“Not you,” he said quietly, grabbing the rocky bank so he could face the Empress Mother without being pushed downstream. “Why areyoudoing this?”
He pointed at the Qilin, who was still doubled over on the ground at her feet. “That’s your son who’s suffering. He told me how much he respected you, what a good mother you’d been to him. Just hearing him talk about you was enough to make me jealous, which is why I can’t understand what you’re thinking now.” He looked around at the destruction. “What kind of mother does this to her child?”
“A fine question, coming from a Heartstriker,” she snarled back. “But I do not do this as a mother. I do this as an empress.”
She stabbed her cane into the dirt and reached down to place a gnarled hand on the Qilin’s back. “My son is the heart of our power. I raised him to be incorruptible, to always put duty first, as I did. And in almost every way, he was perfect, but he had a secret weakness. By the time I realized what it was, your sister had already ruined him.”
“Ruined him how?” Julius demanded. “Love made himhappy.That’s when his luck is greatest, isn’t it?”
“Why do you think I tolerated it for so long?” she growled. “Do you know how relieved I was when Bethesda took her away? I thought here, at last, was my chance to get my son back, to pry her hooked claws out of him. But I did not yet understand the extent of her crimes. When I heard the Heartstriker had laid a new clutch within a year of the last, all became clear.”
Chelsie went still. “You knew?”
The empress sneered. “I’m not stupid. Even the Broodmare can’t manage two clutches in two years, not to mention she hadn’t been pregnant when she’d left China. By the time I heard, though, your ill-gotten spawn were already a year hatched. Even if my worst fears were true, everything was already lost, so I buried my worries and pressed on. I had an emperor to console and lands to manage, and there was no proof. I didn’t think of you again until the seer called me.”
“Seer?” A cold lump formed in Julius’s throat. “What seer?”
The old dragoness gave him a pitying look. “Which do you think?”
There was no question. Even if Julius had been willing to delude himself into thinking she was talking about the Black Reach, the little girl in the empress’s arms made it impossible. There was only one egg that child could have hatched from, and Bob had taken it. Right before the Golden Emperor had landed on their heads.
“Why?” he said, his voice cracking. “Why did he betray us?”
The empress shrugged. “I didn’t bother to ask. All I cared about, all I haveevercared about, is my empire. Really, though, Brohomir’s treason just confirmed what I’d always known in my heart: that your sister is a grasping snake who cares nothing for others. She already broke my son once with her selfishness, and that’s before we knew the depths of her sin.” She looked away with a sneer. “It’s only fitting she die for it here.”
Julius couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You think Chelsiewantedthis?”
“I don’t care about what she wanted,” the empress snapped. “I care about what she did. She broke my son and destroyed my clan!”
“If that’s what you think, why are you finishing the job?” he yelled back, pointing at the Qilin. “Maybe he is the last Golden Emperor, but your son was fine until you got here.Youdid this to him.Why?”
“Because he was already broken!” she roared, red eyes flashing. “No matter what I did, no matter how I tried, henevergot over her! He should have been the strongest Qilin ever born. Fortune should have rained on us from the heavens, and yet we have no more than we got under his father. No new conquests, no new lands,nothing. For six centuries, the Golden Empire has been stagnant, and then he suddenly announces his intention to conquer Heartstriker?”
She shook her head. “I knew. Even before the seer removed all doubt, Iknewthe end was upon us. I knew that he would break, so I took it upon myself to make sure it happened in a place where it would only hurt our enemies.”
By the time she finished, Julius could only stare in horrified awe. “That’s why,” he whispered, looking up at the evening sky through the jagged circle of the broken pavement. “I thought you were just being callous, but now I understand. You broke the news to him in the worst wayon purpose.You used him as aweapon.”
The Empress Mother said nothing, but she didn’t have to. The evidence was all around them. They were temporarily safe since there was nothing directly over their heads left to fall, but the Qilin’s bad luck was still raging through the city. Julius could actually feel the dragon magic like hungry, malevolent teeth on his skin. It had no target, no purpose. It was just fury blindly lashing out, and everywhere it struck, disaster followed.
All over the city, more Skyways were crumbling, filling the air with the sound of cracking stone. Helicopters fell out of the sky as he watched, their engines just stopping as the emperor’s bad luck crashed into them. With every second that ticked by, the noise of crashes and collapse and disaster grew louder and louder and louder, until the whole city was consumed. Already, the adjacent Skyways down the river were starting to tilt as everything that could go wrong did. If this went on much longer, the whole DFZ would collapse, and as much as Julius hated Algonquin, he couldn’t let that happen. Not the city where he’d met Marci, and not to Xian.
“I know that look,” Chelsie said quietly, moving closer to him in the water. “You’ve got a plan.”
Julius nodded, glancing at Fredrick, who was grimly holding onto the bank beside them. “Can you get us up there?”
He looked pointedly at the triangular shelter beneath the fallen road where the Empress Mother was standing above the collapsed Qilin with the baby dragon in her arms, and Fredrick scowled.
“I can try,” he whispered back, glancing down at his Fang. “But this thing only works on Heartstrikers, so I’m not sure—”
“It’ll work,” Chelsie said confidently. “She’s your sister, Fredrick. That makes her one of us.”
He didn’t look convinced. “But—”
“If you’re going to try, do it now,” Julius said, glancing nervously down at the water. “Because I don’t think this is going to be a safe zone much longer.”
It hadn’t seemed important during all the other disasters, but since they’d been in it, the river had dropped several feet. Julius wasn’t sure if that was due to the Qilin or because of the other magical weirdness going on in the DFZ, but it was getting worse by the second. Just in the time he’d been talking to the Empress Mother, the water by the bank had sunk from his chest to below his waist, and he couldn’t imagine it was due to anything good.
“Go,” he whispered, grabbing on to Fredrick. “Now.”
