Instead of following, however, Qora paused, staring up that alley to the east. “There’s someone else,” she hissed. “Jak-”
“Forget him,” Gwenna said. “He’s gone.”
“He was supposed to-”
“I know what he was supposed to do. He didn’t do it.”
Qora hesitated, jaw clenched in an agony of indecision, then let herself be led. Together, they raced down the muddy street. Within a dozen steps, Gwenna could hear the clatter of their pursuers. She grabbed the woman by the elbow, dragging her down a side street as more arrows thunked into the wooden walls. Talal was there, his own blades bare, one wet with blood.
He pointed to a low wall between buildings, just high enough to scramble over.
“There,” he whispered. “Straight shot out of town on the other side.”
Gwenna shoved the other woman toward the short wall, but she yanked away, twisting back toward the square. “Jak!” she whispered desperately. “My partner. Where is he?”
“How the fuck do I know?” Gwenna snapped. “East somewhere.”
“I have to find him. Go back for him.”
“No,” Gwenna said, taking the woman by the arm once more, sizing her up. Qora was an inch or two taller than Gwenna herself, but slender, light enough to knock out and carry if she kept up with the idiotic heroics. Gwenna shifted, wrapping an arm around her neck, but Talal stepped forward.
“Describe him,” he said. “Jak.”
Qora’s eyes were huge as moons. She twisted her head to look at Gwenna, then turned back to Talal.
“Short. Strong. Pale. Shaved head. Twin kettral inked on his shoulders…”
It wasn’t much of a description, but Talal nodded, then darted off down the alley before she could finish.
Gwenna hissed her irritation, started to call the leach back, then muzzled her objection. Talal could take care of himself, his assurance had calmed Qora, and they’d be more likely to confuse the pursuit if they split up.
“Get to the rally,” she growled after him. “And don’t fucking die.”
11
Adare sat at the end of the dock, bare feet rising and falling in the water as the low waves slapped against the pilings. It was hardly an imperial posture, but she’d been trying to look imperial all morning, sitting spear-straight in her chair above the smoldering ruins of the great map of Annur, trying not to choke on the day-old smoke and ash as she signed into law the treaty intended to heal the rift between her empire and the republic. It felt good to recline on her elbows at the end of the palace docks, to watch the great ships out in the bay lean with the breeze, to forget for just a moment how close she’d come to destroying it all.
It would have been nice to forget about it, but her brother refused to let her.
“How did you know,” Kaden asked quietly, “that the entire hall wouldn’t catch fire?”
“I didn’t.”
“How did you know someone on the council wouldn’t attack you? Kill you?”
“I didn’t.”
“How did you know they’d agree to ratify the treaty after all that?”
“I didn’t, Kaden. I was fucking terrified, if you want to know the truth, but I didn’t see any other way.” She blew out a long, frustrated sigh, then turned to face him.
Kaden sat cross-legged, hands folded in his lap, his posture, like the rest of him, contained, closed. Adare had no idea how he could sit like that with the burns. The fire in the council chamber had turned the air instantly, if only momentarily, to flame. Adare’s own skin was tender to the point of agony, a hint of sullen red spreading beneath the brown. The cold water felt so good on her feet and legs that she was tempted to jump in, to float on her back in the cool shade under the dock itself.
She used to love to swim beneath the docks as a child, maybe because it drove her Aedolians to distraction. But Birch and Fulton were gone now-one quit, the other dead-and she was not a child but a woman grown, the Emperor, since the morning’s signing, of all Annur. There could be no more floating beneath docks.
“You have no idea,” Kaden said slowly, “how difficult it was convincing the council to agree to this treaty. They did not want you back.”
“And you did?” Adare asked, studying him warily.
The man who sat before her on the rough planks of the dock bore little resemblance to the boy she remembered from her childhood. At eight, Kaden had been thin and bony, all elbows and knees, dark, unruly hair flopping into his eyes whenever he ran, which seemed to be all the time. He and Valyn had been raised in the same palace as Adare, disciplined by the same parents and guards, schooled by the same tutors, and yet the two brothers had managed to find a freedom inside the red walls that Adare had never truly felt.
It wasn’t that she had resented the Dawn Palace as a child. Far from it. Every time she walked the long colonnades, or prayed inside the scented stillness of the ancient temples, or stood in the cool shadow of the Unhewn Throne, she felt the pride brimming within her, pride of her family, of her name, of her palace, and of the history it represented. Every time she strolled through the immaculately kept gardens, sprays of jasmine and gardenia winding above her, or paused to look up at the graceful angles of the Floating Hall, suspended a hundred feet above the courtyards, every time she stood at the top of Intarra’s Spear, gazing out over an empire that stretched away over ocean, and forest, and tilled ground, stretched away toward every horizon, every time she thought of the scope and breadth and majesty of it all, she felt her own good fortune.
That fortune, however, had weight. Like the golden robes her father wore during celebrations of solstice and equinox, Adare’s own glittering, gorgeous position lay heavily on her slender shoulders. For as long as she could remember, she had felt it, that weight. To be a Malkeenian was to acknowledge the full heft of history, to feel present events, like some priceless silk, slide between her small hands. The high red walls of the Dawn Palace, instead of keeping the world back, instead of blocking it out, held in the whole elaborate apparatus of state, it was the hub around which the spokes of that great world spun. Adare felt that spinning, felt it every day, almost from the moment she woke … even though she knew she would never be the Emperor, that the unfathomable weight of her father’s responsibility would never be hers, but Kaden’s.
Kaden, for his part, had always seemed blissfully ignorant.
The boy she had known was always at his older brother’s side, sneaking away from lessons, trying to elude his own guardsmen, racing around the ramparts or delving down into the deepest cellars. He shared the burning eyes with Sanlitun and Adare, but he seemed to have no idea of or interest in what they meant, in what he would have to do. Most times, Adare could imagine Krim, the kennel master sitting on the Unhewn Throne before Kaden; the kennel master, at least, approached his work with a serious, sober regard.
The only times Adare had ever seen Kaden go still were when he thought he was alone, when he thought no one was watching. Once, frustrated with her failure to understand some mathematical proof, Adare had climbed up to the seaward wall after her lessons, determined to sit there, regardless of the hard salt wind, working through the problem until she unlocked it. To her surprise, she had stumbled across Kaden. His Aedolians were a hundred paces off, blocking all approach to the high wall, and he was leaning against the stone, staring east between the ramparts. Adare started to approach, then paused, suddenly, almost preternaturally aware that this was a part of her brother she had not seen before, or had seen but not noticed. She couldn’t say what he was looking at-Ships in the harbor? Gulls overhead? The jagged limestone karsts of the Broken Bay? She could only see his stillness, an absence of action so perfect, so absolute, that it seemed impossible he should ever move again. Then, after a very long time, he turned. When he saw her watching him, his burning eyes widened, the boyish grin slipped back onto his face, and he raced away, his Aedolians hollering protests as they gave chase.