Chapter 35
Dawn rises over the horizon, and Anton finally switches off the shoddy flashlight he’s been clutching through the night.
Green foliage and brown fronds—that’s how he knows they’ve entered the province.
He’s forgotten where the border is drawn, how the route used to look during their journeys from the palace, but he cannot forget Kelitu’s colors.
Anton doesn’t slow their pace. Calla’s forehead is pressed against his back.
It worries him that there’s very little rain falling.
“Princess,” he yells back. “We’re almost there.”
A small jolt. Calla wakes abruptly, her fingers tightening around his waist. After a beat, she shivers against him.
“It’s cold.”
“Temperatures can drop unexpectedly in Kelitu.” As he speaks, Anton gets a few sparse droplets on his shoulder. “Especially with this weather.”
“Hmm.”
Calla doesn’t say what she must be thinking too. If the god of precious metals was responsible for the light rain in Daol, perhaps its absence in Kelitu means another is combating it here.
“You said the manor was to the south,” Calla calls over the wind.
“Yes.”
“We won’t be venturing too far into Kelitu, then.”
“No,” Anton answers. There won’t be any need to go to the yamen, to wander the main village. They can stay out of the way if something—someone—has descended upon Kelitu.
One problem at a time. One combatant, then the next.
Anton, suddenly, steers their horse off the main path, turning right.
The gravel underfoot changes to grass, a faint path marked by hardened mud.
He had feared that he wouldn’t recognize the turn toward the manor, but Kelitu Province appears exactly as it did two decades ago.
The ground lifts on an incline, pushing into a soft hill, and Anton slows down.
A line of coastal birds squawks overhead.
Calla fidgets behind him, craning her neck to follow the birds.
“I’m surprised your family manor is still standing,” she remarks. She doesn’t have to yell over the wind anymore. “I figured opportunists would have long taken whatever pieces they could get their hands on.”
“I’ve only inquired into the manor once.
” Anton tries not to tense up. The muscles in his back are stiffening with every subsequent mile—and he doesn’t want Calla to feel it.
“After I was exiled and needed the money, I asked whether it might be sold. There could be merchants in the village who might want the property. An assistant for Councilmember Rehanou said no one wanted to come within a hundred feet of the place, never mind move in.”
Which was understandable. The provinces pray to their old gods and maintain their shrines. They shun the sites that have been drenched in blood and sacrifice.
The hill suddenly crests, bringing them up to its apex. Though Anton’s grip doesn’t change on the reins, the horse halts, as though it senses an unspoken instruction. Grassy slopes run a gentle gradient down to the scene before them, to a dilapidated fence that loops the perimeter of a house.
Calla shifts forward, taking in the sight.
Anton almost can’t look directly at it. It is, simultaneously, utterly the same and utterly different; it is exactly as he expected, yet he can barely remember what he expected, so how is he to decide that?
How can he claim that the face of the house has not changed in the wake of tragedy when he can hardly remember the face of his own mother?
Anton urges the horse forward. Carefully, it begins to move, testing its hooves on the grass.
“We used to go around, where the path extends,” he says.
There is an edge of franticness to his voice that he can’t hold back.
An insistence that he does know the way, that he holds enough memory to call this manor his own.
“Carriages were too heavy for this slope. The Palace of Earth only had a few for rent, and my parents took us out often enough that we wanted to be careful we weren’t returning damaged vehicles. Kasa wouldn’t like that very much.”
Though the manor is situated a few miles inland, it stands high enough above sea level to gaze upon the horizon—the tempestuous waves, frothing under the dark clouds. Lightning flashes in the distance, emitting a low rumble over the water.
Calla stays silent as they approach the fence.
The palm trees on the perimeter of the manor wave with the morning wind.
When Anton stares at them too long, he will be hauled back in time, so he tears his eyes away.
This was a home that was not quite home.
An extension outside San-Er granted to his family only because his father was supposed to govern this province to the king’s instructions.
“This way.”
Anton dismounts, his legs shaky. The gate in the fence has a latch in the seams of the wood, and it takes a hard push before the rusting metal is willing to give.
