Burn of the Everflame — Chapter 60

60

DIEM

y the time Alixe and I arrived at the Lumnos pier, my insides had turnedB to stone, dipped in molten tar, and coated in broken glass. Last time I saw the Centenaries, Symond nearly killed me. I had no magic to shield myself if he had decided to come finish me off.

At least that would be preferable to the reason they’d given.

“I’ve kept them on their ship,” she explained as we rode up on horseback. I squinted through the darkness, thinking they must have left until I heard the flap of sails in the evening wind. A face appeared in the distance, onyx eyes on cream-pale skin.

“A while ago, you told me you released the Forging magic’s hold so Descended can use their magic in every realm,” Alixe said. “Is that still the case?”

I nodded. “They have to be able to protect themselves until we stop Vance and his men.”

“Of course, Your Majesty. However . . .” She looked toward the water, frowning, then back to me. “Perhaps you might consider making an exception tonight, given what you told me earlier.”

Alixe was the only person I’d entrusted with the news of Ophiucae’s survival. I knew it wasn’t a truth I could afford to conceal much longer, but this was not the time and place to start its spread. If the Centenaries came any closer, our minds—and our secrets—would be theirs to take.

I reached inward, toward the Forging magic, and flinched at a flash of searing heat. Whatever was blocking me from it had grown in intensity, now too bright and hot for me to even grasp, let alone control.

“I can’t,” I said. “There’s something wrong with the Forging magic.”

Alixe thumbed the blades at her hips. “Maybe we should turn them away. We have enough to handle here with our own people.”

Her words, and their implication—that the Umbrosians weren’t our people, too, an opinion I had done little to counteract—prodded at my

conscience.

“Wait here,” I said.

As I walked to the pier, the water rippled from the downdraft of Sorae circling overhead. Her ability to sense a person’s intentions would have been terribly useful at the moment, but it had been another casualty of my choice to set the gryverns free. In its absence, she’d turned skeptical of every new arrival, and none more so than these.

A puff of sapphire flame unfurled from her jaws, briefly illuminating the anchored ship. It was painted black from bow to stern, as were its sails, and its size was far smaller than I’d expected. The sailboat couldn’t be holding more than ten at most, and all but one—a man cradling a bundle to his chest —wore the signature Centenary scarlet.

“Where’s the rest of the realm?” I shouted. “Or did you decide everyone else in Umbros wasn’t worth saving?”

“They’ll arrive soon enough,” Symond answered from the darkness.

“Kindred help us when they do.”

“We’ve been at sea for days,” a female voice called out. “We need food and rest. We’ll cause no trouble, you have our word. Isn’t that right, Symond?”

Silence followed, then the muffled sound of arguing. Finally, Symond grunted a reluctant “agreed.”

I hesitated, and the woman spoke again. “There’s a child aboard, and her father—from Meros. If you won’t take us, I beg you, take them.”

Sorae snarled another plume of fire to light the night, and I spotted Drusila, the Centenary who had spoken up in my defense in Umbros. It was her child, I realized, and the Meros mate she’d told me about when we first met.

I motioned for them to dock, acutely aware of the murmured complaints from the Lumnos guards behind me. The Umbros Descended had a long and storied history as the least trusted people in Emarion. Even the Guardians were a more preferable bedmate—at least when they hurled a bomb your way, you could run. The Centenaries could make you smile while you sliced your sword through your own belly.

“Thank you,” Drusila breathed when I caught their line and tied them off. “You have no idea what we’ve been through, Your Majesty. After the first attack, we thought we understood what we were facing, but this . . .”

She lowered the gangway and began to cross it. “It’s so much worse than we—”

I held up a hand to stop her. “Your child can stay here. So can your mate.”

The blood drained from her face, sunburnt and smudged with dirt. Her hair was tangled with wind-blown knots, her scarlet armor soiled and reeking of filth. She gestured urgently for the man holding the baby to come forward.

He shook his head. “We’re not leaving you.”

“It’s the only place she’ll be safe,” she said softly.

The man looked at me without moving. “Diem—that’s your name?”

“Call her Your Majesty,” Drusila insisted.

He held my gaze. “I’m not speaking to you as a subject to a Queen. I’m speaking to you as one mate to another.” His voice lowered. “You’re a stranded mate, isn’t that right? That’s what they saw in your head?”

