“Pebble,” Sarai finished. “What do they call them in the south?”
He pinched a lock of her unbraided hair and slid his way down the length of it. “The Crown and its Jewel.” He hid a smile against her temples when she scowled.
“Theywouldcall it that. I suppose it was too much to hope that they’d name it the Pouch and the Coin or the—”
“Noose and the Head?” he supplied helpfully and got elbowed in the ribs for his trouble. He’d barely recovered from the agony when she rose on tiptoe, her breath floating across his ear.
“I want us to live this way too,” she whispered.
A bolt of devastation struck him and left him wordless. Her smaller fingers threaded into the ones he had splayed around her waist and interlocked, and it was all he could do to fight the burn in his throat.
“I’ll make the world give us that peace.” He stilled when the vow came fromher. “I think I’ve been entirely too obliging since the Unraveling—oh!”
He hauled her back into their room and tossed her into bed, pressing his lips to her forehead, temple, cheek, drawing a path to her mouth before claiming it hungrily.
Beyond their entwined bodies, he knew that the constellation known as the Slingshot was upside-down. That the Pebble looked poised to tumble down and slam into the town—an ill omen. That he could ruin all of this because he’d simply wanted to wait for one crisis to end before giving her another.
So, when she fell asleep once more against him, he did as he had never done and asked the gods for the only gift they had never given any mortal—time.
He was unsurprised when they didn’t answer.
Ensconced in Edessa and consumed by its troubles, he had nevertheless sought to do his duty by the north. Coin, power, legislation, he had used every tool in his considerable arsenal to begin redressing the imbalance between both halves of the nation. He saw now that it hadn’t been enough.
Proof that the north was falling apart had taunted him over the past five days of visiting its locales. Poverty, Guild greed, and boil beetles had left a chain of devastation that would take at least a generation to heal.
Most towns had assumed that he and Sarai were there to ensure Guild interests and met them with anger before deflating upon learning the truth. Most of the coalition of northern Praetors had treated him with icy wariness, but their peoples had been more forthcoming. Most admitted that they hadn’t wanting to jeopardize their meager allocations fromthe Guilds but seen little choice in the face of them whittling away at even those quantities.
For all their poverty, the north wasn’t devoid of pride and hadn’t trusted him or the Tetrarchy with the minutiae of their despair. Much had gone unattended and unreported as a result—the whitesleep murders and the extent of the devastation caused by plague itself.
“Last month, we saw a beetle swarm approaching,” the Praetor of a small town had looked close to tears. “A crimson cloud over the horizon, thick as night, venom sacs bloated and yellow. Then, it arrowed into our fields, and we knew it was only a matter of time.”
“It’s hard enough extracting thehavïdthings from adults, but, gods, the children!” A healer in another town had pressed a hand to her lined forehead. “I swear they dig deeper into them on purpose. I’ve seen them in brains and intestines.” Her voice caught. “I don’t understand where they all came from.”
He had a guess. Yet, the plague the north described wasn’t the same as Edessa’s. The corpses Sarai had examined had been attacked by beetle swarms gone carnivorously mad. There was no mention of anything resembling Edessa’s madness-struck.
All of which had only left one city that could provide them with clarity and the whitesleep manufacturer who had infected Edessa.Komis.
Sarai paced the short stretch of ground between him and the city walls while Méherre argued with the guards and asked for the Praetor to allow them entry.
“On one hand, we’ve thoroughly confirmed that the north is plagued by boil beetles. On the other, we’re no closer to understanding what inhavïdis happening in Edessa.” A pained note to Sarai’s voice. “How did we miss so much?”
The south had become the land’s cultural epicenter and the Tetrarchy had been too occupied with its foibles to glance up. No, he hadn’t done enough for the north at all.
Kadra’s gaze followed Komis’s city walls to their zenith. His jaw tightened. He had never intended to return, let alone for a task as ironic as investigating a whitesleep manufacturer.
Standing before the crucible where he had been formed, he wondered how much of it Sarai would forgive. Red-eyed and heavily cloaked, she looked impossibly frail against the ancient limestone blocks behind her. They parted with a groan after a few months as the guard waved them inside, muttering that anyone mad enough to want to enter a plague-struck city deserved what they got, Tetrarch or not.
Then, he was suddenly home.
Blood roared in his ears. Memories of flame and a familiar voice’s litany of pleas pelted him before he mastered himself and offered a mask of cordiality to the city’s Praetor, Ythras.
The thin-faced man loped over to give them an effusive welcome that lasted a quarter hour before he realized that they hadn’t come to load his palms with coin and wanted to enter a plague zone for more information. He had since regressed to sulkiness.
Despite being the north’s most populous city, Komis was better known as Edessa’s darker counterpart. Corruption simmered below the capital’s marble veneer, visible only in political squabbling and in the desolate neighborhoods toward the city’s outer rim where poverty ran rampant. Yet, Komis didn’t bother with the façade.
Blazeleaf vendors hawked their product at street corners, touting blends of allspice and dried fruit with the potent drug. Pleasure-workers peered out from arches and awnings, artfully parting their thick cloaks to provide him with a glimpse of wares before shuttering them against the windchill. Cardsharps and victims prowled the opposing corners of betting tables outside taverns, denarii and tears leaving the latter in equal measure.
Wind carried the scent of the Chaboras River, where the fishers trawled for a catch while secretly smuggling Clan Kader’s drugs across the river for distribution in the south. Where the city hid its bones.
