Chapter 1 #2
Elegy’s mouth is dry. She follows the Sword through the sanctuary door.
Her steps falter. The room is bigger than she expected, and circular, the outer wall made of thousands of small stones arranged in a spiral from bottom to top.
The ceiling is wooden, hundreds of narrow planks converging in the center at a round window that lets in a shaft of light.
The floor is white--dusted stone, as cold as the antechamber, and in the center of the room is a mirror with the light from the skylight sparkling on its surface.
It’s as big as a pond, and fragmented, so it reflects bits and pieces rather than whole images: a wisp of cloud, a wink of sunlight, a sliver of blue.
Standing in a semicircle around that mirror are ten people in dove--gray robes with bands of white across their throats. The augurs.
The Sword ushers Elegy forward, toward the augurs and the future she doesn’t want to know.
The augurs are all different ages, the oldest a straight--backed elderly woman, the youngest a teenager with soft, pink cheeks. All their eyes lock on her the moment she walks in, and the effect is unsettling. Those eyes see more than hers ever will.
“Go to the center of the mirror,” Nerina says to her.
Elegy glances at the Sword. She may not like the woman whose body formed hers, but in this strange place, she’s Elegy’s only ally.
The Sword nods, and Elegy walks past Nerina to the edge of the mirror.
It looks fragile, like her weight will break it, but when she steps on it, it feels solid.
She can see herself reflected upward at a dozen different angles, in one a downturned mouth, in another a fidgeting hand.
She walks to what looks like the center, the window showing blue sky above her.
Sunlight stretches across her body. At once, all the augurs step forward and look at the reflections of her in the glass.
“You see,” the youngest one says, pointing at one of them. “It is her.”
“That’s the faulty logic of the young,” one of the others replies. “One piece of evidence and you say it’s certain.”
“Enough,” the oldest augur says. “We’ve decided on a course of action, and no debate will change it.”
The other augurs nod, and fall silent again.
The oldest augur goes on: “Elegy Rosyk. Welcome.”
“That’s not my name,” Elegy says, before she can stop herself. “Rosyk” is the Sword’s name—-Elegy goes by her father’s, which is “Ahn.”
“It’s not your name yet,” the oldest augur says. “But we can hardly be expected to keep track of ‘yet.’ ”
“ ‘Yet’ is meaningless,” one of the others says, rolling his eyes. “Everything is was.”
Elegy doesn’t get a chance to puzzle over this bit of nonsense.
A heavy door closes somewhere deep in the building.
There are voices. Scuffling. A moment later another black--robed attendant, like Nerina, comes into the room from the door behind the augurs, identical to the one Elegy used to come in. She’s followed by a Talusar woman.
The woman is tall. The tallest woman Elegy has ever seen.
Her feet are bare, but she wears armor in the pattern of a thousand tiny copper plates layered over each other to look like feathers.
Her dirty--blond hair is braided into a crown around her pale face, which has an aristocratic look to it, her nose hooked and her mouth pinched.
“Stand beside her,” the woman’s attendant says to her, gesturing toward Elegy.
The woman looks Elegy over with a mixture of contempt and curiosity. She steps onto the mirror, and Elegy shifts to put more space between them.
“Rava Vidar,” the oldest augur says. “Welcome.”
Elegy chokes, and tries to disguise it by coughing. The Sword told her the Talusar would be here, but she didn’t mention one of them would be Rava Vidar, the Butcher of Calgara.
The Talusar empire spans their planet under the headship of the emperor, Icar Talus.
Rava is his grandniece. Her mother, Icar’s niece, is the most famous of the family members the emperor has installed to reign over his territories, known for her exacting standards and her fatalistic acceptance of brutality.
Rava is her mother’s enforcer and her right hand.
It’s a job she’s had from a young age, young enough that all of Cedre made jokes about the child general.
(What does the Talusar general say to her first in command?
someone would ask. And the answer: Nothing, she just learned her first word last week!) But Rava attained early victories against Fever--changed rebels from the north, and then—-Calgara.
