Page 12

CHAPTER

Twelve

I T TOOK NEEMA over an hour to walk back to the Raven palace, feet rubbing in her silver sandals. The news, barefoot and eager, raced on ahead of her. By the time she’d reached home, everyone had heard. People making their way to Gaida’s rooms for the Raven contender’s afterparty smirked openly as Neema limped past. “About time they clipped her wings,” they said to each other. “Long overdue.”

Benna was waiting for her at the door. “I’m so sorry, High Scholar.”

Neema didn’t have the heart to correct her. It was just Neema now. She slipped out of her heels, removed her rings and her diamond cuff. She felt numb, barely conscious of what she was doing.

Benna set to work unhooking the dress. The famous dress. Gaida’s words. She’d known her performance would have serious repercussions for Neema; that the dress would be cursed by association. Courtiers were superstitious creatures. No one would dare wear it again. Grace Eliat, the imperial designer, would not buy it back for the archives. Neema would leave the island tomorrow morning with nothing to her name but a modest purse of tiles, some clothes, and a few pieces of paste jewellery. Everything else of value in her apartment—the silk rugs, the antique furniture, the unused dinner service, all the glamorous trappings of her high position—she’d rented from the imperial repository. That was the way things were done at court, for those who had not inherited such things from their family. A large portion of Neema’s salary had flowed straight back to the treasury, to pay for a lavish lifestyle she didn’t even want.

A moth patted plaintively against a lantern. Through the shuttered windows, Neema could hear music and conversation, peppered with laughter. Now the opening ceremony was over, people could relax and enjoy themselves, spilling out on to balconies and courtyards, drinking iced wine in a futile bid to keep cool in the deep, sultry heat of the night.

“She’s ruined,” someone crowed, from the balcony above. The afterparty, already in full swing.

You don’t know the half of it, Neema thought. Tonight she had lost the emperor’s favour. Tomorrow she would lose her position in the Flock. Her wings not just clipped but broken. No one would hire her. She would be shunned by the entire Raven community. And her family—would they be pulled into her disgrace? She blinked back the tears.

In the mirror, Benna winced in sympathy, nimble fingers hard at work on the dress.

So what now? Neema thought. What the Eight do I do? She couldn’t risk stealing the file as she’d planned. Imagine, if she were caught creeping through Gaida’s apartment in the middle of the night, on top of everything else.

Her only chance now was to appeal to Gaida’s better nature. If she could keep her Raven name, she might find a clerical post in some quiet, backwater town. If she begged, if she literally got down on her knees and begged, Gaida might enjoy showing mercy, as she would see it. Every act of mercy is an act of power.

“Ugh,” Neema said, out loud.

Benna paused in her work, and put her tattooed knuckles together. Life is short/Enjoy it! “Does that help?”

Not really. “Yes. Thank you.”

She pushed the dress over her hips and let it slide to the floor. Released. For months, she’d dreamed of wearing it. Now all she wanted to do was kick it away from her.

Benna gathered it up with a questioning look.

Neema gave her the directions to Grace Eliat’s workshop at the Monkey palace. The designer wouldn’t buy the dress back, but she might pay something for the material, the tiny, winking diamonds on the bodice. “Tell her I’ll take twelve silver tiles for it. She’ll haggle you down to nine.” Neema could live a few months on nine silver tiles, if she was frugal.

Benna held the dress to her chest, like a protective parent. “But it’s so beautiful…”

Neema lifted her hands . Beautiful, yes—and for ever tainted. “You’ll probably have to wait, I’m afraid. She could be out all night.” Grace liked a party, and a drink, gossiping in dark corners. “Could you bring the tiles here first thing tomorrow, before I leave?”

The emperor had ordered her to take the last boat, and she must be on it. After that, the island would be shut off from the mainland until the Festival was over. An attack was unlikely—there were no reports of rebellion, and pirates hadn’t dared raid this section of the coast in centuries. But Orrun’s richest and most powerful citizens would be gathered together on the island for the next few days, not to mention the Dragons and their ruler. The simplest way to protect them was to do what Yasthala had done fifteen centuries before. Seal up the docks, patrol the waters. No one out, no one in.

