CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
As we pick our way across the hall, I study the faces around us, looking for gray eyes and brown hair.
“She isn’t here,” says Alexi. I flush at how obvious I must seem.
“Why not?”
“When she found out you would be in attendance, she refused to come,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I blink away tears. What did I expect? Did I really think she’d want to see me?
Alexi is obviously familiar with the palace because he leads me directly to a small library. He couldn’t have picked a better spot; I feel so much more at ease here, away from the crowd, with books as my allies and the smell of paper in the air.
Alexi closes the door behind us. He ignores the chairs and sits on the floor, his back against a bookshelf. I hesitate, then take a seat opposite him.
“Mother thinks you want to ruin us. She thinks you were born to destroy us. Bear says she’s wrong.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. The things you said on Wychstar made your allegiances pretty clear, but then I can’t help but wonder how much of that was for Max’s benefit.”
My fists loosen and my breath flutters in relief. “You don’t believe I’m on Elvar’s side.”
“Let’s just say I’m having a really hard time believing my own sister would choose our enemy.”
“And you would be right.”
His face breaks into a smile. “So you were putting on a show because of Max.”
“Of course I was,” I say, my words tumbling out as the dam finally breaks. I get to tell the truth at last. “I needed him to trust me. I wanted him to want me on his side. I competed against you so that no one would think I was on yours, but I’ve always been fighting for our family.”
“I knew it,” Alexi says quietly. “I knew you were one of us.”
I don’t reply. I can’t. My throat has closed up and my heart trembles with the sharp, keen ache of joy. I’ve wanted to be one of them all my life.
There’s a moment of silence and then Alexi says, “You’re my twin sister, the other half of me. I don’t think I ever noticed the emptiness where you were supposed to be before I knew to look for it, but I can’t not see it now. I’ve rewritten my entire life with you in it. It’s what I do when I can’t sleep. I try to picture what it would have been like if Mother had never sent you away. Would we have become warriors together? Would you have teased Bear with me, or would you have taken his side? Would Max have betrayed us if he’d known you? Would Elvar have hesitated if there had been three of us to contend with instead of just two? I think of birthdays, banquets, my first day of training, my first day in the schoolroom, the first time I ever kissed a girl, the first time I ever kissed a boy, the first time I held a sword, the first time I won a fight, and I think of how it might have all been if you had been right there with me.”
“I’ve pictured our lives like that, too,” I say. “We can’t get that time back, but I’m here now. We’re together and we can win.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? And join me? We could have had Titania. We could have fought them together.”
“Have you won yet?”
He gives a rueful laugh. “No.”
“Why not? Because you don’t have Titania on your side? Or because Elvar and Max are able to stay one step ahead of you?”
“The latter,” Alexi admits, reluctantly.
“On Kali, I’m learning their secrets. I know battle plans and the names of spies. I even get a vote on how to move against you. I don’t have an easy way to cut Elvar down yet, but every single thing I learn is useful.”
His eyes are full of anguished hope. “I want so badly to trust you.”
“It’s all right if you still aren’t sure you can. We don’t know each other yet. Trust doesn’t appear like magic.”
“How will you give me the information you have? You can’t exactly call me on your tech.”
I glance at his wrist. “Your watch can record voices.”
“Yes. So?”
“All the information’s in my head,” I say, and grin. “Start recording.”
It takes half an hour. Muted noise and music from the feast drift into the library. I speak as quickly as I can because I know Max and Sybilla will start to wonder what’s taking so long. When I’ve told Alexi everything I know, we agree that I’ll share future information by making trips to Winter under the guise of spending time with Princess Katya, who I will make sure to befriend before I leave the wedding.
“King Ralf and Princess Katya will be happy to give us cover,” Alexi explains. “Everyone on Kali will think I’m busy in Arcadia, nowhere near here, and they can hardly begrudge you a friendship with the princess of the kingdom they rely on for most of their supplies.”
“It could work,” I say.
Alexi’s face darkens. “Watch out for Max. Our cousin is as clever as he is treacherous. If anyone’s likely to figure out what you’re up to, it’s him.”
“He’s not quite the monster I expected,” I say cautiously.
