Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17

Like other parts of the building, the makeshift meeting room is dark, the curtains drawn and the sloped ceiling crowded with shadows rather than light. Most factories in San-Er are built this way, especially the basement levels where produce is stored, and Calla wonders if they simply copied San-Er’s existing construction plans out of laziness, rather than design a base that didn’t need such a low roof.

She peers out the window. Night has fallen, slathering ink upon the wet ground. Eigi gives her the creeps, to be honest. It’s too empty. Too quiet. It’ll only get worse the farther they go into the provinces, because at least Eigi is close enough to San-Er that the terrain bears some resemblance to their streets. Central Talin will appear almost entirely unfamiliar.

Councilmember Mugo clears his throat at the table.

“Are we starting soon?” he asks.

Other than their esteemed king, Calla has allowed only councilmembers into the meeting room. No guards. No additions. No exceptions. That includes Otta Avia.

Slowly, Calla turns from the window and releases the curtain. The last councilmember they were waiting on—Councilmember Savin, who oversees landlocked Laho in the center of the kingdom—walks through the doors.

“Yes,” Calla says. The low rumble of conversation starts to die down, at least across most of the table. Before her, Councilmember Rehanou and Councilmember Diseau are still in debate about one of Janton Province’s sea exports.

Calla walks over to stand directly between them. The two men blink. Councilmember Diseau makes a noise, rears back in offense, but he can’t quite tell her off for getting in the way when the room is entirely silent now, waiting on Calla’s next words.

“Thank you very much,” she enthuses. “I hope my meeting isn’t interrupting your fun chat.”

At the head of the table, Anton props his hands together, his lips thinning. He doesn’t interject. If she were him, she would have long removed Rehanou as councilmember of Kelitu out of sheer pettiness. Then again, Calla can’t quite speak to what she would do in Anton’s position, because she also wouldn’t be quietly pretending to be August. Either get out or rule properly .

Calla shakes out of her thoughts. Councilmember Rehanou has said something dismissive, but she didn’t even register it. Her shoulder twitches. She tries to clamp it down, but then a muscle in her thigh tremors, and her leg jerks, hitting the edge of the table. It makes a small sound, and though no one else around the room seems to think much of it, Anton narrows his eyes.

“Let’s begin here,” Calla decides. She retrieves the photocopied papers she left on the windowsill and hands them to Rehanou to distribute. He takes one set of papers, lip curling, and passes the rest of the bundle down the line. “Leida Miliu claimed that her supernatural feats of qi stem from sigils. I need anyone in the room who was already aware of this to come clean now.”

Silence. Calla doesn’t know if she entirely buys that, but she figured it would take more for the councilmembers to admit to the knowledge. Members of the palace don’t even believe that jumping should be allowed.

“Very well. I had my attendant, Joselie, do some research with me. We took some books out of the vault before the delegation. Hope you don’t mind.”

“You brought royal books into the provinces?” Mugo asks in disbelief.

“Yes, I’m a fucking idiot.” Mugo doesn’t seem to catch her sarcasm. “ No . I photocopied everything.”

Calla waits for the papers to make their way around the table. She took the time to staple them together and everything. Copies of ten pages. It wasn’t easy getting everything printed in the dark. When Anton plucks up a set, he holds it only by the stapled corner, as though he’s afraid that Calla has slathered poison over the text.

The last set of papers returns to Calla. She smooths it open down the middle. “We went through the few inventory books from before the war and scanned anything that could be described as unfamiliar markings . I want everyone to flip through the first five pages and tell me if there’s anything you recognize.”

The room fills with the sound of fluttering paper. A few seconds pass. Calla’s eyes are already drifting to Councilmember Savin when she says:

“Oh. This one.” Savin turns around her papers, which are folded to the third page. There, Calla photocopied a small etching she had found at the top of a village registry. A triangle with a line down the middle.

“I’m very glad you said that,” Calla said, “because I would have been curious why you were lying if not. Turn to page eight, please.”

After scouring the inventory books for sigils, Calla sent Joselie to find Matiyu Nuwa in the surveillance room, working the predawn shift. They needed a cross-reference. She figured there wouldn’t be many instances of the palace logs using the word sigil . They didn’t have the time to look through every suspicious occurrence logged within the kingdom to find when sigils might have popped up in their history. But if Leida was telling the truth and any marking before the war could be a sigil, then it was easy enough to type certain words into the palace system and see what came up once they had their suspicions. Triangle. Line down the middle. Jumping.

