He raised his eyebrows, proffering the manacles. Reluctantly, Ana extended her hands to him. The steel was lined with leather, with dark stains that Ana tried to ignore. The shackles pinched her skin as the commandant pressed the halves around her wrists and locked them together. The harsh click of the lock sent panic rushing through her: he could keep her here; he could take her to one of the cells in the Bastida and do whatever he wished to her-torture her, rape her, kill her.
He must have sensed her growing panic. He stepped back. “My word is law here, O’Teni, and I don’t make promises that I won’t keep,” he told her. “One turn of the glass, and I will take these away from you.”
Ana nodded. The commandant glanced from her to Karl. “And I trust your word as well, Envoy,” he said. With that, he left the cell, locking the door behind him. They heard his footsteps on the stairs.
“Ana,” Karl said, bringing her gaze away from the locked and barred door. “I had nothing to do with the Kraljica’s death. Nothing. I swear to you.”
“I believe you,” she told him. “Only Cenzi knows why, but I do.”
“How are you? Does the Archigos know you were with me when I was arrested?”
“The commandant told him, I’m certain. He seems mostly, I don’t know, disappointed. Dejected. But he has more important issues.”
“And you? Have you been able to find the Scath Cumhacht, the Ilmodo, as you did before?”
She could only shake her head, not trusting her voice. “I’m sorry,”
he told her. She felt his bound hands touch hers. Their fingers linked. “I wish I could show you,” he said quietly. “I wish I could teach you.”
“I wish that, too,” she told him. His head bent toward her. His lips brushed her hair, her forehead. She remembered her vatarh doing the same to her: at night, in the darkness. With her vatarh, she had trembled and turned her face away. With him, she had endured the embrace and the touch. With him, she had felt nothing but ice and fear.
It was not what she felt now. She lifted up her face to meet Karl’s.
She felt the trembling of her lips against his as they touched. She closed her eyes, feeling only the kiss. Only the kiss.
She drew away from him. “Ana?” he asked.
“Don’t say anything,” she told him. Her hands still held his. She leaned her head against his shoulder. She felt him start to move to put his arms around her, but there was only the clanking of chains and a muttered curse. “It’s all fallen apart,” she said. “Everything I thought I had. Everything I might have wanted.”
“I’m so sorry, Ana.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I. . I lost my faith.”
“I did once, too,” he told her, his breath warm on her ear. “And I found a new one. A better one.”
“I glad you could,” she told him. “I can’t.”
He stepped back from her then, though he would not let go of her hands. Iron clinked unmusically in response. “You have to have faith in yourself first,” he told her, and she made a scoffing noise as she turned her head. The yellow light of the Kraljica’s funeral prowled the stones of the tower. She released his hands and went to the opening to the balcony. Vertigo swept over her momentarily as
she looked at the shelf of stone and the long fall below. She clung to the side of the balcony, staring out rather than down. The Avi was a circlet of glowing pearls around the city, and the waters of the A’Sele glittered and reflected the teni-lights. The Kraljica’s-no, the Kraljiki’s-palais on the Isle was brilliant, all the windows alive with teni-lights or candelabras, and the gilded roofs of the temples shimmered in their own radiance. Between the Old Temple and the Palais, the embers of the Kraljica’s pyre still threw tongues of flame and whirling sparks at the stars.
Out there, the teni worked: keeping Nessantico alive and vital.
Nessantico held back the night, refusing to allow it dominion. Like your faith once did for you, she thought.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Karl said behind her. She nodded.
“My vatarh. .” She started to tell him about how he’d said he could see the city at night from afar, and stopped herself. She didn’t want to talk about her vatarh. He was dead, as far as she was concerned. “Tell me about you,” she told him. “Tell me more about the Numetodo. Please. Let’s sit here, where we can look out at the city. .”
She asked him because she didn’t want to think, didn’t want to talk.
She only wanted to sit next to him, to feel his warmth on her side, and listen to his voice. The words didn’t matter, only his presence.
She wondered if he realized that.
They sat, and he talked, and she half-listened, her own thoughts
crashing against themselves in her head so loudly that they nearly drowned out his voice.
Bonds
Jan ca’Vorl
From the wooded crown of the rise, the army spread out along the valley like a horde of black ants on the march. Dust enveloped them in a tan, hazy cloak as they trudged along the rutted, boot-stamped dirt of the Avi a’Firenzcia. The western horizon promised rain, and their banners hung limp in a breezeless air, stained with the same tan that caked the boots of the foot soldiers and packed the hooves of the cheverittai’s horses. Faintly, Jan could hear the sound of the drummers beating cadence.
Jan watched as a single rider broke off from the main force and galloped toward the ridge where he, Starkkapitan ca’Staunton, Allesandra, and Markell were watching. Markell gestured to one of the starkkapitan’s offiziers, standing with their own horses judiciously downhill from the group above. An offizier saluted and mounted, intercepting the rider; they exchanged words and a packet. The offizier gestured back up the hill. “Your pardon, my Hirzg,” Markell said. Nudging the side of his horse with his bootheels, he rode down and spoke for a few minutes with the rider before returning to the ridge.
“Word has come from Nessantico, my Hirzg,” Markell said as he came abreast of Jan. Markell frowned as he handed Jan a leather courier’s pouch. “There’s a letter from A’Teni ca’Cellibrecca inside.”
“And?” Jan asked.
The frown deepened. “The rider tells me that the Kraljica is dead,”
Markell answered. “Assassinated. Justi ca’Mazzak has been installed as the new Kraljiki.”
Jan felt himself sitting up in his saddle at the words. That’s not possible, he wanted to rail at Markell. It must be a mistake. Jan stared out at his army, the army used so often by the Kralji when they wanted a rebellion crushed or a territory conquered, the army that the Garde Civile believed they rather than the Hirzg commanded. The army that was intended to force the Kraljica’s hand, a hand that was now dead and still.
“Vatarh? What’s the matter?” Allesandra asked him. He ignored her.
“Assassinated by whom?” he growled at Markell.
“The gossip is that it was a Numetodo, according to the rider,”
Markell said. “Kraljiki Justi has ordered the arrest of all Numetodo in the city.”
Jan clenched his jaw, staring at the pouch in his gloved hand. He opened it, glanced at the letter with A’Teni ca’Cellibrecca’s seal on it, still intact. A suspicion began to form. All I did for him, all the planning. . “Starkkapitan,” he told ca’Staunton, waiting patient and silent with his face carefully arranged to show nothing, “we will make camp here for the day. Have your men prepare my tent. Find that rider; if he hasn’t spread word yet about the Kraljica, make certain that it stays that way. This is news I need to contemplate, and I don’t need rumors spreading though the ranks.”