What do you see?she wanted to plead.Why won’t you tell me?
Instead, she followed Gaius and the much-dwindled group of spectators down the street and into the station, catching the first burst of rain before the skies sent down a deluge.
For all its wanton destruction, there was something dazzling about stormfall. In the lightning dancing between the clouds, in the hums and roars of thunder. In how it brought a city to absolute quiet and ordered itto catch its breath. Yet, the new strain on Kadra’s face said that he saw too deeply into its workings now.
Feeling a headache coming, she strode down the hallway toward his office and collapsed into her chair, raising her head in surprise when Gaius followed her in.
“You received this.” Gaius thumbed through one of the stacks of correspondence he brought Kadra daily and pulled out a ragged bit of vellum, rolled into a semblance of a scroll.
Well, shit.Only the coldest parts of the north wrote on vellum instead of parchment, so the ink would last the long journey south. She’d written several such letters to Cisuré what felt like an eternity ago.
Sarai didn’t have to break the crude seal to know the sender. She quashed the urge to toss it out of the window. Chieftain Marus wasn’t one to ask for help, especially from her. Her nerves flared with adrenaline as she unrolled the square. Her eyebrows rose.Two lines.
Arsamea is in need of aid. Do your duty.
Gaius fidgeted. “I take it you aren’t fond of your hometown.”
“No,” she said slowly. “The only home I’ve found is here.”And I don’t know how to protect it.
Like his Tetrarch, Gaius didn’t pry further. “You and the Magus Supreme look like you’re on the edge of collapse.” He peered past the office’s floor-to-ceiling window to wince at the storm slickening the roads to shallow rivers. “I saw him adjust his back several times today. Has he injured it?”
She frowned. “Not that I know of, but on the gods, he hasn’t so much as slept the past week.”
“He’ll turn the land into a fortress for you yet.”
She swivelled to him in surprise.
He took the seat across her. “I’ve seen Magus Supreme Kadra run himself ragged for years. At first, I thought it was out of atonement for the crimes he had to overlook while amassing the power to climb up this city. But there’s something heated about how he pushes himself now. Almostlike desperation.” Worry underpinned his voice. “Hours before the graduation, he said something about the life you should have had if it hadn’t been for…” He cleared his throat.
She closed her eyes, twin waves of fondness and heartache squeezing her chest as she saw his persistent overwork in a new light.A guilt complex the size of both moons.“I haven’t been able to convince him that he has no debt to repay.”
“This may be more about your future than the past, Petitor Sarai. The Unraveling brought every thread of conflict in this land into prominence, and we’ve been walking a tightrope since.” The vigile pondered Kadra’s laden desk for a moment. “Do you believe in omens?”
Her hands curled into her palms. “I’m trying not to.”
Gaius’s genial features turned grave. “For months, the Elsarian Order pointed to the northern riots and beetle plague as your doing. They called you Ruin’s handmaiden, plotting to deliver the land to her. But after you dispelled that at the Hearing, people are noting that there were Summonings in Ur Dinyé, many centuries before, without subsequent upheaval. What there hasn’t been is someone—”
“Who returned from the dead,” she finished. Fear bubbled in her chest.How much faster will they turn on Kadra after they learn of the deaths at the horreum?“What do you believe?”
“I have had the privilege of working for the Magus Supreme for nine great years. I have never seen him in greater danger. Politically and…” Gaius’s expression fractured, and the breath caught in Sarai’s throat.
He’s guessed it too.
They sat in silence, confirming each other’s knowledge by speaking nothing of it.
Gaius tracked her tense stare to the crackling hearth. “Omens or not, I believe the country’s enemies remain quite mortal.”
She rested her forehead against Kadra’s desk. “Thank the gods for that. If they aren’t in fact raining down omens, that is.”
Problem after problem knotted in her head like the snowgrape vines she had once climbed. A clap of thunder set the windows aquiver reminding her of the way Cretus’s tavern had shaken during an Arsamean snowgale. What was her hometown facing for Marus himself to have written to her? The beetle plague?
“I. Don’t. Understand.” She hit her head against the desk with each word, and Gaius shoved a stack of parchment under it before she could addle her brain further. “I’ve never heard of boil beetles infecting people let alone entire cities. Then, there’s the rioting.”
“Everything seems to stem from the north,’ he said sadly.
She stilled. “Say that again.”
He squinted in confusion as he did.
