CHAPTER TEN
Kali waits for me, a spaceship suspended in a sky of fire and black and stars. I press against the glass, as if I could will my body out of Titania and hurl myself even faster at my home.
As we get closer, what was a speck is now so big. I can’t help thinking of Wychstar. Like my former kingdom, Kali is an entire civilization built on the disc-shaped surface of the base ship that keeps it powered and suspended in space. Like Wychstar, Kali has two almost invisible bubble-shaped shields around it: the outer shield, which extends about a mile away from the edge of the ship and maintains the atmosphere inside, and the inner shield, which has only half the radius and acts as a physical wall to prevent anyone from entering without permission. And like Wychstar, Kali is not as exposed to the distant sun as realms on planets are and instead uses powerful sun and moon lamps studded like stars over the cities to help re-create the days, seasons, and chemistry of their natural counterparts.
The resemblances end there. From this distance, I would have been able to see almost all of Wychstar, which plateaus across the surface of the ship. Kali is steeper and much, much bigger, sweeping upward from the wide surface of the base ship to the points of the towers of the palace, which seem to brush the stars.
We cross the outer shield. Titania slows, hovering, as Max broadcasts a call to the sentries. They send him a code. Titania keys it into her system and we’re past the inner shield.
Erys, the capital city, spreads out before us. For all that Kali is a realm built on discipline, technology, and the steel of warfare, with little interest in frivolities, its creators must have had some whimsy, some fondness for enchantment. It’s a fairytale realm from afar, a slice of another time, the streets paved in false cobbles and the shops raw and unpolished like cities of old. Weapons and modern conveniences and practicalities are hidden underneath all this. Air vents and temperature systems lurk under gnarled roots; thorny gardens are nurtured by chemicals to grow real fruit; tech screens and fingerprint scanners are tucked under wood and pebbles. It looks like a place where witches steal woodcutters’ children from their beds, where gargoyles come to life when the nights grow dark, where headless ballerinas dance in the forests.
I drink it all in: the white dome of the University of Erys, the small starships circling above the city, the boats on streams of recycled water and the chariots on false cobbles, the fields littered with soldiers in armor like drops of moonlight.
Looming above the rest of the city are the honey-colored arches and spiky towers of the palace. Tall, austere, its balconies carved with statues of knights and chariots. That’s where my father grew up, I think. Where my brothers played as children. Where my mother lived and loved and grew so afraid that she sent me away.
“Home,” says Max.
I don’t answer. There’s a lump in my throat. Kali. It’s perfect, and it’s home, but it doesn’t feel right. It won’t feel right until my mother and brothers are here with me.
I think of my mother, though I’ve tried not to all day. While my brothers are weak points in my armor, my mother is the open wound anyone could use to destroy me. I dare think of her only in the quiet, late at night when I can cry alone and have pretend conversations with her, when I can secretly fall apart.
Now that my identity is out in the world, has she regained her memory of me? Does she remember her love for her newborn baby from seventeen years in the past? Or her grief when she had to let me go?
Or does she hate me for joining my uncle, just as my brothers probably hate me?
Now is not the time to think about her. I can’t fall apart here.
As Titania swoops low, into a tunnel below the palace, the darkness swallows us. Max comes to stand beside me. With only the midnight tunnel outside, the glass is like a mirror and the sharp, clear lighting on the ship makes us look pale. Like silent ghosts, our reflections stare back at us.
Max is a good head taller than I am. He’s full of contradictions: a steely jaw and hopeful eyes; a boyish grin and tired shoulders; kind to me, yet so cruel to my brothers.
It’s time to get ready for the next step. I shut myself up in one of the bedrooms and do what I can to make myself fit for a king’s court: wrinkles smoothed out of my unfortunately rather old and faded dress, loose curls schooled into order, scuff marks and dried dirt wiped off my old boots. It’s the best I can do. It may be perfectly acceptable for Max to walk into the palace with his short hair messy and his shirt creased, but even his greatest critics won’t dare look down their noses at him in his own court. I don’t share that immunity.
The low buzz beneath my feet has stopped. I reach for the panel that will open the door, but don’t press it.
“We’re here,” Max says just outside.
I hesitate. I expect him to tell me to hurry, to remind me that it’s rude to make the king wait, but he waits patiently.
You can survive this, Esmae. You can beat them. I may be an insect in this world, but I bite.
I open the door. “I’m ready now.”
“Your boots,” he says, too observant. “You’ve wiped them. Why?”
“Why do you think?”
He’s silent for a minute. “It wasn’t necessary.”
I look away. Max’s scrutiny is too intense—inconvenient and dangerous. After a lifetime of loneliness, of invisibility, it’s so tempting to allow myself to be seen, but that’s exactly what I can’t do.