“That’s none of your business,” I snapped.

“I know,” he said quickly. “I’ve had all my own secrets taken by them, too. They can’t help themselves. They think they’re doing you a favor by setting them free. Drusila told me I’d get used to it.” He gave a hesitant smile. “Never did. Keeping secrets used to make me feel like I had some control over the world, you know? A secret was something no one could take from me until I was ready to let it go. Had to learn the hard way the world can take everything from you, so you might as well give up the secrets and hold on to the people instead.”

He walked to Drusila’s side and swept his fingers over the mating mark on her wrist before threading his fingers with hers. “I hear you know how it feels to be kept apart from your mate. You know what it does to a person.”

I crossed my arms, saying nothing.

“If what I’ve heard is true,” he went on, “I think you also know what it does to a daughter to be separated from her mother.” He passed the swaddled infant to Drusila and came to the edge of the gangway. “I know the Centenaries’ reputation. I also know they’ve earned it. But they don’t deserve to die. If you turn them away, they don’t stand a chance.”

“Take your child and come to land,” I ordered.

“Not without my mate.”

“I’m your Queen,” I reminded him.

“Please, Diem—Your Majesty—”

“If you want my help, then take your child and come to land.”

Drusila rushed forward and pushed the baby against his chest. “Take her. Keep her safe. Nothing matters more than that.” Tears brimmed in her eyes. “Remember, my love. No tide so deep . . .”

“’Sila,” he whispered.

“Finish it,” she said.

His lip trembled. “No wind so swift.”

“No sea so deadly.” She paused, awaiting his answer, but he hung his head in silence. She kissed the babe atop its head, then placed a hand against his forearm. Beneath his tattered sleeve, a golden glow burned bright. “No sea so deadly,” she repeated, “that it will keep my heart from yours. I’ll find my way to you both. In this life, or the next.”

She gently urged him forward, and he stepped onto the dock. “You’re Queen of Umbros, too, aren’t you?” he said to me. “Isn’t it your duty to protect them?”

“It’s my duty to protect all of my people.” I glanced at Symond. “From every threat.”

Despite the darkness, Symond’s oil-black eyes seemed to shine with hateful light. Whatever reasons he had to despise me, they’d only deepened with time.

“Follow her,” I told the Meros man, pointing at Alixe. “She’ll see that you and your daughter get what you need.”

“What my daughter needs is her mother.”

“Go,” I said again.

His pained expression hardened into a glare that rivaled Symond’s. He shifted the blanket aside to give Drusila one last look at her daughter’s face.

Drusila’s shoulders shook, her hand covering her mouth to stifle her sob.

She pressed her mating mark to her heart, and he did the same, flashing me one final, bitter look before slowly, excruciatingly, leaving them behind to walk to shore.

Drusila swiped away her tears. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I know you’ll keep them safe.” She motioned to the rope. “If you’ll untie our line, we’ll be on our way. We won’t bother you again.”

My eyebrows rose. “I didn’t tell you to leave.”

Hope flared like a fresh-lit match across her face. She looked to her mate, then back to me. “We can stay?”

“You were willing to give up everything you love to save your child from those who wish to harm her,” I said. “I trust that means you understand what I’m willing to do if I believe, even for a second, that you will harm the people here.”

Despite my stiff-lipped threat, the hypocrisy of my words ate away at me. I’d stood in front of Ophiucae, a man who very much intended to do harm to the people here, and I’d been unable to do the one thing I knew would protect them.

Drusila nodded vigorously. “Yes, of course, Your Majesty. We

understand. We—”

“You,” I said. “Not them.”

She looked back at the other Centenaries, who had gathered along the ship’s edge to watch. Their expressions said little, but the way they traded stares in matching rhythm told me there was a great deal being said in voices I could no longer hear.

“We could make her take us,” Symond said aloud. He leaned forward, fingers curling around the wooden railing, and gave a sinister smirk. “We could do anything we want. She has no magic to stop us.”

“Breaching my mind is an unwise choice when you need my help,” I warned.

“I didn’t have to. That secret was obvious—you don’t have an aura.”

His cruel smile grew. “And if you had heard what I just said about you to the rest of them, you would have come aboard and stuck that pretty sword

through my neck.”