No one has come through in years. If they have, they opted to hop the fence rather than loosen the latch.
Anton pushes the gate aside, waiting for Calla to dismount and tie the horse.
Her eyes lift behind him. Following the features of the Makusas’ former residence.
The ground-floor windows, sealed shut. The second-floor balcony.
And a smiling veranda, stretching before the double front doors, its two rocking chairs left out after all these years, their bright paint long fallen victim to the elements.
Anton lets the gate fall back. A new rumble of thunder echoes from afar. He walks up to the veranda, his steps careful, uncertain if his foot will go right through on a patch of rot. It’s almost a surprise that the floorboards hold his weight.
“That one was mine.” He points to the rocking chair on the left. “Bibi liked to hog the other one, but it was our mother’s primarily, unless she felt ill and complained that the motion worsened her nausea. Then she would walk the seaside instead.”
Calla makes no answering remark. He’s not looking for conversation, not really.
Anton, possessing no key, kicks the left side of the double doors.
Both doors fly inward easily, accompanied by an explosion of decade-old dust. He hears the screams inside the house.
He steps inside and sees the spatter, the blood spreading, spreading…
“It’s very clean,” Calla says.
“The guards hosed it down before they left,” Anton replies. He stops in the atrium. His head lifts to stare up at the ceiling.
The colors have faded over the years. He hasn’t thought about the atrium ceiling of the Kelitu manor since he was eight years old, but upon reacquaintance, it’s unthinkable that he forgot about it, that he left behind these memories of lying underneath it, of pointing out each detail to Bibi and making up stories until she dozed into a nap.
“What the fuck am I looking at?” Calla asks.
Anton scoffs a small laugh. “My sisters and I,” he says, “being chased by a village monster.”
Calla is frowning. She doesn’t seem to think it’s very funny.
Their father had commissioned an artist with an abstract style.
Long, sketchy lines. Blocks of color that didn’t stay within their bounds, as though they were misprinted onto the artwork.
It depicted three children, running, and then a…
thing that floated off the ground with a curved tail and two horns.
“I’d forgotten,” Anton whispers. He feels his throat close up. “I’d entirely forgotten.”
Calla’s hand traces along his shoulder. It is gentle and unusual, a touch purely to sympathize with his pain.
Anton clears his throat. Lowers his gaze from the ceiling, focusing on what is before him. This house, their presence. This province, their war.
“Let’s start searching,” he says. “The office is upstairs.”
He’s played hide-and-seek in here too many times to count.
Under his father’s desk, among his mother’s clothes.
It didn’t make sense why a collection of her coats had been brought out when Kelitu’s winters are light and salt-flecked, calling for nylon rather than wool, but they were stored in the closet nonetheless, hanging one after the other in neat order that Anton used to sidle behind.
Anton pushes the coats aside. He shudders. Without looking any further, he closes the closet door. Why would there be a record of a sigil in there, anyway? It was a silly place to search.
He wouldn’t say he developed a fear of tight spaces since his parents were killed—the entirety of San-Er consists of tight spaces—but something about this manor worsens the effect.
The cupboard in the sitting room downstairs curved to create a perfect nook for him behind it.
The attackers could not see him, but he saw them.
Their throats slit, their chests carved open. The light leaving their eyes, the blood soaking the floor.
How do you kill a god? Anton wants to demand. If Fen Makusa was so powerful, why did he let this happen to him?
Why did he leave Anton to fend for himself?
Calla said she would take a look around the ground floor, just in case, even though Anton was certain there would be nothing there.
Maybe she knows that he’s trying to avoid the scene of the attack.
He swears he can smell the phantom stench of blood in the carpet.
He feels the remnants of death in the manor, and his parents will linger in these corridors until the entire province has sunk with the water.
“I haven’t gotten up to much in this time, I’m sorry,” he says out loud, as though they might hear him.
Anton turns his attention to the filing cabinet next, dumping out the papers in the bottom drawer and sifting through them.
Footsteps sound on the other side of the second floor, which means Calla has made her way up.
The manor has always been resonant. A simple whistle at the front door will echo up to the third floor. He forgot about that too.