THE KAISER DOESN’T MAKE MISTAKES often, but he made one when he didn’t kill me. He thinks it’s smart to wait until there’s a larger audience, a more Astrean audience that will be further broken by seeing me killed. I see his logic but there is a flaw in his plan.
I was ready to die for my cause, before. I was ready to greet my mother and Ampelio in the After and watch my country rise again without me. But now I can’t get the image of Elpis’s ashen body out of my mind. I can’t forget the way the Kaiser grinned as he watched her die. As much as I long to see my mother again, I am not ready yet.
I am not done with this world, and I am not done with him.
The guards led me down into the dungeons beneath the palace, a maze of cramped, dirty cells my mother never used during her reign. She thought them too cruel a fate even for criminals, sending them instead to work off their crimes in the Outlands.
These are the same cells Blaise and I explored as children. My feet recognized the path; I could see the layout in my mind as clear as any map. Blaise must remember them, too.
They locked me in a cold cell separate from other prisoners, with no blanket, or food, or even a set of clothes not covered in blood. It’s so cramped that I can’t lift both my arms, and it’s the sort of dark that only exists in nightmares. The heavy lock creaked as it was slid into place, and their boots echoed down the hall.
As soon as I was alone, the laughter began. I couldn’t control it and I didn’t care to. There’s no one to hear me this far below ground, and if there were, let them tell the Kaiser all about it.
Let him believe I’m mad. It won’t be the biggest mistake he’s made tonight. Somewhere out there, Blaise and Heron and Artemisia are getting word of my arrest and they’re putting together a plan to get me out. I know that as certainly as I know my name.
The Kaiser should have killed me when he had the chance.
I don’t know how long passes before my laughter dies down, or how much more time inches by before the footsteps break up the silence, these much softer than the guards’. Too soft to be Blaise’s. Artemisia’s, maybe? I scramble toward the bars and try to see down the hall, but it’s too dark and I don’t dare call out a name.
A candle’s dim light turns a corner, coming toward me and growing brighter, illuminating the girl holding it. I have to stifle a cry of surprise when she stops in front of my cell door, face inches from mine.
Crescentia might have survived the Encatrio, but it didn’t leave her unchanged. Her once soft, rosy skin has turned chalky, and even in the candlelight, it has a gray sheen, except for her neck, which is coal black from jawline to clavicle and rough as unpolished stone. Her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes have all turned from pale gold to a blinding, brittle white. Before, her hair fell past her waist in waves, but now it ends bluntly at her shoulders, frayed and broken at the edges. Singed.
But it isn’t only the poison. The girl standing on the other side of the cell bars isn’t the one I’ve known for the past ten years, the one I pretended to be a siren with, the one I laughed and gossiped with. That Crescentia was pretty and sweet and always smiling, but this girl has red-rimmed eyes and an expression like ice. No one could call her pretty now—fierce, striking, beautiful maybe, but never pretty. When we met, I thought she looked like a goddess, and she still does. But it’s no longer Evavia I see; it’s her sister Nemia, the goddess of vengeance. Before, Crescentia looked at me with love, like we were sisters, but now hate rolls off her in palpable waves.
And I don’t even blame her for it, though I can’t regret murdering the Theyn.
“Do you want to know why I did it?” I ask her when several moments pass in silence.
Her flinch is nearly imperceptible, but it’s there. “I know why you did it.” Her throat is raw and burnt and every word seems to pain her, though I can see how badly she tries not to show it.
She doesn’t know, not really, and I want her to understand. “For the last ten years I’ve lain awake at night with my mother’s dying scream in my ear, with your father’s cruel eyes haunting my nightmares. I thought he would kill me, too, sooner or later. The only way I could sleep was if I imagined killing him first. Poison wasn’t ideal, I’ll admit. A dagger would have been symmetrical; his own sword would have been poetic. But I worked with what I had.”
