The day dawned cool and beautiful. The sun on the water had all the dangerous beauty of a desert mirage, sparkling and twinkling and making the water look like a living thing.
The ishru dressed me in a silvery, shimmering swath of fabric, and an older woman came and adjusted the dress, suiting it better to my frame. She then put a blue dress the color of night sky over my head, laying it along the silver one so it was edged with the bright, metallic color. Dark blue ribbon was next, and she knotted it carefully so that it outlined my breasts, hugged my hips, made me feel somehow taller, if still incredibly exposed.
She snapped her fingers and the ishru brought out another coat, this one a matching blue and lined with white fur, knotted with silver threads that made me ache for the desert.
“The princess advised me that you are used to much warmer climes,” she said. “Will this be too warm?”
She slid the coat onto my shoulders, and I looked down. There was a stiff collar around my neck, and this one didn’t close but cut away to show the dress underneath. It was the softest thing I’d ever had on my body, and I sighed with pleasure. “This is … exquisite,” I told her. “Can I have more like these?”
She smiled like a kind old mother and bowed her head. “My queen.”
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Zova, my queen.”
I pressed my hand to hers. “Thank you. This is lovely.”
She bowed again and dipped away from me. She picked up another stretch of the silver film and let it flutter down over my head, wrapping it back so it wasn’t tied but held still.
The guard opened the door to let Adria in, and I scowled at him, steeling myself to deal with her.
She bowed, and I noticed she looked resplendent in a dress of green and gold. “You may stand,” I told her. “I dislike people bowing to me.”
Her eyebrows rose, and I wondered if this was something she would report to her father. Then she looked me over, her mouth pursing.
“You look very beautiful, my queen,” she allowed. She didn’t sound very pleased.
“Thank you,” I said. “Would you lead me to the presentation?”
She bowed her head. “Yes, my queen,” she said, and the guard opened the door as she led me out of the room, down the hall, and to the front of the castle.
In darkness, held back from the wide arch, I could see thousands of people, and the platform, and everything Calix described. The people were noisy like the ocean, moving in the same restless, relentless way.
Adria stopped and I kept moving, seeing Calix coming forward to me. He took my hand, raising it to his lips to kiss, as I struggled to find my breath. “Don’t be nervous, my love,” he said.
Men stood behind him, all dressed in a version of Calix’s clothing, the same style he wore to our wedding. I had seen enough guards to figure this was a military dress of some sort. Yet today he glinted with shiny silver details, a brightly handled sword and a jeweled knife that looked like a treasure from the islands. A crown on his head, three silver branches woven together to form a circle, shimmered in the sun.
A small boy shot through the ranks, tangling in the knees of one of the men as he bent over. I recognized High Vestai Thessaly and went over to him.
“My queen,” he greeted me, giving me the formal triple bow. “May I present my son, Aero Thessaly?”
Aero gave me his own version of the triple bow, which wasn’t quite as sharp in his small body. “Three blessings,” he mumbled quickly, like it should have all been a single word.
“Thank you,” I told him, crouching down. “How old are you?”
He held up three chubby little fingers. A fourth started to lift, and he tucked it down with the other hand.
“Oh, you look at least five. Are you very brave?” I asked.
He nodded.
“And very noble, I suspect.”
He nodded again.
“Will you—”
“Shalia,” Calix said sharply, standing before me and putting his hand in front of my face. I put my hand in his, and he pulled me to my feet. “High Vestai,” Calix said, nodding.
Thessaly bowed to him with his hands on his son’s shoulders. “Aero, go find your mother,” he said. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
“Adria, you may follow your brother,” Calix told her. Calix nodded once to me and guided me away from Thessaly without another word.
The other men began walking forward, progressing by twos down the walkway. We settled into line behind them and I lost sight of Thessaly as my heart tripped faster in my chest.
As we crested the archway, I looked down to see the vast pool beneath us, reflecting the sunlight and flickering like it was on fire. Drummers around the pool pounded out our footsteps, and the crowd fell very silent. I saw Thessaly on a wide platform with two other men behind him, and a beautiful woman holding Aero, with Adria beside her.
The wind went still, and I barely breathed as we marched, dipping down behind the height of the platform before climbing the staircase up to it.
I stepped onto the platform, and the people cheered. My heart swelled as their joyous noise overtook the drums.
Calix stepped forward, and my hands fell to my sides. The people quieted. “My people, we have known war, and fear, and hunger,” he said. “We have been in an age of terror and pain. That age is over.”
The people cheered for this, and my stomach felt shivery and nervous. Calix waited, collecting their approval.
“Today I give you a queen, born of the desert, foreign to our city, our country, our home. Knotted together in the most eternal of bonds, together, we give you peace.” He looked back to me, giving me a brilliant smile that at once felt stunning, and intimate, and utterly new. “Together, we bring you love.”
