The procession to Jitra was slow. It was far slower than our first trip from the desert—what had been a four-day journey to the City of Three took us more than a week.
Everywhere we went, people lined the roads, desperate to see us, to touch me, to throw flowers at my feet. We seemed to go out of our way to stop at several castles and cities—mostly so I could be fed only to retch my food back up, but also so that the army could go ahead of us and ensure the safety of our route.
My husband was in a startlingly good mood. In the weeks since he’d struck me, Calix was considerate, kind, nearly affectionate with me, and still respectful of the distance I asked him to keep. He oversaw all the preparations for our journey with a zeal that disarmed me.
“Maybe there’s hope,” I told Kairos on the fourth day. We were riding together, the carriage just ahead, and Galen and my guards on horses behind us.
“He was attentive to you at dinner,” Kairos allowed. “That doesn’t mean he’s a different man, Shalia.”
“I know,” I told him. “I know that. But it gives me hope that he could be. That isn’t so wrong, is it?”
He looked at me fondly, but it made me feel foolish. “No. It isn’t wrong. But does it mean that we won’t be leaving in the desert? All the arrangements have been made.”
I sighed. “I don’t know. Every time I imagine it, I feel uneasy. I think Kata’s plan to wait until after the baby is born is smarter, but we will never have so many men as we do in the desert. I feel like the moment I see Mother and Father, I’ll know what to do.”
He nodded. “They’re ready to eject the Trifectate. They can do that after we leave, if you prefer.”
He looked weary. “You aren’t sleeping well?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No. I thought it would be better once we left the capital, but the feeling grows far worse. When I do sleep, I dream of being buried alive. Being choked on dirt and earth and ash.”
Shivers ran over me. “You don’t think—my power—”
“No,” he said quickly. “No, the whole thing—it tastes of hate. And hate is not something in your heart, Shalia. Certainly not in your gift.”
“What can we do?” I asked him. “How can we stop it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m hoping the visions will show me how to stop it, but I can’t control them. I can’t make them show me anything.”
I nudged my horse closer to his so I could take his hand. “And trying means you’re not sleeping.”
His shoulders lifted, and he squeezed his hand in mine. “I have to try.”
He let my hand go. “I wish we would move faster. I’m so desperate just to be there. It seems so long since we’ve been home,” I said.
Kairos’s smile was weak. “We’re nomadic, Shalia. We don’t really have a home.”
I grinned at him. “You know what I mean. Family. The whole clan gathered to celebrate.”
He nodded. “It will be wonderful.”
His expression fell quickly, though, and I could tell he was weary to the point of pain. Whatever these visions were, they were taking an awful toll on him.
By the seventh day, we were climbing higher into the mountains, and the air was growing dry and warm. We had eaten at the castle we’d stayed at during the night, but barely an hour into the ride my stomach twisted hard.
“Oh,” I yelped, dropping from my horse fast enough that I almost fell, voiding my stomach on the side of the road. The dirt was packed hard, and the mess splashed onto my dress and coat, and I even got a little in my hair.
“Shy?” Kairos said, helping me up.
I was staring at my hair. “I can’t—I thought we would make the desert by nightfall.” I felt suddenly and stupidly close to tears. “I don’t want them to see me with vomit in my hair. And on my dress,” I told him. “I hate being sick all the time.”
“I know,” he told me, putting his arm around my back.
“Ugh,” I said, bending over as I retched again. There wasn’t much more to come up, but it hurt, my body trying hard to expel things that weren’t there.
“My love?” I heard Calix ask behind me. “Are you all right?”
“She will be in a moment,” Kairos said, braiding my hair fast away from my face.
My stomach heaved again, and I straightened afterward, nodding. I rinsed my mouth with some water, staying close to Kairos like I might fall over. “I want to walk for a little while,” I told Calix.
“Love, you look like you’re about to pass out as it is,” he told me gently. “You should ride in the carriage.”
I clutched my stomach at the thought. “No, I think that will make it worse.”
He sighed, but nodded. “Very well.” He turned and shouted orders to his guards, that we would travel only as fast as I was walking. He kissed my temple, but he didn’t stay beside me, going instead to his carriage, calling one of his quaesitori to ride with him. Kairos stayed off his horse, and Galen and Zeph appeared behind me.
“Shouldn’t you be riding?” I asked, glancing at them.
Zeph stretched. “I feel like a walk. Don’t you, Commander?”
