CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
A duel. A broken arrow. Blood on the grass.
The duel is to be held in Gray Vale, neutral territory on Winter—a valley with harsh cliffs and grassy, snowy hills. It will take place just after dawn. We will each choose a sword from an identical set presented to us. No one else will be permitted to enter the marked area until the duel is completed, and that will only be when one of us draws the other’s blood.
This is what Max tells me when he returns to the ship. Then he hands me a honey cake from Bear. I can’t hold back my tears a moment longer.
The duel will be in four days, ample time for word to get around. By the day before, it’s as though half the star system is on its way to Gray Vale to watch someone win the world’s greatest warship. Again. We’ve come full circle; an endless, bitter cycle.
“Your mother will never be the person you want her to be,” Rickard tells me. “Kyra will always put your brothers first. She wants Alexi to win Titania. Offering to see you was the only lure she could use on you, so she used it without hesitation. She doesn’t think she’ll have to keep her promise. She’s sure Alexi will win.”
“That’s an assumption everyone seems to have made,” I say. “They will find themselves mistaken.”
Rickard doesn’t respond. Maybe he doesn’t believe I can win either. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to choose between Alexi and me. “Even if you win,” he says instead, “what good will it do to see her?”
“I still wonder if she cares. I still wonder if she hesitated before she threw me away. And if she wept. Truthfully, sometimes I don’t even wonder. I convince myself that she put me in that boat and cried bitterly until she worked up the nerve to send it out into space.” I swallow. “It’s a myth, I know, the dream of her love. It’s a lie I tell myself. But I won’t stop telling it until I see the truth in her face. That’s why I have to see her. I have to put the myth to rest for good.”
“Then I wish you luck,” he says softly.
I hesitate, then ask, “If there’s war, who do you hope will win? Alexi or Elvar? You’ve never told me.”
“I don’t know,” says Rickard. “I love them both. And I will protect Kali. That’s all I know.”
Sometimes I wonder if that’s all I know, too.
We fly Titania out to Gray Vale the day before the duel, taking rooms at an inn built into the snowy hillside. The town is cold, rustic, and quiet. Twinkly. Utterly beautiful in the snow and the ice.
I can’t stand the way everyone I pass stops to stare, so I leave the inn and return to Titania, tucking myself in next to her glass wall. I look out over the snow and grass, shivering until she increases the interior temperature to warm me.
I’m not the only one who can’t escape the shadow of the duel:
Alexi sits at dinner in Arcadia. Bear is silent, furious with him despite the fact that he doesn’t want our brother to share the crown with Elvar either. Our mother says something to Alexi, her eyes anxious and her mouth flattened by tension, but he doesn’t hear a word. He’s far away, in a universe where he teaches his sister to fish by a river, and they stay that way, suspended in time, in a moment where they can never grow old and will never be broken apart.
Guinne shuts herself in the conservatory and prays I don’t lose Titania to Alexi. She doesn’t know about the vision, but if she did, she would pray for me to live and to return to them.
Elvar sleeps, sedated after he worked himself into a panic. Rickard sits at his side, keeping watch over him, but his eyes drift to the window. He looks at Winter and winds back the clock, wishing he could take back the curse he placed on me.
Alone in her room at the inn, Sybilla paces like a tiger. Her face crumples, and she picks up her cup of tea and smashes it against a wall.
Rama is unnaturally quiet. He’s outside, perched on a rock that looks out over the valley, ice chips sparkling in his hair. He stares into the darkness for a while, thinking about a day when he almost fell into the sky and someone grabbed hold of his hand and refused to let go. He gets up and dusts himself off before nodding to himself like he’s ready to face whatever is coming.
Max cradles a paper hound in his hands—my paper hound, from the altar on Kali. He stares at it for a long time until he can’t bear it anymore and crushes it into his pocket before walking away.
How do I know all this?
A god tells me.
I see Kirrin’s reflection in the glass, but I don’t turn my head, staring at him in silence.
“You could ask permission before just turning up, you know,” Titania says tartly. “I’m not a hotel.”
Kirrin grins, and Titania huffs like she’s not really cross at all.
He approaches me. “You are loved, you know. Your friends and family are all thinking of you right now.”
And that’s when he tells me about them, about where they are and how they feel about what my brother and I are about to do.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I ask.
“Because I want you to know that you have made a mark on this world and that mark will not fade, even after you’re gone.”
“And you came here just to share that with me?”
“No,” says Kirrin, “I came here to ask you for that favor you owe me.”
I stand and turn to face him. The smile has left his boy’s face, the twinkle vanished from his dark eyes. Now they’re just as full of calamity as Amba’s have been lately.
I reach into my hair and let my hand close over the blueflower jewel. I pull it away and hold it out. It sits on my palm, deep and beautiful, as much a part of me as my foot or hand, and parting with it hurts as much as if I’d cut off one of those.
Kirrin stares at me, shocked.
“I knew when I saw you appear in the glass. I knew this would be the favor you’d ask of me. I want your blueflower, Esmae, you’d say. After all, Alexi can’t kill me if I have it, can he?”
“And you’re actually giving it to me? You’re not going to refuse or try to persuade me to ask for something else?”
“I made you a promise.”
The god looks deeply ashamed as he takes the jewel from my palm. My hand feels cold and empty when it’s gone. “It’s more generosity than I deserve.”
“Maybe. May I ask why? Why do you want me to die?”
“I don’t want it,” he says emphatically. “Not in the least. But you must. For Alexi’s sake.” Kirrin is silent for a moment. “If you live, you see, you will destroy him. That future I tempted Elvar with? It will come to pass. Ash and fire and destruction and, at the end of it all, Alexi dead or broken. If you live, you will shatter your brother.”
“I would never do that to him!”
“You will, Esmae. I don’t know why, but you will. That’s why, for his sake, you must die first. And I am truly sorry that it has to be this way.”
“I’m not going to die tomorrow. I swore it.”
The jewel has vanished. Kirrin looks at me for several moments, then says, “For your generosity, let me give you a gift. Close your eyes.”
I obey. He presses the palm of his hand to my forehead like he’s about to bless me, and my mind floods with color.
I see a galaxy of possibilities, a wheel of alternate futures, thousands of pieces of maybes: starships and books, fossils and gods and dreams, weddings and babies, and sometimes neither; Rama in his late thirties and Max at sixty and Sybilla refusing point-blank to die at the age of a hundred and sixteen; stories in firelit rooms and Rickard’s forgiveness and my brothers beside me; birds with buttons for eyes and terrible gooseberry wine and a kiss on the base of my throat; children running wild up tower staircases and swords that aren’t used very much.
There must be a million terrible possibilities too, somewhere out there, but Kirrin only shows me the good. By the time he’s finished, my eyes have filled with tears.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” he says.
“They’re happy tears,” I tell him.
He smiles. “I’m glad.”
I shake my head. “You don’t understand. You think you showed me what could have been, but you didn’t. You showed me what will be. I will have one of those futures. Maybe many of them. You showed me what to look forward to, Kirrin. Thank you. You showed me what will be waiting for me when all the ugliness is finally over.”