Chapter 33
Three days pass uneventfully. Calla and Anton ride without stopping. They trade horses at village posts. They trade shifts. When Calla holds the reins, Anton sleeps against her. When Anton holds the reins, Calla attempts sleep against him.
Gray daylight hangs steadily over the fields of Daol Province, and Calla passes the reins over again.
“Did you see that?” Anton asks, clambering back onto the horse.
She had lost her focus and veered them directly into a pothole earlier, which prompted Anton to demand a swap.
Since entering Daol Province, the rain has lessened significantly overhead.
Calla would think it has stopped falling entirely if it weren’t for the occasional droplets landing on her forehead, trailing a path down her cheek.
“See what?” Calla returns, her vision blurring.
She’s exhausted. She’s annoyed that they’re still en route.
They have chosen to trace the hem of the kingdom, taking the beaches of Eigi, then the eastern seaboard of Cirea.
It’s the best way to avoid August’s scouts on the Apian Routes, and the best way to avoid trouble from rural dwellers while the crown flashes on Calla’s head.
“Over there. On the house.”
Calla squints, blinking to focus. Anton is pointing across a lush field.
She succeeds in following his gaze eventually: a two-story brown structure of brick and earth, its thatched roof loose on its left side.
It would have been a normal sight as far as architecture in the provinces went, if it weren’t for the yellow flag flying on the roof.
“Is that a sigil?” she asks.
“Looks like it.” Anton pauses. “It’s not…”
“I don’t recognize it either,” Calla says before he can finish.
After all, the extent of their knowledge starts and stops with the sigils Otta Avia had been flinging everywhere.
It’s not as though Calla possesses any additional insight of this bygone era, which suddenly everyone in this kingdom seems to understand except her.
Different sigils for different families, used as calling cards when praying to patron gods.
Different sigils for each god—as many sigils as there are gods in the pantheon, and the pantheon was endless.
Calla climbs astride the saddle too, indicating that they should keep moving.
Anton rides at a trot while he gets his bearings, so they pass a hamlet at relatively slow speed.
There are rural dwellers working along the road, loading sacks onto their wagons or dragging out the mulch for their fields.
Calla reaches for the hood over her head, holding on tightly.
Just as they’re taking a left, staying on the main road of their westward journey, Calla catches a marking on the front end of a villager’s wagon.
The same sigil.
Anton picks up speed, and Calla tightens her grip on him with her other arm.
The traveling routes through Talin’s provinces are straightforward by design.
The palace wanted councilmembers visiting their designated territories at regular intervals, and the palace could not allow them and their delegations to get lost. There were factors they couldn’t control.
Insurgent attacks. Wild animals. But they could pretty up the parts of the kingdom that their nobility passed through.
The yamen buildings with security cameras. The wide roads amenable to carriages.
“Is that another one?”
Calla almost doesn’t catch Anton’s question. His words are flung apart with the wind, and she leans forward as far as she can without sending them off-balance.
“I don’t see it.”
“We passed it already. I’m starting to think this is unique to Daol.”
They keep riding. The rain stays sparse. Her body grows tense, then tenser as their journey progresses. Calla doesn’t realize she’s waiting to find the sigil again until she sights it once more, this time right on Daol’s yamen wall. Painted on the exterior, stretching to cover the entire surface.
Anton tugs on the reins, drawing them to a halt outside the yamen. It is only trees and forests for the foreseeable horizon past this village. Their horse is tired. Time to trade again.
“I’ll step into the village,” Anton says. “I’m probably carrying enough coins to buy a new horse if there’s any fuss.”
But Calla cannot pull her eyes away from the sigil. On the yamen wall. What could that be except a declaration to challengers who come by?
“Anton,” Calla says. “I think Daol has been taken over already.”
Anton frowns. A flash of alarm darkens his eyes. Calla can see it clearly, because there is no light to intrude with the color.
“Impossible,” he says. “We didn’t pass any camps.”
“No, not August’s takeover.” Calla pulls her cloak tighter, lowering the hood as far as it’ll go. “Whoever this sigil is in reference to.”
This is a collective effort. This is worship.
“Stay here,” Anton decides. “I’m stepping in.”
Calla nods once. The villagers are unlikely to recognize Anton for anyone other than a regular province traveler, especially with his appearance after days on the road.
While Anton steps into the yamen, Calla leads their horse toward a hitching post outside the building.
Only Daol’s east side is coastal, but the province as a whole smells like sea salt—like white, coarse sand that has been slowly encroaching into the fields and farms.
How did it go so wrong? They were supposed to have snuffed out August in Eigi.
The Crescent Societies were supposed to have occupied themselves in San-Er while Calla expanded into the provinces and moved her base there, taking power away from the cult in the capital.