“Damned relief, if you ask me,” Galen said.
I shook my head, but smiled at them.
“Besides, I protect the Princess-in-Progress,” Zeph said, looking at my belly.
I covered the bump with my hands. “We don’t know it’s a girl,” I said, casting a wary glance at the carriage ahead. I didn’t think my husband would be pleased at the thought. “And that is not a real title.”
“It should be,” Zeph insisted.
“I’m very excited to see Zeph as the Baby Guard,” Kairos said. “I’ve never seen him frightened of something.”
Zeph looked offended. “I’m excellent with children,” he grumbled.
“You look like you’re excellent at eating children,” Kairos told him.
Galen laughed at this. “Children, maybe. But a baby? I can’t think you’d have any idea what to do with it.”
Zeph cast around as if taking on challengers. “I will be a formidable Baby Guard. This is not up for debate. And besides, the baby is a part of the queen, and I protect the queen. And I’m good at that, so I’ll be good at protecting the baby.”
I giggled. “I have no doubt, Zeph. You’ll probably be the first to give her a sword.”
Zeph lit up at this, but Galen shook his head. “Now, wait a moment, no sharp objects until she’s at least … thirteen.”
Laughing, I smiled at Galen. It felt forbidden and strange—we hadn’t been alone since Trizala, and though I thought of our kiss constantly, the pain from the argument that followed seemed more real, a heavy weight in my chest. Being able to speak with him and laugh with him now when it had happened so rarely since Trizala felt suddenly intimate. “Thirteen?” I asked. “That’s a little specific.”
He crossed his arms. “Well, I want her to know how to wield a weapon before boys start coming around.”
Kairos smiled. “What boys? They’ll have to go through all of us and half the Dragyn clan to get to her.”
Galen smiled and nodded at Kairos. “I like that line of thought.”
“Great Skies,” I said, shaking my head. “You all know so little. This girl will have you all in knots before she’s a year.”
“When you say ‘Great Skies,’ ” Galen asked, lacing his arms behind his back and stepping closer to me, “is that a god?”
I felt the threads shiver closer to my fingers at the nearness of him. “We don’t have gods,” I told him. “We have spirits. But we consider the sky to be a sort of deity, I suppose. There are people who can tell the future in the clouds, and we live and die by what we see above us. Our lives are very dependent on the weather and climate.”
He nodded. “Do you pray to the skies?”
“We talk to the skies. Thank the skies for bounties—when we go to the desert, the ceremony to bless the baby is asking the skies for good fortune.”
“Does the sky ever respond?”
I laughed at this. “Of course! We speak to the sky, and the sky always speaks back in his own way. Rain, sun, clouds, lightning—these are the sky’s way of talking.”
Galen glanced up. “What is the sky saying now?”
There were few clouds, a gentle heat, and a bright, round sun. “The sky wants us to get to the desert,” I told him. “He’s making it easy for us.”
He smiled. “It’s strange to think that you don’t have a god to judge your actions. To pass down edicts.”
My shoulders lifted. “The sky is something far beyond my understanding. If something must judge, or dictate—to me, that seems little more than a powerful man, doesn’t it?” My eyes strayed dangerously close to the carriage with Calix in it.
“Maybe,” he said, and his eyes followed mine.
I drew in a deep breath. My head was throbbing; my whole body ached from retching so often.
“You’re in pain?” he asked, turning toward me a little.
“Just my head,” I told him. “As thrilling as it must seem, voiding my stomach every other time I eat isn’t very pleasant.”
“And here I was so jealous,” he said, brushing my hair off my face. His hand settled on my shoulder, reaching under my braid to rub my neck.
“Oh,” I murmured, leaning into his touch, ignoring the danger of his skin on mine because of the relief it brought me. “Keep doing that. That helps.”
“When we were in Trizala,” he said, taking advantage of the closeness to speak quietly to me, “and you said your power is triggered by something—what is it?”
He was so close, and the others had drifted back. Whether it was his hand on my neck or the words or what they called up inside me, warmth rushed through my skin. “That’s not fair,” I told him. “Bargaining a neck rub for information.”
His big hand was warm, spanning over my neck and softening my muscles. “I’m quite ruthless.”
My eyes met his for a tantalizing second before I pulled away, and losing his hand on my neck seemed to shoot nausea to my stomach. “I can’t, Galen. Not here, not ever.”
He sighed, but stepped closer and resumed gently rubbing my skin. “Why?”
