Because Sir is dead and Mather is gone. I’m the only one left, the one about to face an evil created thousands of years ago, so long ago that not even myths remain from that time.
I bite back another sob, drawing in deep, slow breaths. I can’t worry about that now; I have to focus on figuring out where I am. Step by step, breath by breath, I open my eyes and survey the world around me.
I’m in a cage. Wooden bars keep me trapped as a great, lumbering ox pulls me on. Men trail alongside, their breastplates showing Spring’s black sun. I’m Herod’s prisoner. Gregg’s story comes hurtling back to me, every detail crisp and clear from when he returned to camp so many years ago, a battered soldier who had just watched his wife die. The way the words tumbled out of his mouth like he didn’t even know he was saying them, just kept coming and coming, telling us every detail about how Herod killed Crystalla. . . .
Nausea roils and I turn over, barely making it to the edge of the cage before my stomach pushes out what few pieces of food I haven’t digested yet. I cling to the bars, heaving and fighting down tears as an all-too-familiar shadow crosses over me.
“Good morning, Meira. It’s Lady Meira now, though, isn’t it? I haven’t gotten a chance to congratulate you on your engagement. A Season managing to snag the wealthy Cordellan prince. I didn’t know Rhythms were stooping to charity now.”
I focus on the grass rolling beneath the cage’s wooden wheels, on the smells of earthy dead plants and sour vomit. Not on Herod’s booted feet, keeping pace beside me, his fingers curled around one of the bars.
“I’m moving up in the world.” I heave again, coughing out air. At least there’s nothing left for me to vomit. My ribs, silent during my need to puke, scream at me now until I roll onto my back. Even that doesn’t entirely appease them. I need medicine, a splint better than my padding and armor. I doubt I’ll get any of that here.
Herod laughs. “How quickly the mighty fall.”
I close my eyes, the sunlight casting red and gold on the insides of my lids. I will not give Herod the satisfaction of seeing me break. I will be strong.
People had conduits once to make them strong. I saw them, conduits like stones and pendants and sticks. I shove the dream away, refusing to let it poison me with more worry, but something catches me and won’t let go.
People had conduits like stones.
The stone in my pocket, the one that Mather gave me, that he wanted to believe was magic when he was a child. A piece of lapis lazuli that Winter mined. It could be . . .
This is insane.
But I have nothing left to lose for trying, do I?
I shut my eyes tighter, focusing on the lapis lazuli ball, on whatever might be inside it. I imagine the stone’s strength flowing into my body, twirling through the cavity of my chest, and filling my ribs with vitality and health.
Nothing happens.
I do it again, gritting my teeth, begging the blue thing to do something, please, to help me in some way—heal just one rib, just one—
Something jabs my side. Hard. I gasp in the sudden shock of pain and swallow down a wave of nausea, my focus shattered by the hilt of Herod’s sword.
“You’ve slept enough,” he says. “Angra will want you conscious when we arrive.”
I shut my mouth tightly once my stomach calms, body curled away from Herod and ribs well beyond the point of screaming pain. Stars poke my vision, threatening me with a long, slow sleep, and I try to hold my chest in a way that would make the pain stop. There’s no relief. No help from magic. The snuffing out of that one flicker of hope makes me feel even more hollow, but I can’t think about that. I have to stay awake. I have to know what dangers lie ahead.
Like magic more powerful and potent than we ever knew, a great, destructive force contained in one man. If it went into Angra’s ancestor . . . has it been passed down, generation to generation, like the Royal Conduits themselves? Why hasn’t it spread throughout the world again?
There is only a handful of magic sources now, though, and the Decay grew when people used magic for evil. Maybe there isn’t enough for it to spread beyond the Spring monarch, so it stays in him, leeching power from him and him alone.
I shudder. No, it’s just Angra. It’s just the man we’ve been fighting for years, an evil, sadistic monster who uses his Royal Conduit for evil. Just his Royal Conduit. Nothing more.
Angra is never just anything, though.
The wheeled cage clunks down, the steady swishing of the wheels through grass giving way to the clomp-clomp of wheels on stone. We’ve passed onto a bridge, one of the many that link the Rania Plains with Spring over the Feni River. The narrowness of this bridge tells me we’re no longer with the bulk of Spring’s army. We must have broken off to reach Abril, Spring’s capital, more quickly.
