This is your road now.
The icy uncertainty faded when Honovi gently gripped Blaine’s hand, reminding him that he wasn’t alone.
“What do they want?” Blaine asked, forcing his voice to remain steady.
The lone Ashionen woman stepped forward, dipping into a smooth, deep curtsy with a skill that did not match the station of her clothes. As she straightened, she picked at the clasp of the choker around her throat.
Her face shimmered, magic peeling away along with the thin gossamer veil she removed. The face she’d had before was gone, replaced by sharper, more beautiful features. Even her eye color had changed, gone from an unassuming brown to a pale hazel, while her ashy hair lightened to a brighter blonde.
Blaine sucked in a surprised breath, as did Honovi, though they were the only ones to do so. TheComhairle nan Cinnidheandidn’t appear shocked at the use of magic before them. The woman clasped her hands together in front of her, carefully holding on to the veil. When she spoke, it was with an accent that jolted him, the crispness of nobility falling from her lips. He wondered if it was true, or merely an affectation.
“You may call me Mainspring. I am here on behalf of the Clockwork Brigade,” the woman said in the trade tongue. “We are a group who stands against the encroachment of Daijal rule in Ashion.”
“You are a rebellion,” Aslaung,ceann-cinnidhof Clan Mountain, said in a voice as dry as thin mountain air. “Rebellions outside our borders should not concern us.”
“Perhaps, my lady. Perhaps not. But Daijal cares naught for borders, and that country cares even less about the dead. Revenants walk where they shouldn’t, and have since the Inferno, as you well know.”
“Ask for aid from the wardens, not from E’ridia.”
“We have. It has not been enough.” The woman drew in a breath, her hazel eyes never looking away from Blaine. “That warning is not the only reason I am here. We have sought answers in the ashes of the Inferno over the last many years. What we have gleaned could be of great help to our country. A child was delivered to your care fifteen years ago, were they not? A babe graced by the protection of the star gods themselves?”
Whoever this Ashionen was, they were used to standing before people of power and giving nothing away. Mainspring posed the question without any inflection in her voice, but it didn’t matter. Blaine still froze where he stood, mind tossed back into a past he’d tried so hard to forget.
He had been the only mortal to walk off the airship in Glencoe. He’d carried no babe in his arms when he left all that he’d been behind. The child had been relegated to Nilsine’s care for that long flight east until she wasn’t. That was a secret he hadn’t given voice to back then, and he certainly couldn’t now.
Blaine had spent the last month or so speaking the trade tongue, and it was easy to work his lips around the sound of it. The languages of Maricol were similar, drawn from the same origin, but the accents and dialects differed, carving out space inside borders. The trade tongue stole from all of them to form a bastardized language that most people involved in trade or who lived in major cities and border towns spoke.
“I was the only one brought to Glencoe. There was no babe aboard for that trip,” Blaine said. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was truth enough, and he would hold to it.
The woman’s shoulders dipped ever so slightly, the only hint of her disappointment. “I see.”
“Why are you here?”
“King Bernard has betrothed Princess Eimarille to his son. He seeks the Ashion throne through her bloodline. Rumor has it his wedding gift will consist of oversight of Amari and its surrounding provinces. Preparation, if you will, of her puppet position beside the crown prince.”
“You hope for a different queen with this missing babe?” Honovi asked into the silence that followed her words.
“Fire kills many things, but it cannot kill hope,” Mainspring said with a conviction in her voice that made Blaine bite his tongue. She stared at him, gaze steady, chin held high at a challenging angle. “Am I wrong, Your Grace?”
Honovi frowned. “Blaine is not of your nobility.”
“He is a Westergard.”
It was a guess on her part, and a good one. Blaine curled the fingers of his free hand against his palms, the leather gloves he wore preventing him from slicing open his skin. He was E’ridian now, but he’d been Ashionen before fire burned away all that he had known.
In the forests, it was known that some trees needed fire to thrive, their seeds incapable of growth without it. Perhaps this was what Nilsine had made of him when she’d carried him east. A seed planted to grow in the ashes of the past.
Honovi stared at him with a frank, questioning gaze, tension holding him still. “Westergard?”
Blaine unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “That is not my name.”
Because it wasn’t, not anymore. E’ridians did not carry surnames, only clan affiliation, and Blaine had given up his bloodline in an airship hangar as a child. He’d never spoken of his past to Honovi, and his husband had never demanded it, not in the wake of a star god’s decree.
What’s more, Blaine had no idea if the babe they’d left Amari with had survived, or what Nilsine had done with her in that border city he knew not to speak of, but it did not matter. For him, there was no Rourke left to guard, and without that duty, he had no right to a name that had existed in the genealogies since the Age of Starfall.
Mainspring spread her hands, palms up, asking for help or forgiveness, it was difficult to say. One could never trust a spy, after all. “The North Star guided me here with orders to bring a Westergard home. I would like to believe she did not guide me wrong.”
Blaine glanced up at the constellations painted across the ceiling of the chamber, mapping out the night sky. The stars led them home, always, even now.
