Chapter 31

CHAPTER 31

An hour before sunrise, when they are set to leave, Actia Province is still cold as shit.

“This is unnatural,” Calla says between her chattering teeth. Her fingers are stiff without gloves. The moment her boots touch the ground, she shoves her hands into her pockets.

Anton lands with a grunt. Rather than risk being spotted, they’re leaving their room through the second-floor window, and he’s made the climb out from the tavern with slightly less grace.

“I don’t suppose we have time to steal coats before we go.”

Calla doubts the villagers in Actia will own coats that are sufficient, anyhow—and if they did, she’s certainly not going to take them. It’s not quite the same as swiping a roasted taro.

“We’ll warm up en route,” she says. The sky hovers before them in that black-muddled gray, both affronted by and resistant to the day that is to come. As far as Calla is aware, there has been no talk of an overnight massacre. No attacks have come of the sudden cold, not like in Rincun.

“What are you thinking about?”

Anton poses the question casually. In answer, she reaches out and smooths his tangle of hair. She doubts he needs to know this, lest his big head grow larger, but this body suits him most. The easy agility, the strong jaw. It gives him a look that closely resembles what is inside: simultaneously the steadfast soldier serving the kingdom and the rebelling noble it never should have armed. Anton Makusa in his birth body has acquired age well, much better than some vessels that are left stagnant for too long. He watches her while she inspects him, holds her gaze taking him in, and when her eyes lift to meet his face, he doesn’t look away.

“What are you thinking about?” she returns. The question seemed like it was leading somewhere.

Anton breaks their staring contest to check over his shoulder, as though someone might be tailing them. It’s entirely quiet. They’re careful to keep their steps light while moving through the smaller streets of the village, avoiding the main thoroughfare. It is too easy to leave footprints in the mud and offer a traceable path for anyone searching.

“On that phone call, you asked your attendants about a Sinoa Tuoleimi.”

Calla stiffens. “Have you heard the name?”

“It took me until now to remember why it was familiar, but yes. Otta owned a book that had her name on the front page. Property of Sinoa Tuoleimi. She destroyed it years ago. I watched her throw it into the fire after a fight with August.”

This is bizarre. A whole Tuoleimi princess existed shortly before the war, and yet their history texts have no mention of her. How can the only records of her existence be one book that Otta Avia owned… and Calla’s hallucinations?

“Strange,” Calla says.

Anton casts her a look. They pause when they approach the inner side of Actia’s yamen, waiting for movement, before nodding at each other and moving quickly through the center. It’s empty. Dead silent.

“Think we were spotted?” Anton asks outside.

“Doesn’t matter.” Calla hauls herself onto their horse, taking on primary rider responsibilities for the first section of the journey. “We’re going. Come on.”

Anton pulls himself up behind her. The horse takes some adjusting, whinnying at the first appearance of the sand dunes, but Calla navigates onto a smoother path quickly. It’s hard to see through the sand and in the dark. She’s almost sure there’s supposed to be a paved route here, cleared for travelers.

They ride without speaking. Anton must be deep in thought, because he does not remark on any of Calla’s riding, even when she sends them over a particularly rough dune. Her constant motion keeps her sweating, fighting back the cold. Nonetheless, her nose loses feeling shortly into the journey. The temperature is plummeting further. It’s coming from the mountains, funneling a cold that she can feel in her lungs each time she breathes in.

“Princess,” Anton calls suddenly. “How far have we gone?”

Calla blinks, straining her ears to catch his question past the roaring wind. “We’re entering northern Actia now. Why?”

“Look. There are people riding toward us.”

At first, Calla thinks Anton must be mistaken, that their poor rest the previous night means he’s seeing things in the horizon. She squints. The dunes have started to level out. In a few hours, as they approach the border between Actia and Rincun, it will become flat, dry land, made for crops to die.

Then, as they get closer, Calla realizes Anton is right. The distant shape is another delegation. Certainly not August’s, nor any rural group.

“Flag them down,” Calla commands. “Wave your arms.”

Anton does as he is told without hesitating, rising slightly on the saddle and waving vigorously. Calla catches the moment the delegation must spot them, because the riders at the front of the group begin to slow. She counts only five people. Not wanting to risk any danger, Calla pulls to a complete stop while there’s still distance between them and hops off with her sword clattering against her leg. Anton follows, nothing for a weapon but equally eager to move.

