Page 62

Building Walls

Reven lets me go the instant we get where he’s shadowing us but doesn’t step away or give me space. It couldn’t have taken us more than a second to get here—I didn’t even feel us move. Which makes sense, because we didn’t go far, only to the private royal garden, which has been walled back up since we took the palace.

I don’t care where he took me. I can still see Tabra’s hate- and fear-filled face as she screamed that I wasn’t her sister.

“She…” I stop to get control of my mouth that doesn’t want to work properly. “She must have had sleep in her eyes.”

The excuse sounds even more flimsy than it did in my head. Good to see my brain is functioning as usual in a crisis, which is fuzzy as hell. I mean, I’ve got to be able to count on something in this world. Clearly, I can’t count on my own sister recognizing me.

Stop. Stop it, Meren.

I close my eyes, trying to herd my chaotic thoughts. “Maybe she was dreaming.”

I still haven’t lifted my gaze past the first button on his shirt.

He doesn’t say anything.

“She has to be so scared,” I say next. “Eidolon attacked her and she…” That’s when I finally look Reven fully in the eyes. “We have to go back. She needs me.” I grab his arm. “We have to…we have to go back.”

I’m well aware that I’m stumbling over my words and babbling a little bit, but it takes Reven shaking his head for me to swallow down more words that want to tumble out.

“Why?” I demand.

“You don’t want to make it worse.”

Worse. I can make it worse for her?

“What do you think she saw?” I ask him. Because if anybody is going to be honest with me in this moment, it’s Reven.

He goes to open his mouth, but I stop him. “Don’t answer. The Shadows crawling over my face again. Right?”

He shakes his head slowly. “It’s more like they subtly distorted your face in a way that didn’t look like you.”

I can’t win.

I spin around to pace back and forth, hardly aware of where I am. I’m sort of muttering to myself something like, “She didn’t know it was me,” and “If they can fool my sister,” and “But she could hear me, how did she not realize.”

Finally, I nod to myself. “I’ll give her some time and then go talk to her.”

Reven considers that long enough that I actually start to lean toward him in anticipation.

“I think that’s a good idea,” he says slowly. That’s all he says.

I stare at him for a second, then pop my hands onto my hips. “That’s it?”

He considers me for a moment. “What were you hoping for?”

Kicking his shins would be childish, right? “Who knows? My own sister just thought I was some kind of demon and didn’t even recognize me.” I go back to pacing. “Every friend I have, including you, is staring at me like I might…I don’t know…take my own head off my body, spin it around ten times while chanting maniacally to the three moons, and put it back on my neck facing backward. But the real threat—Eidolon—is still out there, and we don’t know if he’ll attack with an army or infiltrate us himself more stealthily.”

Like through me.

I recognize that I have yet to take breath, but I’m rolling now.

“I’m not even sure which one of those things would be worse. I wasn’t groomed to be a military leader. Why is this all falling on my shoulders? Meanwhile, the people I trust to advise me are falling like flies in a gas field.” I hold up a hand, not that he tried to interrupt me. “I mean…okay…I acknowledge that Eidolon being able to take me over is scary, and I am losing it right now, only I can’t afford the luxury of losing it ever, because I’ve got people depending on me not doing that. So I need to do something. Only, I’m not allowed to be part of the plans.”

I stop dead in my tracks, sort of nodding to myself. That’s it. Something to do.

Reven shakes his head like he didn’t hear that last bit right. “What?”

I’m grasping for clear air in a sandstorm at this point. “I need to do something. I mean right now. Something that’s productive while I wait until Tabra wants to see me again, and Vos heals more, and Hakan wakes up, and…” I almost said something about Horus returning with usable information, but out in the open like this is not the place to tell Reven. “I can’t just sit around the palace with everybody either waiting for me to turn into a monster or expecting me to know what to do.” I drop my hands to my sides, my chin to my chest, and close my eyes.

“Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll take you there,” Reven says.

Immediate. No hesitation. I might love him all over again for that.

Even so, I heave a bitter little laugh. “At this rate, Allusion’s dominion is sounding pretty fantastic.”

He grunts. “Anywhere but there.”

I guess he caught the implication, and a small part of me really wants to laugh just for a second. What happened to the girl I was only months ago who could laugh at anything, poke fun easily, and not let every little thing get to her?

I sigh. “I kind of miss that girl,” I whisper to myself.

“That girl is still here,” Reven says.

I raise my head to blink at him because I didn’t think I’d said most of that out loud.

