Chapter 13
Calla wakes with a gasp. Her adrenaline is still racing as though she remains in the middle of battle. Her arm lurches, frantic to block a weapon coming right at her, but it’s only Anton. It’s only his hand, trying to touch her face, not a sword on track to pierce her heart.
“You’re okay,” he says. “You’re safe.”
His eyes. They’re burning yellow. Calla heaves a stuttering breath.
There’s wet topsoil beneath her head. Wind howls into the clearing.
She’s unable to help herself. She takes the hand that Anton offers, and she pulls.
The light in his eyes weakens. When Calla sits up, her ribs have already stopped throbbing.
“Where are we?” Calla rasps.
They have taken shelter under a brush of trees that block the rainfall. The branches scratch and screech. Low murmuring floats from across the way. Crescents, some standing, others groaning on the grass.
“East of the base,” Anton replies. “I grabbed you when you went down. The Crescents called a retreat and started to flee toward San-Er, but the Weisannas were on our tail. We lost them in the trees.”
And Calla had been deadweight. Even worse, because she’d needed Anton to initiate a rescue and get her out of there, like some unarmed civilian in a burning building.
This is a disaster. Tsosia’s temple is going to return to San-Er having to answer to the rest of the Crescent Societies what they were doing out beyond the wall, and then they will hear about the casualties.
They will hear about Calla Tuoleimi knocked clean off her feet by Otta’s one little gesture.
“Fuck.” Calla tries to turn, and pain whips down the back of her head. She reaches to touch her hair. There’s blood.
“You shouldn’t move too much,” Anton warns. “It only stopped bleeding shortly before you woke.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Not long. We might have been on the move for half an hour.”
Calla wipes her hand off on her trouser leg. If there is tree cover, then they likely veered farther north than Anton thought. Eigi grows very little greenery in its center. Too much bedrock.
“We weren’t followed?”
“I haven’t seen any sign of scouts yet.”
August isn’t going to send scouts. He’s going to play his next maneuver, regardless of where Calla is situated.
This is not the same situation it was when she made a hit on the Palace of Heavens and fled as the bodies were cooling.
She has no incentive to hide in the provinces indefinitely, so August is under no duress to flush her out.
She is the one on a ticking time bomb, trying to hold on to her coup.
Seizing the crown marked the start of the war. Marching on August’s camp marked the first battle.
And now the rest of the kingdom is going to hear that Calla’s performance suffered tremendously. Why follow her if she is on course toward losing? Why fight for her if she is powerless despite wearing the divine crown?
Calla exhales, rising to her feet. Her head stings. She’s not sure if it’s her bleeding wound or if it’s strain from the crown, worsening the pressure on her skull. Anton grabs her elbow to help her, and without thinking, Calla tugs from him again.
Anton gasps. He felt it this time.
“Are you all right?” Calla asks quickly.
“Yes,” Anton replies, frowning. He is puzzled for a moment. Then, visibly, he brushes off the sensation, unable to place it. “Yes, of course. I should be asking you that question.”
“I’m fine.” Calla pulls away. She already feels better. Her head wound lighter, less persistent in its throbbing. “We need to move. Return to San-Er and regroup.”
Anton watches her. She thinks, perhaps, he will confront her about what she’s been doing, how she’s been sapping away his qi every time it strengthens.
Instead, he asks:
“Do you… feel like yourself?”
“I wasn’t invaded,” Calla says wryly, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
Double qi can’t be invaded. Anton should know better—Anton knows the truth. But he folds his arms, his expression shrouded in the shadows, and she feels his doubt, his wavering.
“I had to ask.”
“It may be your first trick, but it doesn’t work on me.”
“Would you take a moment before getting defensive?” Anton lowers his voice, glancing over at the Crescents to ensure they’re not listening. “Every time I blink, the rules have changed again on our qi. Maybe Otta can—”
“She cannot,” Calla interrupts in a low, violent hiss, “invade me. She is not capable.”
Being in the provinces does, inevitably, bring back remnants of her early dread: her first year in the Palace of Heavens, when she was constantly paranoid that either someone would realize she was an intruder, or the princess would gather enough strength beneath her to boot her into oblivion.