“Twelve silver tiles,” Benna checked.

“But accept nine.”

Benna gave her wobbly bow, indigo silk trailing from her arms. “Is there anything else, High Scholar?”

Neema felt another pang for her lost title. “No… wait. Did you find Pink-Pink?”

Benna’s face dropped.

“Don’t worry. He’ll find his way home.” She hunted out a couple of bronze tiles. “Thank you for your service today.”

She held her smile until Benna had left.

Then she sat down on the floor and cried. Silently, so the laughing guests on the balcony above didn’t hear her, and laugh even harder.

When she was done, she rubbed her face and crossed over to the bath Benna had prepared for her. It was just as she had projected—candles flickering around the edge, the air misty with steam. A thick layer of precious rose oil swirled across the surface in drifting patterns, tempting her in. But as she put her hand into the water she hissed and drew it out again, scalded. Way too hot. Well, Benna had come from the kitchens—she was used to boiling things, not bathing them.

Something else to soothe her, then, while she waited for the water to cool down. Her secret treasure.

Moving to her bookshelves, she brushed her fingers along her collection until she reached a thick black volume, the title debossed in dark blue letters: Tales of the Raven . Putting her nose to the spine, she inhaled its familiar perfume: mottled pages, old leather. Behind that, a faint trace of pepper and liquorice.

She’d found it at the turn of the year, when she was working in the imperial tombs. The emperor thought there might be some Ketuan artefacts buried down there that he could add to his collection, and had sent Neema to investigate.

No one could (or would) explain what happened next, but she had ended up locked in the tombs overnight. She suspected the guards—they’d been muttering as she went in that her visit was a desecration. Shouldn’t be allowed. She’d held her nerve until the lanterns lining the tunnels died out. Then she’d cracked. The cold, the dark, the unseen, scuttling things. Desperate for comfort, she’d prayed to the Raven. When it didn’t answer—of course it didn’t, it was a metaphor, not an actual being —she’d crawled on her hands and knees, groping for… what, exactly? A miraculous tinderbox? A magical, flaming torch? Her courage?

She’d found a book.

Picking it up in the pitch black tunnel, it had felt warm to the touch, emanating comfort. She’d hugged it to her chest all night, and when she was finally rescued the next morning—by the same guards who’d most likely locked her in—she’d tucked it in her bag, and brought it home.

It was only when she’d laid it out on her desk and its pages started riffling and flapping of their own accord , that she’d realised the priceless treasure she had found. An enchanted book, from the Hidden Library on Helia. How it had escaped the Dragon monastery and found its way into the imperial vaults was a mystery, but here it was.

Keeping it was not just forbidden, it was dangerous. There were a thousand cautionary tales about foolish, UnChosen folk who meddled with Dragon magic, and came to a thousand terrible ends. But whenever Neema thought about handing the book over, it resisted. That was the only way she could describe it. She’d brought it here and now it wouldn’t leave, like a stubborn house guest. So she kept it on her bookshelf, hidden in plain sight.

Days would go by when she did not think of it. Then she would catch its scent—that warm yet peppery scent that tickled the nose—and she would take it down. Or she would wake in the night from one of those disturbing dreams that had been plaguing her for months—and before she even knew what she was doing, she was crouched at her desk, reading it by candlelight.

Then there were times like this, when she felt as she had done in the tombs. Alone, afraid, abandoned. The book became her solace, carrying her away into its stories. Sometimes it told her fables of the Hidden Realm. Sometimes it recounted the myth of the Kind Returns—the seven times the Guardians had saved the world from the edge of destruction. Sometimes it took her back into Orrun’s more recent history, recounting events in such vivid detail she felt as if she were living through them. It never told the same story twice.

