Chapter 50
Sinoa Tuoleimi enters Yi a century after it was promised to her.
Back then, it was only one city, not two. It was the beating hub of the kingdom, where nobles concentrated their wealth. Her small temple burning in Yi tugged the rug out from underneath her. It brought terror to her war, bent it beyond salvage, then forced her to flee north.
No more.
The divine crown tightens around her head.
She draws to an abrupt stop outside the wall.
Night gathers thickly around the capital, the shadows heavy without opposition.
Where there used to be lights wired along the top of the wall, illuminating passage through the main gate, most sections have been reduced to ruin, bulbs shattered and pulled from their flimsy electric sockets.
Sinoa dismounts. She climbs over the destruction.
Lands solidly on the bloodied grass inside.
She breathes it in. This could have been so easy.
Her brothers did not need to invent such lies to pull her title away from her.
One hundred years of suffering in Talin—it’s all their fault.
One hundred years of turmoil, caught between the heavens and the earth, and it is because the kingdom would not listen when Sinoa Tuoleimi made her claim.
She flexes her palms. Begins to walk.
It is only when the crown plinks atop her head that she realizes Anton Makusa has not been following.
She swivels around, frowning to be cut off from his qi.
He is so much more powerful than he could believe, only he cannot access even a fraction of it.
It does not belong to him. It belongs to the heavens.
But the crown lets her take it.
“What are you doing?” she calls. He has dismounted, at least. Stepped over the rubble slowly, eyeing their surroundings. A small amount of light streams from the nearest apartment blocks, some windows glowing blue or white. Most stay dark.
When his gaze lifts, Anton’s eyes swirl with power. Even despite what Sinoa has taken.
“There’s something I must ask.”
She shifts on her feet. “Let it wait until we get to the palace,” she urges. “August will be there already. We must kill him.”
August entered first, with his forces, his Weisannas—who listen only to him at present.
They will bring the capital to heel, leave behind no opposition, and because August will inevitably refuse to coronate her, she must kill him, then call for the allegiance of the Weisannas.
She is a Tuoleimi, after all. As far as the entirety of Talin understands it, she is Princess Calla who grew up in Er, and the Weisannas are born to serve the royals.
It is not so delusional a leap. Far less than if Otta Avia had made the grab.
“Was it always a game to you?”
Sinoa narrows her eyes. “I beg your pardon?”
“I could not contend with your true purpose. This, I understand.” Anton is peering up at the city while he speaks. “It only seems fair that you offer me the truth now. If I could not have your affection, why keep this going for so long? Why not let go of me when we were young?”
She can’t help it. Sinoa laughs out loud. Ah. So he knows. In the years she was gone, someone else sank her hooks into him, and it is hard to pull off a performance when she has had little time to study.
“Do you know who you are, Anton?” Sinoa snaps. “Don’t say a word about fair until you understand where you came from. You are owed to me. After all the heavens have done, you are mine.”
Anton’s jaw tightens. Horror carves into the line of his mouth. Across his brow.
“No.”
“I don’t have time for this.” Sinoa reaches out with her qi, engulfing Anton in his entirety. When she pulls, he moves against his will, dragged toward her. “You will not leave me,” she says. “You will rule at my side—”
A flash of light, to her right. Sinoa turns too slowly.
The collision is brutal and sudden, and Sinoa’s hold snaps, her body flying across the field, slamming into a building already half decimated.
The sharp edge of a window slashes down her arm.
She hisses, bringing her elbow close and focusing until the wound stops gushing blood.
She should have gone and done it after leaving the palace in the mountains.
The thought did occur to her. It was on the way.
When Sinoa was running through Rincun, en route to Eigi to join August’s forces, she should have found the place where the godling of greed stashed her first body, and burned it to ash.
Sinoa pulls deep. She is well-versed in the divine crown. She spent battle after battle learning how to tap into its deepest reserves. Her opponent takes shape before her, and Sinoa would know those blank, unseeing eyes to the ends of the earth. Where Sinoa goes, she does too.
She rises to face the godling of greed.
Calla rises from her crouch.
