“Be yourself up there,” he urged.
The only problem with that was Caris wasn’t so sure she knew who she was anymore. But she’d run out of time to find out when one of the mayor’s aides waved at her to head for the stage stairs. Caris uncurled her fingers from Nathaniel’s and left to do a duty she still wasn’t sure she had the right to carry.
But her feet took her up to the stage anyway, and Caris smiled the way Meleri had taught her, but her determination to do what was right? That came from Portia. From Emmitt. From those who had raised her to build things for others because Maricol wasn’t often kind to her children, but Caris had learned to be kind anyway.
The popping sounds coming from a multitude of cameras as they took her picture were like fireworks in her ears. Caris smiled through the noise, through Meleri’s words of encouragement, and found herself standing before a podium with a riser. The speech she had worked on for the past few days was all in her head, but as she looked out at the reporters and people seated in the spectator stand and filling in the rest of the plaza, the words momentarily left her.
She looked back the way she’d come, finding Nathaniel standing at the edge of the stage amidst a small group of politicians and wardens, his eyes on her. His lips shaped words she couldn’t hear, but the fierce, prideful expression on his face was encouragement enough.
Caris turned to face the judgment of the crowd and the country they’d report back to. She took a deep breath and settled her hands on the riser, looking out across the sea of people, and found her voice.
“I want to thank the illustrious Duchess Meleri Auclair, both for her kind words and generosity but also for the support she has given me over the past few years,” Caris said. She dug her fingers against the wood as the crowd quieted and tried not to squint beneath the sunlight. “I was in Amari during the riot where peacekeepers sent revenants against protestors exercising their right to be heard. I and my compatriots were some of the lucky ones during that horror. We escaped. Too many didn’t.”
She drew in a soft breath, the rapidness of her heartbeat evening out. “Too many of us are trapped beneath the rule of Daijal, coerced into offering up our lives as collateral to banks and losing them to debt bondage. Many of you remember what it was like before the Inferno, when the monarchy was held by the Rourke bloodline and not the Iverson one. When Ashion was a country to be proud of.
“I’m not proud of the road Queen Eimarille has set our country on. She calls herself Rourke, and perhaps that is true. Her name is still found in the royal genealogies. Mine isn’t, and she’ll say that gives me no right to the Rourke bloodline.” Caris swallowed, the sharp click of her throat echoing through the voice amplifier. “But I was born during the Inferno. The Westergard bloodline kept their duty and smuggled me out of our burning capital to Cosian. I was given to the Dhemlan bloodline, and that name is all I knew until recently.”
She dragged her nails over the riser before pulling her hands away, reaching deep to call forth starfire from the aether. It burst into existence against her palms like two miniature suns crackling there on earth. It dripped from her fingers like fiery rain, disappearing before it could hit the wooden stage. The crowd let out a collective gasp that broke into a flurry of voices as the cameras went off with countless flashes of lights that nearly blinded her.
Caris blinked spots out of her eyes, starfire cradled in both hands, facing a road she could not escape. “My name is Caris Rourke, and I say, Ashion is not for my sister to take.”
Three
SOREN
The House of Sa’Liandel’s ancestral estate in Calhames wasn’t anything like the Imperial palace, but it was home now for Vanya and Raiah. Soren hadn’t set foot in it and wasn’t sure he ever would after everything that had happened. The street leading to the estate was closed off to through traffic with a sentinel-class automaton standing guard at either end. He hadn’t tried his luck to get past thepraetorialegionnaires, uncertain of his welcome.
Solaria’s government was reeling in the wake of what had occurred, but at least the ruling House had survived. He couldn’t regret that, though the silence from Vanya was as devastating to Soren as he assumed the destruction of the Imperial palace and loss of House members was to the people of Solaria.
Soren licked his lips as he carefully made his way through the ashes of the palace. Of everything that had burned, some items of importance had survived by being located elsewhere. The throne room was gone, but there was still a throne in the Senate building for the emperor’s use. A crown had been lost, but the Imperial jewelers had others on hand, kept secured in a building located off the palace grounds.
Somevezirsof Houses had survived while others had been reduced to ownership claimed by outlier families within the bloodlines to take up core responsibilities. Soren read the broadsheet every morning, heard the gossip on the streets as he drove between the unmanned resupply station he was staying at and the remnants of the palace. The Houses were going through an internal restructure, and he wondered about what that meant for Solaria.
No other wardens had answered the request for aid that night, recalled by the governor in the wake of what had transpired on the Warden’s Island. Soren should, by all rights, be heading to Glencoe, but he remained in Calhames, tending to a broken border and his own broken heart.
The sun beat down on the ravaged remains of the palace, ash being displaced with almost every step he took. His brass goggles kept it from his eyes, the press of them warm against his skin in the sunlight. The headache from his concussion no longer lingered, dealt with by a magician skilled in healing the morning after the palace burned. They’d tended to his wounds, but he hadn’t been around for follow-up care.
Some places the starfire had burned hot enough to slag the dirt and stone, turning sections into dark glass. The flagstones of the forecourt were streaked with such interruptions. The foundations of where the palace had once stood were outlined in scorch marks.
Some of the detached buildings still stood: the garage, the greenhouses, the bathhouse, and the star temple. The garden areas closest to the palace had burned to nothing, creating a demarcation between blooming desert bushes and ash. As Soren crossed that line on his way to the star temple, his steps kicked up a few rose petals that had drifted into the ash.
Praetorialegionnaires, peacekeepers, government inspectors, and engineers were scattered over the property as they all sought to secure the Imperial grounds. Soren had cleared the area days ago for safety purposes, finding no traces of spores in what was left behind. Not that he thought he would. Fire was cleansing, and starfire burned the hottest.
While engineers and others began the long but critical process of rebuilding, Soren’s duty was to tend to the border he’d failed at securing. The high priestess of the Star Order in Calhames hadn’t been present when Alida betrayed her country and the House she’d sworn to serve. The Blades and House of Kimathi supporters had murdered everyone within the star temple. Those bodies had long since been sent to a crematorium. Their names would be etched into the memory walls, as was tradition.
Soren wondered if all the names found below in the crypt would be transferred to marble on a memory wall somewhere else. The remaining bodies in the crypt would have to be excavated and cremated. Soren could not leave Calhames until he’d seen to that duty—a duty he should have handled months ago, years ago, when he’d first learned of the crypt. What had happened was as much his failure as it was Joelle’s machinations. If he hadn’t asked the governor to stay the sanctions, if he hadn’t held off on confronting the Houses about the breaking of the Poison Accords, if he hadn’t succumbed to Vanya’s desires—if, if,if.
What was burned was ash, and he could not change that.
Thepraetorialegionnaires guarding the entrance to the star temple nodded gravely at him, allowing him to pass without a word. Once inside, Soren removed his goggles, the stinging ash not present in that sacred space.
He was surprised to see Taisiya was.
“Valide,” Soren said, feet rooted to the floor as he stared at where she sat in one of the pews mere feet from the winched open entrance to the crypt. “What are you doing here?”
Taisiya didn’t turn away from her perusal of the Dawn Star’s statue with its eternal flame, but she did lift a hand to wave him forward. “Come sit with me. I was told I could find you here on the palace grounds.”
Soren got himself moving, walking down the aisle to her. Star priests worked on record books at the altar whilepraetorialegionnaires kept their attention on Taisiya, pistols and wands close at hand. Soren took a seat in the pew ahead of hers, bending a knee and twisting his torso so he could look over the back of it at her.