She invaded Cedre’s colony there, infected its residents with Fever, and turned the cold war between the Talusar and the Cedrae boiling hot.
The jokes about Rava Vidar’s age didn’t sound so funny after that.
“It’s only right that you should be introduced,” one of the augurs, a bearded man with round spectacles, says. “Rava Vidar, daughter of Ileth Vidar, this is Elegy Rosyk, daughter of the Sword of Cedre.”
Elegy sees herself through Rava’s eyes: a woman not much younger than she is, who stands a head shorter than her, in worn black pants and a rumpled shirt, her face covered to protect against Fever.
Compared to this blond titan in febra armor, she’s nothing and no one. Daughter of the Sword, what a joke.
“I’m sure you’re both wondering why you’re here,” the oldest augur says. “Or perhaps . . . why the other is here.”
Rava and Elegy don’t look at each other.
“There is a prophecy,” the youngest augur says, his pink cheeks even pinker than before. “It might concern you—-” He gestures to Rava. “And it might concern you—-” He gestures to Elegy. “It will decide the fate of one of your nations, or the other.”
“It . . . might concern me?” Elegy says, her voice muffled by the mask.
“Show some respect,” Rava says to her. “Cedre swine.”
It doesn’t occur to Elegy to be angry. She just looks at Rava with interest. She’s never been called “swine” before.
“Some augurs deal in words, and some in images,” the oldest augur says, as if neither of them spoke.
“Some see few visions, and see them clearly, and some see many, and see them vaguely. We work together to arrive at the path we believe to be the most likely, but it’s not an exact science.
And in this situation, we have reached an impasse.
That is partly because of the relationship between you. ”
The oldest augur steps onto the mirror. Her skin is freckled across her nose. There are creases around her mouth, as if she’s spent a lifetime keeping words in. The end of her robe trails on the glass. She stops in front of Elegy and Rava.
“The two of you share a two--pronged lineage, of which each of you is the last living descendant,” she says. “This prophecy trickles down that bloodline—-all the way down to Ileth Vidar, and her many--generations--removed cousin: Keen Ahn.”
Elegy thinks of her father, Keen Ahn, slouched over his morning coffee, his hair sticking straight up as he checks her math homework. The memory aches. The thought of him being related to Rava Vidar even distantly is laughable. But the augur doesn’t appear to be joking.
“What does this prophecy say?” Rava asks.
The augur smiles.
“That is where our solution to this problem comes in,” she says. “This prophecy concerns the future of your respective people. It assures victory for one of you over the other—-and through you, victory for your people over the other’s.”
Elegy feels a laugh bubbling up inside her, but it’s not a mirthful one.
It’s all panic, all confusion. Victory for one of you over the other.
She can’t look at Rava Vidar, the titan, the warrior, the legend.
Elegy and her mismatched socks are no match for her.
Victory for your people over the other’s.
Victory for the Cedrae over the Talusar isn’t something she’s ever imagined.
She thought they were fighting to survive, fighting to maintain the little corners of this planet that they occupy—-not fighting to win.
The augur goes on: “But this prophecy is . . . a storm. Chaos and confusion. Tumult and rupture. And we have devised a way to make it settle.” She looks back at the other augurs, her body angling away from Elegy so she can’t see the woman’s face.
“Half of us believe it speaks of one of you, and half of us believe it speaks of the other. So we will divide and reveal it to you separately. The questions you ask, and the guidance you receive, will force the prophecy in one direction or the other. But you will not know which—-not until it’s too late to change anything.
By the time you leave this place in peace, the wheels of fate will already be in motion.
One of you will triumph, and the other will not.
The Cedrae will be victorious . . . or the Talusar. ”
The augur looks from Rava to Elegy.
“We will proceed immediately. Yes?”
“Yes,” Rava says.
And though all Elegy wants to do is refuse, run out the double doors to the salt flat, and leave this place far behind her, she knows that’s not an option.
“Yes,” she answers.