I watch her face carefully for a reaction as I speak, trying to shock her, but she barely even blinks. She reads me like one of her more challenging poems, and I know she sees through my apathy. It’s not surprising. We’ve always been able to read each other well. The difference is that for the first time, her mind is closed to me. I am looking at a stranger.
“Not killing you was the only time my father defied orders,” she tells me after a moment of quiet, her voice cold. “The Kaiser wanted you dead. My father passed it off as strategy, and he wasn’t wrong, but that’s not the real reason he spared you. He told me once that he looked at you and saw me. That turned out to be the biggest mistake he made.”
I remember the Theyn pulling me away from my mother’s body, even as I clutched her dress as tightly as I could. I remember him taking me to another room, speaking with his soldiers in a halting, violent language I didn’t understand at the time. I remember him asking me in terrible Astrean if I wanted something to eat or drink. I remember crying too hard to answer him.
I push the memories to the back of my mind and focus on Cress standing in front of me, expecting…what? Sympathy? An apology?
“After a life filled with senseless murders and brutalities, that’s truly saying something,” I tell her instead. “I won’t lose any sleep over him, even if I had another night of sleep left.”
Her jaw tenses. After a moment, she speaks again. “And why me?”
A laugh forces its way out of me. “Why you?” I repeat, surprised that she has to ask, after everything.
“I was your heart’s sister.”
The term that was once an endearment now sounds vile.
“You would have turned me over to the Kaiser if I didn’t stay complacent and docile. I wasn’t your heart’s sister, Cress. I wasn’t any different to you than a slave who forgot my place and stepped out of line. You cracked the whip and reminded me who was in charge.”
There it is, a tremble so slight I would miss it if I hadn’t known her as long as I have. She’s wearing the mask of a stranger now, but it slipped for just a second. Just enough to remind me what we were once, how far we’ve fallen in such a short time. But as soon as it appears, it’s gone. Sealed away behind cold gray eyes and stone skin.
I push forward, desperate to break through again, even if it only brings rage and hate. Anything is better than her cold, vacant eyes.
“Thora was your heart’s sister, maybe,” I say. “Sweet, obliging Thora, who never wanted anything. The broken little Ash Princess who depended on you because she had no one else. But that’s not what I am.”
A spark in her eyes, a clench of her jaw. “What you are is a monster,” she tells me, biting out the words with more ferocity than I thought she possessed.
Despite myself, I flinch. “I’m a queen,” I correct her softly, even as I wonder if I’m both. Maybe all rulers have to be at least part monster in order to survive.
But my mother wasn’t, a small voice whispers in my head. I silence it. My mother wasn’t a monster, it’s true, but the Kaiser was right: she ended up with a slit throat and a lost country. Blaise was right, too. My mother was a soft queen because she lived in a soft world. I don’t have that luxury.
“Why did you come here, Cress?” I ask quietly. Her eyes narrow at the causal use of her old nickname, and I wish I could take it back. We are not friends; I need to remember that. It’s not something she will forget so easily.
“I wanted to see your face one last time before you died, Ash Princess,” she says, taking a step closer, until her face is pressed into the space between two iron bars, gray hands clenching the bar below her chin. “And I wanted you to know that I’ll be there tomorrow, watching. When your blood spills and you hear the crowd cheer, I wanted you to know that my voice will be the one cheering the loudest. And one day, when I am the Kaiserin, I will have your country and all the people in it burned to the ground.”
The viciousness in her voice scares me more than I’d like to admit. I don’t doubt she means every word of it. So I say the only thing I can to fight back.
“Even if Søren does marry you, you’ll always know,” I tell her.
She freezes.
“Know what?” she asks.
“That he’s wishing you were me,” I say, twisting my mouth into a cruel smile. “You’ll end up like the Kaiserin, a lonely, mad old woman surrounded by ghosts.”
Her mouth tightens and she mirrors my mockery of a smile. “I think I’ll ask the Kaiser if I can keep your head,” she says, before turning and leaving me alone again in the dark.
When she’s gone, I bring a hand to the metal bar she’d been touching and jump back. The bar is scalding hot.