“The orders are…” Captain Ansalov glances at the paper, at me. He crosses his hands behind his back. “The orders are…”
I fill in the missing words even as my knees buckle from their sheer intensity. “To take us to the gagargi.”
“There are many orders…” Captain Ansalov trails off, shakes his head. He is a soldier at heart. It is in his nature to fight against the insurmountable odds, even if doing so may hurt him. And this is exactly what he does. “That. That is not. That is not—”
I push myself as far as I can. Farther.
As I am connected to his mind, I feel the exact moment of its shattering.
In the stillness that follows, that beyond the night’s last hour, that of the morning’s first, I realize to my horror that there is nothing more I can do. Captain Ansalov’s mind is broken by the commands said decades ago, by my attempts to change them. Even if I were to drain my soul dry, I don’t possess the skill to mend his mind. It becomes a meaningless endeavor to hold on to the spell, and so the best course of action is to simply let it fade.
“Captain Janlav…” Captain Ansalov’s gaze steadies. He motions sharply toward us, a gesture of terrible inclusion. “Bring them with us to the cellar.”
A chorus of gasps comes from behind me. I refuse to make a sound, though this command can’t be the one he received from the gagargi. It can’t be, for the gagargi needs me alive! But I can’t allow terror to even touch me. I must understand where this command stems from to decide the best course of action.
“No, not that one.” Captain Janlav places a friendly palm on Captain Ansalov’s shoulder, but he looks past the captain at me. Having seen my powers, he wants to know if there is more I could do.
I dare not meet his eyes, answer him. I don’t yet have a plan.
“The orders are to clean this house,” Captain Ansalov insists. I realize it then, this order comes from the past. He doesn’t know anymore which of the many orders crowding his mind he has already obeyed and which are yet to be fulfilled. In his confused state, he will not listen to my words. He is beyond my influence, that of my father.
Captain Janlav pats Captain Ansalov’s shoulder, a jovial attempt to save what he can. “No, no, no, the orders are written and sealed. Shall we have one more look at them together?”
And it is only because Captain Ansalov is still befuddled that Captain Janlav manages to distract him and direct him out, his last favor to us out of loyalty for the ruler he once served.
I am not alone with my failure, but in the company of my sisters. I had thought through many scenarios, but none wound up like this. I was prepared to sacrifice my soul, my very life, but in the end, even that wasn’t enough to keep my sisters safe. Defeated, I stare at the flaking paint of the pale blue door, closed and locked once more. For us, another one will not open. Or if it does, it will be that of the cellar, the one we shouldn’t walk through.
My sisters wait patiently behind me. I can hear their nervousness in their shallow breaths and the floor creaking under weights shifted. Turning around, facing them, feels more challenging than confronting Captain Ansalov. “My sisters—”
“He would have helped us!” Elise claps her delicate hands against her chest, awed by the man she once loved, whom she can now admit she never stopped loving, impervious for a moment more to our impeding fate. “All this time, and I didn’t know!”
“Well, now you know,” Sibilia remarks, as disappointed as I am that our sister cares more for her heart’s chosen one than our own well-being. She slips the pearl bracelet around her wrist. She fidgets through each pearl before she finds the courage to ask what I should have willingly provided. “What are we going to do?”
What pains me the most is to see the absolute trust in Alina’s deep-set gaze, hope in Merile’s dark brown one. Sibilia already knows, though she pretends otherwise. We have talked of this often enough. The grimness of our situation is only starting to dawn on Elise. She really thought she would be leaving the house tonight.
“We must decide together how we wish to proceed.” And I lay down the facts and only the facts, no feeble promises of better prospects. I couldn’t change the orders Captain Ansalov received. Captain Janlav’s offer, born from a moment of opportunity, is something we can but forget. Now that the gagargi’s orders are in the air for both his guards and Captain Ansalov’s men to hear, defying them and engaging in a fight that is likely to end in gunshots and blood spilled is not something he is willing to risk.
“One.” Merile picks the black dog up in her arms. It climbs to rest against her shoulder, prods my sister’s neck with its nose. “So you must choose one of us to go with you?”
Alina intently studies my shadow, that of Elise. She nods to herself and kneels to summon the brown dog to her. “I know who you should pick.”
Out of all of us, Alina is the one least afraid. She alone still believes that I will live up to my promise. A thought bordering on delirious comes to me. Could it be that my frail little sister can glimpse our future in the shadows? If I had thought to ask this earlier, could I have saved us? Could any knowledge have made the difference?
“Either we all go or no one goes,” Sibilia repeats. She must have realized, too, that with his mind tampered with, Captain Ansalov will order anyone staying behind in this house executed.
“I don’t agree with you.” Elise has her chin angled up, gray eyes afire with defiance. “Celestia, you are the Crescent Empress. What will become of our people if we meet our end in this house? With us gone, there will be no one left to champion for them. Don’t say no to the gagargi’s generous offer for purely selfish reasons.”
For a moment, there is but silence, for what else could there be? And in this silence, the room feels smaller, the shadows in the corners darker, the light of the chandeliers feebler, the carpet akin to sinking ground. Where once the whole empire was mine, now I am hesitant to confront my own sister. For I don’t know if there is anything I can say to make her see that I am not defying the gagargi because I loathe him for what he did to me, what he did to us and our mother and her sisters. I am saying no to his plan to save her and our younger sisters and the whole empire from oblivion.
In the end, I don’t have to say a thing. A thin, white shape forms beside Elise.
“Drinking,” Olesia wails. Her shape is translucent. “Men drinking downstairs.”
“Oh no,” Sibilia gasps, a hand flinging to cover her mouth. “Celestia…”
I lift my forefinger minutely, a sign she shouldn’t say more. Men drink to gather courage when faced with commands they aren’t willing to obey sober. This is no longer my choice. The two captains will force me to go to the gagargi, to abandon my sisters. Or then, the order they think they must obey is the grimmer one, the one from the past that has already been once carried out, that led Irina and Olesia to their graves. But Captain Ansalov may not remember that, and it is my fault and no one else’s.
“My sisters…” I have always known that as the Crescent Empress I might need to choose from two equally appalling options. But never did it even occur to me to speculate which of my sisters deserves to live the most. For that is a decision I can’t make, one that I can’t ask them to make for me either. “I…”
“Celestia, wait,” Sibilia says, so quietly, so shyly, uncertain and yet so sure of herself. “There is one more thing that we could try.”
“Tell us.” Merile speaks in my place.
Without saying another word, Sibilia strides to the window closest to our rooms and yanks at the curtains. It takes her three attempts to fully part them. The thread tears loose just as we gather around her.