will win? Alexi or Elvar? You’ve never told me.”
“I don’t know,” says Rickard. “I love them both. And I will protect Kali. That’s all I know.”
Sometimes I wonder if that’s all I know, too.
We fly Titania out to Gray Vale the day before the duel, taking rooms at an inn built into the snowy hillside. The town is cold, rustic, and quiet. Twinkly. Utterly beautiful in the snow and the ice.
I can’t stand the way everyone I pass stops to stare, so I leave the inn and return to Titania, tucking myself in next to her glass wall. I look out over the snow and grass, shivering until she increases the interior temperature to warm me.
I’m not the only one who can’t escape the shadow of the duel:
Alexi sits at dinner in Arcadia. Bear is silent, furious with him despite the fact that he doesn’t want our brother to share the crown with Elvar either. Our mother says something to Alexi, her eyes anxious and her mouth flattened by tension, but he doesn’t hear a word. He’s far away, in a universe where he teaches his sister to fish by a river, and they stay that way, suspended in time, in a moment where they can never grow old and will never be broken apart.
Guinne shuts herself in the conservatory and prays I don’t lose Titania to Alexi. She doesn’t know about the vision, but if she did, she would pray for me to live and to return to them.
Elvar sleeps, sedated after he worked himself into a panic. Rickard sits at his side, keeping watch over him, but his eyes drift to the window. He looks at Winter and winds back the clock, wishing he could take back the curse he placed on me.
Alone in her room at the inn, Sybilla paces like a tiger. Her face crumples, and she picks up her cup of tea and smashes it against a wall.
Rama is unnaturally quiet. He’s outside, perched on a rock that looks out over the valley, ice chips sparkling in his hair. He stares into the darkness for a while, thinking about a day when he almost fell into the sky and someone grabbed hold of his hand and refused to let go. He gets up and dusts himself off before nodding to himself like he’s ready to face whatever is coming.
Max cradles a paper hound in his hands—my paper hound, from the altar on Kali. He stares at it for a long time until he can’t bear it anymore and crushes it into his pocket before walking away.
How do I know all this?
A god tells me.
I see Kirrin’s reflection in the glass, but I don’t turn my head, staring at him in silence.
“You could ask permission before just turning up, you know,” Titania says tartly. “I’m not a hotel.”
Kirrin grins, and Titania huffs like she’s not really cross at all.
He approaches me. “You are loved, you know. Your friends and family are all thinking of you right now.”
And that’s when he tells me about them, about where they are and how they feel about what my brother and I are about to do.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I ask.
“Because I want you to know that you have made a mark on this world and that mark will not fade, even after you’re gone.”
“And you came here just to share that with me?”
“No,” says Kirrin, “I came here to ask you for that favor you owe me.”
I stand and turn to face him. The smile has left his boy’s face, the twinkle vanished from his dark eyes. Now they’re just as full of calamity as Amba’s have been lately.
I reach into my hair and let my hand close over the blueflower jewel. I pull it away and hold it out. It sits on my palm, d
eep and beautiful, as much a part of me as my foot or hand, and parting with it hurts as much as if I’d cut off one of those.
Kirrin stares at me, shocked.
“I knew when I saw you appear in the glass. I knew this would be the favor you’d ask of me. I want your blueflower, Esmae, you’d say. After all, Alexi can’t kill me if I have it, can he?”
“And you’re actually giving it to me? You’re not going to refuse or try to persuade me to ask for something else?”
“I made you a promise.”
The god looks deeply ashamed as he takes the jewel from my palm. My hand feels cold and empty when it’s gone. “It’s more generosity than I deserve.”
“Maybe. May I ask why? Why do you want me to die?”
“I don’t want it,” he says emphatically. “Not in the least. But you must. For Alexi’s sake.” Kirrin is silent for a moment. “If you live, you see, you will destroy him. That future I tempted Elvar with? It will come to pass. Ash and fire and destruction and, at the end of it all, Alexi dead or broken. If you live, you will shatter your brother.”