“Ayden Junmen, thirty years old,” Calla reads aloud from the page. “Entered San-Er as a legal lottery entrant two years ago, his fourth time applying for the draw. He emigrated from Laho in the autumn, and by winter he had joined the Crescent Societies. Three weeks later, he was executed.”

Half the councilmembers around the table lean in.

“I don’t remember this coming before us,” Rehanou says, almost sounding disappointed that he hadn’t signed off on it.

“It would have been private,” Anton interjects. It’s the first thing he’s said since the meeting began.

Correct, according to the Weisanna files that this account was pulled from. Public executions are ruled on by the council when the crimes are deemed serious, kingdom-wide affairs, like treason or mass murder. There hasn’t been a public execution in years. Most daily crimes in San-Er are sorted with a callous sign-off by only the king, and then the Weisannas put those sentences into effect. Calla remembers her parents flipping through the stack of sign-offs within minutes before breakfast, back when the Palace of Heavens was still around.

“He was charged with the crime of excessive, illegal jumping, and apprehended when he attempted to pass as Daine Tumou, the head of the Evercent Hotel in Er. Some of you may also know Mr. Tumou as Number Seventy-Nine in the most recent games.”

Anton visibly experiences a flash of recognition before smoothing down his expression. He and Calla almost lost their lives fighting Seventy-Nine’s hired men in the games. They ended up fleeing instead of finishing the battle.

“Ayden Junmen occupied the body for a few days before getting caught, when one of Mr. Tumou’s men finally got a good look at his eyes. Here’s the kicker: among all the men giving statements, not a single one saw a flash of light, though there wasn’t any moment Mr. Tumou was left in public without accompaniment. Ayden Junmen was extracted under torture, placed back into his birth body, and executed in the palace. He didn’t give up any accomplices. Under duress, he claimed he acted alone. When his body was processed, they found a marking on his chest drawn in blood, resembling ‘a triangle with a line down the middle.’?”

“This sounds like the Crescent Society experiments,” Mugo says immediately. “Leida Miliu’s work.”

“Perhaps.” Calla flips to the next page and continues reading from the quotes. “Ayden Junmen’s record was clean when he was granted entry into San-Er, but upon further investigation from Councilmember Savin when asked how something like this happened, Laho’s yamen found that he had two cousins with connections to the Dovetail.”

Councilmember Savin sets her papers down. She’s taken off her thin glasses and propped them atop her head, massaging the bridge of her nose.

“Yes,” she confirms tiredly. “That is true.”

“Just to be very clear…,” the councilmember seated next to Anton cuts in. Deep-green eyes. A member of the Farua family, perhaps, but Calla doesn’t remember which province they govern. “This is the same Dovetail group that is now committing attacks across the provinces?”

“Indeed,” Calla says. “So what seems more likely, that Leida put in a random assignment through the Crescent Societies two years before she began her conspiracy against the throne, or that the Dovetail have known how to manipulate qi for a while now and taught this man two years ago?”

“Calla, speak plainly, would you?” Anton demands. He lifts his volume, an echo reverberating through the room. “I’m hearing story after story of context, but no reason as to why we are discussing this.”

“In conclusion,” Calla snaps, “I find it convenient that a rural group with remarkable capabilities is striking the provinces right when we hear the crown is false. The Dovetail are making their presence known to the kingdom after hiding for years, perhaps decades, and suddenly the Crescent Societies in San-Er are also yelling No throne without mandate ? Something triggered that first attack in Rincun, and I will be the first to connect the dots aloud: Otta Avia is behind this.”

Anton shoots to his feet. “That’s enough.”

“Will you deny it?” Calla returns just as quickly. “Will anyone in this room deny it?”

“I do ask,” Savin interjects. “When would she have plotted this? In the few days since she’s awoken from her seven-year coma? Or before she fell ill, when she was a mere teenager? There is no communication into the provinces from San-Er.”

Calla scoffs. “As if a little lack of telephone wires is going to stop her.”

“While I don’t deny the aspects that line up,” Councilmember Rehanou says, leaning back in his chair, “do you accuse her of making a play for the throne? What other reason is there to cause kingdom-wide chaos like this?”

Anton is shaking his head. Refusing to acknowledge what’s in front of him. “This is ridiculous—”

“She’s known the crown has been false for however long and bided her time until it was right to go after it,” Calla says. “We are wasting time arguing about her motivation. She needs to be removed from this delegation—”

“This is her delegation, Princess Calla.” Councilmember Mugo stands. “And forgive me, but it is starting to sound as though you bear a personal grudge. Of anyone in the room, you are the one who poses the biggest threat to the succession of the throne. Otta Avia has no blood claim. It would take a coup that eliminates every member of this council if she wants to wear the crown.”

