“It is necessary.”
Unlike Taisiya, Chu Hua didn’t argue his intent beyond the initial protest. “I will inform the southern command of your orders and plan for your arrival.”
“I hope to not be the only one fighting with starfire, so plan for that as well.”
“Of course. Give me an hour.”
She was polite enough to let him end the call first, even though he knew he’d given her a headache-worthy task to coordinate his presence in the poison fields against the revenant horde. But she was the best general he had, and he trusted her to protect him and the Imperial throne while he did his best to protect Solaria, his home and his heart.
“Will this be your road, then?” Taisiya asked quietly.
He looked at her, knowing that if he didn’t put his all into this fight, they wouldn’t have a country at the end of it. If he had to burn down cities to keep the walking dead at bay and bring Soren home, then so be it. “There is no other.”
Vanya was, it turned out, ever his mother’s son.
Four
JOELLE
Bellingham’s warning sirens jerked Joelle out of a deep sleep, hands flailing beneath the thin sheet she slept with during the late-summer heat at the end of Tenth Month. Almost immediately, her door was thrown open by one of her handmaidens, the young woman switching on the gas lamp in the room, bathing them both in burning light.
“What is going on?” Joelle rasped, still struggling to shake off the dregs of sleep.
“I don’t know,vezir,” her handmaiden said gravely.
“Is it revenants?”
As soon as the words left her mouth, a distant explosion echoed through the air, loud enough to hear even through the walls of her House’s estate. Joelle flinched with her entire body. “Have our defenses been pushed back so far? How did that happen?”
Her handmaiden’s lips pressed into a thin line as she helped Joelle out of bed. “I do not know.”
Another handmaiden hurried in, the pair of them helping Joelle into the first set of robes they could get their hands on in the closet. She didn’t bother with any jewelry, only her cane, gripping it tightly as she left the bedroom.
Those servants who lived within the estate were awake, though no one had turned on the gas lamp lights throughout the rest of the building. They were all well aware of the directive to stay dark at night whenever possible so as to not mark them a target while the Legion crept ever closer beyond their walls. Joelle’s forces had lost ground before the Legion ever since Eimarille had refused to send more soldiers and war machines to thevasilyetafter their last telephone call.
The captain of the estate’s guard found her and Karima in a ground-floor receiving room, her daughter frantic but hiding it better than Joelle thought she would. In the flickering light from a lantern that cast a limited glow, the captain saluted sharply, clutching a televox in one hand. The clarion crystals on the device were dark.
“Vezir, the airfield is on fire, and the western city gate was damaged. The wall in that section is compromised,” Captain Reva said.
Joelle stiffened, forcing back the fear those words brought. “How is the emperor’s Legion so close already?”
“It wasn’t their forces who attacked—it was our own.”
Karima gasped, eyes wide and glittering in the gas lamp light. “How?”
“Rionetkas,” Joelle hissed out, gripping her cane with both hands to hide how they shook. “How bad is the damage?”
“The gate is gone completely, taken out by an airship’s bombing run. The outer wall no longer stands whole,” Captain Reva said.
Which meant revenants would be able to gain access to Bellingham, bringing with them poison and spores, tainting the city her House had held since the Age of Separation. “Close off the inner walls. Let no one pass between the gates, especially not anyone in the outer ring. Find engineers to deal with the hole in the outer wallimmediately, and I want magicians searching forrionetkas. They can start with the soldiers who so damnably betrayed their duty.”
Captain Reva drew in a breath. “Closing the gates will cut off our forces and?—”
“My concern is the city and keeping revenantsout,” Joelle said sharply. “Relay my orders to the commanders in the field.”
Captain Reva pressed her lips into a thin line and saluted. “Right away,vezir.”
She left, but Joelle had little hope the defenses she wanted put into place would save her House.
