Chapter 13 #2
She hadn’t seen herself as a particularly stupid person, but kneeling in a shadowy doorway in an alley, trembling with dread, she cursed herself for being a blind idiot.
She’d followed the woman out of the palace, and even though Melia’s companion tried to be careful, Liana knew Abia too well to be confused by her meandering.
She also knew the house the woman eventually entered: It belonged to Roderi of Elmar.
The treachery ran deep, all the way to the Defender of the South, the Scourge of Seragia, the border hero. Melia’s father.
Liana remembered that the Elmarrans had changed sides and turned against the kingdom, but her meager recollection of the events in Abia didn’t include them stirring the conflict.
The conversation she’d heard in the garden, the proof that the woman was indeed from Elmar, sent by their lord, changed everything she thought she knew.
Elmarrans were responsible for the slaughter in Abia.
The bloody tide of war was rushing towards the festive, careless city, and Liana had nothing but her two hands to stop it. She was out of her depth.
There was a pattern to it, though. Amron had always been the one who planned ahead, perennially worrying about outcomes. He would’ve seen the trouble looming in the past, he would’ve understood the futile enormity of her task. He would have warned her.
But of course, he did warn her. Don’t fight the gods, he’d written. And yet, she had to go and do the exact opposite, because that was what she’d always been doing. Rushing into things without thinking, stirring trouble wherever she went.
All she had been able to think about was getting Amron back. It had never occurred to her that there might be other people around him. People whose destinies she knew, people who would die horrible deaths in the pointless, disastrous war that was brewing right now, before her very eyes.
Telani had accused her of not caring about other people, but that wasn’t true anymore, not since her father walked into that little attic room. The pain and yearning she’d felt, the worry she’d seen in his eyes, changed everything. She wanted more time with her father.
If Abia rose against the Seragians, Darin would die. That much she remembered.
No, he would die in any case, because that was how the events in Abia had played out. It was a done thing, it was history.
Except, it wasn’t. It was happening now, all around her.
She and Amron had changed something already, running away from Amril’s party, fighting the Seragians.
And now she knew those weren’t really Seragians, but Elmarrans.
The black heart of treason beat inside the palace. Surely, that meant something?
It occurred to Liana this might not be an already completed fragment of time into which Perun had inserted her, otherwise it would have looked like an illusion, and she wouldn’t be able to alter the smallest thing.
She would be nothing but a ghost, a powerless spectator of past events.
The fact that she had any power here told her this was the present, real and volatile and malleable.
There could never be two presents. The gods couldn’t create parallel timelines. They could stretch time or condense it, they could move through it in both directions, but they couldn’t multiply it. There was only one timeline.
Which meant all bets were off.
Liana doubled over on her knees, biting into the soft fabric of her sleeve, into the hard flesh of her forearm, to muffle her terrified moan.
There was no other Liana, hunting in the forests of Till, safe and unaware of the events in Abia. There was no victory waiting for her, no hard-won war for Amron in the end, no throne for the heirs of Amris. There was no future life together for Amron and Liana because there was no set future.
She howled into her arm like a wounded hound.
Perun had sent her back, and there were no guarantees, no fixed points in the future that were still true.
It was all happening here and now, it was all decided at this crucial point, this unfortunate wedding that would change the history of the kingdom.
All possibilities were still crammed together, like seeds in a bag.
Her moan shattered into desperate laughter.
It was a trap, Perun had set her up. She had been a na?ve fool to believe this was about Amron and her. No, the gods liked to play for high stakes. Thousands of innocent lives, destinies of kingdoms and empires. Nothing was more exciting than a good war: bloody, long, and unpredictable.
There was no such thing as simply getting Amron to kiss her. Removing him from Abia now would mean there’d be no one left to win the war. And the future they’d go to, live through, would be a future of defeat and loss.
Perun could not have done this alone, they must have all agreed on it, the gods, including her mother. Including Morana.
Liana could see the vortex of death before her, starting here at this wedding and ending with half the kingdom burnt to ashes, the imperial army marching across it.
People dying or fleeing north, back to the mountains and forests Amris had led them out of, but ill-prepared now, used to soft lives, still hoping that the shattered kingdom could protect them.
She remembered the battlefields. The Siege of Myrit, the city starved to the bones, its lord captured and executed beneath its walls, his wife watching from the battlements.
The desperate attack that followed, Amron’s forces outnumbered, the knights that Prince Nykodios sent after him, who would’ve killed him were it not for Liana’s arrows.
And then the Battle of Syr, the battlefield so horrific that even Liana, hardened from years of fighting, sobbed.
Where Amron died and came back, carrying Morana’s curse that would destroy him. The victory that cost everything.
Her body was a tight ball of dread on the cold stone, chest bent over her knees, forehead touching the flags, arms crossed over her head.
A light-footed person strolled down the alley, walked by the doorway, paused, and walked back to her.
“Are you all right?” a female voice said.
“No.”
“Can you get up? Come, I’ll help you.”
Liana moved her head a little and saw a pair of leather sandals and a blue linen skirt with a frayed hem. She lowered her hands to the doorstep, pushed herself up. The girl set aside the jug she was carrying and knelt beside Liana.
“Are you hurt? Or sick?” the girl asked.
“I’m terrified,” Liana admitted.
“Of what?”
The girl was no older than fifteen, with a plain, well-scrubbed face and dark hair hidden beneath a white cap. She was the smallest of the small fish in this game. If the war broke out and Abia fell, she and thousands like her would die in the streets.
“If you knew for sure something terrible was going to happen, what would you do?” Liana asked.
The girl shot her a long look, taking in Liana’s messy hair, her creased dress, her red-rimmed eyes. “I’d try to stop it, I guess,” she said at last.
Liana took a deep breath, forcing her lungs to fill with air and her brain to think again. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me.”
Throwing Liana one last worried glance over her shoulder, the girl picked up the jug and disappeared. Liana got up, leaning on the wall.
If there was no set future, then everything was still possible. If this was a game played by the gods, if there were stakes, then there had to be different outcomes on the table as well. The one where the kingdom slid into a horrible war. And the one where it didn’t.