“—theextentof the coin Aelius’s Quarter must have received over the years!”
“The roads in Cassandane’s could use some work.”
“I—” she sagged when the volley of questions continued.Ruin’s teeth.
Hands gripped her shoulders and drew her back against a warm chest. “That’ll be a matter for Head Tetrarch Cassandane,” a beautiful, dulcet voice pronounced. Kadra’s thumbs found the back of her neck and drew a long, tender stroke down. She nearly melted, her heart squeezing hard with love and exhaustion.
A hand pulled her from Kadra’s grasp. He let go, gaze as hot as a knife on her cheek.Rest, those black eyes ordered,I’ll contain them.
Faintly heartsick, she allowed Anek to drag her toward the Petitor’s Entrance, feeling rather like the world had liquefied into an ocean. It tipped when they wrangled her onto her mare, Caelum.
“I haven’t spent any time with him in weeks,” she mumbled.
“Wrath and Ruin, I don’t need that picture in my head. And that’s with my having read every volume ofThe Alternate Histories of the Sidran Tower Girl.” Anek patted Sarai’s shoulder when she groaned. “Nicely played. I wondered why you agreed to this, but it was a masterstroke.”
She slumped into Caelum’s mane. “You think it worked?”
“Oh, yes.” Anek’s incisive gaze swept the crowd. “Cease thinking and rest. You’ve had quite an ordeal.”
They sent the mare off with a slap on the rump. By the time she reached Aoran Tower, she was practically insensate. But Verentia’s pronouncement haunted her when she unlocked the gate into Kadra’s home, when she nearly drowned in the bath while falling asleep as she sloughed off travel dust, and when she finally trudged upstairs to his bed and collapsed into a sea of black and gold sheets.
Law and order fell by your hand. Everyone now knows that they can do the same.
“When the land burns, history will ask why. It’ll wonder how we missed the signs that flare rune-bright in hindsight. It’ll sigh that we fell like the malleable, ambivalent creatures the Elsar know us to be, without any cognizance that war’s bitter tide rose from a spring of our making.
Beneath Ur Dinyé’s placid surface after the monarchy’s fall, roil a thousand currents that any enterprising student of history can steer into war.
The powerful, secretive Elsarian Order seeking to impose religious governance. The Guilds’ long-held monopoly of northern resources against the economic reform posited by Tetrarchy. The elite wealthy against us all. Stormfall crowning our skies.
A historian’s task then rises above an arbiter of fact to an observer of pain. To examine these conflicts for betterment, detriment, or stagnation. Learn how they’ve been woven into each other. Find their weavers and those threads that, if strengthened in one fight, can ruin another.
Watch for symptoms of war. If the public is vigilant, then the public cannot be fooled.”
—excerpt from a lecture by Magus Telmar
Winter mornings drained Edessa of color, painting the citadel that housed the Academiae with charcoal and silver and draping the Tower Gates in gossamer shadows. For once, the city seemed as it was: an insular spiderweb of secrets that dictated life in Ur Dinyé. Home, and yet a battlefield.
Frost limned Sarai’s cloak and trailed the length of her braid. The first rays of sun broke over the Academiae’s presently bauble-laced tree boughs, its artfully trimmed gardens hidden by a crisp carpet of snow. Just off the cobblestone path, a group of tall, blond, water magi from the distant land of Usten sat in bewilderingly thin leather tunics and trousers, murmuring in melodic accents as they shaped ice into a frozen flight of birds. The Academiae spared no expense for its winter graduation, and despite Kadra’s opinions to the contrary, Cassandane insisted that everything proceed as it always had.
“We’ve much to prove.” The Head Tetrarch had looked haggard at their last meeting before the Hearing, crimson robes echoing the strained blood vessels in her eyes. “We can’t give the public any reason to believe that we’ll upend their lives more than we already have. People don’t care that you did it to protect them, Sarai. They only remember that it made them feel scared.”
The irony. Kadra’s deviation from established law had ruined Edessa’s tyrants. Now came the bitter task of holding on to power via the same system that had been proven not to work, all because folk liked the idea of change more than they liked its implementation. The people she sought to protect had become those she had to outmaneuver.
Ahead, an ornate metal steeple pierced the bruised dawn sky like a sword thrust through flame. The Academaie’s marble student chapel rang with a lusty chorus of song and prayer for glorious careers, coin a plenty, and a blessed beginning to a new era in the graduates’ lives.
The cavern of dead dreams she barely visited these days let out a sad thrum. If the Fall hadn’t happened five years ago, she would have been among those gleeful graduates last winter, linking arms with friends, reminiscing of sneaking back into their dormitories after a night in the city. She would be… young. The thought was as foreign to her as the Elsarian chapel was to Usten’s water magi, who were casting flabbergasted glances at the uproarious singing.
She silently added her voice to the mix. After all, the gods were real, even if she found them in other places. Her soft exhale drew a shroud over a past that had not been, and she walked on toward what was.
She nearly ran into an agromagus after two steps.
“Petitor Sarai, I wrote to you last week and have heard nothing.” The violet-robed man’s chest swelled at this ignominy. “Bad enough that the north is rioting, but now, word abounds of this beetle plague they’ve got. Should we be concerned?”
Not this again. She sighed. “I know as much as you do. The coalition of northern Praetors have not shared the type of beetle causing the damage or the extent of the injury to their cities, so my lack of response was no insult. I cannot share what I don’t have.”
The agromagus puffed his chest out further, bringing his crest pin of a desert ironwood—Ur Dinyé’s national tree—to prominence. “Northerners visit Edessa daily,” he spat as though the poorer half of the land were beetles themselves. “Having them inspected prior to entry is fine and well, but what if the vigiles miss something? The south holds most of Ur Dinyé’s viable farmland! We riskfamine. As a northerner, you may not understand—”
“I do,” she said with more ice than the eavesdropping magi from Usten were sculpting with. “As I have repeatedly told your colleagues, the coalition of northern Praetors has informed us that these beetles swarm cities. Unlike the north, the south lacks mountainous terrain to veil a swarm’s arrival. The magi patrolling our city walls will raze them long before they’re a threat.”
