Chapter 4

Bellingham's warning sirens jerked Joelle out of a deep sleep, hands flailing beneath the thin sheet she slept with during the late-summer heat at the end of Tenth Month. Almost immediately, her door was thrown open by one of her handmaidens, the young woman switching on the gas lamp in the room, bathing them both in burning light.

"What is going on?" Joelle rasped, still struggling to shake off the dregs of sleep.

"I don't know, vezir," her handmaiden said gravely.

"Is it revenants?"

As soon as the words left her mouth, a distant explosion echoed through the air, loud enough to hear even through the walls of her House's estate. Joelle flinched with her entire body. "Have our defenses been pushed back so far? How did that happen?"

Her handmaiden's lips pressed into a thin line as she helped Joelle out of bed. "I do not know."

Another handmaiden hurried in, the pair of them helping Joelle into the first set of robes they could get their hands on in the closet. She didn't bother with any jewelry, only her cane, gripping it tightly as she left the bedroom.

Those servants who lived within the estate were awake, though no one had turned on the gas lamp lights throughout the rest of the building. They were all well aware of the directive to stay dark at night whenever possible so as to not mark them a target while the Legion crept ever closer beyond their walls. Joelle's forces had lost ground before the Legion ever since Eimarille had refused to send more soldiers and war machines to the vasilyet after their last telephone call.

The captain of the estate's guard found her and Karima in a ground-floor receiving room, her daughter frantic but hiding it better than Joelle thought she would. In the flickering light from a lantern that cast a limited glow, the captain saluted sharply, clutching a televox in one hand. The clarion crystals on the device were dark.

"Vezir, the airfield is on fire, and the western city gate was damaged. The wall in that section is compromised," Captain Reva said.

Joelle stiffened, forcing back the fear those words brought. "How is the emperor's Legion so close already?"

"It wasn't their forces who attacked—it was our own."

Karima gasped, eyes wide and glittering in the gas lamp light. "How?"

"Rionetkas," Joelle hissed out, gripping her cane with both hands to hide how they shook. "How bad is the damage?"

"The gate is gone completely, taken out by an airship's bombing run. The outer wall no longer stands whole," Captain Reva said.

Which meant revenants would be able to gain access to Bellingham, bringing with them poison and spores, tainting the city her House had held since the Age of Separation. "Close off the inner walls. Let no one pass between the gates, especially not anyone in the outer ring. Find engineers to deal with the hole in the outer wall immediately, and I want magicians searching for rionetkas. They can start with the soldiers who so damnably betrayed their duty."

Captain Reva drew in a breath. "Closing the gates will cut off our forces and?—"

"My concern is the city and keeping revenants out," Joelle said sharply. "Relay my orders to the commanders in the field."

Captain Reva pressed her lips into a thin line and saluted. "Right away, vezir."

She left, but Joelle had little hope the defenses she wanted put into place would save her House.

"Mother?" Karima asked quietly, the fear in her voice a brittle thing. "If the airfield is on fire, how are we to leave?"

They'd had a plan, a way to escape if Bellingham was in danger of falling, predicated on Eimarille still being an ally. Now? Fleeing to Daijal was no longer an option, and if their troops had been compromised by rionetkas, the streets were just as dangerous. A city's walls were meant to keep threats out, but when the threats were within, escape was far trickier.

"We'll leave for the Imperial estate within the city. Quietly, with only a few guards to escort us," Joelle said.

"How will staying there help us?"

"Because we must assume Eimarille's people are within the city and that they will come here. Better to be out of reach while we figure out what to do."

Because the galling, bitter realization that they couldn't stay—not here in their ancestral estate, nor likely Bellingham—sat like poison in her heart. Joelle did not want to run—did not want to give up everything her House had lived for over the Ages—but she'd rather be alive to enact revenge at the end of the day than not.

"What about the Ashionens?"

"We'll take them with us." They'd have to knock out the prince, which was never easy, considering his tolerance to poisons and drugs, and assign a magician to watch over him. Transferring the lady was a bigger problem, considering her still-unconscious state and needing the machine to keep her that way. Joelle glanced at her handmaidens, tipping her head at the closest one. "See to what needs to be done to transfer the prisoners."

Her handmaiden sketched a shallow bow before leaving with quick strides. Karima watched her go with a frown. "What if Vanya knows?"

Joelle levered herself up to her feet, letting Karima carry the lantern. "If he does, I find his spy network lacking. We've had the warden for weeks now."

"Do you think he'd raze Bellingham to get the warden back?"

Joelle didn't profess to know what Vanya was willing to do or lose or risk to reclaim the warden, but she wasn't going to make it easy for him. She'd lost too much of her House to him since she'd signed the betrothal contract for Nicca years ago. The opportunity to claim the Imperial throne was slipping through her fingers. All her attempts at fostering political support with other Houses and clandestine alliances with Daijal were crumbling in the face of counterattacks she had nothing left to defend against.

