Chapter 32

CHAPTER 32

Actia’s yamen takes shape ahead of the delegation. Despite the midday sun, the cold temperature has misted around the building and the surrounding walls, rendering the image hazy with white. As Galipei signals for the delegation to stop, August passes his reins to another of his guards. He recognizes one of the horses tied outside the yamen already. A palace creature. The one Calla took when they fled Lankil.

They must be here.

Mayor Policola hurries out from the yamen. A woman follows close on his heels—Councilmember Venus Hailira, though it takes August a moment to recall her name. She inherited the title from her father. He wouldn’t have thought she’d last this long.

“Where is Calla?” August asks, in no mood to make pleasantries.

Mayor Policola grimaces. Hailira, meanwhile, does a quick double take, as though she’s surprised to hear the question.

“I said to hold her until I arrive, so I better not hear that she’s gone,” August continues, his voice sharp.

“Your Majesty, by the time we received your message, she had already departed. We didn’t realize it was Anton Makusa who accompanied her. We assumed him a mere travel companion.”

Hmm. Fine. If they have shortly departed, they couldn’t have gone far. In any case, it won’t be long until August has them captured, because this is Anton Makusa they’re talking about, and Anton is going to want the crown for himself. They have Anton and Calla’s destination with certainty.

“Very well,” August says. The mayor visibly relaxes. He was prepared for punishment. “Summon your generals. We’re proceeding forward.”

The mountains are already visible from here. Though Rincun is large, the borderlands are taller, casting their entire province neighbor in their shadows.

“Your Majesty, if I may,” Venus cuts in. “It’s a lost cause trying to enter Rincun. The province has frozen over. We’ve tried sending people through the border.”

“Do they remain alive?”

Venus hesitates. “Yes, I suppose, but they move about an inch per minute. Once they cross, we cannot fetch them back.”

The borderlands are sapping qi. If it extends all through Rincun, it isn’t a one-off occurrence. It’s something near-mythical.

“Otta has reached the crown,” August says lowly. He’s only speaking to Galipei, but Venus Hailira tilts her head curiously, trying to follow along.

“I will tell the councilmembers their journey ends here,” Galipei declares. “The movement forward is no longer a delegation.”

“You’re not hearing me,” Venus exclaims. She sweeps her arm out, in the direction of Rincun. “There is no forward. The cold will freeze you in place.”

Galipei is already walking into the yamen. “Fetch your generals, Mayor.”

“What?” Venus mutters, but she’s lost her fight. Her expression is wholly confused, and when she catches August’s eye, he offers no further explanation. Only a shrug, and then August begins toward the yamen too.

“It’s not the cold we should be worried about, Councilmember,” he calls back. “It’s when it stops.”

“You’re quiet.”

Calla bites her thumbnail while she walks, peering over her shoulder to eye the village fading to a dot. With knowledge of August’s impending arrival, there was no time to fetch the horse outside the yamen, no time to do anything except steal two cloaks from the main office and flee on foot.

They’ve made enough distance now to slow down. She turns back around to face the mountains ahead.

But they’re also coming to the end of the line.

“Princess,” Anton prompts again. “Are you ignoring me on purpose?”

She is. It’s cold enough to freeze her brain from activity. She’s trying to think , but she can only bump up against the conclusion that it is impossible to get any closer to the mountains, so how the fuck are they supposed to find—

“Princess. Sunshine. Sweet pea. Green beans. Red tea—”

“Are you quite entertained?” Calla finally answers. Her breath puffs out in thick, opaque clouds. “Enough. You’re only naming items. I’m listening.”

“I hadn’t even started getting specific yet.”

Maybe they could go around , push off the western seaboard of Rincun and ride a boat out into the waters to get to the borderlands, but that would take days. They don’t have days.

“What’s wrong with a little dearest of my heart ?”

“ Tyrant of my heart is far more fitting.”

Calla’s eyes snap over to him in a glare. He speaks in jest, and yet a poisonous part of her still rears up, spitting acid whenever it is provoked. “Don’t demote me. That role wasn’t exactly occupied well in the past.”

Anton sighs. He can’t counter the allegation, now that Otta Avia is somewhere deep in those mountains doing who knows what. His lips thin, and then he says:

“I still don’t understand it, Calla. Why did she ask you to come, and come alone at that?”

A more careless Calla would have assumed it to be a matter of politics. A spurned woman, trying to prove a point. The Calla who watched Otta throw a knife directly into a man’s neck, though—she isn’t going to say the same. Otta Avia is far smarter than any of them were prepared for.

“I don’t know,” Calla says. “If something seems meaningless, rarely are we looking at it correctly.”

Anton stops abruptly in his step. The wind howls, and his loose hair falls into his eyes.

“Did you see that?”

Calla looks toward the mountains. They are still. Gray giants, sleeping in the distance. “See what?”

“A beam of light.” Anton points ahead, to the left. “It arced from there”—his finger moves slightly across the range, directing her gaze straight ahead next—“to there.”

Calla scrambles to pull the map from her pocket. She smooths out its creases, holds it flat. “Anton, that’s the crown.”

“What?”

“I’m serious. The landing spot matches the location on the map.”

Anton doesn’t seem convinced. He tries to swallow, and his throat moves with a stuttering motion. The more they walk, Calla feels it too. The cold twists and warps her insides in a way she hasn’t experienced since she was eight years old. It isn’t quite right to call it pain. The sensation exists somewhere parallel to it: her organs at odds with her body, struggling to pull free.

“It seems a bit convenient for it to be shooting a light into the sky, don’t you think?”

“ You said it was arcing in,” Calla replies, shoving the map back into her jacket. “It’s not shooting light, it’s taking it. Anton, it’s qi. The site is absorbing it across the province. Sacrifice.”

