Page 194 of Scorched Earth

Kaira didn’t reply, only continued to wear a path in the carpet she traversed, her brown eyes shadowed, and her cheeks hollowed. Despite the other woman’s harsh words toward Teriana, Lydia still felt sympathy for her.

Not eating, Sonia had told Lydia.Nor sleeping.And it was no wonder, given the fate of an entire nation rested on her shoulders. She was the princess marked by Tremon, the woman who had won every battle, who had protected her people with an obsessiveness that had cost her nearly everything. Everyone, including her father, expected Kaira to deliver them from this.

Incredible pressure, which Kaira might have been able to withstand if not for the fact that she’d already lost to Marcus once. And that loss had rattled not only the faith everyone had in her, but the faith Kaira had in herself.

Loss of faith was exactly what the Corrupter wanted.

“He has researched you, Kaira.” Agrippa’s tired eyes sharpened as he watched the princess. “Probably spent hours reading reports on your character and history, so he knew that you’d always put civilians first, no matter the cost. But above all, he counted on you believing that he’d slaughter a city to get what he wanted. I understand why you’d believe that, because the Maarin have been filling your ears with tales of his villainy.”

“He is a villain,” Kaira snapped. “And Teriana will have told him personal details about me, using the knowledge she gained from the trust between our peoples.”

Lydia stiffened, annoyed that Kaira continued to paint Teriana as the enemy.

“I’m sure he mined her for information and he’s definitely no hero, but…” Agrippa frowned. “How do I explain this? Marcus loves to win, but he doesn’t love the violence. There are commanders in the Empire who will quite literally massacre a city for pleasure, then eat the victims for the thrill of it. Marcus hunts thebestvictory. The one with the least collateral damage that results in the Senate preening over his genius. The moment I learned that he boxed you in, I could have told you that Emrant wasn’t his goal. He always leaves a back door for civilians to escape. Always.” Agrippa hesitated, then added, “But what else could you have done, not knowing anything about him? You had an army with the worst sort of reputation on the doorstep of a city filled with thousands of innocents, and to have left them undefended based on a gut feeling? Even if you’d been right, your people would never have forgiven you for it.”

Kaira stopped in her tracks, pressing her fingers to her temples. “It feels like a thousand spiders dance across my skin. A threat is near, I know it.”

“Astara’s last report was that they are marshaling in Emrant,” Sonia said quietly, crossing the room to touch Kaira’s arm. Lydia knew they had spent some time alone together, her friend giving a secret smile whenever Kaira’s name was mentioned but never saying a word about what had passed between them.

“Astara is overdue.”

“Perhaps so. But it’s weeks of hard marching between here and there. If they move, we’ll have warning. What you need is rest.”

Kaira leaned into Sonia for a long moment, then sighed and stepped away. “There is no time for rest. I need… I need to do something.”

“The best advice I can give you is to convince the Sultan to negotiate,” Agrippa said. “To pursue some form of agreement with the Empire even if it only buys you time.”

“Time is what we need, Kaira.” Malahi closed the book in front of her. “More than anything else, we need time. If we can defeat the blight and find a way to draw it out of the blighters that form Rufina’s army, then Mudamora will be better positioned to aid Gamdesh when the Cel push north. I will not—”

Malahi broke off, her face flushing, then she said, “Mudamorawill not leave Gamdesh to stand alone. But we cannot fight a double-sided war in earnest. We need time.”

“Gamdesh has not conceded territory in generations,” Kaira said quietly. “And my father is proud. I don’t think he can be convinced to accept the loss of Emrant to Celendor, no matter the cost of trying to take it back. He…Ican’t fail him. That isn’t an option.”

Lydia’s heart ached at the hollowness in the woman’s voice, though Kaira remained composed.

“We are still gathering our forces,” Kaira continued. “It will be another few weeks before we have all our soldiers at the ready, as well as the ships we need to attack the Cel from both sides. We will give you every resource at our disposal until then, and with luck, we’ll both make our moves against our enemies.”

Two of the librarians came into the antechamber at that moment, moving slowly, a wood-and-glass case suspended between them. An open book rested in the center of it. “We’ve found something of interest,” one of them said. “But it is fragile beyond measure. To read it through even once might see its destruction.”

They gently set the box on the table, and Lydia sucked in a sharp breath at the faded illustration on the open pages, which showed a man with both hands outstretched, one with black lines trailing out from it, the other with lines of silver. Lydia read from the page: “Blessed are the marked who use the power of the Six to serve the people, for they are salvation against the endless night delivered by the Seventh.”

Malahi moved to sit at her elbow, everyone else crowding around to look at the open pages.

“It was in the back of the ancient collection room,” one of the librarians said. “Judging from the dust, the case has not been removed in centuries.”

Lydia pulled on the white cotton gloves she used to handle the old books and then took a deep breath and lifted the glass case. Only to cringe as the pages visibly deteriorated the moment fresh air struck the book, bits crumbling from the edges and the whole volume seeming to sag. “Write down everything I say,” she said to one of the assistants. “We will not get a second chance at this.”

The young woman sat across from her with blank pages, ink, and a pen, the latter of which she held at the ready as Lydia gingerly slid a flat piece of metal under the page to support it and carefully turned it over. The edges crumbled into dust, bits of paint flaking away, but as her eyes moved over the illustration of a woman touching ground laced with black veins, Lydia breathed, “I think we’ve found it, Malahi. These words… They are written by the marked featured in the illustrations. These are the words of those who fought the blight at some point.”

Malahi pressed close to her as Lydia translated. “Killing the corrupted tenders stopped the progress of the blight, but it did nothing to remove it from the land, and it still killed anything it touched.”

“That won’t do,” Malahi muttered. “Mudamora is overrun. It’s not livable unless we strip the blight from the land.”

“Agreed.” Lydia turned the page. “Especially since this says that if you leave the blight, the corrupted tenders eventually regenerate and reform. Like ripping out the head of a weed but leaving the root, they come back. Nothing those combating them did, not fire nor blade, stopped them from coming back. Which likely means the one I thought I killed wasn’t entirely dead.”

“The Six have mercy,” the assistant breathed, writing swiftly as she transcribed Lydia’s words. “An abomination of Yara’s gift.”

Lydia tentatively turned the page, cringing as it crumbled.