The room falls quiet. Calla, too, falters momentarily, scrambling to counter Mugo’s point.

“I will increase security and ensure there’s no intrusion from the Dovetail during our journey, given they are a real threat,” Mugo continues before she can summon a retort. “But let us not invent further dangers where there are none, lest we think ourselves too self-important.”

“Are you serious?” Calla demands.

Councilmember Mugo strides out of the meeting room, already pulling his cellular phone from his pocket. The rest of the councilmembers exchange glances. In the lull, Anton pushes his chair in and brushes dust off his sleeves.

“Meeting dismissed,” he announces. “We will continue onward in the morning. Let’s not waste time.”

Without looking in Calla’s direction, he exits the room too.

The councilmembers slowly follow suit. When Councilmember Farua walks past Calla, who remains rooted at the edge of the table, she offers a small nod.

The room clears.

“I can’t believe this,” Calla says aloud.

Her head twinges. She winces. Maybe she’s losing it. Maybe this is a paranoia of her own making. The room rustles with sound, and then Calla hears a whisper.

Sinoa .

She swivels fast, but there’s no one present but her.

That sigil she copied from Leida is doing this to her. There’s no denying its effect: something peculiar is happening to her qi, something beyond unlocking the abilities that the Crescent Society experiments sought. She has been displaced anew. Out in the provinces, qi might behave differently from how it does in the cities—farmers might sense the seasons before they turn; villagers might move in tune with the crops and gauge the needs of the animals they keep. But they don’t hear whispers that aren’t there. They don’t start phasing in and out of consciousness with their eyes wide open.

Calla allows herself a second of recovery, blinking frantically to get rid of the blots of yellow crowding into her vision. Before anyone can notice her delay, she hurries out of the room too, grumbling about the council’s uselessness.

There’s an arcade at the security base.

Heavens knows how Anton stumbled onto it while walking around. The base comprises three buildings connected by multiple skywalks. Still, when he slipped out the window of his assigned room after failing to sleep, moving quietly to avoid notice from the guards in the adjacent lodgings, it seemed the base was easily made for ground movement too. The first door he opened ushered him into a laboratory of sleeping computers. He trawled deeper, picking up notepads and keyboards and a half-finished apple core that someone hadn’t thrown out. Everywhere he went, a faint shroud of cigarette smoke hung in the air. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, where he found cabinet shelves and data drives. Third floor, where a faint beeping struck his ears, though he couldn’t identify it quite yet while investigating the resting couches and teapots.

Now, on the fourth floor, he registers the sound as video monitors that have been left on through the night. Coins dropping and swords swinging, piped through the make-believe of a speaker. It’s so jarring that he almost turns back on the stairwell and returns to his bed.

Then he spots her in the corner, sitting by the claw machines.

Anton approaches from behind. Drops silently into the velvet chair facing her, a low round table separating the space between them.

“Didn’t like your bed either?” Calla asks.

Anton kicks a shoe up onto the edge of the table. “I’m only sleepwalking right now. Don’t mind me.”

She doesn’t react. Despite the hour, she’s wearing a dress that seems to have been torn in half to go with her leather trousers. Red bundles of fabric resembling flowers bloom at her shoulders, and her long sleeves run past her wrists in a wide bell shape, falling backward when she props her arm up to lean on her fist. Though there’s a length of fabric covering her collar—and the sigil she’s drawn onto herself—the rest of her neckline is absent in a thin triangular cutout, taunting past her heart and ending just above her navel.

Maybe it’s the forsaken hour, but Anton has an urge to lick that exposed swath of skin.

He gestures forward. “I haven’t seen you in much palace clothing.”

“This old thing?” Calla shifts in her chair. “I repurposed a few pieces before we left. I was starting to get the impression no one would take me seriously as an advisor if I kept dressing like a street urchin.”

Anton quirks a brow. “I’m not sure if that is why you’re having trouble being taken seriously.”

“As Mugo helpfully pointed out earlier, I am aware that being both the spare to the throne and a patricidal maniac is also not good for my reputation.”

Anton almost laughs. But he gets ahold of himself before anything shows, because that is a slippery slope toward forgetting who she is, and who they are, and why they’re here. For a moment, Anton and Calla merely stare at each other to the sound of the arcade. A machine nearby beeps incessantly, cawing “ Winner! Winner! Winner! ” without care for the fact that no one stands before it.

