Chapter 8
I called out for my beloved from across the River,
But he didn’t come for me.
I planted jasmine in my garden,
But he didn’t come to see.
The River kept him,
The River kept him,
The River kept him from me.
—Songs of Astola, collected and compiled by Mahira Nazir
Yaseema
Voices shouted from a distance, and I knew they were close, likely already in the vault by now.
There was nowhere I could hide.
Still, I ran from the antechamber and into the main hall of the vault.
If I was going to get caught, I didn’t want to be standing in the room where I’d found the haath phool.
The Citadel was looking for it and I didn’t want to give them any help.
I was just in time to see the excavators flooding through the crater they’d made in the ceiling from the dynamite.
But it wasn’t just excavators with them—they had brought Citadel soldiers, armed with rifles and grim faces. The excavators led them through the vault, their identical tanned uniforms making them seem more like pillars of sand than humans.
When they saw me, both excavators and soldiers came to an abrupt halt, with some of the Citadel soldiers even pointing their rifles in my direction.
“Yaseema?”
I winced at hearing the familiar voice, and the surprise in it.
But I pressed my lips together and met her gaze.
“Sophie.”
Sophie Hightower’s mouth was agape, her blue eyes wide, like the chips of sky they’d blasted through the ceiling of the vault to see. Her bright blonde hair complimented the golden fae vault around us, but she still seemed incongruent—a manicured lawn in a row of wild jasmine flower gardens.
I kept my expression carefully blank as I stared back at my former friend.
We’d worked closely together on many of the excavations led by the Citadel.
She wasn’t Astolan but had seemed sympathetic to us and often donated her food ration to those starving outside the Citadel gates.
I had thought I’d found a kinship with her, even though she’d come from the greater Empire of Angrezia to assist the Citadel in digging up fae relics.
She had even worked for Empress Lorna preserving Astolan relics in her museum.
But when I’d found Sophie reading through my mother’s journal that she’d stolen from my satchel, the betrayal felt like she’d taken a Citadel saber and stabbed me in the gut with it.
She had been mining the journal for secrets, feeding the Citadel all she learned, the songs and stories that my mother had spent her life compiling, the ones that weren’t contained in any book in the Citadel archives.
And as Sophie stood before me now, her face full of shock, I felt supremely satisfied that I had at least bested her in this.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her tone filled with accusation.
“I didn’t want you to have all the fun, you know.” I kept my voice light.
“You?” The lead excavator came forward, a man named Robert Winthrop, who’d barely ever spoken to me when I’d worked in the archives.
He pushed in front of Sophie, his face furious.
Bits of stone from the blast clung to his grey hair and uniform, making him seem like a statue come to life.
He pointed at me, but his gaze whipped back to Sophie.
“Hightower, what is the meaning of this? How could an archive scholar have gotten here before us?” He looked back at me, his lip curling with contempt.
“I was the one who led you here in the first place,” I offered, daring Sophie to challenge me on it.
She’d followed the clues in my mother’s journal just as I had, songs and poems she’d found laying a path to the Golden Vault’s location.
Only I had been the one to find the door, to unearth the key.
Sophie had exploded through the vault ceiling with dynamite.
In response to my statement she flushed a deep crimson, her freckles standing out in stark relief.
“It’s true,” she offered, biting her lip. A wave of surprise washed over me. I had assumed she would pretend she didn’t know me, or at least didn’t know what I was talking about. “We used her research to get here, so she did assist us in finding this place.”
Not willingly.
“Well, this is Citadel property now.” Winthrop folded his arms across his chest, giving me a cold stare. I knew that look. It was the one I received most often when I walked through the halls of the Citadel, the gaze that said, you don’t belong here.
Even when my feet were planted on the ground of my own kingdom, I didn’t belong.
“Scholars are not allowed on excavation sites. You are trespassing.” Winthrop stepped forward, surveying the golden fae vault around us, as if he’d already dismissed me.
“Arrest her.” He waved his hand in my direction, and at least ten soldiers surrounded me, their guns drawn.
