Chapter Three
Neither Adria nor Larus saw what happened with the man who held the knife to my throat. It would be easy enough to lie to Larus, to tell him I’d stabbed the man on purpose and that I was going to finish the job before Adria arrived.
It would be better for me if I did lie to him.
My power as a shadow-born is fueled by secrets and lies.
The more I deceive others, the darker my shadows become.
It doesn’t matter much under ordinary circumstances, but in a fight against the fire-born or the light-born, light-born like God-King Ronan, it could be the difference between life and death.
There are shadow-born who go through the world lying to everyone they meet. But my mother wasn’t like that. She kept her secrets, but she knew who to trust.
I’ll lie to my sister if she asks me about it. But I won’t lie to Larus.
“I’d forgotten how good the beer is here,” he says as he takes a deep gulp from a clay mug. “I never got a taste for Nithyrian wine.”
I can’t help but snort at that. “Really?” I had seen Larus at the bottom of a bottle more than once.
“There’s a difference between drinking something and liking it.”
“I suppose,” I say, though I don’t really know what he means.
There’s a long pause while Larus drinks his beer. He’s waiting for me to say something, but I just stare at him in silence, thinking of the fight.
He took out three of the bandits while Adria dealt with their fire-born.
They’d gone over the entire thing in painstaking detail on our way to the inn, with Adria constantly trying to bring up my ridiculous act of mercy and Larus stopping her short every time she tried.
I appreciated that. Though he loved all of the Verran children, we all knew Larus had a soft spot for me.
I wish I had remembered any of the things he taught me when it mattered.
“I choked,” I admit when Larus sets down his empty glass. “I got lucky. He ran into my sword.” He opens his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. “I know what you’re going to say.”
He looks around the bar. Adria is chatting with a redheaded man somewhat amiably; she doesn’t seem to be in any trouble, although that could change at any moment. He must decide that she can handle herself in any case because he stands and gestures for me to follow him.
“Let’s take a walk.”
I follow Larus through a back door onto a deck overlooking the river. It’s a dark night with only a crescent moon to help him see, so I take the lead and guide us down the steps and along a path on the riverbank.
The river is wide and slow, its banks shrouded in reeds and rushes that reach my waist. This thin strip of land is the lifeblood of Selara.
It’s surrounded on both sides by hundreds of miles of desert, much of it as treacherous as the desert we crossed to reach Fenval.
The land we’re walking on now will flood just after the harvest in a couple of months.
When the waters recede in the new year, they’ll leave behind everything the plants need to grow. This is how Selara survives.
And it’s how Nithyria survives too now. Almost all of our arable land was destroyed in the war, leaving us nearly completely reliant on Selara for food.
They’re only too happy to feed us in exchange for the most precious resource in the world: the ash of the phoenix cypress, a tree that only grows one place in the world.
The forests of Nithyria.
“Tell me what you thought I would say,” says Larus finally as we pass into a copse of low-growing palms.
“I don’t know. Something about how I should have fallen back on my training like you’ve told me a thousand times.
That I got stuck in my head again, and that I can’t count on every person I fight to kill themselves for me.
That it was a good thing Adria was there to save me.
But you’d also say that you know I don’t really need saving, not if I’m at my best, and you know I won’t let you down again. ”
“How diplomatic of me,” says Larus. His face is solemn, but there’s a hint of a smile in his voice. “Did the version of me in your head offer any sort of comfort?”
“A pat on the shoulder,” I say.
“Like this?”
I laugh as Larus awkwardly pats my right shoulder three times in quick succession.
“And did it work? Do you feel comforted but also gently reminded of your duty?”
"I do,” I say, but the words don’t feel quite right. “I—”
The face of the dead man on the road flashes into my mind. Marcus. He had been one of our men once. One of the people we’re trying to save.
There would be no saving him. He died there today.
I swallow a sob. “I know I’m just the backup plan, but how in the fuck am I supposed to…?”
I stop short of saying it. We can’t discuss our plans to kill Ronan now that we’ve left Nithyria, but I know Larus gets my meaning.
My desire for vengeance runs bone deep, but after today, I’m worried if it’s enough. What will happen if I choke when it really matters?
Larus hesitates a moment, stroking his beard and looking around. Then he sighs. “I told her just to tell you. But you know how she is.”
That gets my attention. There is more to this than they’d told me. “Told Adria to tell me what?”
“If I tell you this, it stays between us. Let the secret strengthen you.”
I nod, urging him to continue.
“You’re not the backup plan,” he says. “Adria knew you would assume you were, and she wanted you to do so. You’re used to living in her shadow. You’re comfortable there. But you aren’t the backup in case Adria fails. You are the plan.”
I’m sorry, what?
Is Larus going senile? Did he somehow miss what happened today or the conversation we had not even five minutes ago about how big of a fuck-up I am?
“Think about it, Sylvie. Did you think one of you would face him in single combat? Did you think you were going there to challenge him to a duel or to fight him on the battlefield? Did you forget who he is and what he can do?”
Ronan, like most of House Alta, is light-born. The light-born are the top in the alchemical chain of magic and the rarest of all magic wielders. According to the Codex, our most sacred text, they wield the sun goddess Vayla’s powers as their own.
