Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

The world falls quiet.

Calla exhales. Inhales. The voices disappear. The pain fades. Slowly, her surroundings take shape around her: the temple dusted in gray, the moonlight beaming up the path, the marble steps…

Her body.

Calla doesn’t dare breathe as she approaches. Her head is lolled, her hair splayed. She can’t see her face. She has no indication whether she’s just freed a centuries-old entity onto the world, if Sinoa Tuoleimi was reborn as Calla Tuoleimi and was on a path toward vengeance against her enemies before her plans were diverted by a rural orphan.

Her wrist is still warm when she touches it. The fabric of her shirt rustles, responding to the push she gives her shoulder to turn herself around.

Calla goes cold. Her eyes are wide open.

Wide and yellow instead of an empty vessel’s white.

With the bewilderment of a child, Calla merely freezes, thinking if she doesn’t move she will not be attacked. But the body before her is unresponsive. Unblinking, even when a gust of wind howls through the night and sends ash flying about. Calla reaches forward and, as though this body is a corpse, she closes its eyes. An empty vessel wouldn’t be damaging its eyes by keeping them open, so it doesn’t matter. But an empty vessel isn’t supposed to have the appearance of an eye color at all, because that signals the presence of a person’s qi, and unless the real princess is still lurking in there, why would—

Calla rushes to lift the sword that was in Galipei’s hand. She puts the blade close to her face, enough to catch a reflection in the moonlight.

She hears a delirious laugh, and it takes her a second to realize she’s the one making that noise. She laughs and laughs with Galipei’s reflection mimicking each move, then as quickly as the sound came, she settles into abrupt sobriety. In the silence, her eyes blinking silver, she finally has to reckon with the question that emerges, the question she’s never thought too hard about lest it push something strange out into the open.

She’s always known something peculiar happened to put her on this course: either she was born with Tuoleimi yellow as her natural eye color, or she didn’t bring her own eyes with her when she invaded royalty. Either she was born with the most unlikely coincidence, or she was born with the fathomless ability to jump without the one indication that has marked invasion for as long as their kingdom has kept records.

First she jumps into royalty. Not merely a child but, if any of these voices are to be believed, someone with a qi much older, someone a hundred times more powerful. Now she’s jumped into a Weisanna without really trying, which is an exercise that hovers at the cardinal baseline of impossibility.

“Who the fuck am I?” she whispers.

Her body doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move. If the princess were hiding in there and pretending to be immobilized, she would still need to breathe, would she not? It can’t be an act. Her collar has fallen slightly astray; there is still a sigil marking her chest. Acting off a suspicion, Calla goes to push the shirt collar on Galipei’s body and glances down cautiously.

A sigil made of light. It’s the same as Leida, when she jumped between bodies and marked up the one she moved to. Calla scrubs a finger against the light sigil, and nothing budges.

She shoots to her feet, perturbed. Maybe she shouldn’t have drawn something irremovable on herself before understanding what it was. There is a language to these sigils, and she doesn’t have the first idea what this one does.

“Okay,” she says aloud. “I’m okay.”

Something catches her eye upon the temple’s outer wall. She didn’t notice it earlier, too distracted and delirious from the pain, but with her head clear, the flapping motion in her periphery is persistent. Calla turns properly to find a dagger buried to the hilt, fastening a folded piece of paper to the clay wall.

She’s almost hesitant to leave her body unguarded, but she trudges over to the temple wall, keeping herself within view. Otta left this for her; there’s no doubt about it. The dagger looks newer than anything in this city, shiny and metallic where everything else is covered in a layer of grit. As soon as Calla plucks it out—the blade emerging from the clay with a hard yank—the paper drops to the floor. Skeptical that this can be anything good, Calla’s holding her breath when she picks it up and unfolds it.

COME ALONE.

The words show first. Below the instruction is a map, one black X marked beyond the border of Rincun, deep in the mountains. There’s no debate regarding the purpose of the map. Otta has given her the location of the divine crown, and Calla cannot fathom why .

Calla glances over to the marble steps. Her body—if she can even lay claim and say it is hers—remains splayed. Though Otta came through this city to leave the map, she must be long gone. The city is eerily quiet, echoing Calla’s breaths back at her.

She shoves the map into her body’s jacket pocket, keeping it safe. Then, with a grunt, she picks herself up and drapes her collapsed vessel over her shoulder.

Galipei’s strong. She shouldn’t be surprised. Still, she doesn’t remember how it feels to move in a body that’s not hers, and it takes her considerable effort not to flail her new limbs, to adjust her center of gravity while walking back through the city’s main road and avoid tripping when she’s stepping over the mound of dirt at the city gate. Galipei must have forced it open when he followed her in. She didn’t even hear him.