She shouldn’t be making a stop in Kelitu because they’re struggling to gain an upper hand over Otta Avia.
She shouldn’t be seeking a sigil that Anton’s father possessed, because he was a Dovetail sympathizer providing them with power, because he was waging a coup before he was killed, because he was the king of the heavens—
Calla finishes the knot on the hitching post, gritting her teeth hard.
“I didn’t believe it at first, but color me surprised.”
Calla whirls around. A young man stands at the tree line, his hands behind his back, his short hair tied back with a kerchief.
Though he’s dressed like any rural dweller, plain gray cotton and brown boots, his features are incongruent with the image.
Beginning with the wine-colored eyes that lock onto her and do not waver. No surprise. No fear.
“You don’t look well,” the man says. “Might I suggest some rest?”
“Forgive me,” Calla replies. “I don’t take advice from strangers.”
“Heavens, you don’t even know how funny that remark was.”
When he swings his arm, the force wipes Calla off her feet. She barely braces before her back slaps the ground and robs the air from her lungs—one second, then two, and she rolls fast, launching onto her feet once more. Her hood falls back. The man does not appear surprised to see her crown.
Calla returns the favor. She throws her arm out; the crown pulses. Though physical light erupts into the space to slam into her opponent, he only slides back a few paces.
“That was pathetic,” he remarks.
“Who are you?” Calla demands.
“It is a shame you have forgotten.” He shakes out his hands. Begins to stride forward. “I have fought so hard over the decades to hold on to our time working together.”
There’s a sharp noise emitting from him. A hum that only strikes Calla’s ear wrong at first, but the closer he walks, the more it grows utterly head-splitting. He grabs her elbow, and Calla strikes, pulling her sword free and plunging it into whatever flesh she finds.
And before her very eyes, her sword disappears. It absorbs into him, becomes another part of his torso—warping, then flattening. Calla, fighting for breath, stumbles back two steps. Holds her hands before her.
“What the fuck?”
“I hope that will help illustrate my might,” the man says. His eyes brighten. His very being glows. “All in the province shall be protected. The rain ceases; the floods disappear. Therefore all who enter the province will kneel to me. That includes you, godling.”
Calla charges again. This time, the sound he’s emitting blasts to full volume, shrieking through her skull when she throws an elbow forward.
She misses; the man hurtles aside. He yells out, and then the sound is unbearable, then Calla is on her knees.
She can’t fathom what’s happening. First, Otta knocking her out.
Now this, this inconsequential stranger who emerged from the trees, reducing her to such a state.
“Stay down,” he says over the screeching in her ears. “I’d quite like to see that crown on your head.”
The divine crown can raze cities, the stories said. The divine crown can recruit armies with the snap of a finger, push sea tides in the other direction, flatten mountains standing in one’s way.
Calla can’t even get up.
She scrabbles for the gravel underneath her palms. Her hand closes on a rock, on its sharp edges, and she hefts all the crown’s qi into her arm, into her makeshift weapon. And she throws it hard, gathering just enough resolve to look up and aim directly at the man’s head.
In a snap, the screech ends, accompanied by the man falling into a dead faint.
Calla takes a few seconds to recover. Staggers onto one knee, then rises. She could vomit. She might just vomit.
“Calla?” Anton’s voice drifts from the yamen. “Calla!”
“I’m fine,” she calls out.
Anton returns to the scene cautiously, eyeing the fallen man. Her throw dented the left side of his skull. Calla heaves for breath, shaken. She knows how hard she threw that rock. Had this been a normal man, it should have taken his head clean off.
“Princess,” Anton says. “You’ve got blood on your face.”
“Do I?” Calla replies. She touches her cheek. Traces it to its source, where there’s a wet sensation leaking from her ear.
“I was coming to offer a warning, but I see you’ve met him already.” Anton stops beside the man. He puts a finger under his nose. Gauging by his expression, he must find him to still be breathing. Unfortunate.
“He’s the one who took over Daol,” she guesses.
“Yamen workers announced that he’s the god of precious metals,” Anton says.
“Shortly after the coup in San-Er, he declared that the old gods had returned to Talin and he ought to be worshipped. Killed all the palace soldiers in the barracks with a qi attack like it was nothing. The villages in Daol have been answering to him since. He stops the rain and he helps the crops. He rules as a king.”
Calla eyes the man. She moves to peel back his sleeve. Checks his arms, then his torso. No sigils. He was acting of his own accord.
“He ate my sword,” she mutters.
Anton looks around the clearing, as though there is a chance Calla merely dropped it. Her sword is nowhere to be found. Around them, there lies only gravel, splattered wet from rain, and colored red where Calla scraped herself. There lies the man’s body, unmoving yet unbroken.
“We should go,” Anton decides after a beat.
“We should go,” Calla agrees.