Chapter 27
A god?” Anton repeats. He doesn’t understand. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly that,” Calla replies.
She moves briskly as she fetches her shirt and pulls it on, then tugs her long sleeves straight.
Calla doesn’t much look like herself these days.
It has taken Anton some time to put his finger on it, because her physical appearance remains the same.
The way she walks, the way she tilts her head to prompt an answer.
Her habit of biting her thumbnail if she doesn’t catch herself before raising her hand to her mouth. All that remains.
It is, Anton decides, something about the clarity in her eyes that has shifted.
When she believed him responsible for plotting a hit on Eno, she’d stormed through his door, each step leaving the sear of a chemical burn.
Her presence in the apartment plummeted the temperature.
Her touch on the walls burned silver; her grip on his neck threatened to sink through muscle, through sinew, into bone.
“No, Calla, you need to explain further than that.” Anton hurries for his clothes too. He is off-kilter. His foot misses the leg of his trousers. “What did you see?”
He had caught flashes of her in return. Merging qi opens a two-way street, and if she went digging through his very sense of self, then he was left adrift in the wide expanse that makes up her distant memories.
The fields of Rincun, the cold mountains.
The borderlands—why would Calla have been in the borderlands as a child?
“It wasn’t just your memories,” she says, pulling on her shoes. “It was you. Your qi that is so much more potent than everyone else’s. Do you know that I can pull power from you, Anton?”
She looks over to him. He is rooted where he stands.
Since Calla took that crown, there has been distance in her gaze. A murkiness while she’s lost to her thoughts, never fully disappearing even when she blinks and pulls herself back into the moment.
There was a time before Anton’s exile when August got an eye infection that took him out of school for a week.
The infirmary forbade him from walking around lest he infect others, but Anton slipped into August’s rooms nonetheless, bored once his work was done, wanting accompaniment.
August, because he was August, showed no distress.
It hadn’t even looked like he was sick, short of the way his left eye would film over lightly.
Either Calla is not as skilled at hiding her affliction, or hers runs too deep to try.
“Is that what this was?” Anton asks. He lifts his hand. Scrunches. Tries to envision jumping, and a low, leaden alarm bell knells from his chest.
“The crown demands sacrifice,” Calla says. She turns away and shrugs on her jacket. “In case you forgot, you were the one who told me to take it—”
“I was the one who asked you to consider that a coup was our last resort,” Anton corrects. “That there was no option in which August ruled and we quietly slithered off into exile. I didn’t offer myself up as a sacrifice to your crown. I didn’t put myself forth as—”
“You didn’t, yes.” Calla spins around. “You were born into my path. You were born put forth.”
Anton wants to claim he hardly recognizes Calla anymore.
But that prompts a new fear: the question of whether he’s ever perceived her as she is, whether there has invariably been some veneer or another shielded over his eyes.
The Calla before him now could be the same as she’s always been.
Perhaps he has only never looked properly.
“Stop,” he breathes. “My father was not a god.”
“Anton.”
“He was an aristocrat born into the Palace of Earth,” Anton insists. “The Makusas are old. We can trace our family line back before the war.”
“The man you called your father was not the same man he was born as,” Calla snaps.
“He was invaded. By the time you were conceived, your father possessed great qi that he could not fully access in mortal form. But you inherited some. And with the divine crown’s return, heavenly qi rushes to earth.
The old gods awaken, and a part of you does too. ”
A nerve twinges in Anton’s knee. He steps forward and almost collapses onto the rug.
This war was his machination. He blew the first breath of life into the coup, knowing it would descend into madness, yet he never would have imagined these circumstances for their game board.
He has never had his hand over the queen piece.
He barely knows where the borders of their battle are anymore.
“You are pulling something out of a children’s storybook.”
“I witnessed a man detonate every building at San’s wall.
” Calla gestures out. In the direction of the window and its gray clouds.
“Then Chami, someone I have known since childhood, someone who spent years in the palace as the most ordinary attendant, killed him with a gesture. These are all storybook events. There are gods in our war, and there are gods in our kingdom. Long before I’d even left Rincun, this entire storybook had started, and it does us no good to deny it. ”
Anton is lost for words. Where is any of this coming from? His memories? Over the roar in his ears, he can only stagger, and then he does drop fully onto the rug.
“Anton,” Calla says after a while. She does not come to him. She remains where she is, at a distance.
“You say I was born into your path,” he intones. “I was not. I chose this. I chose you.”
“But it makes sense now, does it not? First, Otta. Then, our…” Calla trails off.
“What? Our love?” He grips the bedpost at his side, his palm cutting into the grooves. “You can say the word, Calla. It is not poison.”
“I asked for your love before we fought in the arena. Forgive me if I cannot identify it, given you were willing to kill me for Otta at that moment.”
Anton can hardly breathe. It is his qi, he realizes. His lungs are tight and his throat is closing, and the reserve of his power inside him is empty.
“No,” Anton says. “That’s not how it was. You cannot dredge that back up—”
“It was me or her. And so it was her. Out in the provinces, as August’s prisoners, it was me or death. And so it was me.”
“Stop. Stop!”
His shout echoes harshly. Anton closes his eyes. He reaches in, tells his body that perhaps he is to jump, and there—a flicker. This emptiness is not permanent. It is only a matter of time until it fills to the brim again.
Anton forces himself to his feet.
“I promised myself as your general, Calla,” he says, gathering his composure. “It is too late to resist it. We are no longer mere allies in a tyrant king’s games. We stand on a grand battlefield. I don’t… I don’t…”
Calla’s stare stays on him. She must understand.
Once he thought it a mighty ask if she wanted him to leave the king’s games so she could claim victory.
He could not pull his wristband, and they fought to see it through to the end.
Now Calla’s crown glints, and the walls warp toward her, each tendril of air bending to make sense of the pull she possesses.
Her irises glare yellow, Tuoleimi yellow, capable of devastating the kingdom.
“You have my heart tied to your rudder,” Anton says. “Where you steer, I go. Where you crash, I burn first.”
Calla exhales. Her arms twine before her. He would have been content to let her take her leave then, but she steps toward him instead, closer, closer, until she tips her forehead into his collar. Surprised, Anton lifts his hands. Caresses the sides of her head, barely grazing against her crown.
“I do, though,” she whispers.
Anton stays very still. “What?”
“I love you. Even if the heavens decided it.”
Perhaps every event across the mortal plane was decided that way. What would be the difference? Whether he was always predestined to end up at Calla’s side, or whether it took a series of careful decisions. He is here all the same.
Calla’s arms unwind, wrapping around him. He can hear the thud, thud, thud beneath her ribs, thunderous at such proximity. He focuses on the rhythm pressing against his skin. The constancy, the infallibility behind such a sound. He doesn’t let himself wonder if she is lying.
“Do not take from my qi again,” he whispers. “Don’t make me beg.”
Calla nods. He cannot see her face, but he feels her movement.
“Okay.”
He counts a minute. A minute to hold her. A minute to pretend that the war is already won, that he has risen beyond the man who was subject to exile.
“We have a problem to handle,” Anton says. “Galipei is still in the cells.”