To the east, the sun has started to rise and bleed a murky violet semicircle. The delegation comes to a halt while they remain a field away too. Unlike Calla and Anton’s sturdy approach, the moment the first rider alights from their horse, they stumble hard, taking two steps and faltering on the third.

“That’s a councilmember,” Anton says at once. “She voted against the delegation for the crown. What is she doing out here?”

As soon as Anton identifies the woman, Calla recognizes her as Venus Hailira too. Her clothes are torn. Days old for sure, dirt and blood smeared on the light fabric. The sun climbs higher. Ripples gold and yellow over the sand.

“She came to protect Rincun,” Calla says, uncomprehending. “But what is she doing riding back south?”

Calla starts to move forward. The closer she gets, the clearer it is that Venus is seconds away from collapsing. Her lips are blue. Her skin is bloodless.

“Venus,” she calls. “What are you doing out here? Are you okay?”

Venus keeps herself upright long enough for Calla to fully approach. The moment Calla grabs Venus by the arms to check for injuries, she keels over. Calla scrambles to prevent the councilmember from falling. When Calla lowers onto her knees, the ground might as well be made of ice for how it stings upon contact, even through her leather trousers.

“Venus,” Calla says, panic sinking into her voice. “What happened? Who attacked?”

“Don’t,” Venus rasps. “Don’t go in.”

Calla doesn’t understand. She glances over to Anton, who appears equally flabbergasted. His gaze lifts over the other members of the delegation, to the horizon where Rincun and its distant mountains reach for the sky. The sun has risen enough to show that the other riders are in similar condition. Near-frostbitten features, their clothes dirty.

“Don’t… go?” Calla echoes. This must have something to do with the first attack in the barracks. This must have something to do with the borderlands and the object waiting in there, the grand prize that the kingdom is fighting for.

“Don’t go into Rincun ?” Anton adds, dragging his hands through his hair. “What happened?”

“Rincun has frozen over”—Venus shudders, the effort strained—“along with everyone inside.”

They return to Actia’s yamen.

This time, Calla announces her arrival, asking for an audience with the mayor. The air has taken on a sunburned smell, even while the temperature plummets to freezing. Inside the yamen, the elements are substantially less severe. With the way the floors creak underfoot and the windows are faintly stained gray, Calla could fool herself into believing they sit in Eigi, or Dacia—somewhere close enough for her to grab her sword and quickly return through San-Er’s wall if she wanted. The architectural plans for the provinces’ yamen are all identical. She only needs to block out the scene outside.

But they’re far, far from San-Er here. Yet they cannot move forward either.

“And you’ve received no communication from either yamen in Rincun?” Calla asks. She’s clutching a cup of hot tea in her hands, but it does very little to warm her.

Mayor Policola, who is doing his best to appear genial, flounders with each new question Calla asks. He doesn’t know how many travelers have passed through Actia to get to Rincun, therefore he cannot predict exactly how many civilians are trapped in Rincun at present. He doesn’t know if Otta Avia came through. He doesn’t have a clue why this is happening and why Rincun didn’t issue an emergency call from either mayor in West or East Capital.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” the mayor says while Calla massages her forehead, at a loss for how they’ve found themselves in this situation, “how did Councilmember Hailira get out?”

“We had horses, and we fled,” Venus calls from the other side of the room, overhearing the question. Before this, she’d only managed to nod yes or shake her head no to answer the healer. Her guards appear slightly worse for wear, slowly defrosting on the seats. “What are you trying to say?”

Policola scrambles to assure her he didn’t mean anything by it. Meanwhile, Anton makes a thoughtful noise. He declined any tea. Instead, he’s pacing the space around Calla, and she’s letting him only because the movement is helping create heat in the room, no matter how little.

“It wasn’t instantaneous,” Anton says—a question, despite his tone.

“It… crawled,” Venus answers. “As long as we kept moving, we could outrun it.”

Anton pauses in his step. The room falls quiet. “So is everyone else in Rincun dead ?”

Venus doesn’t answer. She cannot: she does not know, and it shows plainly on her stricken expression. No one in this room has the faintest clue, half a day away from the border of Rincun.

“They can’t be,” Calla says. “Otta must be inside the province too. I’m willing to bet anything that she set this off.”

“Even if she set this off, maybe she remains unaffected while the rest of Rincun falls dead.” Anton starts pacing again. “It is an unnatural cold. That much is certain. It might not strike everybody the same.”

