Most of the faces around the table had closed-tight lips, narrowed eyes, clenched jaws. They didn’t like hearing the truth, and they certainly didn’t like being lectured about it. Kaden was watching her intently, hands flat and still on the table before him. She couldn’t read his face, but he looked as though he wanted to tell her something, to warn her, but it was too late for that. The moment for conciliation, if it had existed at all, was past.
Another emperor would have found a way to avoid this situation. Her father would never have screamed at the council, would never have shoved their faces so directly in their failures. Kaden seemed cut from the same cloth-calm, deliberative, measured. Another emperor would have seen a way to make peace with the council, but then again, there were no other fucking emperors. Sanlitun was dead, and Kaden was … whatever he was-cowardly, or complacent, or gelded. She wasn’t doing the greatest job, but at least she was trying to do her ’Kent-kissing job.
“We have received the reports,” Bouree was saying. He seized a long pole from the table before him, gesturing with it toward the north of the map, toward the hundreds of small lakes obscured between the tiny pines. “You need not lecture us about your … difficulties.”
“My difficulties?” Adare spat. “My difficulties? If you plan to rule all Annur, if you plan to pass laws and enact policy as our treaty stipulates, you might want to start thinking about events beyond the walls of this very beautiful chamber as your problems, too.”
Moss raised a hand, calling for calm as though he were the only adult in a room of petulant toddlers.
“A semantic slip, young lady.”
“Your Radiance,” she growled.
He pursed his lips, as though the very thought of the words was sour.
“If you intend to heal the breach,” she went on, “as you claim. If you intend to abide by the treaty we have both signed, then I am the Emperor, Annur’s Emperor, and your Emperor, and you will address me properly.”
“I’ve always found that those most insistent on their titles,” Moss replied, “are those least deserving of them.” He shook his head, an understated performance of urbane regret.
A few seats away, Kegellen smiled. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said brightly. “I suggest we all relinquish our titles, emperors and aristocrats alike. At once, if possible.” She raised a hand, fluttering it in the air. “I make the motion.”
People shifted uncomfortably. This was a group, after all, who relied on their names and titles for life and livelihood, for the privileges and prerogatives they had enjoyed from childhood, from birth. It was one thing to challenge Adare’s imperial claim; another to see the foundation of their own positions suddenly vulnerable to assault.
Moss frowned. “We will, of course, adhere to the forms of the treaty. Your Radiance. But to return to the matter at hand, I believe my Channarian colleague was simply observing that all these dire tidings that you present with such … shrillness are already known to us.”
“We have read the reports,” Bouree bellowed again. “Every day.”
Adare stared at them, looking from face to face. Many were nodding. One man with a square head and a crooked nose was gesturing to a sheaf of papers spread out before him, as though the mere existence of those papers would prove his commitment to Annur. Moss had steepled his fingers before his face, watching from behind them. Kaden’s blazing eyes never left Adare. She considered going toward him, for a moment, then turned the other way, circling the table slowly.
“Perhaps the reports have failed to convey the necessary gravity,” she said, managing to lower her voice for the first time. She kept walking. People twisted in their chairs as she passed behind them, trying to keep her in view. As though they think I’m going to stab them one by one, when they’re not looking, she thought grimly. And they didn’t even know about Valyn.
“Perhaps,” she went on, “the elegant phrases of your reports lack the urgency required by the situation.” The gashes to her face burned. The scar laid into her skin by the lightning burned. The blood covering her face scalded. “Perhaps you are confused about the nature of your nation, about the scope of your commitment. Perhaps you don’t understand the price of failure.”
She was approaching Bouraa Bouree now. His face was screwed into a scowl.
“You presume too much,” he snapped. “We convene here every day, all day, in the governance of the republic.” He waved his long pole at the map below. Even that pole was a work of fine craftsmanship, rings of precious metal laid into the polished shaft. The length of wood with its inlaid gold and silver was worth a farmstead, worth what a large, hardworking family might earn in ten years. All to point out places on a map. Bouree gestured with it vaguely to the borders of the empire. “While you’ve been pleasuring your general up in the north, we have been ruling Annur.”
Adare ignored the gibe. “How can you rule Annur,” she asked quietly, “when you don’t even understand it?”
“And what,” asked Ziav Moss from across the width of the table, voice languid, almost bored, “would you have us understand? Your Radiance?”
She glanced over at him, then turned back to Bouree, seized the long pole in both hands, then wrenched it from the Channarian’s grasp. He shouted, tried to rise to his feet, to take it back, but she was already twisting away, swinging it in a broad, vicious arc overhead.
“This.”
The wood connected with one of the huge globes overhead, shattering the glass. She didn’t wince as the shards crashed down around her. A few more slices to her face would hardly make anything worse. Lamp oil spilled over the catwalk, acrid and glistening, slicking the planks and pouring over onto the land below. She took two steps forward and shattered another globe.
“This,” she said again. “And this…” Smash. “And this…” Smash, smash, smash.
People were on their feet, shouting their objections, waving their hands or wringing them pointlessly. Probably no different from what they did when their precious reports rolled in. A scarred, bearded man tried to take the pole from her. Adare broke it over his head, knocking him half over the railing. She continued swinging the jagged end, breaking the glass lamps over and over and over until she came to one, finally, that was lit.
“What I want you to understand…” She was screaming now. She didn’t care. “What I want you to fucking understand, you ’Kent-kissing assholes, is that this…” She stabbed the shattered pole at the perfect landscape laid out below. You almost couldn’t even see the oil slicking the rivers, dousing the trees. “This is not Annur. It has nothing to do with what is going on out there. Nothing to do with what is happening in your republic right fucking now.”
“All right.” Kaden’s voice. Still calm, but carrying. “All right, Adare.”
She extended the pole out toward the lamp, almost gently this time. It took only a moment for the oil-soaked wood to catch. She held it before her like a torch, watching the fire twist, writhe.
“No,” she said, turning to face her brother, speaking more quietly now, channeling his calm. “It is not all right. That is what I’m trying to tell you.”
She threw the burning brand over the catwalk railing.
There was a great whoosh of wind, like the last, terrible breath of the earth, then the flame.
Everywhere, the flame.
10
A full night, and a day, and part of another night had passed by the time Gwenna finally hauled herself out of the surf onto the slick stones. When she tried to stand, her legs wobbled beneath her, dropping her back into lapping waves where she sat for a moment before reaching out to grab Talal’s wrist, dragging him up onto the rock.