“Symond,” Drusila hissed.

He chuckled, looking me over like a savory meal he wanted to devour, but not like a gourmet dish—like a lion appraising a wounded gazelle. “We could take this whole realm for ourselves. Make the Queen of Emarion ours to control. Just like he did to them.”

“Silence,” Drusila said. “Haven’t you cost us enough?”

Darkness spilled across his face, a monster emerging from the icy deep.

The black of his eyes seemed to consume him as he dropped his head and

gave me his back.

“What happened in Umbros?” I asked.

“You didn’t get our hawk?” She exchanged serious glances with the other Centenaries—more shifting expressions, more mental conversations I couldn’t hear. I cleared my throat, and Drusila looked back to me. “We stopped receiving messenger hawks the day before the attack. We found it strange—Umbros never goes a day without a hawk arriving. It seems you didn’t receive ours, either.”

I glanced at Alixe, whose uneasy frown reflected mine. We hadn’t received a single messenger hawk since my return from Sophos, nor any

responses from those we’d sent.

“Tell me what happened,” I said again.

“After you left Umbros, we formed a militia from the survivors of the first attack. When the rebels came back, we managed to hold them off at the city entrance, but a gryvern came to help them—black with red wings. It attacked the canyon walls, and we feared the rock would cave in and crush the city. Then your gryvern arrived.”

“We would not have needed her if Cyranei had been there,” Symond

muttered.

“Who is Cyranei?” I asked.

The Centenaries responded with a wave of disgusted scowls. Even Drusila’s brow stitched into a disapproving frown. “Cyranei was our gryvern,” she said.

The memory of the Umbros gryvern’s death ruined me all over again.

Watching her body crash to the soil, drawn to her demise like a fyre- breathing moth to a broken, pitiful, rain-soaked flame, had been my darkest moment on the island.

Knowing her name made her death real in a different way, more painful for how little I’d known of her. Had she loved nibbling on crisp apples like Sorae? Did she have a usual spot to snooze on a sunny afternoon? What life would she have chosen if she’d survived long enough to see freedom?

That question haunted me most.

“Your gryvern was fighting the other when the red-winged gryvern suddenly turned and flew away,” Drusila went on. “The rebels retreated. We

thought we were saved.”

“They came back?” I asked.

She shook her head, looking ill. “City residents started standing still.

They wouldn’t move or say a word. We couldn’t even compel them to speak with magic. Their eyes changed—hazy, like pipe smoke.”

Another Centenary let out a sob and covered his face. The others moved to comfort him, while Symond cast him an empty stare.

“His mate was the first Centenary to be affected,” Drusila said quietly.

“We fled to the palace’s godstone room in the hopes it would save us from the same fate.” She glanced at the group behind her. “We were the only ones who made it in time. We stayed there for two days. When we came out, there was no one left. Not dead—gone. No bodies, just thousands of footprints headed south.” She hesitated. “We think they’re still alive, but . . .”

“Not in any way that matters,” Symond finished flatly.

My body went numb. In Sophos, I’d given Ophiucae a choice: end the killing and I would join him, or lose me forever. Had he already stolen the Umbrosians’ minds before I laid my ultimatum at his feet . . . or was Umbros his answer?

“I’ll send our fastest riders to warn the southern realms,” Alixe said.

“Maybe they’ll listen to you,” Symond muttered.

“We tried,” Drusila said. “The Arboros Descended raised a wall of seagrass to keep us from their port. Faunos nearly killed us with their creatures. We didn’t even dock in Fortos. We feared they might send something deadlier than sharks and kelp.”

“The Descended in Arboros,” I cut in, “did you see them?”

“Only from a distance,” Drusila said.

“Did they look as if their minds had been taken? Did they move strangely? Were they looking at you, really looking, or—” I stopped as the Centenaries fell into another silent conversation, eyebrows floating and furrowing.

After a moment, Drusila gave a helpless shrug. “They were too far away to be sure.”

A hope that I’d harbored in my heart, a candle still burning against all odds through a long and windy night, flickered and threatened to go dark.

The fate of Arboros would give me Ophiucae’s answer.

And when I had his decision, I could not delay mine one second more.

My gaze flicked back to Symond. His head was turned slightly, and though he tried to hide it, I knew he was watching me. Studying me.

