A smirk slid back on his face, derision swallowing the fierce glint that had hinted at humanity. “Hierarchy is all that keeps us in order. Make the Magus Supreme cease pressuring the Guilds. Let them feel like they’re in control again. They’re so amenable when well-fed.”
While half the land goes hungry. “I’mnotKadra’s errand girl.”
“But you’re nothing else either. And you’re without allies.” He drew away in a swirl of blue and green, breath fogging from parted lips as though he were smoking a roll of blazeleaf. “Don’t be stubborn. We both want what’s best for the country.”
“But I won’t make the country pay for what I want.”
He spoke over his shoulder. “Then, you’ll pay for what the country wants.”
The morning breeze stung her half-frozen cheeks. Yards away, the water magi’s ice sculpture had melted to resemble a gnarled, frozen hand as the group split their gazes between her and Harion’s departing figure, evidently waiting for her to deliver a rejoinder.
But he’s right. Months of belittlement before yesterday’s Hearing had driven that truth in so deep she wondered that she wasn’t bleeding. It was one thing to rid the land of evil politicians. But how did one reckon with the bigoted, swathes of the population who’d allowed them to amass power and sought to carry on Aelius’s mantle? There were too many to kill or imprison, and both decisions would make martyrs of them like it had with Aelius. But leaving them alone forced those rebuilding the country to contend with their divisive cruelty.
No good answers. She offered her audience a weak grin. “Please tell me that Usten’s politics are simpler.”
The leather-clad magi broke into guffaws, awkwardness dissipating like hoarfrost. “We are a land of glaciers with a monarchy,” a statuesque woman explained in accented common tongue, rolling herr’s like the warble of glass over marble. “You will only find simplicity in ice, and even that requires”—she gestured at their melting sculpture with wry mirth—“maintenance.”
Smile broadening, Sarai conversed with the group through their resurrection of the desert ironwood and as they engraved the sculpture’s base with runes for it to last through the night’s graduation ceremony. When students poured from the chapel like spilt grain to gape at seeing water magi in action, she made her farewells and slipped into the now-barren hall of the gods.
No Cleric waited in the narthex to startle at her visit. She knelt before the steps marking the start of the chancel and loosed a sigh that sapped her strength.
Sixteen gods examined her from the altar, the light filtering in through the chapel’s high windows lending their painted eyes an uncanny brilliance. The ten-foot-high fresco spanned the altar’s width. Six High—the Elsarian Order had once again relegated Wrath’s status to Ambiguous—seven Dark, and three Ambiguous gods faced off against each other baring weapons—and in Wrath’s case, fangs—with otherworldly enmity.
Sarai hid a laugh at the artist’s depiction of Death as an old man wielding a scythe. “Well, they certainly got you wrong.” Her lips trembled, the strain of the past few months yearning to free itself in a flood. She bowed until her head met the cool stone steps and didn’t allow a single tear past.
Political turmoil was a foolish thing to resent. She had power now. Gone were the days where she’d had to watch the world go mad and been left with little recourse. But she fought every day for every inch of public approval. The knowledge that other battles lay ahead tasted more like poison than hope.
Was I wrong? Would the land be in such turmoil if I’d taken Aelius to trial and watched him wriggle his way out?
Perhaps this was futile. The gods hadn’t spoken to her since the Unraveling. They might never do so again. But she couldn’t stop talking to them now that she knew they were listening.
I shouldn’t be lonely, should I?She stared at Lady Wisdom’s luminous features, at the goddess holding her sword aloft with utter surety that her path was the right one. Sarai couldn’t relate anymore. Nothing felt certain in Edessa. Her every step seemed to be on shaky ground, and the fight felt empty.I shouldn’t complain. You’ve given me more than I dared imagine. She let out a brittle scoff against the porphyry steps up the chancel.Temperance’s heel, I sound like a child. It isn’t as though I’m the only one who’s overwhelmed.
Kadra had always worked himself to the bone, but he’d begun pushing himself to inhuman heights after the Unraveling. The three Tetrarchs shared Aelius’s Quarter’s responsibilities while the country chose a successor, so she barely saw him outside of adjudication. He was either swamped at his vigile station or curbing stormfall, in addition to his new duties as the Headmaster to the Academiae. He hadn’t been home in a week, and she doubted she’d get a moment with him at the graduation tonight when the nation wanted his ear.
She railed against the ache building behind her nose and eyes. “He has more to do than see to me,” she whispered against the steps. “I shouldn’t impose.”
The chapel’s quiet enveloped her, undemanding and all-seeing. As stalwart as the Tetrarch who ruled her heart. Stern and intensely guarded in public, Kadra shed that formality within Aoran Tower, and she had bloomed in the warmth of a man as deeply tender as he was judicially vicious. Yet, he wasn’t without his secrets. Buried within the ice and lightning that comprised him was a barrier so impenetrable that she had stopped short when she’d first come up against it.
“When were you born?” she’d asked on the night of her nineteenth birthday, the eighteenth day of the Month of Harvest. His vigiles had just thrown her a raucous celebration—her very first—and she’d been effervescent.
Something undefinable had crossed his face before he’d distracted her with a rough kiss that had quickly turned into more. He’d never answered.
Her lashes battered against the steps as she sucked in a steadying breath, recalling the deft way he’d avoided other queries over the past several months.This shouldn’t sting.His secrets were his own, and she had no right to demand them when she knew, down to her soul, that he would never betray her. But that didn’t stop her from wondering,fearinghis reasons for keeping them from her. Especially, now that he was—
“The Codices also call Lady Truth the goddess of despair.” A voice pronounced at her shoulder.
She started so badly she nearly broke her nose on the steps. Scrambling upright, she fixed the newcomer with a hard stare.
A familiar man in ocean-blue robes smiled—at least, what she could see of his face did. Inquisitor Silvus’s customary veil began below his nose and ran under his wavy mass of black hair to knot at his nape. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Discomfited, she thrust her hands in her pockets. “What brings an Inquisitor to the Academiae?”
“I conducted today’s service.” He walked up the chancel and closed the volume of the Codices on the pulpit. “It’s customary for us to impart wisdom to the graduates.”
She could only imagine what sort of wisdom he’d been imparting. Cassandane’s exhausted face came to mind. Strain had made a new woman of the Head Tetrarch after months of protests that she wasn’t fit to lead the country on account of her sex. An easily reinforced opinion when the dominant religion’s greatest villain was female and canonically had a penchant for red robes.
Her hands fisted. “Interesting. Good day, Inquisitor—”
