Chapter 25
Zara
When I walked into my room later that day, I bit my lip, unease churning within me when I saw that Raven still hadn’t returned. In her place, a new handmaiden waited. “I’m filling in for her, Highness,” she said, her plain face betraying no emotion.
“Do you know where she is?”
She shook her head. “I was asked to bring you your evening meal and tea.” After she put down the silver tray, she turned to me. “Will there be anything else you require? A bath, perhaps?”
My mind was still on thoughts of Raven, so I nodded absently.
She left the room to prepare the bath, and all I could think about was what Talon had told me about the missing servants.
They had never been found. Was Raven yet another victim?
What was happening to them? Something to do with that horrible creature?
I almost went into the hall to ask Talon about it, but then I remembered that he had been replaced for the night by another guard. I picked at my food and drank my tea. When the other handmaiden finished preparing the bath, I barely registered the soothing hot water.
“Shall I help you bathe?” she asked.
“That won’t be necessary.”
She left as quietly as she came, and I sank low in the water.
As I washed my hair with the perfumed oils, I swore to myself that in the morning, I would investigate Raven’s disappearance.
She had mentioned a family—maybe she had been called away suddenly.
There could be a perfectly innocent reason for her not being here.
After washing myself, I lay back in the water and closed my eyes. The heat felt so good now that I was constantly cold.
As I lay in the bath, my thoughts drifted to Talon. It was hard to believe I had once feared him, that I had called the power of the wind down on him and nearly killed him. Now I couldn’t imagine how I would endure the palace without him.
I had seen another side of him in Naharu—relaxed and at ease.
The way his eyes crinkled at the edges when he smiled kept playing through my mind, making my own lips curl in response.
I thought of the way he had held my gaze before leaving the pasture, and a warmth spread through my chest, slow at first, then consuming, like sunlight breaking through the clouds.
Shazeera’s words to me in Naharu drifted through my mind. It’s a shame he isn’t the emperor.
Heat snuck up my neck as I remembered my response, only half in jest. I would have married him already.
But that was the problem—how could I let myself be attracted to Talon when I was supposed to marry his cousin? The thought made a cold pit form in my stomach, like I had swallowed a stone.
The muffled sound of a man’s voice suddenly filled my quiet bathing room, and I sat up to hear better. I thought at first it was coming from the hallway, but then I realized it was coming from the other side of the wall.
Emperor Altair’s room.
There was something about the tone that even though I couldn’t hear it clearly, I could still tell it was distressed. I grabbed a silken robe and got out of the bath. Wrapping it around me, I quietly stepped toward our shared wall.
More murmurs came through, and this time, I heard another voice. Shamelessly, I pressed my ear against the stone wall.
“This has gone too far,” Altair said.
“There’s no going back,” the other voice said, and I thought it sounded like Lord Heron. He said something else, but I couldn’t quite make it out.
I pressed my ear harder against the wall, bracing against the cold stone with my hands.
As I did so, some mechanism inside clicked, and a door cracked open.
Stunned, I held my breath, sure I would be discovered.
But they continued their conversation without pause.
I peered through the slight opening, wondering distantly if it was a lovers’ door for the emperor and his empress.
Altair stood before a roaring fire, almost unnatural in its intensity. It burned so high and bright that it looked like it would escape the hearth. Lord Heron stood to his right, and both had their backs to me.
“Every day he grows in strength, and soon he won’t stay confined to the shadows,” Lord Heron said.
“Bring me the girl,” a new voice said. It seemed to come from the fire itself, the deep and gravelly sound covering my skin in goose bumps.
“I can’t do that,” Altair said. “The treaty—”
“I need her power,” the voice interrupted, and I thought I would be sick. They were talking about me—I was sure of it.
“Now that we have her here, you won’t even need the treaty with her people,” Lord Heron said, and I clutched the wall tighter.
My breaths came faster, but I tried to suppress them.
If I was caught now, I had no doubt they would hand me over to that shadowy creature immediately—just to shut me up.
“Ozul will consume her power and be unstoppable. You will conquer not only this continent, but the entire known world.”