Panic seized me, not at the thought of my arrest, but at them searching me and finding the Queen’s bracelet there. I needed to get out of this mess, and fast.
“Do you really need this many Citadel soldiers to arrest one girl?” I asked mildly, but no one was listening to me. Even the soldiers who’d approached me were distracted by our surroundings. They were all staring at the Golden Vault, as if only just realizing the magnitude of fae wealth around us.
“Remove and compile all the valuables in the vault to send to the Empress,” Winthrop continued. “But there’s one relic in particular we need to find now.”
Sophie nodded, and I wanted to throw her into the pit full of spikes I’d just climbed out of.
“The quqnoz,” Sophie said softly and I stood a little straighter at her mention of the statue I’d just held in my hands. Of course, she would go right to it.
Winthrop gave a disgusted face. “What is that?”
I let out a little laugh. After all this time, they couldn’t be bothered to learn the proper names of the Astolan mythological creatures and relics they stole.
Sophie shot me a look. “The phoenix statue,” she explained to the excavator. “The song says it’s in an antechamber, not in the main portion of the temple.”
Only because my mother’s journal told you that, you traitorous weasel.
I didn’t say that out loud.
But the betrayal of our friendship still burned like rubbing black salt into an open wound.
She had been one of my closest friends in the Citadel, even though she’d come from the Angrezian Empire.
But I thought she had understood what we were going through and cared about helping us.
Instead, she had been using me to find treasures for the Citadel, to leach our land of life magic and starve more of my people.
I didn’t scream at her, because I also didn’t want to give them another excuse to search me.
So I stood with my lips pressed closed while they excavated the vault, and tried not to react when they shouted about finding the phoenix statue.
“Give it to me!” cried Winthrop.
A thorn of fear pierced through me. I couldn’t be here when they noticed the haath phool missing. Though first, they would have to get through the fae’s traps.
Slowly, I took a step toward the hole they’d blasted open in the ceiling, the rubble piling up like a makeshift staircase. But as I did so, I realized what they were about to do. Dread pooled in my veins as I watched Winthrop stride toward the antechamber.
He wouldn’t . . . not even the Citadel was that stupid.
Sophie followed my gaze to see what Winthrop was doing and gasped. She’d read my mother’s journal, she knew about the traps ancient fae used for their most powerful relics.
And if this one granted the power to cross the River, it was important indeed.
“Stop!” I screamed, unable to let him continue. I despised the Citadel for all they had done, for all they would do, but I wasn’t like them. I couldn’t watch them die when I had the power to do something about it.
I pulled away from the soldiers, not even bothering to glance at the guns trained on me. “You shouldn’t touch that without—”
Winthrop snatched the phoenix statue from the podium, not even bothering to look at the tiles underneath. He clutched it to him, features twisted with greed and ambition. “The Empress will be very pleased with us all today.”
The burn of acid hit my throat. I stepped back in shock, but two guards wrapped their burly hands around my shoulders, preventing me from going any further.
The ground below us shook, not unlike the dynamite that had exploded half of the mountain open for them to get in here.
But this time, the dynamite was underneath our feet.
A powerful, magical, fail-safe that would destroy the vault and everyone left inside it, a punishment for anyone who had stolen from them.
Shouts and screams echoed through the vault. A boulder fell from above, smashing to the glittering, golden tiles. Soldiers and Citadel workers scattered, running in all directions as rocks and pieces of the mountain began to collapse on us.
Magic stung the air, the bright thrum of it, the same sensation every time I used my own power. This time, instead of feeling like a path forward it was a warning.
You won’t get out of here alive.
But I had to change my fate somehow. I wrenched myself free of the soldiers and raced away, peeling out of the vault and towards the open crater in the ceiling even as the floor cracked in half under my feet.
Others ran towards the rubble as well, recognizing it as the only way they’d make it out without getting crushed. I jumped across the split in the floor that had opened up, managing to avoid getting swallowed by the mountain, though a soldier next to me was not as lucky.
I climbed up the boulders that had been left jagged by the explosives. My shoulder was still aching from the fall earlier, but I managed to heave myself through the opening, the cool morning air like being doused in relief.