The people cheered at this anew, and I stood silent.
Calix stepped back, moving behind me to gather up the silver filmy material that covered my face. “My people, meet my wife, Shalia!” he yelled, right in my ear, and he stepped forward and took the fabric and pulled.
It was as shocking as when Galen stole my first veil from me, and I gasped and blinked as the force of their cheers hit me like a blast. Women and children and men were jumping, heaving, pushing at the guards, their faces open and eager and screaming their approval. I felt like the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, the force of them churning against me, sweeping me away.
I sensed motion on the platform, and a small man in a black coat with a length and style similar to mine appeared beside me. He held up my crown, a thinner, daintier version of my husband’s, and the crowd went quiet again.
“By the might, the power, the right of the Three-Faced God,” he boomed, “I crown Shalia of the Desert Peoples the queen of the Bone Lands by holy appointment. She will live in the service of the Three-Faced God, she will reign in the glory of the Three-Faced God, and she will die in honor of the Three-Faced God.”
The crown settled on my hair as a sudden panic clutched my heart at those last words.
I looked at my husband, but his expression was unchanged as the people cheered again, louder, wild, pushing forward so I felt a jolt at the platform.
“Calix?” I said, my hand reaching for his as the platform swayed. The guards pushed the people back, rough and forceful, but I didn’t find his hand. I looked at him, and his head was turned, his eyes behind me.
I followed his gaze. The pool of water that extended beneath the archways looked strange, like it was forming a white crust.
People screamed, and my focus whipped away from the water to see them pointing behind me. When I looked back to the pool again, it was too late. Huge vines of ice were twining up out of the pool, curling forward like they were reaching for something.
They were reaching for me.
“Calix!” I cried, leaping and straining to get to him. He met my eyes, but it happened so quickly he didn’t even get the chance to save me. The ice caught me, freezing, shimmering vines wrapping my feet and pushing me up, up, up into the air as fear strangled a scream in my chest.
Ropes of ice as thick as tree branches formed a cage around me, and then the ropes grew spikes, pushing Galen and Kairos with their hacking swords away.
It was cold inside the cage, and quieter, my own breath magnified, rattling around inside the ice. There were wide gaps between the ice branches that meant I could see out, but in a limited way, the light refracting and bending as it came through the glass-like ice. I was nearly twenty feet above the platform, far enough that if the ice broke, it would be a long way to fall.
The ice wrapping my feet pulsed like there was energy rolling through it, and my fingertips tingled and itched. The air around me felt thick, tangible, like it was full of fine threads that breathed and rushed with energy.
No, not energy—magic. Something in the ice was calling to me, making my blood rush and beat, making power thicken around my fingertips.
The ice around my feet loosened, and I gasped, stepping out of it, but the power didn’t calm, rushing so fast it made me dizzy. It was an Elementa who was controlling the ice, and being so close to it made my power tremble frighteningly close to the surface. With every terrified heartbeat, my power drummed closer.
There was no denying what I was, not now, not with the feeling so intense beneath my hands. I was Elementa, and in a moment, my husband and his whole court would see me completely unmasked if I couldn’t control the threads weaving wildly around my hands.
“We have been in an age of terror and pain!” a voice yelled. “But it is NOT over!”
The voice seemed to move, changing locations in the middle of a word, a syllable, a breath. I tried to track it, but I couldn’t see enough around me to even begin to follow the source of the sound.
“You steal our people from their beds!” a new voice shouted.
“Kill them!” I heard Calix shouting at his guards.
“You hunt and kill those of us with power!” This was another voice.
I was breathing in short little gasps, trying to suppress the threads pushing at my fingertips, and Skies Above, it wasn’t working.
Now several voices joined in. “You have no power, you have no might, and you have no dominion over the Resistance!”
My eyes roved over the crowd, trying to find who was doing this. Everyone was moving, turning, talking, searching, but there was one face staring straight at me.
Unmoving.
Smiling.
Rian winked, and I couldn’t tell if he truly saw him or not, but I watched Calix stretch out his hand toward my brother.
Instantly, my control on my power snapped and I felt it rush out, a wave of crushing, numbing relief sweeping through me.
It was as if someone took a hammer to the side of the cliff the castles were built on, and one hard jolt threw my husband to the side, swaying the platform.
The ice around me cracked, and a moment later it shattered, a barrage of sharp crystals that melted as they moved.
I screamed as I fell, dropping toward the ground in the shower of ice shards.
Arms caught me, but the force was too much and we crashed to the ground in a heap. The fall slammed the breath out of my chest, and Galen was under me, gripping me tight, every inch of his body against mine.
