Chapter 30. Now Maris
NOW: MARIS
Sometimes you must burn a field to save it.
My robes fluttered over the marble floors as Ophelius’ words echoed in my mind. They hadn’t made sense to me the day she spoke them, but they did now.
When Luca crossed the river, I’d thought him selfish. But now I could see that he’d known something I hadn’t—that there was no remedy for the kind of sickness that bled through Isara. The only way through was flame and smoke. Blood and dust.
I’d stood in the Tribunal Hall for years and watched as Nej smiled and shook hands.
Clapped the Magistrates on the back. There’d been a moment a few days ago, as I sat for my portrait watching him pace the study, when I’d finally been sure I could trust him.
I’d finally convinced myself that despite all his faults, we were on the same side.
But all I could see now was a man who had his eye on the podium at the front of the Forum, where the gavel rested.
And now I wondered if my mother, his own sister, had been sacrificed on the altar of that ambition.
The young legionnaire posted outside Nej’s chambers straightened when he saw me, gaze dragging from my hair down to my feet. He looked too young to stand the post, but that was what the Loyal Legion was now—the sons of Citadel officials who’d been fit for armor they hadn’t yet earned.
There was a strange look in the legionnaire’s eyes, and I wondered if the dead feeling in my heart was visible on my face. When my steps didn’t slow as I neared the doors, his javelin lowered in front of me.
“Stop.” He shifted forward, putting himself between me and the open chamber behind him.
From a distance, I could see the shadow of someone moving. There was the faint sound of parchment. The tap of a stylus on an inkpot.
“What’s your business?” the legionnaire said.
Now I looked at him, willing myself not to recoil when I saw the youth in his eyes. This boy would be dead in a matter of days. Maybe hours. We both would.
“Magistrate Casperia.” I said only my name, the title bringing to mind the image of my mother. The white pallor of her bloodless skin. The empty blackness in her open, kohl-smudged eyes.
He looked me over again, as if trying to determine what was wrong with me. There was, indeed, something wrong. Even the tone of my voice sounded strange.
“Casperia.”
I looked up when my family name filled the hall, and my uncle suddenly appeared, centered in the inner chamber’s doorway. There was a proud, paternal smile on his face, but he looked different to me now. Like one of the trickster sprites in the old tales.
“Come,” he said.
The legionnaire gave me a reluctant nod, moving aside so I could enter, and I stepped forward without another glance in his direction.
Beyond the chamber doors, Nej stood behind his grand, gilded desk, a gold-rimmed chalice clutched in his hand.
There was a glimmer of something in his eyes, a twist of the light that made them look more silver than blue.
Immediately, there was something warped and bent about the arrangement of the room. There he stood, in the light of the blazing lamps, with a jug full of wine and a tray of bread and fruit. It was as if everything was just slightly askew, like I was peering into a mirror world.
“I’m glad you’ve come.” He came around the desk to face me. He had a placating expression, as if he was getting ready to handle me gently.
“What just happened in there?” I said, voice barely above a whisper.
“What just happened”—he crossed his arms over his chest—“is that you cast your first judgment stone.”
My feet were so firmly planted on the ground that I couldn’t move. The weight of all this—everything that had happened since the day Vitrasian died—was pressing down on top of me.
“It doesn’t get any easier, Maris. The burden of the responsibility you now share in the Forum is a great one.”
There was an unbridled compassion in his eyes that was more than convincing. It almost made me want to believe him.
“What did you do, Nej?” I said, my voice weak.
The softness in his face sharpened just a little, his gaze growing more focused. “I ensured that once all of this is over, you’ll still have your name. Your family’s reputation.”
“You expect me to believe that it’s me you’re looking out for?” I scoffed.
“What benefits you benefits me, Maris. That’s no secret.” He let the mask drop just long enough for me to see what lay behind it. The Philosopher, Luca, my mother, me. He was writing the story himself.
“And what harms one of us harms the other?” I said.
“That’s right.” He nodded.
“Was that true for my mother?”
Nej’s almost imperceptible reaction was like a turning flame on the wick of a lamp—there one moment and gone the next. That weight was settling within me. It was turning my heart to stone.