Altair shook his head. “She entered into this agreement in good faith, thinking she was saving her people.”
“And what about your own people? She doesn’t matter. She’s not one of us.”
My hands clenched at my sides, and a desperation rose within me.
Should I make a run for it now? Get Shazeera and try to escape?
I thought of the impossibly steep mountains, and the goats they used to traverse them.
I thought of Neo flying through the clouds to get us here. We would never make it out on our own.
Talon, then? Would he even help me? And what would happen to my people and the treaty?
“Harming her goes against the treaty,” Altair added weakly. “The Children promised that others with that same power will rise against us if anything happens to her.”
“If Ozul consumes the wind power, it won’t matter,” Lord Heron said confidently.
I could feel the blood drain from my face, and I had to brace myself on the doorway to keep from falling.
Altair seemed to draw himself up straighter. “I won’t do it.”
For a moment, Lord Heron was quiet, and only the roaring of the fire could be heard. But then he said, “Maybe your father was always right about you. Or have you forgotten what he used to say?”
The flames flickered and flared brighter, and then suddenly, images appeared in the midst of them.
The man from the paintings that hung throughout the palace—Emperor Lamir—glared out from within the fire.
His hair was darker, without as much silver as it had even in the painting.
He was holding what looked like a broken-off leg of a chair.
Near the base of the flames, bloodied and crying, was a very young Altair. He couldn’t have been older than seven.
“Please, Father,” young Altair cried, holding up his hands to ward off the blows. “I’ll do better with the spear. Please stop hitting me.”
“Stop crying,” the emperor roared, beating him again, but never in the face. “Your cousin Talon has already mastered the spear, and he’s only a few months older than you!”
The beating continued, Altair’s wails having no effect on his father.
“Why was I cursed with a worthless son like you? I wish you had died with your mother.”
I flinched away from the savage words, the cruel blows, but I could see that this beating was not a unique event. It had happened before, and it would happen again, many, many times until his father finally died.
Altair now stood before the phantom images in the fire, shoulders hunched as if to ward off the blows.
“Worthless and better off dead,” Lord Heron said.
Altair shook his head roughly. “Stop it!”
“And then, of course, there’s the truth I helped you hide. The truth about what you did to him—your own father.”
The images changed to reveal an opulent bedroom.
Altair quietly entered under cover of darkness, gripping a dagger in his right hand.
His father slept quietly, bare-chested despite the cold.
Altair walked over to his father’s bed, dagger raised, and in that moment of hesitation, his father opened his eyes.
“You wouldn’t dare,” he said and closed his eyes again.
The sound of the dagger hitting his chest was as loud as a punch, and when his father opened his mouth in shock, blood bubbled out.
“Finally you grew a pair,” he said, and promptly died.
He killed his father. He killed the emperor. It seemed impossible, and yet, I’d watched him do it, and I knew the emperor was dead. Obviously, the palace had covered it up and spread the word that Altair’s father was killed in battle.
The weight of it—seeing the truth of what happened to the previous emperor—felt like being suddenly doused with ice-cold water. I couldn’t move. I could only watch helplessly as Lord Heron and the creature continued their torture.
Tears streamed out of Altair’s eyes as he stood over his father’s body, and he shook so violently, I thought he was seizing.
“I freed myself of the monster that had abused me every day of my life, but I didn’t know what the consequences would be,” Altair said.
“It led you to Ozul, so that was well worth it,” Lord Heron said.
The flames told the story of how Altair had been tortured by the memory of taking his father’s life. He relived it almost constantly, until in the dark of night, he fled the palace on his eagle, Sky.
They landed in the mountains, and Altair had fallen to his knees, gripping his hair like he would tear it out. Sky tried in vain to comfort him, but Altair was deaf to all his attempts. Night had fallen by then, the moon hidden by clouds.
From the shadows a creature crept toward them.
It hid amongst the flames in the fireplace, and I couldn’t see it with any clarity.
Like they did in the hot springs, shadows coalesced into one writhing mass, which flowed toward Altair.
And he had brought that thing back to this palace, where it now hid itself, slowly growing in strength.
“Bring me the girl,” the gravelly voice repeated.