As time passed, the dread hardened into something existential.
She started to comprehend the feat she achieved.
She decided that she would die before she gave up this bodily conquest. Anton does not understand, because he was born into aristocracy, and this power has always been promised to him.
“You’re not invaded,” Anton states, “but you dropped like you were dead, Calla. What did Otta do to you?”
What hasn’t Otta done since she woke, that’s the better question.
These slow embers of fury have been burning in Calla’s stomach since the day Otta was brought into the Palace of Union, but upon retching, there’s molten resentment and embarrassment alike on her teeth now.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Calla wields the divine crown.
She’s supposed to emerge victorious against anyone she goes up against.
“I don’t know.” She hates that it is an honest answer. She hides no agenda up her sleeve while admitting to her shortcomings. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense, does it? She overpowered me in the palace in the mountains, fine. But with the crown? In what world—”
And, suddenly, Calla remembers what Otta said.
She’s implied it before too. Back when they regarded a mere replica as the divine crown.
When Anton was the one walking around in August’s body, trying to stop Otta from revealing the truth to the kingdom.
Otta had warned Calla. It was only that Calla did not want to see it.
You have taken everything from me.
Her stomach drops out from underneath her. She must still be weak from the battle, because Calla’s knees buckle, and she staggers in response.
Anton rushes to catch her. “Calla?”
The air is drier in Rincun—it’s the mountains, looming like sleeping giants.
She is eight years old. She is starving.
She sights the princess from San-Er walking toward her, surrounded by nothing but empty fields and deep troughs of mud, and she wants to be her.
Wants it more than anything in the world, wants it enough to break herself apart.
“Yes, Calla,” she says emphatically. She lowers her voice. “It’s her.”
Anton is not understanding. He couldn’t. Even after he’s walked away from her, there is no world in which he imagines Otta Avia as anyone other than the girl who fell through the Palace of Earth by chance.
“What—”
Calla takes his shoulders, shaking him once. “It’s always been her. The real Tuoleimi princess. Sinoa.”
In the aftermath of revelation, while marching through the night at the head of their army containing bruised and beaten Crescent Society members, Anton is left alone to trawl through his memories.
Every incident with Otta where she spoke or acted in a manner too strange for their circumstances.
Where does he draw the line? What was real—what was rehearsed?
Were they ever going to run away together, or was it one additional step in the grand recovery of her body?
Her behavior never struck him as odd. It’s this that he turns over, chewing on every encounter until they’re barely intelligible.
He always thought Otta Avia fit the image of the person she was supposed to be.
During her first few years in the palace, before he had truly entered her orbit, he heard from August that she was a hypocrite: she told him off when he jumped because putting his qi in a common body was unsuitable for their new stature.
Anton remembers coming across Otta in one of the sitting rooms and daring her to jump into one of the attendants—you won’t do it, he goaded—and she did it and returned in a flash, one brow quirked to say, I’m hardly afraid of you.
In retrospect, she had done it quickly because the real Otta Avia would have come back otherwise. This was before Sinoa Tuoleimi quashed the girl who was born Otta into utter nothingness.
Before Anton started to watch her at the formal dinners. Before he saw something kindred in her behavior, in the way her gaze drifted to the head of the table and stayed there, longing for the seat.
“Calla,” he calls over his shoulder, squinting through the rain.
Seven years. He kept Otta alive for seven years, because she was arrogant enough to wield her mortal qi beyond her control and burned herself on it.
Anton could have let her die, could have pulled the plug at any moment.
Instead, he twiddled his thumbs around her sleeping body, made her his only purpose in San-Er, and all the while he was incubating a weapon for August to wake.
Calla throws her gaze wide, trying to find his voice up ahead.
She’s walking with Tsosia, the two of them embroiled in contentious discussion.
A somber mood smothers their march back toward the capital.
They’re trying to decide where this went wrong.
Trying to pin blame elsewhere in an effort to preserve their alliance.
The Crescents had two casualties. Three, if they were only counting bodies, but one managed to jump into a regular guard at the camp, taking over and then leaving with haste.
“There’s someone heading toward us,” Anton warns.