Chapter 5 #2
Anton doesn’t crane his head to look.
“We better clean that wound,” he announces, feigning sympathy. He grabs her elbow. Gestures to the Crescents, then the swords on the ground. “Your clerics won’t like the mess you’re making of valuable weapons from the vaults. Make sure everything goes back where it was found.”
He marches Calla toward the palace. She lets him, because she’s busier watching the yellow haze settling onto the scene.
His face, his chest, his hands. Floating upward.
Floating toward her. If there was any doubt that only she is capable of seeing him like this, there is none after this display.
The Crescents do not remark upon it. They stand oblivious to the precious qi that they worship, flowing freely.
“They’ll start following us again in a minute,” she warns.
“Then move faster,” Anton instructs.
They return to the palace using a side entrance in the coliseum. Calla drops the dome, and there’s faint squawking from the Crescents, surprised by the rain returning.
It is dark inside the palace. Cold, too, because of the draft slithering through the north wing. She watches Anton try to wring some water out from his undershirt, then give up promptly when it drizzles a path onto the floor.
“Did you have a hiding place in mind?” she asks.
“I was thinking we squat under a sitting room table.”
Calla shakes her head. “Come with me.”
While reorganizing the palace, the first stop Calla made was to August’s quarters, taking inventory over what could prove useful.
She found nothing. She knew Anton must have trashed some items while he was holding August’s body hostage, but it was still suspicious that there were almost no personal materials left behind.
August was not the type of person to rely on the cabinets in the war rooms. Where were his adoption papers?
He must have wanted those laminated and framed.
It had taken a complete sweep of the north wing. Accidentally leaning against a mantel that pushed into a servants’ passage. Finding the door that opened onto an unending spiral staircase. Only then did Calla finally stumble upon a nook high above the twin cities.
She leads Anton into the turret now. A few Crescents followed her the first time she found it, so it’s not as though it is a secret.
She eyes the scratches on the inner wall, no doubt made by palace scabbards.
The Weisannas must have walked through often.
Or rather, gauging by the path worn onto the stone steps—its tread veering to one side—there was one particular Weisanna, coming and going.
Something scuffles across the floor as soon as Calla arrives at the top of the turret, and she freezes. Seconds later, she recognizes the sound and realizes it’s only her cat. He, too, came up when she was last here. He must have been wandering this space at his own leisure since then.
“That’s not a toy, Mao Mao,” Calla warns.
Mao Mao ignores her, continuing to scratch the box he is occupying. It takes him a few more seconds to work up traction before he leaps out and sprints into a corner, and Anton grimaces, swerving to go the other way.
“I didn’t know August kept another office,” Anton remarks.
“No,” Calla says. “Neither did I. I found this place when you were handling the vaults.”
There was an old pager in the desk drawer, an unread message blinking from Galipei.
The floors and windowsill were clean when Calla found the office…
Galipei’s work as well, she guessed. He must have showed up after the coronation.
Calla imagines him sitting behind the desk, waiting for the sun to rise, his ears perked for a whisper of sound.
Growing wary when August’s steps did not clatter after him, when August continued to feign ignorance about their private dwelling.
Then, finally, the pieces clicking, and the conclusion obvious.
Galipei notices every detail about his beloved prince. Was there ever a chance that he would overlook Anton’s charade?
Though Calla sidles behind the desk, she does not sit. She folds her arms, leaning against the window. The skies are too dismal to offer much past the dense weight of gray.
“Uncover anything good?” Anton asks. He perches on the edge of the desk. Though he tries to seem uninterested, there is a hungry glint in his eyes. He wants to know exactly what more August has hidden from him.
“Nothing salacious,” Calla answers.
It hadn’t taken her long to dig through everything August left behind.
His correspondences, his handwritten plans.
There was no sign of his exchanges with the Dovetail, back when August plotted with the provincial insurgents to attack his own palace soldiers and destabilize the council.
Galipei must have destroyed everything, already mistrustful before the delegation set out to search for the crown.
For several beats, Anton and Calla do not speak, letting the specter of August’s wrath hiss its piece. The window rattles with the rainfall. Mao Mao tires of such unexciting activity, and he trots away, disappearing down the steps in search of food.
“I seem to recall,” Calla says, “your commitment toward letting go of Otta.”
Anton’s eyes narrow. “Have I reneged on my word?”
“You seem quite concerned about Otta’s presence at the base.”
In an ideal world, Otta Avia would have been eaten by wild animals somewhere beyond the borderlands.
But Calla remembers fighting Otta. All that power, shuddering into the palace in the mountains.
She remembers the scene they walked in on: Otta crouching at the feet of a dead princess from a century past, funneling qi across the kingdom.
Each time the memory flashes in her mind, Calla feels sick.
“Because I’m worried about what she brings to August’s defense,” Anton says. “She left a sigil in Pashe.”
Calla turns away slowly, her eyes settling over the twin cities. This is the highest point in San-Er. They stand far above the capital’s residential low-rises, above the clouds of factory smoke. When she cranes her neck, she spies the line of reddish black in the distance. San’s wall.