When I don’t reply, he turns and moves to the hatch. The supply ship pilots have already disembarked; I see them outside. I follow Max.
Kali’s dock is larger than Wychstar’s, laid out with precision, each ship in its own space and every space tagged with a number. It’s beautiful to see the different shapes and sizes, the different tones of silver and chrome and gray. The clink of tools and chatter of engineers and pilots has a familiar rhythm.
As we step out of the hatch, everyone nearby looks up. Trying to pretend they’re not there, I cross Titania’s wing and jump off the end.
A girl strides up to Max and me. She’s made up of slender lines and sharp edges, a little older than I am and a couple of inches taller, with reddish hair skewered ruthlessly into a knot and a spray of freckles across her nose. She wears a sword on her back and a dagger sheathed at her waist. Her gray tunic has the Rey crest of a silver crown made of stars embroidered over the breast pocket.
“Sybilla,” Max says, relieved, “I hoped it’d be you.”
“Of course it’s me,” she replies with a snort. “I promised you I’d keep the hordes at bay. They’re all pouting in the Throne Hall because I deprived them of the pleasure of seeing Titania as soon as she arrived.”
Max grins at her, then looks at me. “Sybilla’s a friend. She’s in charge of palace security and is also the second commander of the Hundred and One.”
The what? But this isn’t the time to ask for details.
Sybilla has already cut in anyway, her eyes fixed on me. “Are you sure this is the same person who won the competition?”
He sighs. “Sybilla—”
“Not one scar,” she says, studying every inch of skin not covered by my clothes. “Unmarked knees. No calluses on her hands.”
“Sybilla—”
“She could be a decoy. Some kind of trap. Are we really supposed to believe a student of Rickard’s escaped his training without a single scar?”
“Sybilla,” Max finally snaps, and she immediately falls silent.
My hand twitches towards my hair and the blueflower jewel. Amba’s gift is not a part of me I’m ready to share with anyone here just yet.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Sybilla.” I look her straight in the eye. “I won Titania. Give me an arrow and I’ll prove it if you like.”
She considers me for a moment and then, almost reluctantly, nods. “I’ll take your word for it. For now.” She points behind us. “Those pilots are from our Tamini supply ship, aren’t they? Why are they here and where is the ship?”
“I’ll explain later,” says Max. “Let’s go inside.”
Sybilla strides ahead of us, hard boots striking the floor. The cracked stone of the dock gives way to polished floors as we ascend into the heart of the palace. The stairways are narrow and steep, the hallways wider and without decorations. I notice the furniture everywhere is elegant, lush, and bolted in place. Wychstar is in a relatively quiet part of the star system, but Kali is much more prone to bumps and strikes from small asteroids and space debris.
As we cross stairways and bridges that arch over courtyards and gardens, we pass servants, who do comical double takes as they recognize me from the broadcast, and children, who giggle and scamper around us as though they’re used to treating these parts of the palace like their very own playground. Max pauses to speak to most of them, and the smiles on their faces are unmistakably sincere.
I try not to let my surprise show. The prince so loathed across the galaxy seems to be much more popular on Kali.
“Who are the children?” I ask. I know the Rey family tree and I have plenty of distant cousins, but they’re all older than the little ones I saw racing about.
“Their parents live all over Kali,” Max explains. “My mother set up a school in the south wing a few years ago.”
“He makes it sound so nice,” says Sybilla, with a smile like jagged paper. “The fact of the matter is that there are families who want to be rid of their children, and they’ve sent them here because they know the queen won’t turn them away.”
“Their families don’t want them? Why not?”
“Any number of reasons,” says Sybilla, “Too poor to feed another mouth, difficult behavior, disabilities they don’t want to deal with, you name it.” She glances back at me. “You probably know as much about it as anyone. Max told us how you ended up on Wychstar. So you know what it is to be unwanted.”
I blink. Amba’s blueflower is no protection from that sort of attack, and it’s amazing how much it hurts. I squash the urge to defend my mother, to refute it, to say I am wanted.
Sybilla walks a bit farther, then stops and turns around when the silence behind her becomes too oppressive to ignore. Her puzzled gaze shifts from my face to Max’s furious one and back again. She blushes so red her freckles vanish. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s only the truth. Anyway,” I add, more calmly than I feel, “it’s very kind of the queen to look after them.”
“She calls them her children.” Sybilla says. “She calls us her children. I used to be one of them. All the Hundred and One were at one point.”
I open my mouth, then shut it again. I didn’t come here to stick my nose into her private life.