“I would never do that to him!”
“You will, Esmae. I don’t know why, but you will. That’s why, for his sake, you must die first. And I am truly sorry that it has to be this way.”
“I’m not going to die tomorrow. I swore it.”
The jewel has vanished. Kirrin looks at me for several moments, then says, “For your generosity, let me give you a gift. Close your eyes.”
I obey. He presses the palm of his hand to my forehead like he’s about to bless me, and my mind floods with color.
I see a galaxy of possibilities, a wheel of alternate futures, thousands of pieces of maybes: starships and books, fossils and gods and dreams, weddings and babies, and sometimes neither; Rama in his late thirties and Max at sixty and Sybilla refusing point-blank to die at the age of a hundred and sixteen; stories in firelit rooms and Rickard’s forgiveness and my brothers beside me; birds with buttons for eyes and terrible gooseberry wine and a kiss on the base of my throat; children running wild up tower staircases and swords that aren’t used very much.
There must be a million terrible possibilities too, somewhere out there, but Kirrin only shows me the good. By the time he’s finished, my eyes have filled with tears.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” he says.
“They’re happy tears,” I tell him.
He smiles. “I’m glad.”
I shake my head. “You don’t understand. You think you showed me what could have been, but you didn’t. You showed me what will be. I will have one of those futures. Maybe many of them. You showed me what to look forward to, Kirrin. Thank you. You showed me what will be waiting for me when all the ugliness is finally over.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Esmae, wake up,” says Max.
I open my eyes. I’m confused at first, disoriented, because I seem to be reclined in one of Titania’s seats with a blanket draped over me. Why am I here?
And then I remember. I must have fallen asleep at some point after Kirrin vanished.
It’s morning now, the sun gleaming hard and gold into the ship and across the icy valley, and I have to go duel my brother.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Max says, and the shadows under his eyes tell me he hasn’t slept. “It didn’t even occur to me that you’d be here in the dock with Titania until a minute ago. I looked in the woods, in the library, all over. You’re late. You know that, don’t you?”
I bolt up out of the seat and the blanket tumbles to the floor. “What?”
“The duel was supposed to start five minutes ago.”
Horrified, I rush to find proper clothes. “Titania, how could you not wake me? Didn’t I tell you what time the duel was?”
“Yes, but you didn’t specifically ask me to wake you,” she says. Her tone is prim and—
Guilty?
I stop, cocking my head to one side. “Why didn’t you wake me, Titania?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Titania.”
“Rama asked me not to wake you,” she says. “He told me Amba came to him with a way to stop the duel, but she needed his help to make sure you didn’t get there on time. He asked me to keep you here for a little while.”
I grab a coat, furious. “How could they scheme behind my back? Why couldn’t they just speak to me?”
“I don’t know.”
I turn on Max. “Did you know about this?”
“Of course not. If I’d hatched some sort of plot to stop the duel, you’d have known about it immediately.” He looks troubled. “We need to hurry.”
“I can’t believe them,” I growl, jamming my feet into my boots and practically tumbling out of the hatch. “They probably offered Alexi something to call off the duel. Behind my back! And it would have to be something enormous. I can’t think of a single thing that Alexi wants more than to go back home and take back his crown.”
“No one could have convinced him to call off the duel,” says Max grimly. “There’s nothing Amba or Rama could have said to persuade him.”
I glance at him. “Then you think Alexi will still be waiting for me? And the worst that will happen is that I’ll look like an idiot who couldn’t turn up on time to her own duel?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. Why would Amba feel the need to be so secretive about this—”
We clamber down the mountain path, over ice and rocks, finding the quickest way to the Basin—the amphitheater—deep in the valley. The sun is in my eyes, sharp and real and alien, dancing off the white of the snow.