Neema had never believed in magic until she encountered the book. At first she had found this shift in her reality disquieting, but in time she had come to terms with it. She had grown used to the way her tongue pressed down in her mouth, whenever she thought of telling anyone about it. She’d accepted the way it sometimes appeared beneath her pillow, when she was sure she had left it on the shelf. As far as she could tell it meant her no harm—quite the opposite. What it felt like, if it felt like anything, was a companion. A friend in the dark.

Carrying it to her desk, she opened it at the middle and settled down. The book had other ideas. Its pages shrugged at the edges before whisking towards the back.

For a moment, she stared at an empty spread. Then the left-hand page bloomed with life. She was looking down through the branches of an oak tree at a grass bank rampant with wild primrose. A man lay sprawled in the grass, bathed in lemon sunshine. Neema recognised him at once from the setting and from the blood seeping from his chest. Eyart Just—Empress Yasthala’s husband, and father to her two sons. This was the scene of his murder—three days after the signing of the truce. When he’d thought it was safe to put down his sword at last, and rest.

Not the comforting story she was hoping for. But once the book was open, she was compelled to read, until it was done with her.

Ink blossomed on the opposite page, forming into text. A title resolved itself.

Empress Yasthala and the Cursed Blade

“Oh, actually I would like to hear about that,” Neema conceded, and the book gave a satisfied shuffle as if to say, I know , and continued:

… and when the guards came to Yasthala, and gave her the news, she would not believe them. The Eight would not take Eyart from her now after five years of civil war, fighting for a victory that most days felt like a defeat. For the empress knew it would take a lifetime to heal Orrun, and fulfil the promises she had made to her people. Only with Eyart at her side could she hope to succeed—her love, her friend, her wise and honest counsel.

Angrily she rose from her white marble throne. With her own eyes she would see him, and prove them all wrong. The empress who once walked pilgrimage across her lands in shabby travel clothes, who led her armies into battle in blood-spattered armour, strode now down the golden halls in robes of black velvet and imperial silk—and those she passed sank to their knees, and bowed their heads.

They kneel not to you but to the crown , Eyart had told her, and so she had allowed it, this deference she despised.

“He is not dead,” she told them—as if she could command Death the Dragon, as she had commanded her troops.

Yasthala walked until she reached the sloping grass banks that led down to the Guardian Gate. And there, beneath an oak tree, the empress found her husband’s body, and lost all reason.

With a piercing scream she fell to her knees, touching the savage wounds in his chest as though she might seal them closed with her fingers, and make him whole again. But Eyart Just had fought his last battle. When Yasthala saw he could not be saved, she sat back upon her heels. Hollow were her black eyes, as she smeared his heart’s blood down her face.

Only then did she see the Raven, perched in the oak tree.

“ You ,” she spat—for she knew the Second Guardian of old. “You saw this and did nothing.”

The Raven’s voice reverberated in her head, thrummed through her bones. The voice of all the ravens that were, all the ravens that are, and all the ravens that will be. “We did nothing,” it said. For even the Raven, Guardian of What Has Been and What Will Come, cannot stand against the will of the Dragon.

“I saved this world,” the empress said. “And yours. I stopped the Last Return. You said I would know peace, Raven, when it was done.”

The Raven tilted its head, to study her the better. “And so you have, Empress, these past three days.”

“Give him back to me!” she screamed. And in her grief, she picked up the blade she had found lodged in Eyart’s chest. A small, plain cook’s knife with a wooden handle. A modest weapon to fell the greatest warrior of the age. “Do not forget, Raven, that you promised me a gift when the war was done. I claim it now. Bring him back to life.”

The Raven gave itself a short preen. “This is not in our power,” it muttered, beak under its wing. The Second Guardian did not like to be reminded of its limits.

Yasthala fell silent. A look of quiet acceptance crossed her face. She placed the blade to her throat. “Then I shall go to him. Wherever he has landed on the Eternal Path, I shall find him, for I am his, and he is mine.”