“And our uncle is not the cruel villain you expected either, I imagine,” says Alexi. He laughs at the surprise on my face. “It’s hard not to warm to them, Esmae, but that doesn’t mean you can trust them. I’m sure our uncle cares very much about you, just as he once cared a great deal about me. That’s who he is. He cares until he thinks you’re a threat, and then you become his enemy.”
I want to protest that Elvar isn’t that fickle, but then I think of how certain he is that people like King Darshan are out to destroy him. I think of that first dinner on Kali, and how easily Lord Selwyn put that look of suspicion on Elvar’s face, and how there’s no way to tell what he whispers in the king’s ear.
Alexi uncurls and stands, quick and nimble. I follow. He holds a hand out to me, and I take it. “Thank you,” he says quietly.
“We will win, Alexi.”
He smiles, young and hopeful, his gray eyes bright as the sun. “I know we will.”
“The gods are wrong.”
“You mean the vision,” he says, smile fading. “The one Amba and Kirrin saw. The one that makes me your murderer.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Neither do I. You need to know that, Esmae.” He’s earnest, his wounded honor written across his wide eyes. “You need to know I would never betray you or myself that way. I don’t want to hurt anyone, let alone my own sister.”
“You’ll do what needs to be done to win this war,” I point out.
“But this vision wasn’t about open war. It was a duel. I would never breach the honor of a duel. And why would we duel, anyway? What would be the need? It makes no sense. How can what they saw possibly happen?”
“It can’t. And yet they saw it.”
His fists clench and unclench. I look down and see that mine are doing the same. “I can believe that we could be forced into a duel somehow,” he says, “I can wrap my head round that. But no one can force me to hurt you. I won’t be my sister’s killer.”
“I told Amba it wouldn’t come to pass. Swore it, in fact. Swore I wouldn’t die that way.”
Alexi smiles. “Good.”
I smile back, oddly comforted. The possibility of my blood on that grass is so much less terrifying now that I know there are two of us working against it. Loved by gods. Wasn’t that what Amba said we are? Surely there’s nothing, then, that we can’t do together?
“We should return,” Alexi says. “What shall we say we were doing all this time?”
“Arguing. We’ll say you tried to persuade me to join your cause so you could have Titania and I refused because of what our mother did to me, so we argued about the way I’ve betrayed our family. They’ll all believe that.”
When we return to the feast, it’s difficult to watch Alexi’s face shift into a more mutinous expression as soon as eyes of others can see us, but it’s necessary and I keep my posture just as stiff. Alexi marches off to find General Saka and Bear, and I go back to Max and Sybilla. I look back once, watching them go, my two brothers with copper in their hair and battle scars across their skin, and feel like a part of me has gone with them.
Sybilla raises her eyebrows at me. “That went well, then? Nice bit of family bonding?”
“Don’t ask.”
We leave early. The airchariot glides over the snow, sending clouds of white into the air, and a moon winks down at us from above. It’s a half joker moon, the moon that laughed when the god Gann slipped on a banana peel and was consequently punished with a curse. You will be the joker moon forevermore, the god said in the story. Only to appear when tricks are played and treachery is afoot. It’s bad luck to look at such a moon. I shiver and turn my face away.
We’re about ten minutes into the journey back to Erys when Titania informs us that there’s a screw loose in one of her controls. Max goes down to sort it out.
As soon as he’s out of earshot, Sybilla turns to me. “Are you going to leave us for your family?”
I’ve started to understand the sharpness in her voice, and I can see now that that curt, brittle tone is a layer she uses to cover her fear. “Of course not. What would I gain from joining my entitled brothers and the mother who literally threw me out of our home? If I went anywhere, it would be back to Wychstar, but I don’t plan on doing that anytime soon, either. And anyway, no matter where I went, I wouldn’t leave you. We’d still be friends, wouldn’t we?”
She nods, relieved, but we both know friendship wouldn’t make any difference if we had to face each other in battle.
Sybilla scuffs a boot against the floor, making Titania grumble. “I told Max we shouldn’t have let you go off with Alexi,” she admits.
“Did you both expect me to go with my brother and, what? Never come back?”
“We didn’t think you would. Just that you could.”
A question sticks in my throat, but I ask it anyway. “Does Max want me to go?”
“Between you and me,” she says, “I think he’d give almost anything for you to want to stay.”
I look away so that she can’t see the pain on my face. “I do want to stay.”
For more reasons than I dare admit even to myself.