I couldn’t open my eyes for long moments. I could smell him, like sweat and salt and something I wasn’t used to, that I vaguely knew from the ride here as the scent of forest. Green. Free. I was surrounded by his body, safe and sheltered, and I dug my fingers into his chest, trying to claw out a breath.
He touched my face, and I heard him calling my name, his chest heaving so hard that it pushed me up and down. “Shalia!” he said.
I opened my eyes. My hands on him curled tight, and I drew in a hard breath.
Galen held me as he sat up, then managed to get his legs beneath him to bring us to our feet without letting go of me. I stood and my knees sank as if I was standing in sand. He held me close.
I was vaguely aware of him checking me over in his soldier’s way, the touches quick and light and impersonal, but my head was buzzing and I was still struggling for deep, even breaths.
“Shalia?” he asked, holding my arms now. “Shalia?”
I nodded belatedly.
It was like all the noise around us rushed back in at once; Calix was yelling and pointing, and people were screaming, trying to rush out of the courtyard, but the gates were closed.
There was a keening sound, and then a terrible crack as the platform buckled.
“Clear the platform!” Galen shouted, and he pulled my hand, rushing to the stairs and tugging me behind him. “Jump!” he shouted at me, and I obeyed him, leaping from the stairs as the platform collapsed in a cloud of dust. His hand in mine anchored me, guiding me close to him.
“Kairos!” I called, seeing him in the rising dust.
Galen let go of my hand. “Get her out of here!” he told Kai.
Kai pushed me in front of him as we ran up the walkway. I felt weak and disoriented, but I kept putting one foot in front of the other, glancing back to see his scimitar drawn and gleaming in the sun.
When we were in the archway, I looked back and saw the madness. The gates were shut, and the guards were trying to control the terrified people. I watched them use their shields like weapons, battering people and pushing them back.
Hurting people.
At the center of it all, my husband was barking orders for the guards to search the crowd by any means necessary, very nearly condoning their brutality, but somewhere in the melee, Rian was there too. Which one of them was more to blame for the people’s suffering?
“Shy, come on,” Kairos growled.
“Rian will be trapped,” I told him, my voice hushed.
“Rian wouldn’t come into the courtyard without more than one way out,” he told me, his eyes flinty. He wasn’t surprised. He’d seen Rian too—maybe he’d even known Rian would be there.
I moved forward, and we rushed through the halls. We made it to my bedroom, and Kairos ordered the guard not to let anyone in without his explicit approval. He brought me to the bed, and I sat with a sigh.
“Are you all right?” he asked. His head swept around the room carefully, and he asked, “The shaking—was that you?”
I swallowed and nodded slowly. “But not the rest.”
He shook his head. “No. That was the Resistance. From what I can gather, that is the bulk of their forces—recruiting people with elements that need protection. That and some farmers and dissenters.”
“But they seemed so organized,” I said, drawing my knees up.
“They are,” he said. “More than I can give Rian credit for too. Whoever Rian’s working with has a strong eye for that sort of thing.”
“Why would Rian do this?” I asked, shivering. “He’s attacking me.”
Kai sat beside me on the bed, his shoulder pressed to mine. “No,” he said gently. “I think our brother is a damn fool, but I can see, at least, that he was making an effort to do it in a way where you wouldn’t get hurt. Except for being dropped from the sky, but at least Galen saw to that. And as far as I can tell, he’s doing this to protect people from Calix’s injustice. Especially the Elementae.”
“Does Rian have an ability?” I asked.
He sighed. “Not that I know of. But Rian was in the islands during the massacre—do you remember that? Whatever he saw while he was there, it changed him.”
I drew a deep breath, uncomfortable with the idea that there were sides of my brothers I didn’t know at all. “I think Calix saw Rian.”
Kai’s expression turned stormy and dark. “That Rian cannot risk. If your husband believes you have anything to do with this—even through Rian—” He stopped abruptly. “Skies,” he muttered.
“But I don’t,” I insisted. “We don’t. Right?”
His eyes flicked to me and away. “I don’t know if things like ‘reason’ and ‘responsibility’ really matter to your husband. If he wants to see a connection, he will.”
I shook my head, standing from the bed. It was growing foggy and dark outside, and it felt like this was finding its way inside my mind and smudging what I was certain of. “He wouldn’t. He’s my husband.” I stepped closer to the glass, but looked back at Kai. “What about Kata?” I asked.
He lifted his shoulders. “I haven’t heard more.” Standing from the bed, he sighed. “I’m going to find Galen. You need your own guard, and I’m assuming he’ll agree to it after today.”
“Will a guard help if it’s my own brother endangering me?” I asked. “If it’s my very hands?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yes,” he said, coming and kissing my temple before he left me alone again.