More and more, Joelle questioned her decision all those years ago to turn from the Dawn Star and place her loyalty with the Twilight Star.

"It doesn't matter what Vanya will do. What matters is our own efforts to secure our power," Joelle said.

"But we keep losing."

"Our House still stands, and we will ensure it stays standing by leaving until it is safe to return."

Karima pressed her lips together in a thin line. "My daughter shouldn't have died for scraps."

Joelle tightened her grip on her cane, silently lamenting that Artyom wasn't with her. He'd been a better heir than Karima ever had. "Obey your vezir and do your duty to your House."

Karima bowed her head, knuckles white where she gripped the lantern. She said nothing as she left, taking the light with her. Joelle let out a slow breath, keeping a firm grip on her temper. "Turn on the light."

"Of course," her handmaiden murmured, moving to switch on a small table lamp, providing them with some illumination—enough that Joelle could see the hideous, desiccated face pressed against the glass of the window that looked out upon the rear garden.

She opened her mouth on a warning cry, but nothing came out, voice too tangled by fear to find the words. Her horrified expression must have given enough of a warning, for her handmaiden spun around, and the shriek she let out was cut off by the revenant that crashed through the window, bloated hands reaching for her. The revenant dragged the handmaiden to the floor, mindless in its ferocity to kill the living.

A guard slammed his way into the room, eyes widening in horror as he took in the scene. "Vezir!"

He gathered her up in his arms, Joelle dropping her cane so it wasn't in the way. They fled the room for the darkness of the hallways, the sound of shattering glass elsewhere in the estate reaching her ears.

"How did revenants get into the estate?" Joelle asked frantically as she was carried down the hallway.

"We don't know, vezir," the guard grunted. "But we must get you out."

She curled close to his chest, bones aching from the jostling she endured as he raced through the estate to wherever the rest of the guards were preparing to stand their ground. She didn't see Karima anywhere in the rush to safety, but Joelle breathed out a sigh of relief when she caught sight of her daughter in one of the ground-floor rooms located in the center of the estate, the interior space having no windows.

Joelle tried not to feel as if she were stepping into a grave like the sort that used to rest beneath the old Imperial palace in the royal crypt.

Karima let out a cry of relief at Joelle's arrival. The guard carrying her set Joelle on her feet, and she let Karima grasp her hands and pull her close. "Mother, did you see them?"

"We'll barricade the door," one of the guards said.

Fear spiked through Joelle as she thought of how Artyom must have died in the Imperial palace. "No, we can't stay in here. We need to leave."

"We can't go out there," Karima protested, her voice pitched high from fear and disbelief. "They're bombing the city walls, and now we've revenants in our home!"

Joelle flexed her fingers, glancing down at her wrinkled, arthritic hands, which had an ability that hadn't shown up in her daughter or granddaughter. It'd shown up in Raiah, though Joelle bitterly wondered how much was from her bloodline as opposed to Vanya's. "The attack on the walls must be a distraction."

Not by Vanya. He'd never send revenants into a city, not after what he'd survived in Calhames. But Eimarille? The Daijal queen had commissioned death-defying machines and bade the Klovod create rionetkas. Eimarille had no respect for the living.

Joelle should have remembered that.

The click of a lock sliding into place made Joelle stiffen. She turned on shaky feet, every instinct that had kept her alive through all the games the Houses played crawling through her bones and ringing a warning louder than the sirens going off over the city. She called forth a spark of starfire, something she'd rarely cast except when making a point in the name of her House. She didn't have the strength or depth the House of Sa'Liandel carried in their bloodline, but it was still bright enough to blind if one looked directly at where it burned against her palm.

"Mother?" Karima asked, voice cracking.

The guard who had so thoughtfully carried Joelle through the halls of the estate turned to face them, expression bland, but the coldness in his gaze reminded Joelle of a fanatic. "Queen Eimarille sends her regards."

For all that Joelle could cast starfire, she'd never been trained to use it in defense of her life. It'd been like a parlor trick over the years, proof that her House, for all that it hadn't sat on the Imperial throne for centuries, still could. But it couldn't save her or Karima or the dreams she had for the future of the House of Kimathi.

Starfire had always burned bright, but the bullet that slammed its way into her gut was what snuffed it out.

Through the brutal agony that swallowed up everything, Joelle could just make out the sound of Karima screaming and the cracking sounds of a pistol going off. Everything moved like liquid around her, a blackness clawing at the edges of her vision. A metallic taste flooded her mouth, dribbling out between her lips. Her hold on consciousness, on her body, was a tenuous line that kept fraying there at the end until it broke, cut by a Blade.