It is possible that Otta is inside and perfectly unaffected. It is possible that she doesn’t have anything to do with this and she’s frozen like the rest of them. The problem is that they don’t know enough to move forward, and soon, August will catch up with them and hold them captive out of spite.

As if he can read her mind, Anton trails his finger along her arm as he circles her again, maintaining contact while he’s near. From the outside, it might appear a gesture between lovers, but Calla knows better. He is reminding himself she is nearby; she is assuring him that they stand united. There is no path out of this situation except through.

“Councilmember Hailira,” Calla prompts suddenly. “Rincun has two cameras, yes?”

“Yes, at the two yamen.”

Calla tilts her head to the computer in the room. There’s only one camera in Actia, and two in Rincun at East and West Capital. The provinces aren’t wired with the infrastructure for the type of electronics that San-Er runs. To make life easier for the councilmembers, the palace put in the bare basics for administration operations at each respective yamen and left it at that.

“Mayor Policola, would you turn that on, please?”

Though the mayor frowns, he walks over to start the machine. Calla gestures for Venus next, and when the councilmember looks to the healer for permission, he takes the blanket off her to confirm her examination is finished.

“Do you want me to log on?” Venus asks.

“If you don’t mind,” Calla replies.

Talin shares a network across its provinces. If Venus inputs her credentials, she can still access Rincun’s server from here.

Venus leans over the keyboard, entering her details. “What am I pulling up?”

“Turn on the live footage from the West Capital yamen. I want to know what we can see.”

Venus navigates slowly, her eyes flitting left to right in search of the right buttons. She doesn’t appear too familiar with where each function is located, but she knows how to use a computer, and under her identity number, she has access to Rincun’s administration, so she’ll figure it out eventually. Calla’s tea has gone cold. Anton has turned his back on the activity, opting to stare out the yamen window. Maybe he’ll find a solution out there.

A soft knock on the door. One of the yamen workers brings papers to the mayor, murmuring softly under his breath. The conversation is largely inaudible, though Calla figures it can’t be anything relevant to the situation.

The screen in front of Venus switches to a video player.

“Here we are.”

Calla peers over the councilmember’s shoulder. The rectangle of footage shows West Capital’s yamen, two statues of lions placed on either side of the front entrance. The only indication that this is live footage and not a still image comes from the dusty, unpaved ground, where every gust of wind blows small pieces of dirt and grit off the surface.

“You said the cold crawled .” Calla ensures she’s using Venus’s exact wording. “What exactly did you see happen to the civilians left behind?”

There’s something in the far distance, appearing in the corner of the camera by the barest smidgen. Try as Calla does to turn her own head this way and that, she can’t get a better angle on what it is.

“They stopped moving,” Venus says. “When the cold caught up, it froze them.”

Calla thinks about the first descent of cold in Rincun. How it seized down from the heavens, and the qi was stolen from the barracks, and the cold faded. “The cold is some aftereffect of qi, though. It’s not literal ice. That doesn’t make sense.”

“As I keep saying,” Anton mutters by the window.

Calla leans closer to the screen. The slight movement in the distance is getting closer. She swears it is larger than the quarter of a pixel it was before. While Venus Hailira starts hypothesizing about other times they’ve seen strange feats of nature in Rincun— I’ve been reading about it, you see, and it occurs more often than you’d think —Calla taps the keys. The video rewinds. It confirms her suspicion, and she exits the screen.

The people in Rincun aren’t frozen. They’re moving really, really slowly. In fact, the person captured on the footage must be in the midst of trying to make it to the yamen as the closest place of shelter.

Out of the corner of her eye, Calla notices Anton turn, a brow raised. She’s seen him in battle enough times to read his movements, the way his muscles stiffen. He’s gauged a threat, and other than Venus Hailira, there’s only the mayor in the room and the boy he’s speaking to. Calla doesn’t make a fuss by asking what he’s noticed. Just as she would in battle, she syncs with his movements, switches her focal point of attention to tune out Venus and into the mayor’s conversation instead.

In that initial second, she thinks she’s hallucinating again. Since she jumped out of Galipei, she hasn’t heard voices nor felt flashes of other people’s memories. This, though, has nothing to do with her recent sigils and everything to do with her first jump. The girl she was.

