“Yes.”
Aki touched the locket at her throat. He was coming. The man who used to be just a boy, her other half. The brother who used to play pirates versus taigas with her. Her partner in crime, sneaking into the palace kitchen together to steal peach pies.
The man who’d also torched the Imperial City, who was obsessed with the Evermore, and who would bring blood and destruction to Kichona again.
She inhaled deeply and waved her hand toward the hill outside her window. “You have my permission to do whatever you need to Rose Palace.”
“Really?” Spirit’s eyes widened, like a child who wasn’t sure if she’d truly been given free reign to do the one thing she’d never been allowed to do.
“Yes. You have my permission on one condition . . .” Aki stood. “You let me come with you. If we are to do things differently, then I want to be an active part of this. I will not sit in a gilded room while the taigas fight for me.”
Spirit’s eyes grew wider, if that was possible. “It would be an honor, Your Majesty.”
“Let me change into something more practical,” Aki said, gesturing at the gown sweeping at her feet and heading toward her bedroom. “But let’s be clear about this mission to dismantle my palace—it is also an honor for me to be able to join you.”
Chapter Sixty-Three
The gray of night still had a tenuous hold on the sky when Sora and Empress Aki slipped out the rear gates of the Citadel. It may have been Prince Gin who was the sibling blessed with magic, but now the empress was in a taiga uniform, and with her hair pulled back in a simple bun, a knife on her belt, and her commanding stride, she really could have passed as a young warrior.
Empress Aki had also found Sora a taiga uniform to wear. Sora stretched an arm out in front of her. It felt good to see a sleeve without the ryuu’s green whorls embroidered there.
I can wield their magic, but I am still a taiga, and I always will be.
Instead of heading up the winding road to Rose Palace, though, Empress Aki turned toward the Field of Illusions guarding the Citadel’s western fortress walls.
Sora hesitated. “Where are we going?”
“A secret that only the Imperial Guard and I know. And now you.” The empress winked.
She sprinted onto the sand, which immediately began to shift beneath her, in front of her, all around her.
In a matter of seconds, the empress was already fifty yards into the illusions. How was she so fast?
“Wait!” Sora ran after her. “Your Highness, you need a taiga guide or else—”
“Or else this will happen?” Empress Aki stopped abruptly in the middle of a black-and-white spiral of sand that swirled and made the ground look like a three-dimensional vortex that would swallow them whole.
And then it did swallow her.
“No!” Sora shouted.
But the empress’s laugh came from deep beneath the sand. “Spirit, stand in the middle. Follow me.”
Sora rushed into the spiral to the spot where Empress Aki had just been. She jerked herself backward at the last second when she realized there was a hole there. Her toe almost slipped down.
“It’s all right, Spirit,” Empress Aki said from below. “There’s a soft landing down here.”
Sora looked around to see if anyone was watching. She took a breath and stepped into the hole.
She let out a small cry as she plummeted. But as the empress had promised, she landed on her feet on a thick mat. Not unlike the ones the Society used for training.
“Is that—?” Sora began to ask.
“A sparring mat?” Empress Aki said. “Yes. I have many. Are you surprised?”
“I . . . I shouldn’t be.” It made sense now why the empress could run so fast. How could Sora have thought that the ruler of their kingdom would just sit around in her throne room? Especially since she’d grown up with a twin brother who trained as a taiga; she couldn’t command magic, but there was no reason she wouldn’t have learned the other drills for physical conditioning and fighting. And Empress Aki had fought the Blood Rift—and won—when she was only fifteen.
“Good. Because sparring mats are the least of my surprises.”
It was only then that Sora really took in where they were. It was an underground room. The floor was striped in black and white, as if the Field of Illusions had been beaten into submission and the sand packed tight as stone. Cypress beams held up the ceiling. And the walls were covered in ceramic tiles, some blue, some gold, and some with the Ora tiger crest painted on them.
“Is this some kind of safe room?” Sora asked, still gaping.
“You’ll see,” Empress Aki said.
“Does the commander know about it?”
“Like I said, only me, the Imperial Guards, and you.”
Despite the fact that they were on the brink of war with Prince Gin, Sora grinned. She had stepped up to her potential. And now someone was taking her seriously, letting her in on a part of history almost nobody else knew.
Empress Aki produced a necklace with a locket on it and pressed the locket into one of the tiger tiles.
A dusty corner of the floor began to sink down into the ground, revealing a stairway.
“What in all h—” Sora stopped before she cursed in front of the empress.
“Do you think you could use some of my brother’s fancy magic to light the way in an underground tunnel?” Empress Aki asked. “There are lanterns around here, but it would be faster if you were able to—”
Sora shook herself out of her shock and conjured an orb of light in her hands, and then several more. They floated in the air around her.
“Well, then,” the empress said, “that takes care of that.”
They descended into the cool earth, into a tunnel that ran through the mountain. It went under the Citadel, up beneath the winding road, under the crystal waters of the moat, to the palace. Every thousand yards, a solid iron door sealed and separated the next section of the tunnel from the previous one, and each door was secured by a tiger tile that required the locket medallion to be pressed into it—sometimes it was the tile on the upper right of the left wall, sometimes in the middle of the right wall, sometimes on a spot halfway from the center to the bottom left corner, et cetera. Sora watched in awe as Empress Aki unlocked each door without a moment’s hesitation, the solution to each one memorized.
On the way to the palace, Sora had explained to the empress what she wanted to do with the crystal. Now they emerged from the tunnels through a panel in the floor of the courtyard where Sora and the other Level 12s had performed their exhibition match.
“I thought you could use that slab of crystal,” Empress Aki said, pointing to where her chair had been that night. It was the part of the courtyard wall etched with the imperial family’s crowned tiger and the motto “Dignity. Benevolence. Loyalty.”
“It’s a good size,” Sora said. “But are you sure? I could break down a piece of less significance.”
Empress Aki looked right at the crest. “No. This one sends the right message.”
Yes, it does, Sora thought. She’d already known that these principles were the underpinnings of the kingdom. But now Sora also understood that they were the foundation on which she herself had been made. Dignity, benevolence, and loyalty had molded her and her friends, and if they adhered to them, these same principles would guide them into who they were going to be—people as noble and selfless and good as Empress Aki. Hopefully.
Sora nodded at the crystal wall. “The facets of the etching will also make the light sparkle more, be more unpredictable to the ryuu.”
Four Imperial Guards arrived. They seemed unsurprised to find that the empress had returned to the palace, as if she’d told them it was a possibility all along.
“You should take cover, Your Majesty,” Sora said. “This could get messy.”
“I’ll wait in the tunnel.” She pressed her locket medallion into the secret panel and descended into the courtyard floor. Her Imperial Guards went with her.
Sora stood alone before the wall. She hadn’t mentioned to the empress that she wasn’t sure how or even if she could break off a piece of the palace.
What is the best way to do this?
The fire ryuu had told a story about melting the edges of an iceberg before, but that was no help. Sora wasn’t a master at fire magic, and crystal wouldn’t melt at the kind of temperatures she could manage.
She could try to command the magic to form giant hands and wrench the wall away, but that might cause irreparable damage to the rest of the palace. Sora shuddered thinking of all the cracks she’d create, and how they’d spread, shattering the rest of Rose Palace because of the fractures.
Okay. No wrenching the wall.
What she needed was a clean break.
“A saw.”