Her plan forms as she approaches the campsite, shifting her collapsed body off her shoulder and into a more appropriate hold. The few guards on night duty spot her coming toward them. They call out in alarm when they see the body in her arms, making the conclusion that they must be under attack again.

“It’s all right,” she calls, and Galipei’s voice almost breaks under her use, pitched too high. She clears her throat, sinks into his natural timbre. “Where’s Otta Avia?”

Two of the nearest guards exchange glances.

“Otta Avia?” one echoes. “Is she not in her tent?”

“No,” she answers. “Go wake His Majesty.”

“I’m awake.”

Anton emerges from his tent at a speed that indicates he was already listening from inside. He’s squinting for a moment— that’s right, a gut feeling in Galipei supplies: August’s vision isn’t the best at night, and Calla takes aim. She shifts the body in her arms. Waits for the first sign of realization when the face turns toward the moonlight.

Maybe it’ll be glee. Maybe annoyance, that someone got to her before he could.

Instead, she watches a visible wave of horror take over Anton’s expression. He surges forward in a run, and it’s the most he’s ever broken character because August Shenzhi does not run.

“Is she—”

Anton doesn’t finish his question. His hands come down on her body’s neck, feeling for a pulse. I would have answered for it with my life, she said to him, the last thing she said before all of this. I still can.

Look where they have come to.

Calla doesn’t rush to make reassurances. With Galipei’s height, she looms over him while the clouds blow over the moon; the night darkens to utter shadow, and maybe Anton loves her after all, if he’s breathing like this, ragged and desperate.

“I found her in the city,” she says. “I heard her calling for Otta when I was nearing the scene.”

Anton’s head snaps up. “ What? ”

“I think Otta performed some ritual to gain power, and now she’s gone after the crown herself.”

With such a wild claim, Calla expected chaos to erupt. It’s not entirely a lie: if Otta has gone missing, there’s only one reason.

You’ve already burned your palace down. This one is mine. Otta spoke those words herself. Why leave a map and then disappear? Otta wants to get there first.

Calla is met with stunned quiet. Several councilmembers have been roused by the commotion and have clambered out of their tents, yet there’s no uproar. They’re in unknown territory—wondering how Calla was attacked, how long Otta has been plotting rebellion, whether they’re in far more danger than they imagined. Through the gathering crowd, Joselie pushes forward, looking over Calla—the body—with mechanical inspection.

“Galipei, what are you saying?” Anton asks. He’s blinking fast.

“We have to go after—”

“Is she still alive ?”

The rest of Calla’s answer dies on her tongue. It is in the dark that Anton appears most like himself. That the purple tinge in his irises comes to life when he meets her gaze, gives him away to those who know how to look.

“She’s still alive,” she says, pivoting quickly. “Check her eyes.”

The moment she’s given the instruction, Anton’s hands move from her neck to her eyelids and push up lightly. Electric yellow, not replaced or dulled. Alive, undoubtedly, and stuck in there.

“Give her to me.”

Calla falters.

“I will help,” Joselie adds. They must think Galipei wants to be rid of this burden as soon as possible.

Recovering, Calla eases her body into Anton’s arms. She’s surprised that he receives the handover with care, that he tucks her head against his shoulder and adjusts for the sword hanging from her hip when he turns and walks. She hardly recognizes her own body when it’s made into something fragile. With her height, she’s never been small, yet somehow she’s rendered into the flat imitation of a person the moment her qi is removed.

Calla watches them take her body to the last carriage. Anton delivers some instruction, and Joselie helps him move her in by pushing around some of the items before he places her body down. From afar, Calla catches a brief glimpse of three stacked boxes before Joselie closes the carriage door again.

Anton, what on earth did you bring in that carriage?

“Galipei, what are we to do?”

The voice comes at her shoulder. She turns to find a close cousin of Galipei’s: Balen, or Bayen, or—

“We get to the borderlands as quickly as possible,” she answers. The map sits safely in her body’s pocket. “Even if we don’t know the exact location without Otta, we travel as far as we can until we spread out to hunt her down. This isn’t only about getting the crown to keep peace in San-Er anymore. It’s about stopping her possible coup.”

“And finding out what the fuck she did to Calla,” Anton adds, returning to join the gathering crowd and rolling his sleeves up. When the guards blink at him, he claps his hands. “What are we waiting for? Break camp. Come on!”

Calla lets him issue the instructions. Lets him order around the guards and the other councilmembers, hurrying their mission. Quietly, she falls into line, joining their effort to gather up the campsite.

It would seem this has worked greatly in her favor.