“ —is the work of the gods. The city folk will make it worse. ”

“ Maybe they’ll find the junndi and put a stop to it. I trust an official force more than I trust a criminal killer. ”

Actia almost entirely shares a dialect with Rincun. Calla understands their words.

“ Nevertheless, it is their business. None of them are our people. Remember what the throne did to Eigi. ”

“Mayor,” Anton says loudly. “What are we talking about?”

He doesn’t understand them. But he can discern that it’s something suspicious. Junndi, Calla rolls over her tongue, squashing the two syllables against the back of her front teeth. What does that mean? She’s never heard the word before. Her vocabulary is too stunted, capped at the year she left Rincun in a golden carriage.

“Low numbers for grain, sir,” the mayor replies. In Talinese, he’s bright and accommodating. No indication whatsoever that he was slamming them seconds ago as callous city folk, her as a criminal killer. “Lucin, why don’t you close up around the yamen? It’ll be an early day today.”

The employee, Lucin, nods. He steps out through the door, and Calla pushes away from the computer desk too.

“I have to use the washroom,” Calla says. “Please excuse me.”

The mayor thinks little of her exit. Venus doesn’t turn either. When Anton makes eye contact, Calla signals a simple up-down with her finger, then nods her head at the door and mouths, Thanks! She’s not sure whether he understands what she’s trying to say, but Calla has already stepped out, running her palm against the door hinge.

She slashes her hand hard against the metal. A jagged cut blooms to life, beads of blood pressing through the broken skin. Calla squeezes her palm tightly while she follows after the boy.

She jumps, the movement so smooth that Lucin raises his foot in one step and she’s the one to put it down. A soft thump sounds behind her, but she doesn’t turn her head back, wanting the benefit of the doubt if anyone is to ask why Princess Calla Tuoleimi suddenly fainted. She pushes through to a different set of rooms. The chatter doesn’t stop when she enters. It is as ordinary as anything for her to walk toward the one desk that is unoccupied—Lucin’s, surely—and scan through the contents, looking for some reason why he was whispering to Mayor Policola about city folk making matters worse.

“Hey,” Calla calls aloud, directing the question at anyone in the vicinity, “anyone have any new thoughts about the junndi?”

“Are you on about that again?” someone across the tables replies. Interesting tone. “Better be quiet. They’ll think we know more than we actually do.”

What does that mean ? Calla thinks frantically. She starts to rummage through the papers on the desk. She should get back in a few minutes, or else the mayor will wonder where she’s gotten to, and she doesn’t want to leave Councilmember Hailira to make the decisions…

Calla lifts one sheet of paper.

KEEP THEM THERE.

Anton follows shortly after Calla, giving the excuse of wanting water, and stops dead in his tracks when he sees her body collapsed outside the door. Ah. So that’s what her signal meant.

“My goodness,” he mutters under his breath, scooping her up in a quick maneuver and throwing her body over his shoulder. He supposes he’ll find the kitchen, then shove her somewhere out of sight until she gets back. If anyone can sniff out where he’s gone, it’ll be Calla Tuoleimi.

Anton stays in the shadows of the yamen, moving fast on his feet. The effort is wasted: there isn’t anyone around anyway. He nudges into the kitchen and closes the folding door after himself. Calla’s body is eerily still in his arms, and though he understands that she’s been doing something funny with her qi, he’s still unnerved when her eyes fall open a fraction, revealing her yellow irises perfectly intact inside.

“Stay here, Princess,” he mutters, opening a large cupboard and setting her inside. Her body folds, malleable wherever he sets her head. To think he was actually afraid seeing her tucked into Galipei’s arms, brought back unconscious from Lankil’s city. That’s the last time he’ll ever be stupid enough to think Calla could go down so easily.

Anton fetches himself a glass of water and wanders back to the yamen’s main office. Just as he’s stepping through the door, the mayor rushes past him, looking harried. Seconds later, Venus Hailira follows too, calling after him in concern.

“We need your numbers,” she’s saying. “Actia’s councilmember may not be here, but I can get in touch. It’s to your benefit—”

“Councilmember, please, I have emergency warnings to put in place at the borders—”

“Mayor—”

Their voices fade. Anton takes a sip of water. Resumes his position by the window to watch the scene outside.

Seconds later, the door opens again. Calla has returned to her own body.

“We’ve got to go,” she says. “ Now , Anton.”