Eventually, Payton was given a glass of whiskey from Terilyn, handed off to a guard, and hopefully escorted home and not someplace where his body might turn up in a gutter.
Then it was just Melvin and Eimarille and the lies he lived that he hoped were enough to save him. Sabine had, in the end, saved the chains around her, as well as keeping secret Melvin’s position as the Marshal. Her own magic had carved out her memories, so even if Eimarille had imprisoned her, there would be nothing left to take. Merely a husk of flesh that was little more than a revenant, and Eimarille had seen her be not even that in the end.
There in that room, he silently prayed that Sabine danced amongst the stars.
Eimarille studied Melvin with keen eyes. “This war makes strange bedfellows of those who should know better.”
Somehow, he unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “So it seems.”
“Your bloodline will hold only good favor for allowing my Blade to flush out traitors to the crown.”
At that, he sketched another bow, all the years of his boyhood learning the dance of manners guiding him when he only wanted to hide. “The Khaur bloodline only ever wishes to aid the war effort and support your rule. We are at your command.”
“Indeed.”
Melvin straightened, forcing himself to meet Eimarille’s gaze, wondering if he’d soon feel the sharp edge of a knife slide into his back. She studied him with gray-blue eyes that gave nothing away, but in the end, she let him keep his life.
Eimarille headed for the door. “I believe it is time we said our farewell to the guests. You have been an excellent host, Mr. Khaur.”
Melvin turned to follow her out, doing his best to pretend he wasn’t lightheaded at escaping death in that room. Still, her actions were a reminder of the damage done to the Clockwork Brigade, and he knew his family’s future faced a ticking clock.
After Eimarille and the guests departed, after the remnants of Sabine’s life had been swept up into a vase as a makeshift urn to be dealt with in the morning, after silence settled like mourners at a memory wall, Melvin and Ezra found themselves alone in their bedroom. They undressed in silence, sliding beneath the covers and holding each other close. Melvin never once let go of his clarion crystal–tipped wand, for all the good it would do if a Blade slipped through the shadows.
In the dark, with the memory of Sabine’s death playing through his mind, Melvin was never more cognizant of what was at stake than in that moment when war came knocking at his door. For war was never famine; it was always feast. It ate the lives of people in its path, swallowed their hope, and burned their freedom to ash. War was a glutton never satisfied, bones of the conquered churning beneath the boots of an army that kept driving forward.
War had teeth, and it would always bite.
Four
PORTIA
When the door to her locked cell pushed open, Baroness Portia Dhemlan couldn’t bring herself to rise to her feet from the narrow bed she lay in. The barracks housing herself and other high-profile prisoners were located in the center of the POW camp. Weapons from the soldiers and automatons that guarded the camp against revenants had gone off all night, keeping her awake.
“Get up. You’re wanted in the city.”
She tried not to flinch at that order. Being summoned like this had never gone well in the past—the last time had seen her put on a steam train at the rail station in Amari. It had taken her and Emmitt west, out of reach of anyone who might think to try to save them from an occupied city.
Portia carefully sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. The thin mattress and patched blanket weren’t enough to ward off the morning chill, but it was spring, she thought, and the floor wasn’t as icy as it had been even a few weeks ago.
Portia slipped her feet into the thin-soled shoes allotted to each prisoner in the camp once they were processed through the gates. The drab gray pants and loose long-sleeved shirt matched the clothes worn by other prisoners. Being nobility didn’t mean anything there in that hellish place. Her rank as a baroness only afforded herself and her husband separate tiny rooms in the barracks with other high-profile prisoners when everyone else in their same predicament lived in rows of tents, at the mercy of the elements.
The soldier snapped a pair of shackles around her wrists once she stood. The metal dug against her wristbones, but she knew better than to protest. Portia followed her jailer out of the cell, the heavy metal door clanging shut behind her. She looked past the soldier, heart skipping a beat at the sight of her husband as Emmitt came out of a cell at the other end of the hallway.
They locked eyes, and Portia bit her lip, swallowing the urge to call out to him. It had been weeks since she last saw him, and she ached to hold him and be held in return. Portia blinked back tears and drew in a shaky breath, refusing to cry before their jailers.
Emmitt and his guard joined them at the landing. His shackled hands twitched toward her before he fisted them and pressed them close to his stomach. The hollows in his cheeks seemed worse, though the cough he’d had the last time they saw each other seemed to have gone away. Portia had begged for a healer for him, and she hadn’t known if one had been granted to see him. Looking at Emmitt now, one must have, for all the good it had done.
“Portia,” Emmitt murmured right before he was prodded down the stairs.
She squared her shoulders, following him down, aware of the soldiers at their back, waiting for a shove that never came. She and Emmitt were spared the violence most other prisoners had to live through in the rest of the camp, though Portia wasn’t grateful for that reprieve at all. It singled them out, and the reason for that had escaped Amari and was rallying the Ashion army if the rumors from other prisoners were true.
But oh, how she missed her daughter. Knowing that Caris was hopefully still alive did nothing to ease Portia’s worry. Caris was her daughter and always would be, no matter the name she now used. She might have been born a Rourke, but she would always be a Dhemlan in Portia’s heart.
Their transportation from the POW camp to Istal was in a motor carriage whose engine needed an oil change if the grinding sound of the pistons was anything to go by. Portia ignored the sound on the fast drive toward the city, leaning hard against Emmitt on the back seat, taking what comfort she could from his presence. He didn’t smell like the cologne he used to wear, but the press of his lips to her temple was achingly familiar.
The driver bypassed the main entry line through the city gates for the one used by the military. Whatever papers he brandished got them waved through to a bustling street. Portia stared at the passing buildings and the people who went about their business as if a war wasn’t being fought and they didn’t have the dead clawing at their walls every day.
Revenants were a scourge Daijal was no longer safe from. Portia had read the broadsheets when they’d been imprisoned in Amari. She knew the atrocity Queen Eimarille Rourke had perpetuated against the wardens, damning her country to the walking dead and poison fields that would never be cleansed. Eimarille had done it in the name of progress, a fitting reason for the Age they were in. But all progress came with a price, and Portia wondered if Eimarille would damn all of Maricol for a future not everyone believed in.