Debating a choice of his own.

“You may stay with your child,” I told Drusila. “The rest of you should return to Umbros. Gather whatever weapons you can find in the markets to

defend yourselves.”

“We did that after the first attack,” a Centenary protested. “Now they’re his weapons. If you send us back, we’ll become his, too.” Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe that’s what you want. He is your father—maybe you’ve

chosen to join him.”

“I haven’t.”

As one, they stiffened, their magic sensing the not-quite-truth. Every Centenary turned to me, a firing line of accusatory obsidian stares.

“You’re working with him,” Drusila whispered. She eased a step backward and cast a nervous glance at her mate and child.

“I’m not,” I insisted. “I mean, not yet. I told him that if he stops the killing, then I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” another Centenary interrupted. “A thousand years in a Fortos prison wouldn’t be punishment enough for what he’s done.” Their head cocked at my silence, lethal and loaded. “Were you planning to punish him at all?”

I could not summon an answer that would neither be a lie nor condemn me forever. Life beyond the war was something I’d allowed myself to want but not imagine, especially not one with Ophiucae in it. As I considered it now, my naivete stared back. What future could he and I possibly have? To everyone else in Emarion, he was a monstrous killer. If his blood didn’t run through my veins, he’d be the same to me.

And that wasn’t a good enough reason. Sharing an identity with someone, be it blood or homeland or faith or trauma, could earn them our compassion, but it could not erase the harm they’d done.

Suddenly, I felt ashamed. Pathetic. Ignorant. Mortified that I’d ever believed in any other outcome. Everyone had urged me to give up on mercy and bring this war to a quick, bloody end. I was a fool to insist there was a

better way. Love couldn’t save him.

And it couldn’t save me.

“Your Queen orders you to return to Umbros,” I mumbled, bleak and dispassionate. I walked back to shore and paused at Alixe’s side, staring into the forest’s shadows while I waited for the ripple of water at my back that would mark their departure.

Though I couldn’t hear the Centenaries’ unspoken debate, I sensed it in the unease of my Royal Guard, who gripped their weapons, some preemptively raising their shields. The Centenaries’ limited numbers made

their magic far stronger than the average Descended. If they made a final stand here, I had no idea which side would win.

Alixe might have had the same thought, as her pale blue shield glittered around me. “What would you like me to do if they refuse?” she asked.

I held my answer inside as I listened.

Waiting.

Old wood creaked beneath footsteps coming down the dock, softening as they crossed onto Lumnos soil. The guards tensed, but didn’t attack. A moment later, the Meros man’s arms opened, and Drusila crashed into them, burying her tear-stained face against his chest.

Her red-rimmed eyes turned to me. “Let them stay,” she pleaded.

I said nothing. Felt nothing.

The quiet was broken by the rustle of canvas sails pulling taut and the creak of a wooden ship lurching into wind-blown seas. Drusila and her mate extended their palms to the sky and murmured a prayer for safe passage to

their respective Kindred.

“They’re leaving,” Alixe confirmed.

The guards relaxed. Shields began to fall.

Drusila wept.

My eyes turned to her Merosian mate. “Bring them back to the pier.”

He frowned, not understanding. “But you just made them leave.”

“I had to know I could trust them to obey my orders. They’ve proven that, so have your wind magic return them to the dock.” I looked at Drusila.

“I expect you to make it clear that if even one Centenary breaches someone’s mind without consent, all of you will face the consequences.”

She gasped. “You’re letting us stay?”

“I’m the Queen of Emarion,” I said numbly. “It’s my duty to protect my people.”

My eyes cut to Alixe, wary of her earlier words about our people and theirs. She nodded. “I’ll find them tents.”

“Good. In the morning, do the same for everyone in the palace who hasn’t joined the army. The orphans and their caretakers may keep their beds, as well as palace staff. Everyone else can fight or sleep outside.” I thought for a moment. “Lumnos City, too. If the Twenty Houses want a safe home to live in, they can fight for it like everyone else.”

I glanced over my shoulder to the bewildered faces aboard the Umbros ship reemerging from the darkness. Though my heart felt hollow, my

resolve was full.

It was time for the people of Emarion to make their choice.

All of them.

Including their Queen.

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