The impact of her attack was more forceful than she expected.
This form of hers is hard to be delicate with.
Before Sinoa prepares a defense, Calla is already moving again, drawing her qi from her chest, into her palms, sending it screaming forward.
She remembers nothing of her life in the heavens, but she remembers everything about the Palace of Heavens, about its training, about her drills.
The generals that came through, tapping her arms, moving her feet.
When she seizes a Crescent’s fallen sword from the rubble, she swings fast. Sinoa finally blocks with a tremendous surge of her own.
Calla flies back. She crashes into the remains of a watchtower, which has detached from the wall and crushed several Crescent Society sentries. A metal bar protrudes from the damage, and Calla’s palm stings when she uses it to push herself up. She wheezes through a cough.
Near another piece of the wall, Anton has backed himself into a tight space, knowing he cannot interfere with this sort of fight. Calla catches his gaze as she reaches for her sword, and he tilts his head up, signaling the top of the nearest building. A tall water tank, on the rooftop.
Sinoa strides forward. Her face is red. Her mouth twisted. She claws her hand, and several paces away, Calla feels the motion around her throat. She’s wrenched off her feet, hauled an inch from the ground.
“I never could have imagined encountering an immortal so stupid,” Sinoa spits. “You have the power to claim your own segment of the kingdom. You have the power to situate yourself the ruler of the whole north if you wanted. And you come after me instead?”
“Me,” Calla barely rasps past the obstruction around her throat. Mine.
“Don’t be absurd.”
Sinoa’s grip turns searing hot, attempting to burn through Calla, and Calla sends her qi toward the fallen sword.
It hurtles through the air with a sharp whistle—Sinoa is forced to release her hold, halting the blade instead.
Calla gasps for breath. Her vision blurs.
She is straining for power, desperate to find the ceiling on the qi she can wield.
When Sinoa straightens, she raises her arms. As if to indicate peace, to indicate an armistice in this back-and-forth, evenly matched.
How can she be so much better at wielding the divine crown?
The godling of qi had the audacity to boot Calla from that body, claiming she would be stronger here, yet Sinoa Tuoleimi maneuvers her qi like it is nothing.
“What is it that you want?” Sinoa asks. “Some role in the kingdom? That can be agreed upon. We need not do this.”
“That’s enough,” Calla says, and her voice is hoarse. “This is not your world anymore. This is not the kingdom you ruled. You have no claim to it.”
“No claim?” Sinoa wails.
Right as Calla seizes the water tank and pulls, Sinoa’s arm snaps toward it too. She locks it in place. It becomes a battle of will, equal force against equal force.
“On the contrary,” Sinoa says, “I was born with a claim. I was born in this body.”
“And that,” Calla returns, “was a mistake.”
The tank shatters. In the deluge of its contents, Calla is truly blinded, her eyes blinking and blinking and finding nothing.
Water sludges along her skin, collecting in her lungs.
She flings it away with a pulse, and then Sinoa is closer than she expected, then Sinoa has a grip on her throat, not using qi from a distance but her own calloused hand, her fingers digging in.
Calla is familiar with her strength—what her body is capable of.
In this form, she emits a burst of qi, and Sinoa tamps it, absorbs it.
Calla tries to tear, to pull, to do anything that might interrupt such a death grip.
Anton is moving. She sees him. By the wall one moment. Closer, the next. Sinoa does not notice. Her hair is drenched. Water drips down her face in mimicry of the crown’s metal beads.
“You will not stop me,” Sinoa hisses. “You wouldn’t answer me in my time of need. You took pleasure in my suffering, and then you fell in line with your pantheon. Now you will see what these years spent waiting have taught me. You will regret ever stealing from me.”
Yes. Calla does regret it. Who knows what she could have achieved if she had stayed put in this form: she could have wandered Rincun until there was some clarity in her mind, until she gleaned some part of herself back.
She was turned mortal in punishment, because only then would she be willing to go through this torment, desiring to be Calla more than anything else, unable to part with the identity.
She regrets it, but this was how it was always supposed to play out.
The heavens decided it. Just as the heavens decide everything.
