Javier bent to pick up the handheld gaslight that had rolled off to the side, the device having escaped the heat of starfire. The light flickered but stabilized when he smacked his palm against the cylinder. Holding it and his wand in front of him, Javier entered the room on the other side, stepping over the bodies as he went. Yadvir went next, wand up as well, ready to call forth magic.
Vanya had been carrying the brunt of the defense within the halls they traversed, starfire the only weapon they had against the furious dead when they’d run out of nearly everything else. He spared a glance behind him to assure himself of Taisiya’s presence. Hisvalidewas still held in thepraetorialegionnaire’s arms, the man having not let her feet touch the ground since the garden.
Facing forward again, Vanya stepped over the burned corpses and into the grand hallway that opened up the private wing he’d called home since he was born. He’d hoped—prayed—that thepraetorialegionnaires on duty here had managed to barricade the wing, but he knew otherwise now.
The family wing was built to withstand a siege. That every door they passed was open, the windows broken in some of the rooms and bodies on the floor that hadn’t risen yet, was proof the defenses hadn’t been activated. Fear that Vanya had managed to push down and ignore threatened to strangle him just then. Letting it consume him wouldn’t help, but it simmered in the back of his mind, the horrible knowledge of what he might find when he reached Raiah’s suite of rooms.
His hand strayed to his pocket where the televox was, half tempted to try calling Alida again. But she hadn’t answered—not once—and that worried him. Drawing in a breath, Vanya stayed on Javier’s heels, tiny tongues of starfire flickering above their procession. It made them a target in the dark, revenants drawn to the light and the warmth of their bodies, but Vanya and the people with him couldn’t survive in the dark.
They reached a portion of the hallway where marble pillars lined the section of it, stretching two stories high in an inner atrium. A set of stairs led to the second floor, where Raiah’s rooms were located.
Huddled around the fallen figures of threepraetorialegionnaires on the stairs themselves was a small horde of revenants. The glow of starfire caught the revenants’ attention, skulls turning their way, dried-out holes staring at them without seeing anything.
Vanya clenched one hand into a fist and raised an arm, prepared to cast starfire. The revenants opened their mouths and let out an ugly, rasping sound that might have been a scream if they were alive.
But they weren’t.
The ringing sound of metal against stone cracked through the air from above, drawing everyone’s attention, even the dead’s. Vanya’s gaze jumped from the revenants to the figure standing at the landing, half-lit by Vanya’s starfire and the handheld gaslight. That spiral of fear Vanya had been carrying suddenly dissipated, fading in the realization of who had arrived.
Soren didn’t wait for the revenants to come to him.
Soren made himself the closer moving target, and the revenants went after him instead. He cut through them with brutal thoroughness, but there was a drag to his motions, a sluggishness that only Vanya might recognize. He knew how Soren fought, had watched the warden practice in the palace’s salle over the years. Soren might be up and moving, but Vanya ached to get his hands on the other man to check for wounds.
When the last revenant had its head removed from its body, both parts thumping down to the stairs, Soren finally turned to face them. Vanya flicked his fingers at the starfire, casting it brighter, enough that he could see the shadows on Soren’s face weren’t all shadows but streaks of blood and bruises. The way Soren needed to use the railing on the way down made Vanya look for wounds he couldn’t see.
The moment Soren got close, Vanya settled a hand on his hip to brace him, the other holding his jaw. Vanya tilted Soren’s face up to better look at his bruised skin. Soren’s gaze was steady enough despite the uneven pupils, an obvious sign of concussion.
“Soren,” Vanya ground out.
The warden grimaced, angling his poison sword away from Vanya’s knees. “It’ll keep.”
“Where were you?” Taisiya asked tartly, raspy voice louder than Vanya would have liked.
Soren’s gaze flicked to hisvalidefor a moment before returning to Vanya. He reached up to gently pry Vanya’s hand from his face. “Knocked out and trapped in a coffin.”
It was warm in the palace, air heated by starfire and the muggy night air flowing through broken windows. In that moment, all Vanya felt was cold. “What?”
“When I came back from the resupply station, I went looking for you at the star temple. I was told you might be praying. You weren’t there, but Alida was. She wasn’t alone.”
Vanya went still at the mention of his majordomo’s name and the burgeoning implications coming out of Soren’s mouth. “Who was she with?”
Soren shoved a hand into his pocket and came up with a pendant on a necklace that Vanya didn’t immediately recognize. Vanya took it from him, staring at the imprint of the House of Kimathi’s crest in gold.
“Daijalan Blades and House of Kimathi allies.” Soren swallowed, the sound loud in the silence that had settled over everyone. “She gave them the keys to the crypt.”
When Vanya was a child, his mother had sat on his bed and woken him from sleep one night. Zakariya had smoothed back his hair and told him—dry-eyed but with a breaking voice—that she was sorry, but he was the heir now.
He’d known, even that young, what it meant when she’d slid the ranking necklace over his head, the one Iosiv had always proudly worn. It had felt like the worst of betrayals—that his brother was dead, that his mother had given him a road that shouldn’t have been his to walk. It hurt back then, the same way it did now, when his world upended itself, ripped from its moorings like a damaged Tovanian ship-city left to drift amongst the waves.
“I sent her to Raiah,” Vanya breathed hollowly, feeling as if someone were digging a knife into his gut and twisting it deeper over and over again.
“What crypt?” Cybele asked from behind them.
Soren blinked, a flicker of something passing across his face. An apology, perhaps, for giving voice to a secret every major House had kept for centuries. One which Joelle had ruined first with this play.
“The Dawn Star buried the first royals of Solaria at the beginning of our country. The Houses who have held the Imperial throne since then have followed her wishes regarding the royal dead,” Vanya said after a long moment.
The major Houses knew their history. Cybele was from a minor House, one who had never held the Imperial throne and who would not know of the dead that once slept beneath the Imperial palace. Cybele stepped closer, causing Javier to tense, but the captain didn’t block her way.