“What are you doing here?” Calla finally asks. “Why are you… being pleasant to me?”

He’s not. Or he supposes he’s eased off trying to provoke a reaction out of her, and in contrast, he almost seems kind. It’s hard for him to pinpoint how he’s coming across. This whole time, how he feels about her hasn’t changed. It has never changed, whether from before he entered that arena or after that performance of a coronation. His impulse is still to reach forward, touch her mouth, cradle her hair. At every up-and-down flicker of her eyes, he begs for attention, craves that relish when her expression changes in reaction to something unexpected he’s done.

There’s only a stronger ache that has forced him to alter his behavior. Self-preservation, knowing that he will splay his arms open and allow her to kill him yet again if he forgets how she unstitched him with the blade of betrayal.

He won’t come back from death a second time. Calla Tuoleimi has ruined him, so he’ll have to ruin everything in return.

“I have something to discuss with you.”

“What have we been doing these past few days except discussing things?” Calla replies. Still, she doesn’t sound unyielding. She strains her arm up, reaching for a folded game board on the shelf beside her. “Do you want to play?”

When she flips the board open, the surface shows a grid, ten by ten, each square numbered from one to a hundred. Its border is decorated with colorful depictions of the old gods, one midmotion while transforming into a cloud of dust, another sitting on a pillow and resembling a green-faced dog.

“?‘Chutes and ladders’?” Anton asks, recognizing the game. “What are we, twelve?”

The briefest smile crosses Calla’s lips. “I always liked this game back in the Palace of Heavens.” She unlatches the accompanying box and peers at its contents for a moment before offering it to Anton. “You remember how it works?”

“Of course.” Three tokens and two dice wait inside the box. He takes one of the tokens. “It’s hardly complicated. Land on a ladder and follow it up to the higher number. Land on a chute and follow it down to the lower number.”

“Did you know that some of the boards look different depending on which city makes it?” Calla reaches for a token too, then takes out the dice. “Er usually prints theirs with an equal number of chutes and ladders. San is known to generate boards with more chutes.”

Anton lifts a brow.

“We’ll play the old way,” Calla continues. “Ten rolls for each player.” She throws the dice. They both land on a three, so she moves her token along the first row and stops at the sixth square. The next one would have offered a ladder directly up to number thirty-four.

Anton holds his hand out for the dice. Where their skin makes contact upon Calla’s pass, his fingers whisper with recognition.

He rolls a seven. Slides right up the ladder. “It’s about Otta—”

“Naturally.” Calla takes the dice. Though her tone remains level, that single word is acidic.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Calla moves her token again. “It means exactly what I said. Naturally . It’s always Otta with you.”

“May I finish? I was going to say you can’t be so blatant about your suspicions. She’ll recalibrate until it’s harder to catch her.”

Calla’s gaze snaps to him. She didn’t expect this. “So you believe me?”

“Obviously not that she plotted the Dovetail attacks,” Anton hurries to correct. That’s absurd. Although he hates to give Mugo any satisfaction in being right, it’s true that Otta has had no time to put anything into effect since she woke up. If there is some coalition effort attacking royal soldiers across the kingdom, it was planned in advance.

“Then what?” Calla demands. She’s paused with her next turn, clearly irritated.

“I don’t know,” Anton says honestly. “That’s what I want to find out. Do you remember that day August summoned you to the wall? When he wanted a word with me first?”

Calla takes her turn, eyeing the board as she moves her token.

“Yes,” she says. “The day Leida was caught red-handed.”

“He asked about Otta. It seemed bizarre to me. Seven years go by, and he was suddenly thinking of her. Not only that, but he was inquiring what she last said to me. As if he feared whether she might have revealed something.”

Anton takes a chute down. Calla’s next roll has her on a ladder up.

“The crown, I gather.”

“Maybe. Or maybe there were other secrets too. I think Otta knows far more than she’s willing to give up at present.”

One machine nearby abruptly jangles with chiming bells. Perhaps marking the hour, some distorted grandfather clock. Another ladder later, Anton has reached the middle of the board.

“You aren’t worried that biding your time will endanger you?”

“I am more worried that scaring her will change her course and prolong the result further. I need to know what she’s trying to do. There must be a grand motive up her sleeve with all these gambits. Releasing this information. Asking you along on this delegation.”

In silent response, Calla rolls. Up. Down. Again. Her pointer finger is slow while she pushes her token around. They play a few rounds without speaking.