As the cage thumps into the grass on the Spring side of the river, the empty expanse of the Rania Plains changes to blossoming trees, the kind with white-and-pink buds that cast floating petals into the air. Spring’s forest is pretty, honestly. But a marred pretty, a mask.
Herod jabs me in the back with his sword hilt again. “Sit up. We’re nearly there.”
“Sitting is easier said than done right now,” I croak, but one more jab from his sword hilt and I wiggle into a semi-erect position, black dots swirling through my vision.
Abril sits in the northwestern tip of Spring, close to Winter. There are no outlying villages nearby, no signs of life outside its massive stone walls other than the occasional field of crops cutting through the forest of eternally blossoming trees. Laughably peaceful representations of a kingdom that has been anything but.
The small army of men around my cage descends from a side path onto a wide main road that cuts through the trees. Abril’s walls rise before us, casting the surrounding land in shadow, looming rows of black behind the pink-and-white trees. After a few moments of shuffling, we pass through a gate and into the city itself. I cling to the details around us, forcing my mind to stay active instead of losing myself in the dread pulsing in the pit of my stomach.
Angra’s banner, the black sun on a yellow background, dangles from four-and five-story buildings, the tall structures encasing us in an eerie shadow. As we roll by, heads pop out of smudged windows, eyes peek through cracked doors, but I see no people in the streets and hear no chatter of city life. Like they’ve been choked so long under Angra’s suffocating use of his magic that they’ve forgotten how to be alive.
We cross a bridge and the buildings get a little nicer, windows cleaner, walls painted and whole. People stand around now too, smirking over another Winterian prisoner, another show of their king’s dominance.
Fear is a seed that, once planted, never stops growing.
Sir’s voice whispers that phrase in my memory, keeping the fear at bay.
A black iron gate sits at the end of one last road. Soldiers march on the wall above it and eye us from towers, a reminder that Spring is a kingdom crafted by war. When we pass through the gate, a grand green yard rolls around us, leading up to a palace of black obsidian. Even from as far back as we are I can see colored etchings in the rock, green ivy vines, butter-yellow and sunset-pink flowers—Spring in darkness. It’s both poetic and sad how well it embodies this land.
The gate shuts behind us, and Herod nods to the men, who near the cage. I stifle a cry as they drag me out, my bones grating, shocking bursts of pain as I collapse, helpless, hanging off two men. Dried sweat and bits of vomit cling to my skin, crunching as I move, and a few cuts along my leg burn. But I’m just here, draped between Angra’s soldiers, wholly at their disposal. Helpless and useless and alone—
The piece of lapis lazuli is still in my pocket. A piece of Winter. I straighten a little, wincing. I may be alone, the stone may not be magic, but I am not weak.
We start to move forward and something clinks to my right, a shovel banging on stone. It makes Herod flinch enough that I jerk my head toward it.
I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d kept looking forward, let my worries about Angra suck me into a numb thoughtlessness.
Off to the right, in a garden, a group of Spring guards stand watch over a pile of gray bricks, a deepening hole, and . . . Winterians.
Everything about me drops away, flimsy and weightless. Three Winterians, their white hair matted with sweat and mud, their pale faces gaunt, stand waist-deep in the dirt. It’s a wonder their bony arms can even hold a shovel, let alone dig with one—they’re so frail, so thin, they could be mistaken for ghosts.
Tension cuts off the air to my lungs. I want to cry out to them, run to them, fight off the guards, whisk them to safety. But I can’t do more than croak feebly in their direction.
One of the Winterians stops digging. She lifts her head, face caked with mud, and when her gaze meets mine across the lawn, light dawns on her face. A ray in the shadows of Spring that makes me heavy with guilt—she can’t be any older than me.
“Get back to work!” one of the guards yells, and readies a whip. It curls around the girl’s forearm and yanks her forward, but she keeps her eyes on me, her face alight with wonder.
“No,” I whisper as the guard raises the whip again. “Stop!”
Herod steps between the Winterians and me. The whip cracks, and Herod leans in so all I can see is his face. “Keep moving,” he growls, and pushes the soldiers holding me. We plunge up a set of gleaming black steps as the whip cracks harder and faster.
“Stop!” I scream as we enter the shadow of Angra’s palace. “Stop it!”
I reach back for her, for all of them. As I do, a deadly will rises in me to help them. As hard and fast as the whip, as brilliant as the girl’s hope. But the soldiers pull me inside the palace, yanking me away from doing anything more than hurting.