Anton closes his eyes. She doesn’t understand what he’s doing, nor does she think it’s a very good idea when she hears something in the distance and sights movement coming toward them from the village.

End of the line. But if they keep going any farther, they will freeze.

“Calla,” Anton says suddenly, “teach me what you drew on yourself.”

It takes Calla a second to comprehend his demand. By then, Anton is already acting, unsheathing only a fraction of her sword and slashing his palm across the blade. Blood gathers on his fingers, and he offers it to her.

Anton Makusa was the one who stumbled onto the first of this practice on his own, who turned a dead body into his chance for survival. Who sacrificed so tremendously that he needed no guiding sigil.

“Here.” Calla takes Anton’s hand, his blood running onto hers. She’s already marked—the sigil hasn’t faded—and she pulls down his collar to trace the same sigil onto him. A rush of cold spirits down her spine. The world comes into sharp focus.

“Were you watching the order?” she asks, her voice low.

“No,” Anton answers, and his eyes drop to her mouth. “You’ll have to teach me again. I’ll see you by the light.”

And then he falls, collapsing as deadweight onto the cold ground.

“Hey!” Calla bellows. “You—”

August’s delegation looms closer, riding at full speed. She can’t waste time shouting at air, though she would have expected Anton to wait for her. With a huff, Calla turns in the direction of the mountains and closes her eyes, feeling for qi too.

She jumps.

The first landing immediately feels bizarre. She’s alive, conscious. But she can’t blink. The world doesn’t move around her—it is a hollow make-believe of shapes and colors, barely stitching together in her understanding of which way lies north and which is south.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, she turns her face. She cannot move her limbs, but she can feel the direction of the wind. It blows in from the western seaboard.

As far as she can stretch her own qi, she searches for the next body.

Calla slams in with the sort of momentum that should cause her to stumble, but the body doesn’t budge.

She’s on the streets of Rincun again. The field looks familiar. There’s a muddy puddle by her feet, and though it takes some time, Calla tilts her head enough to look at herself in the crystallizing reflection.

When she first saw the princess here, she looked so beautiful. Gems in every part of her headpiece. Her sleeves trailing pink, her dress glimmering with gold. The tears are dripping down Calla’s face without any way to stop them. Her body cannot move outside these tedious speeds, but her tears fall and fall and fall without cessation.

She had wanted it so much. She wants so much… the world, the seas beyond.

Calla must go. If she gives in, she will remain here forever, just like the girl she left at the bottom of a puddle. She shutters her eyes closed, waiting for them to block the sights of Rincun out entirely.

Her skin is frozen. She’s dying. Her waist is buried in white snow, her palms split open on black rock.

Go, she urges herself. Keep going. If this mountain path continues north, there ought to be someone else—

Her head is pressed to ice. There’s blood in her mouth. This time, she has gotten entirely lost. Perhaps mere minutes pass, perhaps entire hours. She searches and searches with her slow-flickering eyes, but she sees only the white snow of the mountains.

The body has fallen. That’s why. Inch by inch, Calla manages to get her head tilted up, staring into the sky.

Please, please…

A flash of light comes from the left. There .

Her hand cradles into her chest. Her hand is so small. She’s found herself among a group. They’re turning in the wrong direction. They’re fleeing. Calla keeps moving.

This body is entirely numb. Approaching death. She feels how close she’s getting to the site of the crown. That flash of light is nearer each time. The twisting sensation in her throat is unbearable.

A knife in her stomach, her lungs awfully full—

There are so many people in the borderlands.

“About time you made it.”

Calla’s eyes fly open. She registers that in an instant: she can move. Whatever the limits were on the freeze, they’ve broken past it.

“Anton?” she whispers. The plain gray sky unfurls above her, pressing close enough to the earth that she might believe she could stretch her hand up and touch its folds.

“You can kiss me if you’re unsure,” his voice replies. Doubtlessly, although he possesses a higher pitch, it is Anton Makusa and not an imposter.

Calla turns. She barely stifles her gasp.

“I know,” Anton says. “And we thought the Hollow Temple was bad.”

Bodies upon bodies upon bodies. Anton has taken one that lies farther down the row from her—feminine, with hair falling in soft waves around his pinched, cold face. Calla counts ten bodies between them. On Anton’s other side, the line of bodies continues as far as her eye can see, curving upward to make a semi-circle of endless sleeping faces.

Calla looks down at herself quickly, finds gloved hands and a padded jacket. She feels hair curling around the nape of her neck, tucked behind her ears.

She exhales, a puff of visible breath dancing into view. Her eyes flit up, searching the mountain incline alongside the mounds of white. There’s an entrance jutting out midway, gaping an open mouth into a structure built into the mountain. At first, the structure isn’t visible, blending in with the snow and mountain face. Then Calla picks herself up and slowly trudges a few steps higher along the incline, craning her neck to look from a different angle. Its smooth exterior and round turrets wrap around the entire mountaintop, poking farther into the clouds. This is a palace.

“Junndi,” Calla whispers under her breath. That’s what it means.

Across the top of the palace entrance lies a plaque written in archaic Talinese. Though Calla can faintly sound out the characters, she can’t understand what it says. Except for a name that has remained the same in today’s Talinese.

TUOLEIMI

“These are all vessels,” Anton reports, startling Calla’s attention back to him. He’s prying at the body next to him, opening its eyes. Blank. Better to be vessels, because there is no suffering.

It is quiet on the mountain. She doesn’t want to be present at the site when that next flare of light comes. Heavens knows what that might do to them.

“Leave them be,” she says, dusting her hands off. She gestures to the palace entrance. “We’re needed up there.”