He tips his head, searching my face. “She’s standing right in front of me, and she’s struggling because nobody in all of Nova—before, now, or to come—could handle the pressure she’s under and the decisions she’s making without cracking just a little bit.”

Which only makes me huff. “Are you saying I’m cracking?”

Reven rolls his eyes. “Given everything you just ranted about, only you would decide to argue with me.” He takes a step closer. “But you just proved my point.”

“Was there a point?”

“The wisecracking, smart-ass girl you fear you’ve lost is still in there. She’s just a little…” He sort of trails off, and I get the uneasy sense he’s holding back.

“A little what?” I demand. “A little darker? Is that what you were going to say?”

Irritation passes over his features the same way it did with Tabra just a second ago, and I actually hold my breath, waiting for him to turn on me the same way she did, but he doesn’t. At least not right away. Instead, he says, “I’ll make you a deal.”

“A deal.” I stare at him dubiously. “What kind?”

“The kind where I, for one, stop looking at you like the way you said, if you will admit that you have been acting unlike yourself lately.”

I put my tongue to the roof of my mouth, trying to hold back my first knee-jerk reaction of wanting to push back. “You just said anyone would react the way I have been,” I point out through admittedly gritted teeth.

“And anyone would,” he acknowledges. “But it’s still very dark for you .”

I turn away from him slightly, not really taking in the trampled state of the garden, just trying not to express my frustration in the concerning way that apparently everybody fears I will. “How would you know?” It’s mean to use that against him. I know it as soon as it’s out of my mouth.

“Because I know you better now.”

“You seem to have an answer for everything,” I grumble.

“What do you say?” he asks. “Do we have a deal?”

I twist my lips. The thing is, I’ve already admitted as much to myself. When I was torturing those Devourers, it felt right . Justified. Reasonable even. In the cold light of day and with distance, I’m not so sure. “Anywhere I want?”

Reven nods. “Other than the hells or heavens, yes.”

“And you won’t stop me from doing what I want when we get there, even if it seems ill-advised?”

“I—”

“As long as it’s not”—it takes everything in me not to roll my eyes—“dark or deadly.”

He doesn’t hesitate. “Yes. That’s the deal.”

“Fine.” I hold out my hand to shake.

Reven looks down at my hand and then up at me, and I get the impression that he’s wondering right now if he can trust me to keep up my end of the bargain. He can. Maybe not for the reason he’s hoping, but because I already know it’s true. There’s nothing to really admit.

Finally, Reven shakes my hand.

“Great,” I say. “I acknowledge it. I’m already scared of it.”

His eyes widen ever so slightly. “Meren, is that true—”

“I’m not stupid, Reven. Of course that’s true. That’s why the way everyone is treating me is so frustrating. I need help, not judgment.” I don’t want to talk about this anymore, so I step closer to him. “Please take me outside of the city, but right at the outskirts. Preferably on the southern side, at least to start.”

I hardly get the words out before we shadow away and back a second later, exactly where I asked him to take me. I shoot him a glance that’s probably full of suspicion, because that was so fast it feels like he’s pandering to me. But I’m not going to balk. I’ve got too much to do. “Thank you.”

“I promised.” He glances around us. “Now what?”

“Now…” I don’t bother to hide the grimly determined tone from my voice. “I build a wall around my city.”

Something one of the previous queens should have done long ago. Yet another thing to be irritated with my family’s rulers who came before me about. It’s become glaringly obvious that none of them ruled so much as tried not to die early.

I raise both hands, already glowing yellow.

“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.”

I pause. “What?”

He looks from me to my hands to the city beyond, jaw working, probably to keep from telling me this is a bad idea. Because he promised. “Shouldn’t you be conserving power?”

He’s not wrong, but I already considered that. “I can’t help my sister release the goddesses and fight Eidolon. That will be many times worse if the entire time Oaesys is vulnerable to his attack.” I cast my gaze out over the city, the buildings rising higher toward the palace, the north side of which abuts the shores of the Sea of Terra. “We have a little less than three days to the Alignment. We’ll just have to pray that I’ll have enough time to rest before he comes. But I know for certain that this is how I can help right now.”

“But—”

“Uh-uh.” I wag a finger. “You said as long as I don’t go dark or deadly, you wouldn’t stop me, even if it was ill-advised. You shook on it.”

The me from before all this would probably have laughed at the expression that crosses Reven’s face. I have no doubt he’s kicking himself right now, which is kind of fun for me. Except that I’m still thrown by what happened with Tabra, and honestly the reason I thought to do this at all has more to do with the fact that I need to release some pent-up tension. It’s either pace around the palace as I wait yet again for Eidolon to come for me and mine, or this.

