The heralds blew their horns a third time.
With a deafening roar from the crowd, the racers plunged forward onto the Flats, the wide stretch of grasslands outside the city gates.
The Chase had begun.
? ? ?
The first few minutes were a blinding frenzy of sound and color. The hooves of five dozen horses kicked up clouds of dust.
To Rielle’s right, a man with a metal guard over his teeth yanked on a spiked glove and knocked another racer off his mount with the thrust of one meaty arm. The other racers trampled him, cutting off his screams, and his horse left the course with its reins trailing.
Rielle drove Maliya forward, looking around wildly. An arbiter should have disqualified the man for that. But in the storm of dust, she couldn’t pick out the arbiters’ colors. It was as though they had vanished.
She crossed the Flats, guiding Maliya through a throng of shoving elbows and flying whips, racers shouting at their mounts to move and yelling threats in a dozen languages. When she reached the foothills of Mount Taléa, she slowed her pace and directed Maliya up the steeper forested climb. She saw a flash of familiar color through the trees ahead. Black and gold. Odo’s colors.
Audric.
She lowered herself against Maliya’s neck, urged her mare up the foothills, and emerged out of the trees into the first mountain pass. A broad stretch of grass shivered in the wind before her. Walls of rock towered on either side.
Rielle’s heart lifted. She murmured the Kirvayan words Odo had told her the mare would respond to: “Ride the wind, falcon of my blood, wings of my heart!”
Maliya shot forward.
The wind whipped past them, ripping tears from Rielle’s eyes. She caught up to Audric and crowed with triumph.
He glanced her way, his scarf falling loose. He grinned at her, and her heart leapt. Despite the danger of the race, she couldn’t help but wish they could stay out here—away from court, away from everyone else—forever.
Seconds later, Audric veered away, taking the shortest path around the mountain. His Celdarian mare was bred for such steep, rocky trails.
But Maliya was built for speed. Rielle pushed her on across the pass, and Maliya obeyed. The wind howled in Rielle’s ears. She could hardly hear herself breathe. The shapes of the other riders, fanning out across the pass, were blurs of color. They were catching up to her.
She turned Maliya right, onto a narrow cliffside trail. Not her first choice, but it would give her better time. She told herself not to look and yet couldn’t help it, peering over the edge into the chasm below. She broke out in sick chills; her vision tilted. One wrong shift of her weight, one misstep from her horse, and she’d fly to her death.
Behind her came a clatter of hooves and rock. When the cliff trail widened, sloping down into the wooded foothills, she looked back.
One racer zipped by her, and then three more, so close she could smell their sweat. Behind them, a racer rammed his horse into the side of another, knocking both horse and rider off the cliff Rielle had just traveled. The fallen horse let out a terrible scream, then fell silent.
Rielle turned away, heart pounding, eyes stinging from the dust clogging the air. She exited the woods near the trail to the second pass that would bring her around Mount Taléa and back toward the city.
There, she found arbiters at last: seven of them, some distance ahead of her. They had thrown off their masks, letting their blond, braided hair fly free. They were letting out shrill war cries that Rielle recognized at once from one of Audric’s interminable lectures about Borsvall.
They were closing in on the rider nearest them—a man in black and gold, his cap and scarf fallen free, the wind ripping through his dark curls.
The world distilled to this single, terrible moment. Dread knocked the wind from Rielle’s lungs.
The arbiters, whoever they were, were no soldiers of her father’s. They were from Borsvall.
And they were surrounding Audric with their swords raised to kill.
4
Eliana
“But when the Empire forces came to Orline, the capital of Ventera, they were struck blind by a brilliant light. It was the Sun Queen, glittering and vengeful. She led the charge with King Maximilian at her side, and everyone she touched felt their long-forgotten magic awaken. They were sunspinners once more, firebrands and earthshakers. And the river that morning ran red with Empire blood.”
—The Sun Queen’s Triumph (Being an Alternative History of the Kingdom of Ventera)
As written in the journal of Remy Ferracora
June 14, Year 1018 of the Third Age
After the executions, Eliana saw Harkan home to his tiny apartment on the top floor of the building next to her own.
As she turned to go, he said softly, “El?”
She hesitated. If she stayed, they would share his bed, as they often did. His touch would be absolution—his strong, brown arms, the tender way he held her after and stroked her hair. For a little while, she would forget who she was and what she had done.
But then, Harkan would want to talk. He would look into her eyes and search for the girl she had once been.
The thought exhausted her.
“Please, El,” Harkan said, his voice strained. “I need you.”
He could hardly look at her. Was he embarrassed that he didn’t want to be alone? Or ashamed to crave the touch of a monster?
Unbidden, a memory surfaced: the boy’s defiant, tear-streaked face, just before the executioner’s sword fell.
Eliana’s stomach clenched. She squeezed Harkan’s hand. “All right, but I just want to sleep.”
His voice came gently: “Me too.”
They climbed through the terrace window and into his room—plain and small, strewn with rumpled clothes. The rest of his family’s apartment remained silent and shuttered. Since his mother and older brothers had died at the wall the day the Empire invaded ten years earlier, Harkan had not touched any of their things or sat in furniture they had sat in or used his mother’s pots and pans. The apartment was a tomb, and Eliana dared not enter it for fear of breathing ghosts into her body.
But Harkan’s bedroom was a familiar, untidy place. Over the years, Eliana had spent as many nights there as she had in her own.
She climbed into his bed, waiting. He pulled the drapes nearly shut, leaving the window open behind them. He lit the four squat candles he kept on a side table—one for each member of his lost family. When he had pulled off his shirt and boots, he climbed in beside her and drew her down into the warm nest of his arms.
“Thank you,” he murmured against her cheek.
She smiled, wriggling closer. “I always sleep better when I’m with you.”
He laughed softly. Then the room filled with silence. He worried the ends of her braid between his fingers. “Someday, we’ll have enough money to leave this place.”
Eliana closed her eyes. It was the beginning of Harkan’s favorite story, one he had told her countless times. She didn’t have the heart to tell him she couldn’t stand listening to it, not today. That this story had been a comfort when they were young and didn’t know any better but was simply cruel and pointless now.
So she waited until she could speak instead of yelling at him, and asked, as she always did, “Where will we go?”
“North across the Narrow Sea, to Astavar.”
Astavar. Eliana used to dream about what it would look like—white-capped mountains, lush green valleys, a world of ice and snow and night skies filled with twisting strands of colored light.
Now it was simply a place on a map. Ventera’s northern neighbor and the last free country left in the world.
“No one gets in or out of Astavar,” Eliana countered, falling into the rhythm of their practiced back-and-forth.
“We’ll find a smuggler,” Harkan continued. “A good one. We’ll pay whatever we need to pay.”
“Astavar will fall one of these days. Everyone falls to the Empire. Look what happened to us.”