The Basin is built exactly as its name suggests, a grassy stage at its heart with stone steps rising around it in a circle. The stage is much too small for a tournament or competition, but it’s perfect for a duel. An audience would normally sit on the steps to watch, but today’s audience is on its feet, packed onto the steps, transfixed by the duel.
The duel?
I freeze at the top of the steps and blink the sun out of my eyes. “Have I lost my mind?”
Max doesn’t answer. His gaze is fixed on the stage. Disbelief and fury war across his features.
Because there I am. Unmistakably me, copper in my hair and a sword in my hands, locked in a duel with my twin brother. I am not at my best today and Alexi seems to be holding back, but I am there nonetheless. One step back, another forward, my teeth gritted, my brow beaded with sweat, my sword hand quivering a little. The swords flash in the sun, and I notice that there’s no snow on the ground beneath the duelers’ feet, just green, green grass.
“I’m going to kill Rama for helping Amba pull off this nonsense,” I mutter. “Where is he? He must be here somewhere.”
I’ll have to go down there now and humiliate myself by announcing that there’s been a mistake, a goddess has been up to all sorts of tricks, and can we just start the duel all over again? And then everyone will fuss and complain because Alexi will have exhausted himself fighting already while I’m completely rested, so it won’t be fair. And then what? We delay the duel for a few hours? What did Amba hope to achieve with this nonsense?
There are gasps from the crowd as Alexi almost nicks the other me on the cheek. I wince like it was my own cheek. It’s bizarre and unnatural to see myself from the outside.
I start pushing my way down to the stage. Cold bites into my exposed skin, and my breath blows white on the air. Between the glare of the sun and the cold and the stuffy closeness of the crowd, it’s difficult to even shove my way past the top step. I persevere. No one notices me, until a hand grabs my elbow.
“What the hell are you doing up here when you’re also down there?” demands Sybilla. “Why is Max so angry?”
“Don’t ask,” I say.
I elbow my way down farther, one eye always fixed on the stage. The other version of me has just fallen, but scrambles up again. Behind me, I hear Max saying something to Sybilla, and she makes a choked sound.
The clash of metal, the flash of the sun. Alexi isn’t far from beating the other me. She’s nowhere near as good as I am with a sword. She jumps back, grips the sword with both hands, cuts sideways. Alexi dodges the blow and catches her sword with his. The blades flash, the sun glitters off metal on Alexi’s back. My clone looks tired.
What is she? An illusion? A robot? Some other kind of artificial construct?
No. An illusion can’t hold a real sword and machines like this don’t exist. There’s something much too human about my other self’s movements, about her shaky hand, about the tension and exhaustion in her face.
It’s someone else. Amba’s gone back to the gods’ old tricks. She’s cloaked someone to look just like me.
What’s the point? Why would she cloak a human for the first time in a hundred years just for this? Does she really think I’ll stand back and give Titania up just because a false version of me is about to lose this duel? Doesn’t she realize I’ll put a stop to this whole fiasco and insist on doing it properly?
I push my way closer. “Where’s Rama?” I ask, glancing back at Max and Sybilla.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve seen him today.”
“Not at all? He didn’t come to the Basin with you?”
“No. I knocked on his door at the inn, but there was no answer. I didn’t think much of it because I couldn’t find you or Max either. He wasn’t with you?”
“No,” says Max.
“Where is he then?”
The prickle on the back of my neck is faint at first, but it soon grows, solidifying into fear. I spin my head around again and look at the other me, at the clothes that don’t quite fit her properly and the tired sword hand and the wide eyes, and I see the traces I missed before.
And that’s when I understand. There was a vision, and the vision was inevitable. Amba had to keep the secret from everyone except the person she needed to take my place. And it was all my idea. She said so herself. She stood in my room, and watched Lord Selwyn stab a duplicate of me, and she saw a way to help me. A silent scream builds in my throat and now I’m frantic, desperate, pushing the crowd, stumbling forward, determined to make this stop before it’s too late.