I chose this. This , at least, might be helpful.

He gives in on a grunt of a word. “Fine.”

“You don’t have to stay.”

He tips his head. “Trying to get rid of me?”

I frown. Is he trying to tease? If it had been before, I’d know he was. But at the moment our relationship feels like we’re suspended in water, unable to swim for the top or to drown. Like we’re just sort of, stuck. “Fine. Stay if you want.”

His lips press together. “Eidolon could show up at any moment.”

Physically or through me? I’m guessing it’s the latter, although I’m not tapping into the king’s power for this. I deflate a little. Even after admitting my fear, he doubts me? If he thinks I’m not already twitching with every sound and shadow around me, then he’s not paying attention.

Without waiting for him to change his mind, I face the city, close my eyes, and picture the sands of the dunes coming to me. I’ve brought them to me before, in the palace, when Shadow had control of Reven and attacked me.

Goddess, that feels like forever ago.

This time is easier for so many reasons. I start the piles heating and building and heating and building. Not glass. I only heat them enough to be able to form bricks and have them stick together. I try to picture stacking them at least a few feet thick. I don’t linger on any one brick. There’s not enough time for that. I just build as fast as I can.

“What do you think?” I ask over my shoulder, eyes still closed. “Is twenty feet high enough?”

“Not to stop shadows—”

“No kidding—”

“Give me a second, princess,” he says in a voice that tells me he’s losing patience.

“Well?”

He grumbles something under his breath that I can’t quite catch but sounds like something about passing a trait on to children, and my first instinct is a sort of giddy hope that he’s starting to remember me, but then I realize that I could pass things on to children that aren’t his. So, I let the giddy go.

“What?” I ask.

Another grunt. “I was going to say that twenty feet should be high enough to give humans trouble. Although they’re likely to have Imperium with them.”

Truth. “Let’s hope they attack from the outside. Then this will at least buy us time. I’m not planning to make a gate out. It would be a weak point.” If they attack from inside the city, though, this is going to trap them with us. It’s a risk worth taking.

“That, too.”

We don’t talk much after that. I build, he watches, and every so often I ask him to move us to a different location as I make my way around the city. At one point Cain shows up, and the only reason I know is that I recognize the sound of his voice as he talks to Reven quietly.

No wonder. A giant sand wall going up around the city is pretty damn obvious, and of course someone would come check on why. He grumbles something along the lines of “You could have warned us she’d be doing this first,” which, fair enough, but he leaves without saying anything to me.

I keep going. It takes me until well into the night, even though I started in the morning. I don’t stop until both ends of the wall hit the massive Sea of Terra, building them into the water far enough that it would make going around them that way difficult. I harden the layers actually in the water to glass so that the sand won’t melt away.

I consider extending the wall along the banks, but it’s unlikely anyone will attack from that direction. Every dominion has at least one or more large lake or sea big enough that they could build a navy, but what’s the point? With no way to travel the oceans, our navies would be, essentially, landlocked with no access to the other dominions. We certainly can’t bring them through the portals. Consequently, none of us have a navy. Not anymore.

I drop my arms. I’m not sure I could keep going anyway. My limbs have been shaking for a while and feel so heavy someone might as well have filled them with the bricks I’ve been making.

Almost like that was a sign to the rest of my body, I hit a wall of exhaustion like I ran full tilt into my own fortification of sand. I droop, eyes still closed because I can’t make them open.

“You did well,” Reven says quietly, close enough that my body prickles at his nearness.

No admonishment about wearing myself out, just you did well .

Somewhere under the drag of exhaustion a small glow of warmth blooms in my heart. I guess I needed to hear that. “Thanks.”

“Let’s get you back to the palace, get some food in you, and then I think you should rest all day tomorrow,” he says.

“You won’t get an argument from me.”

He snorts a laugh. “For once.”

“Hey.” I pry open my eyelids, looking out over the sea that I can see beyond my walls. Reven is still behind me. “You used to love it when I argued with you, I’ll have you know.”

“Are you so sure about that?”

Despite the lightness of this exchange so far, sadness tinges my next words, mostly because I’m too tired to keep it out of my voice. “Yes. You may have been frustrated, but you still loved it. I’m sure.”

I hear him draw a breath behind me, and like earlier, he mutters something that I don’t quite catch. My heart sort of wishes it was “Still do.”

But until his memories return, I can only lean on hope that’s been twisted and smashed and thwarted so many times, it’s not the steadiest ground to walk on anymore.