“Replacing the crystals will help with that. The shapes are correct. Whoever cut them just cut wrong across the crystal rod they used. The crystal didn’t quite like that.”
“Are the ones you have from E’ridia?”
Caris nodded, never taking her eyes off her work. “We received them in a shipment during winter. Urova has blocked all clarion crystal trade with Ashion since the start of the war.”
“How is the war effort going?”
They could speak freely there in her small laboratory, without Nathaniel to overhear what he shouldn’t. Caris didn’t immediately pick up the conversation, and Blaine patiently waited for her to find her voice.
“Badly now, I think,” she admitted softly. “We’re doing the best we can, but I don’t think it will be enough, despite the wardens helping. Daijal has war automatons they stole from Solaria, but that’s not enough for the Imperial emperor to give us aid. Even with the new alchemy bombs the wardens have cooked up, it’s not enough to keep the amount of revenants at bay. Daijal is taking the fallen in skirmishes off the battlefield and sending them through their death-defying machines. And E’ridia?—”
She broke off with a sigh. When she didn’t immediately continue, Blaine picked up where she’d left off. “E’ridia is reluctant to get involved.”
Caris’ mouth twisted, eyes on the clarion crystal she was extracting from his mechanical prosthetic with thin tweezers. “I gave E’ridia permission to use our airspace to rescue you. I wanted you back, that was never in question, but I thought the situation would be enough to get theComhairle nan Cinnidheanto see the threat Eimarille represents. My ambassadors tell me nothing comes of their requests to your ruling body.”
Blaine knew thecinn-chinnidhwho made up theComhairle nan Cinnidheanwere focused on quietly rooting outrionetkasfrom the government. Even with the wardens having found a way to push aside the compulsion to giverionetkasback their own minds, they couldn’t remove the intricate spell completely without risking the destruction of the clockwork metal hearts. It meant his country’s Seneschal could no longer hold that office, and an election for the clans to choose a new one had been handled carefully over winter.
While everyone believedrionetkaswere created by Daijal to infiltrate the political spheres of foreign countries, they didn’t have any proof. Without proof, Eimarille would deny to her last breath that she had anything to do with the destruction of so many lives and the interference of a sovereign nation’s right to rule.
“Taking the starfire throne would go a long way toward breaking Eimarille’s propaganda,” Blaine said.
“It wouldn’t stop the war.”
“Wouldn’t it?”
Caris set her tools down with a sigh, lifting her gaze from Blaine’s mechanical prosthetic. “Amari is occupied by Daijal. Eimarille hasn’t been to that city since last year, and we don’t know why. But trying to take the capital would decimate the army that we have, and we don’t have allies to fall back on. Sitting on the starfire throne to put out the North Star’s decree won’t end what she started.”
“Then perhaps it is the North Star keeping it safe.”
He’d never seen Ashion’s guiding star; the Dusk Star had been the one to help him flee the Inferno and the ravages that coup had produced. But Aaralyn was the star god that Ashion prayed to, and if anyone would have a say in who claimed the starfire throne, he rather thought it would be the North Star. Though it wasn’t only Caris and Eimarille who had the right to it these days.
“Have you spoken to Alasandair yet?” Blaine asked.
Caris picked up the rod of clarion crystal and the cutting tool resting near her elbow, not meeting his gaze. “Meleri doesn’t think it would be a good idea to reach out to him.”
“But do you want to?”
“I don’t know him, the same way I don’t know Eimarille. I was a Dhemlan before I was a Rourke and had no siblings until recently, and then in name only. Claiming a bloodline doesn’t make a family.”
She sounded frustrated, as if she’d had this argument before, though Blaine’s intention wasn’t to argue. He rested the stump of his left arm on the worktable and leaned forward. “Meleri believes him to be a risk to your right to rule.”
“She believes much is a risk to my right to rule, including the decisions I make.”
The bitterness he could hear was a keen identifier of her state of mind, something anyone could pick up on. For all that Meleri had taught her spywork over the years in the Clockwork Brigade, Caris’ political savviness when it came to court and keeping one’s opinion veiled was not the best.
He could understand, too, Meleri’s desire to keep the siblings apart. If Blaine hadn’t seen for his own eyes the shocking similarities in looks between the warden who went by Soren and Caris, he never would have known. But he’d seen the same gray eyes Caris had in the warden’s face, the same dark hair, and the same missing road beneath their feet.
Soren had denied being a Rourke when he’d met with Blaine, Honovi, and the wardens’ governor that day in Glencoe. But Delani had seen what he had, and she’d moved to keep Soren’s identity a secret going forward for as long as possible. Because if Sorenwasa Rourke, then the possibility he could cast starfire was high, no matter his denials, and that meant the wardens had broken the Poison Accords of their own volition in the past. They were meant to be neutral, and the only way to truly be was to never take those whose names were written in the royal genealogies as tithes.
The wardens didn’t know which of their governors had made that decision, as Soren’s records had been destroyed—along with so many others—during the attack on the Warden’s Island. Unlike with Caris, Blaine couldn’t stand witness for the prince, if he ever even reclaimed that title. Soren, Blaine had come to learn, was very much a warden, and he didn’t know how the nobility would react to Ophelia’s only son having been remade through alchemy into someone who spent more time outside city walls in the poison fields than anywhere else.
“Perhaps he is, or perhaps he can be an ally,” Blaine said.
Caris didn’t look away from the clarion crystal as she started cutting the rod. The deep violet color was different from the aquamarine ones currently powering his mechanical prosthetic. “And if he wanted the throne? He could claim it, you know. He is older than I am.”
By five years, if Blaine recalled correctly. He wondered if Soren remembered how he had escaped the Inferno, if there had been someone to carry him out of that city the way Blaine had with Caris. “He hasn’t claimed anything.”
Caris’ mouth twisted as she delicately changed the cutting angle on the clarion crystal, hands moving with a deftness Blaine missed. “He could, and what then?”
