Chapter 48
Without a sigil for protection, without Calla at his side, without any weapon stronger than this pathetic blade he scooped from the battlefield, Anton is horribly exposed.
While he rides his horse at a full gallop, he almost tips off the saddle at multiple points because he’s peering over his shoulder, paranoid about pursuit.
He needed to leave. He wasn’t going to be any help after the sigils went dark. Anton is not a soldier. He does not care to sacrifice himself en masse, another body in the casualty count thereafter. If he bears no additional power, he goes where he can uphold an advantage.
“Faster,” Anton urges. “Faster, girl.”
As frantic as he is to return to Teefa, back to the marshes where he has hidden Calla, he can’t make sense of what has happened. Where is she? Why would she leave him behind? At this critical point of their push against August, she… flees?
Anton can feel the terrain changing. Desert dryness transforming into the plains. The plains, when nearing the sea, becoming wetland. He’ll pluck her up and get moving. If August refused to fight, then he must be on the move. August must be heading toward San-Er.
Worst-case scenario, Anton gets in Calla’s body and rules in the interim until he figures out where the fuck she is—
Anton barrels into the marshes. He almost misses the site, marked by a stray cattail on the road. He would have, if not for Calla already moving around, bent over the low swamp and throwing up.
“For fuck’s sake, Calla,” Anton calls out, dismounting the horse hard enough to send a shock up his legs. “Where have you been?”
Calla, slowly, backs away from the edge of the water. Though she turns her head to acknowledge Anton’s arrival, she remains on her knees for a beat. Her face is green. Her eyes blazing yellow. She wipes her mouth.
When she stands, she pitches forward.
“Calla!” Anton exclaims, lunging to catch her.
It is, perhaps, an odd comparison to make, but she looks like Otta did in those seconds after coming down with the yaisu sickness.
Anton is jolted back to the memory: the way Otta staggered in the vault, the sweat beading at her temples when he caught her, asking if she was all right.
He had gotten the barest shake of her head before she was unconscious, her organs burning beyond recovery.
He memorized the exact pallor of her face when the Weisannas closed in on them and pulled Otta out of his arms.
But Calla is not falling ill before him. She breathes in slowly. A flush of pink appears on her cheeks.
“Thank you,” she says. “You always make me feel better.”
Anton frowns. “What’s wrong?”
“A bit of qi sickness. You saw those soldiers from Rincun, didn’t you? I needed to recruit them quickly.”
Anton is reeling. They never talked about soldiers from Rincun.
That wasn’t their plan—even if they expected that August and Sinoa might bring forces to the meeting, Calla’s method of attack was elsewhere.
Kill August, kill Sinoa, and no leaders meant no battle in Actia.
They weren’t actually grappling to seize the northern provinces when August was clearly in the weaker position, half his army wiped out.
“Two hundred,” Anton murmurs under his breath.
Calla gives him a strange look. Having regained her balance, she withdraws from his arms. She whistles for the horse’s attention, then asks, “Two hundred what?”
Even two hundred seemed a low number for half their army.
But it was Marra Weisanna who confirmed so, who said half had split off to Janton.
When Anton was ruling as king, though, he had performed a once-over on the palace paperwork and thought he noted nearly seven hundred Weisannas.
There were a few casualties during the attack in Eigi.
There were a few casualties during the Crescent takeover and Calla’s coup, yes. But still… where were the rest of them?
And where was Marra during the battle?
“We have to go back to San-Er,” Anton says. “Immediately.”
August didn’t split his army into two. He split it in three.
“Yes, correct,” Calla says. She is oblivious to his epiphany. “We must pursue August.”
When Anton left the battle in Actia, it was still in full force. The tug slithering across his neck, the qi thick in the air. Calla fixes the saddle on the horse. She asks, “Anton?”
“Didn’t I tell you once,” he says, more to the marsh, to the air, to the battle raging some distance away, “that I would recognize you in any body?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Never mind.” He clambers on the horse. “Let’s go.”
Calla flees by taking a horse from the Weisannas, unhitching its reins with a quick tug.
She expects to find the marsh empty. She expects that Sinoa entered her body and wasted no time moving—and she is proved correct—but some part of her still thought Anton might have seen through the ruse, might have stopped her and kept her put.
Calla screams, the sound echoing harshly over the wetlands, scaring off a flock of birds. Her horse, too, startles beneath her, but she tugs the reins sharply, turning its path to the south instead.
August’s forces have been obliterated in the north. But it matters not. Because he was always aiming for San-Er. A meeting to discuss bisecting the kingdom, as it once was. A lie, simply to lure Calla to the scene, simply for Sinoa to take occupancy of her body.
“Okay,” she hisses. “Let’s go.”
She begins her frantic sprint to San-Er.