“You said we can’t talk about it.”
“No one can hear,” he whispered. Without moving much, I saw Zeph and Kairos laughing, almost five paces back, and no one else near us. “Every day I think about the haunting things you say. That you’ve been imagining things between us. That something—something we did or said or felt in that cave triggers what you can do. What is it, Shalia?”
Anger bubbled up inside me, and I pulled away again, turning to face him. “No, Galen. You can’t do this. We can’t do this. And you already know—or you suspect, at least,” I hissed, trying to keep my voice down. “You want to hear me say that I care about you? Will that make it easier when I have your brother’s child? When he ceases to honor the fact that I don’t want him to touch me? Will that help?”
Galen looked stunned. Then he looked away, shaking his head like he was trying to clear it. I looked over my shoulder and caught Kairos’s watchful gaze, but kept walking. “Wait,” Galen said. “There are many, many things in what you just said. Your power is triggered by l—” He stopped, and didn’t say that word. “Caring? About people?”
I nodded.
“When I returned home from the south and met you in the courtyard, the stones fell apart into sand. Was that you?”
My face burned with heat. I nodded.
“It happened almost the moment I kissed your hand,” he said.
I had hoped he would never put that together. “Galen,” I said, shaking my head in warning. It wasn’t wise to think about that, much less discuss it.
He looked ahead, a strange expression on his handsome face, his chest rising and falling faster than was merited by our walk. “And he hasn’t—he hasn’t touched you?” His eyes slid to me at this, running over me like a physical touch.
I crossed my arms. “I thought my guards reported to you.”
Color bloomed on his cheeks. “Not about that.”
“No,” I said, looking down. “Not since he struck me.”
He nodded. “That’s a good reason.”
Chewing my lip for a moment, I hesitated to add, “There are many reasons.”
He looked to me in question.
“I just can’t stand the thought of him touching me,” I whispered. “Not after … Trizala.”
“He took that surprisingly well,” Galen said.
I shrugged my shoulders. “He wanted a baby, and now he has one. Besides, he’s trying to prove to me that he actually cares about me.” I shook my head. “I don’t believe him.”
I couldn’t look at him, even though I felt his eyes on me. “I can’t imagine anyone not caring for you,” he told me in a soft, gentle murmur.
I tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite come out that way.
“Here,” he said, passing me water. “You should drink more.”
I nodded, taking a sip. I passed it back to him, rubbing my own neck.
He watched my hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, soft. “I shouldn’t have brought any of this up.”
“No,” I told him with a sigh. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I feel like my whole life, I’m desperately trying to hide who I am. And with you, I think you just see it. Or it seems that way.” His shoulder lifted. “I can’t help myself.”
I nodded. “I wish it were different. You deserve to have someone who sees you.”
“You do too,” he said. “You deserve someone who loves you.”
Pulling my coat tighter, I looked at the ground and walked a little faster.
We didn’t make the desert by nightfall. We stopped at Vestai Atalo’s castle, and he and his wife made a great fuss over me, saying their bedroom with the stars in the ceiling must have given us a child so soon.
We returned to the room with the bathing chamber, and Calix ordered the servants to draw a bath for me. When I slipped into the water, he ordered them out. “May I come in?” Calix asked from the doorway.
I looked at him. He was watching my body through the water, and I felt exposed. “Calix,” I murmured, covering myself, looking away from him.
“I just want to talk. Is that all right?” he asked.
I considered for a moment, then nodded.
He came in, sitting beside the bath. “Do you remember the first night we spent here?” he asked.
I nodded again.
“You washed my feet for me,” he said. “No one had done something so simple and selfless like that for me in a very long time. I never wanted to love you, Shalia, not after everything with Amandana. But that night, I started to care for you.”
I stared at the surface of the water.
“I did an awful thing to you, Shalia. But I did it because I thought you were just like her. I thought you were deceiving me. But it occurs to me, we haven’t had much opportunity for the truth between us.”
My eyes shifted over to him, surprised. “No,” I agreed.
“Is there anything you want to tell me?” he asked, meeting my gaze. “Confess to me?”
I hugged my knees in the water. He couldn’t possibly know, could he? I had so many secrets, but no—I couldn’t trust him with any of them. “No, Calix,” I said softly. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Danae took a sorcerer to the lake,” he said. “They still couldn’t find it. I need to know if you will support me damaging the lake—draining it, or blasting around it to find what’s hidden.”