Calla stops struggling. Where Sinoa had been putting all her energy into holding Calla in place, there is a sudden overshoot now, a scramble to pull back her power before it flies wide.
The age-old queen flinches. Calla no longer needs breath in her lungs.
She hovers off the ground of her own volition.
There is movement, right over Sinoa’s shoulder, but she does not notice while Calla’s eyes ooze blinding white light.
“Sinoa Tuoleimi,” she says, and her voice rumbles like thunder from the skies.
“You make your sacrifices. You grow powerful on heaven-gifted qi. But you are mortal. No matter what you do, no matter what blood you spill and how many years you spend planning, you are only scraping a fraction of what I am capable of. I am a god. How do you expect to overpower a god?”
Anton claps a hand to the back of Sinoa’s neck.
The wind howls. When he wraps his other hand around the ridges of her crown, the metal tries to resist. Sinoa gasps, wanting to wheel around, but Calla clamps down on both the queen’s arms, holding her immobilized.
Calla’s grip is no longer a negotiation. She is a god. She is a god.
Lightning cascades from the clouds. Screaming and screaming and screaming—the crown does not want to lift off, but Anton is achieving progress.
The metal slowly detaches from skin. Ribbons of dermis rise alongside the band, blood capillaries popping and ripping from exposed raw tissue.
A wearer is not supposed to survive the removal of the divine crown, but Sinoa Tuoleimi remains upright when Anton, with the last remnant of heaven’s will on earth, hurls the crown off.
Calla does not need another cue.
She jumps in.
It is no different from drowning at the bottom of the puddle again.
Sensation rushing up her nose, down her throat.
This is a battle she has fought before. Her qi spreads, oozing from the back of her tongue into her stomach, and she returns to that memory, clear as ice.
Calla wants. She wants to claim this body; she wants to push these arms and run with these legs.
From the edge of her perception, she senses a foreign source of qi.
Anton presses close. His hand stays at the back of her neck.
It is permission: it is his endless well offered up to her.
She feels Sinoa—weakened into tatters after the divine crown was ripped off.
Sinoa senses Anton’s presence too, making a valiant effort to grab at him, but Calla is better at taking.
Calla quashes her and gulps and gulps and gulps.
The godling of greed is not forgiving. The godling of greed has held her place at the top of the pantheon since humanity was born on earth.
I prayed to you every day.
Calla hears the voice everywhere. In this moment, she is only qi, as is Sinoa.
I prayed to you, Sinoa whispers, and you came to me. You understood. Even while I was sleeping, you understood what I asked for. You killed all the Tuoleimis. The bloodline is dead.
Laughter. Whether it comes from Sinoa herself or some clamor from the past, Calla can’t be certain.
She consumes another torrent, pulling from Anton, and suddenly a kaleidoscope of memories flashes into awareness, flooding her perception.
The rage, the resentment—her hatred for the king of the heavens.
The mortal queen in Talin, who was wronged, who didn’t deserve to be punished simply for embracing her patron god.
The last-ditch effort to save her friend, and her hope that it would work once she was forbidden from answering any more pleas.
The Palace of Heavens has fallen. The Palace of Earth is held by a newcomer.
—No! Take it back. She remembers everything. They wiped her memory so that she would turn against her devotee.
Everyone who betrayed me has had their legacy devastated. There is nothing of them left behind. I win. Hah! I win.
“Sinoa,” Calla rasps out loud, but everything has gone silent. She opens her eyes. Before her, the vessel she departed has collapsed. She looks at her hands, touches her arms, her hips, her face. She took her body back. She is Calla Tuoleimi.
And Sinoa is gone. Depleted into nothing.
She turns around to find Anton catching his breath.
He has taken a step away at last, his arms loose at his sides.
The crown was flung onto the ground beside him.
Its ridges flash gold, catching the faint lights of the twin cities.
After the tumult of the battle, nothing feels real anymore.
Calla is only staring at illusions. Movement, flashing behind Anton.
Calla blinks. Not an illusion. It’s Galipei. His arm held steady. His sword, as sharp as his charge.
“No!” she screams.