The Raven stopped its preening, opened its black beak wide and let out a deep, rattling cry.

Yasthala’s head jerked back. An oily, purple-black liquid spread out across her eyes, coating them and spilling over the lids, streaming down her face. Dark, viscous tears, mingling with her husband’s blood.

And as the present blurred into the future, she saw what would become of Orrun, and her people, if she left them. How her enemies would rise again and steal back all she had won from them. More battles, more bloodshed, pushing the empire back into civil war. Her two young sons used as pawns, and set against each other. Their deaths, violent and terrible. And on, more death, more horror, until the Guardians had no choice but to Return from the Hidden Realm, streaming down from the sky to destroy the world.

The vision ended, replaced by another. What would happen if she stayed. The empress saw how Eyart’s senseless death brought her people together in grief. How she won not a perfect peace, but a lasting one. Her sons grew up and had children of their own. The world turned, and life flourished.

The last of the black oil spilled from Yasthala’s eyes and down her cheeks. She blinked, and found herself upon the grassy bank once more, in the spring sunshine. “These futures are not certain,” she said.

The Raven did not answer. It had shown her its visions. The empress must decide what to do with them.

Yasthala looked upon Eyart’s ruined body. And in her heart she knew that he would not wish her to follow. “I shall remain until my work is done. Wait for me, my love, and I will find you.”

The Raven shook its ruffled neck, pleased by her words. “A wise choice, Empress. Fare well.” Spreading its wings, it prepared for flight.

“Wait,” the empress said. “I have yet to claim my gift.”

The branch beneath the Raven’s claws shuddered. A breeze, hot and sour, riffled its feathers. Uneasily, the Second Guardian folded its wings. “Very well. What is your wish?”

Yasthala inspected the modest cooking knife that had killed her husband. “I wish to name this blade.” She ran her finger along its blunt edge. “And curse it.”

The branch shuddered more violently. The Raven lifted lightly into the air, and settled. “Curses are dangerous things, Empress,” it warned. “Most of all for those who make them.”

“So be it. The Tigers of Anat-hurun are responsible for this. I am sure of it. I name this blade Hurun-tooth in their honour. The blade is named.” Sheltering the blade in her cupped palms, she lifted it high. “And now I curse it. The next time Hurun-tooth takes a life, the Eight will Return in blood and fire.”

“Yasthala!” cried the Raven. “No!”

“Seal the curse into the blade,” she demanded.

“You would bind the fate of two worlds to one blade? Such a weapon cannot be allowed to exist.”

“Not a weapon,” Yasthala said, her grief lending her voice a touch of madness. “A gift from an empress, to her enemies. The Tigers of Anat-hurun shall guard this blade with their lives. This shall be their punishment and their burden, until the end of time.” She lifted the knife higher, the steel glinting in the sun. “Seal the curse into the blade.”

The Raven had made a promise—it must obey. Stretching its neck, it gave out a sharp, piercing cry that ripped through the air. For one long, terrible moment, the day vanished, replaced by a freezing, soulless night. And then the light returned, and it seemed to Yasthala that the grass looked fresher, the leaves on the trees brighter, the sun kinder than she had ever known them before. Tilting the blade, she saw a tiger’s eye etched into the steel, and knew that it was done.

Regret flew on swift wings to her heart.

“What have I done?” she whispered. “Eyart… Eyart…” And she fell upon his body again, and wept, because her husband would have stopped her, her wise and patient friend, but he was gone.

When she could weep no longer, Yasthala took the knife again in her hands. She had done what she had done. “Hurun-tooth. Blade of Peace. Yes. That is what you must become. A Blade of Peace. Perhaps you are a gift,” she mused, balancing its weight on her fingers. “Within you lies all the destructive potential of our Guardians. So: we must be careful. Our world is precious, and fragile. We must take care of it, as closely and as lovingly as we shall take care of you.”

This is how an empress lives with her mistakes.

The Raven was not impressed. Snapping its wings open it said, “Goodbye, Yasthala. We shall not meet again in this life.”