The full knowledge of what they’re capable of is a secret. But Ronan has a power that’s unique even for the light-born, and that one everyone knows about: he can read people. Not their thoughts, but their feelings. He can sense what anyone feels when they’re near him.
He can even sense when someone has murderous intent. It has saved him from assassins before. It will save him from us if we aren’t careful.
We need to keep Ronan from finding out our plans until Seth can raise our armies and Larus can prepare one of the navies of the Enez Islands to lay siege to Faros, using the cover of the Great Festival to hide their movements.
But until now, I’d imagined that when the time was right, Adria would strike. Then I’d use my magic to hide us and get us out of there. And if something happened to Adria, a dagger in the dark would work as well as her dart of flame.
I would be the backup plan. Like always.
“I know we can’t attack him outright, at least not in the beginning. But I don’t get how I’m meant to be the plan.”
“It could be months before we’re ready to strike.
It could take the entire festival and maybe even sometime after it.
We need to maintain access to him. From what we’ve learned of him, he allows few into his confidence.
What do you think the chances are that Adria can stay on his good side for longer than a day? ”
I smirk. Adria is many things, but I’ve known her to toss out friends more often than she changes her toothbrush. If she manages to get through a single conversation without losing her head and giving everything away, it will be a miracle. “Slim to none.”
Alright, sure, I’m less likely to immediately piss Ronan off, but then what? “The plan is for me to befriend him?”
Larus grimaces in the way that he does when he’s about to have to talk to me about something uncomfortable. “Befriending would be good. But Adria thinks—and, well, I agree with her—there’s a chance he’ll see you as more than a friend.”
Are they fucking serious?
I clench my fist. Ronan? They want me to seduce the one man in the world that I truly hate? My one and only enemy?
I drop my voice low. My eyebrow twitches with barely contained rage.
“He killed my father, Larus. His father killed my mother. Even if I’m faking it, just befriending him would feel like a betrayal.
Anything more would be treason against my own heart.
If the plan hinges on me seducing him, you might as well send me home right now.
Because I am telling you that it’s never, ever going to happen.
I’ll cut his throat before I’ll share his bed. ”
Larus pulls back to look at me. Then he gets that know-it-all grin on his face that he gets when he’s taught me a lesson, but I haven’t realized it yet. “See? You do have what it takes.”
I’m still practically vibrating with anger when what I’ve said hits me.
Well, fuck.
I don’t know how he did it, but he somehow managed to convince me I can kill Ronan. And not just that I can, but that I must.
“You won’t fail,” he says. “Don’t forget who he is. Don’t forget what he did to your family. To all of us. And all for a bit of ash.” He spits at the ground.
All for a bit of ash. It was true. The phoenix cypress ash was the key to everything.
When Selaran alchemists started buying barrels of the ash, my grandparents hadn’t known what to make of it. Our own alchemists used the bark of the phoenix tree to help with a headache, but among our people, the ash had no known alchemical properties.
It was years before they learned the truth: the ash is the critical ingredient for one of the most elusive alchemical processes.
It can turn lead into gold.
It requires more than just the ash, of course, and the entire process is a closely guarded Guild secret. But access to the ash became Selara’s highest priority.
And eventually, it became the catalyst for a war that was long overdue.
The Selaran crown, then wielded by King Ronan’s father Aurelian IV, had long been taking more from Nithyria than it provided.
When my grandmother died and my father became the Head of House Verran, Aurelian demanded so much ash that our people could no longer tend their own fields.
The fire-born were forced to start massive blazes in the mountains; the water- and wind-born were forced to keep the flames from spreading; and the nature- and earth-born were forced to haul the ash down from the mountains all the way into Selara.
Only the shadow-born were left to work the fields, and soon our people were starving.
The Orsa, a savage people who’d raided our lands for generations, took advantage of our weakness and plundered our half-abandoned farms and villages, killing thousands.
My father traveled to court a dozen times, begging the king to show mercy.
But the king refused. If our people could not deliver what he asked for, he could just get the Orsa to do so instead. In return, he’d give them our lands.
For a fire-born, my father had been exceptionally patient, but there was only one reasonable response to that insult: war. Five years later, when both my parents and King Aurelian were dead, Adria surrendered to the newly crowned King Ronan, and everything King Aurelian promised had come to pass.
We were forced from our ancestral home, Pyka, and the Orsa were gifted it by the crown as thanks for their support in the war.
The Machair Plains were lost, and with them, our only ability to feed our people.
King Ronan promised to keep us fed as long as we kept the ash flowing into Selara, and for a time, he kept his word.
But shipments started arriving late. And when they finally did arrive, they were often spoiled.
The flood was weak, they said. There were problems with pests from Brakkar.
But the people of Selara weren’t asked to go without.
They imported food with the gold they made by razing our forests while they let us go hungry.
And every year, they demanded more and more from us.
And that’s why Ronan has to die. It isn’t just vengeance for our parents. It’s for the lives of our people. It’s for the lives of all of the people of Selara and Nithyria. Our two kingdoms will remain united, only this time under our rule.
Our spies report division in the capital. Many people are unhappy, not just with the failed harvest but with a number of changes Ronan has made. If Ronan himself were to fall, they say, all the pieces would fall with him.
And apparently, I’m going to be the one to bring him down.
“I won’t fail. When it’s time, I won’t hesitate. I know who he is. I know what he’s done.
“And I know he’ll pay for it with his life.”