“Of course,” she finally mutters, “because it is so terrible for me to be here.”

“It’s unnecessary, certainly.”

Anton eyes the movement of her token. She’s overtaken him, at seventy-five.

“Have you considered,” she says, “that maybe I am here for you?”

“Sure,” he replies. “Finding your opportunity to force me out of August.”

Calla practically stabs her token down. “Protecting you. I acknowledge my wrongdoing in the Juedou, but outside of those coliseum walls, I was fighting beside you for most of the games. I am still that same person.”

If he can help it, Anton tries not to think about that final battle. The moment he relives the bag being torn off his head to begin the Juedou, he remembers August’s role in getting him there, and then he can concentrate only on August’s silence over the years, saying nothing of his family. The moment he goes back to the image of the coliseum at night, crowds cheering on all sides, he can only hear Calla saying, I love you. I love you, so this is a favor to you , and enough fury boils in his blood to burn him inside out.

Anton, here, says nothing to preserve the temporary peace they’ve found. He rolls the dice. Pushes his token to eighty-nine. And despite being a gasp away from reaching the last row, it is this exact number that has a chute taking him all the way back to square one.

“Oh, that is so vile,” he mutters beneath his breath, following the chute down. Anton sighs, gesturing for Calla to take her next turn. “Go on, then. Victory is yours.”

“Can’t.”

Another machine screeches from a distant corner. “Excuse me?”

Calla shrugs. “I’m out of rolls. Game over.”

Surely she is joking. Anton doesn’t know any kid who still plays by the ten-rolls rule.

“Just like that?” he asks. “You’ll accept loss while you’re so close?”

“They’re the rules, Anton. I can’t change the rules.” She pauses, scoffing. “I suppose I could do this.” With one finger, Calla flips over the whole game board. Their tokens go flying across the table. “Now we both win.”

He shakes his head. Any earlier humor dancing crookedly to fit between them has since disappeared.

“Don’t push her, Calla,” he says, returning them to the matter at hand. “For the good of the kingdom. You can do that for me, can’t you?”

Calla puts the tokens back into the box. Then the dice. Her lips have thinned, and Anton reads the expression for irritation. That, at least, is what he expects before Calla looks up and meets him with misery in her yellow stare, and suddenly he wonders if he can read her at all.

“You have so quickly forgotten,” she says quietly, “that I would have razed the twin cities for you. There was one irreconcilable matter in what you could ask of me, and you pressed on it too hard.”

Winning in the arena. King Kasa dead.

Anton hesitates. “Princess—”

She’s already stood up. Her sleeves flutter on either side of her. After spending so long in the games together, he has half a mind to warn her that she should detach those before they tangle her up in a fight.

“Yet now,” Calla says, “now the irreconcilable matters between us grow and grow. But I’m in no mood to yell about that tonight, so fine. You can keep Otta compliant. Learn the secrets you need. But don’t forget that you are not the one who’s supposed to be acting for the good of the kingdom.”

“And you are?”

Calla freezes in her step. “I beg your pardon?”

“You seem to like playing executioner,” Anton continues, refusing to heed the warning in her voice. It’s easier to speak to her like this, when she’s turned away from him. She becomes a shadow of a woman, made up of hungry wisps and the smell of smoke, something impossible to grasp and therefore something he was only meant to lose. “Getting rid of the people you’ve deemed worthwhile sacrifices, so on and so forth.”

He could be talking about himself. Or Leida Miliu, who used to be his friend, who used to insist she didn’t mind dying on the job, until her mother did. What a terrible way to go instead—without the glory of a fight but the quick plunge of a profane princess’s blade. Perhaps he should be grateful that, at least, Calla offered him the fight.

Without another word, Calla leaves the arcade, her sleeves sweeping after her like twin streams of blood. In her absence, Anton can only shake his head, listening to the hum and the clank that surrounds him. “ Winner! Winner! Winner! ” that persistent machine hawks, and Anton finally gets to his feet with a heavy breath. Maybe it is a reminder directed at him. San-Er didn’t make him their victor, but he won the king’s games nonetheless.

Winner! Winner! Winner!

“I sure don’t think so,” he says, dragging a hand through his hair. The truth is, his fight with Calla never ended with the Juedou. If they’ve been exchanging blows since then, San-Er’s victor is still pending.

Calla has long disappeared from the stairwell. He waits a moment, paranoid that she is there, hiding, having decided to take him by surprise and shut him up.

Nothing.

Anton makes the slow amble back to his room.