I frowned. “If you find some indication that the elixir is there, we can discuss the means to retrieve it. But damaging the lake isn’t just about the elixir—it’s the water reserve for the desert,” I told him. “That would be incredibly dangerous for the clans.”
He heaved out a heavy sigh, but he nodded. “Maybe we can come up with a way around that. Alternative water stores, or something.”
I reached for his hand. “We’ll figure it out. But, Calix, what if it’s not there? What if you can’t find it, and you have no way to defend yourself against the Elementae?”
His face pinched into a deep scowl. “We have to keep looking for it.”
“But if you can’t find it, Calix. What then?”
“This feels like a trick, wife. If we can’t find the elixir, we need to start eliminating this threat before it grows more powerful. But I don’t think that’s what you want me to say.”
“Perhaps you should consider protecting them,” I told him. “Working with them. Rather than try so hard to eradicate them, consider how they might benefit your reign. It would remove all the power the Resistance has. It would defend us. It would achieve peace without death.”
He stood, shaking his head. “That defies everything I believe, wife. Have you forgotten one of them will kill me?”
“Maybe because you try to eradicate them,” I told him. “And you have an heir now—it seems the prophecy is far more complicated than you believe. I just … I want you to consider it.”
He paced in the room, shaking his head as he went, and I felt fear gather within me. Then he stopped abruptly. “You don’t believe in the God,” he told me, staring at me. “That’s the real problem here. You’ve never believed in the God, so you will never see me as his vessel, his voice, his arm. You put all your faith in the desert, in their way of thinking. But tomorrow you’ll see—you aren’t one of them anymore, wife. You’re mine. This is where you belong. This is the only loyalty.”
Stunned silent, I stared at him, my mouth open but still.
“Rest,” he snapped. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
We left the next morning, and I was dressed in my new, more modest clothing. Even Calix decided against the carriage and opted for a horse instead, and we rode proudly. Much of the army had gone on ahead, and as we neared the land bridge preceding the pass, we saw them lining the road.
I frowned. “Why aren’t they in Jitra?” I asked Calix.
He glanced at them. “The same reason as always. Clans don’t allow soldiers in Jitra. They can go into the pass and to the southern edge of the city, but not inside. Your family is very proud, very strong. And the desert is difficult to breach when they are fortressed inside. Which is, of course, why peace between us was so necessary.” His eyes flicked to me. “But I don’t want to spoil the day.”
“You needn’t lie about wanting peace. I know all you wanted was the elixir.”
Turning my head to look at him, his gaze was sharp and assessing. “Yes,” he said. “But you are hardly one to criticize me for being calculating.”
“Calculating?” I repeated. “How so?”
There was something raw in his eyes. “I gave you a chance last night, to explain. I know you’ve been communicating with your family. Asking them to hide you from me—to steal you from me.”
I shook my head. Had he discovered Kairos’s plans? “Calix, I never asked them—”
But he continued. “And then you even admit that you don’t believe in my greatest cause. You don’t want to find the elixir. You want me to welcome those sorcerers into my kingdom.”
“Calix, stop,” I said. “Please. I’m not leaving you, and I didn’t say those things last night to upset you. It was just an idea. Please, I don’t want to fight about this today.”
He drew a breath, looking forward, and slowly let it out. “Finding that elixir—eradicating the sorcerers—is the most important thing, wife. More important than anything else.”
We were nearing the land bridge, and I could see the mouth of the pass ahead. “I know, Calix. I—” I started, but I stopped. Just within the pass, I saw my mother and father, my father standing tall with a torch in his hand, waiting for us. My mother pressed against his side, and even from here, it looked like she was crying happily at the sight of me. My tall brothers beamed, and Catryn was struggling to hold Gavan from running forward.
My breath caught. “How did they …?” I asked.
Calix looked at me. “I had my soldiers tell them we were arriving, if they wanted to greet you here.”
Filled with joy and gratitude, I smiled at him. “Thank you, Calix. Truly,” I told him, and I dismounted.
I saw soldiers, maybe ten or so, walking out, walking away from my family.
I noticed a yellow powder on a man’s boots as he jogged past me.
Gavan distracted me, though, breaking free from Catryn to run ahead.
Galen came from behind us, hard faced and riding forward to the entrance to the pass.
A moment before Galen got there, I saw Calix smile, a dark, evil expression.
And then the world exploded.