With that it left her. And from that day the Raven empress saw no visions, and dreamed no dark dreams that were not of her own making.

So ends the story of the Empress Yasthala, and the Cursed Blade.

The words faded from the page. Neema blinked, as if coming out of a trance. “Was that really what happened?” she wondered aloud. “I believe Eyart was murdered with a cooking knife, and Yasthala cursed it and gave it to the Tigers. But I don’t think it has the power to summon the Eight. The Eight are metaphors. The Raven is a metaphor.”

And you are talking to a magic book. The words materialised on the page, surprising her. The book had never spoken to her directly before.

“Hello,” she said, and felt a wave of profound embarrassment when it didn’t reply. The words had already faded from the paper. She rubbed her eyes; maybe she’d imagined them.

Your bath is ready , the book said, and closed itself with a smart snap.

Well, that was strange, Neema thought, as she sank down into the water. It was the perfect temperature, and smelled divine. The rose bath oil clung to her skin in fat, translucent beads. Benna must have emptied out the whole bottle, not realising it only needed a few drops. No matter. Neema couldn’t take it with her, and it felt deliriously good; rich and indulgent. She massaged the oil deeper into her arms and legs, across her stomach, feeling the stresses and aches of the day melt away.

The mirrored ceiling threw back her reflection, blurred by the steam. Something sparkled at her neck. The amethyst choker. She’d forgotten she was wearing it. She reached up to remove it, then changed her mind. It was still hers, for an hour or two.

She lowered her arms back into the water, and closed her eyes. Her thoughts turned to Cain. Eight. He’d looked good in imperial silk. Toned from his years of Festival training. The way he’d reached out, and touched her dress.

Would you like me to creep into your apartment in the dead of night?

No.

No.

She took a deep breath, and slid under the water.

Emerging a while later, she slipped into her white linen wrapping gown and stepped out on to her balcony. Leaning out, she could see that the afterparty up in Gaida’s apartment was thinning out. Another half hour and she could go up and beg for her future. “Ugh,” she said again.

She started packing for the morning, then gave up. She’d hoped the bath would calm her nerves, but if anything she felt more agitated. Her heart was hammering as if she’d downed several cups of strong coffee.

Taking herself up to her sleep platform, she found the book lying on her pillow. No, you see… no … she was absolutely certain she had left it on her desk. “I’m not reading any more tonight,” she said, defiantly. “I’m done.”

One page.

The thought tugged her forward as the book opened up again. It seemed insistent—anxious, even, as it reached the final page—a brightly painted illustration, edged in gold. The Awakening Dragon of the Last Return, wings unfurled, fire glowing in its sinuous throat. With its next breath, it would burn down the world.

She had seen this exact illustration before, many times—on the ceiling of the throne room. The same Dragon, the same pose, the same backdrop.

She traced the twists and turns of the Dragon’s body with her fingers. So lifelike, she could almost feel it moving against her skin.

Something’s wrong , she thought, dimly. Usually the book calmed her down, but now it seemed to be screaming at her, silently. Her heart was pounding and she felt feverish—tipping towards delirium. She could hear the laughter from the balcony above as if it were here in the room, tormenting her. The flower patterns on her quilt were moving, petals opening, stems tangling and knotting together. The scent of roses from the bath oil, heady and sickly sweet. Her senses were opening up and deepening, halfway to pain, halfway to pleasure.

More laughter from above—piercingly loud. She clapped her hands to her ears.

The Dragon twisted and turned on the page, calling to her. The fire building in its throat was a furnace, rippling the air between them.

And suddenly the torment stopped. She felt nothing, heard nothing. The whole world and everything within it was reduced to one, overriding thought.

The throne room. The painting. She had to see it. She had to see it now.

Go.

Down the steps of the sleeping platform.

Across the living area.

Balcony.

Garden.

The Dragon. The Dragon. Now.

Neema was moving, and nothing would stop her.