Sybilla turns a corner and stops in a pale, polished anteroom with a set of arched double doors that open at the far side. Her posture and attitude shift dramatically, becoming formal and polite. She nods at the guards posted on either side of the doors.
“Ready?” Max asks me.
I nod.
The doors open.
I clasp my hands together in front of me and count prime numbers in my head to keep myself calm.
The Throne Hall is a large room trimmed in honey and white, with a pale polished wood floor, arched roof, and white pillars that frame a wide path all the way from the double doors to a dais at the other end. Arched windows run down one side of the room and look out over the stars and snowy Winter. The room is packed with courtiers and soldiers, richly dressed, their faces in shades of cream, brown, black, and pink—a sly, curious sea pressed uncomfortably close.
The elders and prominent advisers who make up the war council have thrones of their own here, simple and austere ones set next to the dais. I see them out of the corner of my eye but don’t dare look closer for fear of whom I may see sitting there. I focus, instead, on the four thrones directly in front of me. There are two carved gold ones in the middle of the dais with a simpler, smaller one on either side. My heart throbs with pain as I realize they were once intended for a king and queen and two child princes. Now only ghosts and usurpers sit there.
Both the king and queen wear blindfolds and crowns. His is the crown of the ruler, silver, cut like a wreath of knotted vines; hers is the consort’s crown, silver, smaller and simpler. Elvar is a big man with a barrel chest. He adopted Max when he was about forty, and must now be at least sixty, his hair gone white and his hands slightly unsteady, but still he holds himself well, and I have to remind myself that he was once one of Rickard’s students, too. Guinne is almost as tall as her husband. She’s willowy and graceful, her hair still deep brown, and her face somehow simultaneously incredibly warm and incredibly cold. She looks exactly like a woman who could compassionately open her home to hundreds of unwanted children while banishing her husband’s nephews from that same home.
“Max!” Elvar booms, rising. “I can’t tell you how relieved we are that you’ve come home safely.”
The queen nods in agreement, smiling gently in her son’s direction. Max assures them that we were safe the whole time and gives the court a brief description of the assault on the supply ship. There’s a great deal of tutting and anger and, at the end, a cheer when Max tells them how Titania dealt with the enemy ships. They want details about what she did and how, but Max remains stoic, almost curt, and doesn’t join in the air of celebration.
When the story is done, the room’s attention turns to me. There’s a silence, so heavy with tension and anticipation that I feel sick. I wonder what’s expected of me.
When he addresses me, Elvar’s big and booming voice becomes quiet, almost tentative, like he’s unsure. “Alexa?”
His tone makes my hatred falter. “I’m here, King Elvar.”
“No,” he says at once. “No, you mustn’t call me that, my dearest, dearest niece.”
I want to feel angry at what must surely be a false show of affection, but he sounds so sincere. His voice cracks in a way that I’m sure can’t be faked. He takes two steps forward and stops quite close to me.
He raises a hand. “May I?”
I’m confused, then realize he wants to touch my face. His hand is quick, tracing my features with a gentleness that surprises me. I almost expected him to try to snap my neck.
“Cassel’s nose,” he says. Astonished, I watch a tear fall from under the blindfold, hitting the floor between us. “I never dreamed I’d come upon that nose again.”
“Uncle,” I hear myself say, “you have the same nose.”
He chuckles. So do most of the other people in the room. “So I do, so I do. Forgive me, I’m in a sentimental mood.” He steps back. “I’m very happy you’re here.”
“I’m happy to be here, Uncle.”
He beams benevolently at me. “Ah, but you must be impatient to greet your beloved teacher. Don’t let me keep you!”
My heart stutters, but I finally dare to look around the room. At the other set of thrones. And there, with the elders and the war council of Kali, sits a tall, weary man.
He looks so ordinary, always a shock given his reputation. He’s old. No one knows how old; some say the gods once granted him a boon that froze him in time, but he always chuckled when I mentioned that little piece of gossip to him. He has broad shoulders that taper down into a body that’s like an oak, ancient and unbowed, and his cropped beard and hair are gray. His skin is a deep rich black, scars knot his throat and hands from an old battle with a raksha demon, and his eyes are warm and full of kindness.
You will always have a place in my heart, he had said.
Rickard stands, then approaches me, and for an instant I’m so terrified of what he’ll say that I can’t breathe. He will never forgive what I did.
But his face splits into a smile filled with so much pleasure there’s no question that he means it, and I understand that a lack of forgiveness doesn’t mean he loves me any less.
He holds out his hands. “Esmae,” he says, his voice deep and low, and wrapped in my name are all the tender endearments that he doesn’t say out loud. “Welcome to Kali. Welcome home.”
I burst into tears and throw myself into his arms.