“Of course it was. She was my sister,” he answered.
It all unspooled like a ribbon, uncurling back as far as the dying fields.
The vote that changed the dole. The Philosopher’s execution.
What whispers had he spoken then? What wayward strategy had he fed the factions?
That was what he did—he planned. Found a path where there wasn’t one.
It was the greatest lesson I’d learned from him.
Nej was maneuvering the Magistrates. Building a safety net. But how? The seat in the Forum engraved with my family name now belonged to me, and I was convinced that he was the one who’d put me there. What other plans did he have for me?
He stepped forward, taking my face in his hands. “You’re a Casperia, Maris. You were made for this. Everything is about to change, and our family will be standing to inherit the will of the gods when it’s over.”
He looked so sure that it made me tremble.
Now I did believe him. I’d underestimated my uncle.
So had my mother. He wasn’t just pulling strings.
He was the one spinning them on the wheel.
The vote. The Priestess. The blood rites were his idea.
And I could guess who he had in mind to drink from that cup. He wanted the magic.
“I won’t do it.” I said, “I won’t perform the blood rites.”
The sound of boots echoed behind me and his gaze lifted to the doorway. When I turned, two legionnaires were waiting.
“The Consul is asking for you,” one of the men said.
Nej smoothed my hair back affectionately, like he had when I was a girl.
He gave me a soft, reassuring smile before he let me go.
“You will do exactly what I tell you to, because I’ve worked very hard for this.
For very long. And if you stand in my way, there is no god who will be able to help you. Do you understand?”
I was seeing my uncle clearly for maybe the very first time. He wasn’t just blown by the winds of favor, like so many others in the Citadel. No, this man had the fate of this city clutched tightly in his fists.
He looked me in the eye for another moment before he followed the legionnaires out. I stood there, motionless, watching the shadow of fluttering wings on the eaves of the window.
I’d known for a long time that the Magistrates who worked behind these walls had their own interests at play.
I’d overheard their talk over elegant dinners and beneath the beaded curtains at parties for as long as I could remember.
And I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that my mother or my uncle had ever been good.
We were just a city of hungry beasts, waiting to devour one another.
Nej, me, Luca. All of us. But this was a plot greater than I could have imagined, and I could feel all Nej’s strings pulling tight.
Something was coming. Everything was about to change.
I slowly glanced over my shoulder, checking the doorway before I moved toward Nej’s desk. I quietly opened the drawers, moving the contents around carefully. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but any chance I had to find it was quickly slipping away.
I rifled through the parchments on the desk, dumping out the alabaster bowl and opening the scrolls. When I found nothing, I went to the cabinets on the wall, pulling down texts and artifacts, relics from temples and other treasures Nej had collected.
My hands stilled on a half-opened scroll when I noticed a box carved from black obsidian by the window. The same one I’d seen in his study all those months ago.
The scroll slipped from my fingers, clattering on the ground as I moved toward the box, and when I took it in my hands, sliding it from the shelf, its weight seemed to pulse in the air around me.
I sank down, my white robes billowing onto the stone floor, and opened it. The gleam of golden light filled the air, and when my eyes landed on what was inside, I stopped breathing.
It was a stylus. Forged of shimmering light. It glowed before me, its tip as sharp as the point of a knife. I knew what this was. I recognized it from the frescoes and the tapestries that hung in the temple. The paintings on the domed ceiling in the Forum. It was a gift. From the gods.
Nej had been gifted.
I carefully lifted the stylus from the box, and the light seemed to almost melt into my skin. Every tale Ophelius had ever told me flitted through my mind, her voice like a low hum in my chest.
I swallowed as I touched the tip to the parchment, exhaling as its luminous golden ink marked the page. My hand moved in a memorized pattern as I wrote my own name.
Maris Casperia.
Slowly the light that formed the letters began to fade. It bled into the parchment until the letters were gone, leaving only the golden shimmer behind.
Breath by breath, the realization took shape in my mind. Mortals weren’t the architects of this war. The gods were.