“Yaseema!” Sophie climbed out after me, and I whirled with surprise. I hadn’t even noticed she was behind me. Our eyes met, and I knew mine were dark with rage from the way she retreated half a step.
“You can’t run from the Citadel.”
“And what should I do, Sophie? Help them?”
“Why not, Yas? You’ve worked beside me for years. You’re an excellent scholar. The Empress will reward you.” Her words were pleading, as if she were trying to appeal to me. But she could never appeal to someone who had no future here.
“Not after today.” I shook my head. “And I wouldn’t work beside you again, even if the alternative was going to prison.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said evenly, her hands spread as if showing me she wasn’t a threat. The problem was, they always were, even when they pretended they were your friends. Because in the end, they never wanted to give up what most benefitted them.
“We only want to help you,” she continued, with an air of benevolence. “Look at you. You’re all starving. You rely on a power that doesn’t exist anymore.” She laughed a little and I wanted to throw her backwards into the crumbling vault.
“Only because you’re stealing it.”
How could I have been so wrong about her?
I had trusted her, I had confided in her, and she had betrayed me for the Empire.
Did she ever really see me as a person? As someone who was her friend, as I did her?
She couldn’t have, not if she were choosing them over me.
“If stealing our relics, starving us to death, cutting off hands when we make our cloth, and refusing to allow us to wear and make our jewelry is helping us, then we don’t need that kind of help.”
She looked up at me with despair rather than anger.
“You disdain us so much, Yaseema, but we are here to stay. Maybe you should work with us instead of against. The Citadel wants to preserve your treasures in its museums, to keep them safe, and study them. Not keep them buried under the ground where no one can see or use them. Isn’t that better?
In a way we are honoring them much more than if they stayed here. ”
“Why do you think they are buried in the first place? Why do you think we’ve been having endless droughts and famines?
Why do you think there’s no magic left while the Citadel sends the artifacts back to Angrezia, for the Empire?
Because the Empress wants them for herself.
All of it. She wants to strip our country bare and put our relics behind glass where only she can see and use them.
And now, she wants the power to cross the River too. ”
“Why shouldn’t she cross the River? Why shouldn’t we?
The fae are selfish, hoarding their magic and riches to themselves, not sharing it with anyone, cutting us off with their wall.
They shouldn’t be allowed to keep us out.
If anything, the Empire crossing the Basrol River will be good for Astolans. ”
“The Empress doesn’t want to cross the River to help humans, Sophie.
And certainly not Astolans,” I said flatly.
Some part of me wanted to make her see, make her understand what was really happening.
But she stared at me with that same patronizing smile, as if I were a child and she a mother waiting patiently for me to tell her a story.
“If the Empress was trying to help us, there’d be fewer whippings in the public square, she’d care about the mass famines, and she wouldn’t punish us for owning Astolan jewelry and fae relics.”
Sophie attempted to speak but was cut short by another crash under our feet, as the vault finally caved in on itself.
I didn’t have much time.
Excavators poured out of the entrance, unfortunately including the Winthrop, who still held the phoenix statue in his hand.
I whirled away from Sophie, but she held my wrist in a biting grip. “You can’t leave now Yaseema. They’ve seen you. You need to be arrested and stand trial.”
I gaped at her. “For what?”
She couldn’t have any idea I had Queen Azari’s haath phool hidden safely on my person, the bracelet and connected rings sitting heavy against my skin.
“You trespassed. It was their discovery,” she said mulishly.
“There was nothing to discover!” I shouted at her. But I’d finally run out of time. The ground shook, pieces of rock falling into the vault, the dirt collapsing beneath our feet. It was as if the earth were swallowing itself.
I twisted out of Sophie’s grip, stamped hard on her foot, and she released me with a yelp.
But even as I ran through the forest, and away from the Citadel soldiers, I knew they would find me. Sophie knew I had been there—Winthrop knew I had been there. And when they discovered the haath phool was missing, they would come.
I eyed the forest in the distance, where I knew a wide emerald river split our land in two and no one except my mother had been able to cross it for hundreds of years.
Until now.