“C’mon.”
Arit followed Nick’s retreating back down the corridor. He stopped at a doorway blocked with broken crates, but rather than navigating around the blockade, Nick stopped. He hung the lantern from a rusty nail protruding from the wall and grabbed a shard of shattered wood, tossing it into another room on the opposite side of the hallway. Arit helped.
“Careful,” he said, muscling the jagged pieces aside to create a path.
When they’d cleared enough space, Arit stepped aside so Nick could precede him.
“This is the nursery, where the youngest children were tutored.” Nick turned in slow circles in the center of the room, gray walls pockmarked with holes, floorboards creaking under his weight as he moved. “Toly, Catterin, and the older kids were tutored in the library, but I spent a lot of time here.”
Assessing the room as a potential campsite for their haunted night, Arit shrugged out of the backpack, relieved the ache in his shoulders eased as he placed the pack on the ground. He tried to imagine what the place must have been like when Nick was a boy. If the light had been brighter, maybe he would’ve been able to identify some sign children had once played and learned here, but in the arc of light from the lantern he’d fetched from the hallway, Arit couldn’t see anything except plumbing exposed by sheets of missing wood paneling. “You don’t have to do this.” Arit grabbed Nick’s arm. “No one will think less of you for leaving this behind you.”
“No, I need to be here.” Nick looked at Arit over his shoulder, a sad grin curving his lips. “I have to show you something.”
He shrugged off Arit’s grip and marched to a recessed cabinet, doors long gone. He stooped to a crouch and, reaching into the black depths, cleared dusty cobwebs. Arit crossed the room to join him, bracing a fist on the cabinet and leaning down. Nick shoved hard, and a panel in the back of the cabinet popped free.
Tipping his head up, Nick grinned at him. “I think we can still fit.”
Shock arrowed through Arit as his mate shuffled into the cabinet and through the opening the panel had disguised. “A secret passage?”
“No.” Nick’s laughter filtered back to him. “We children discovered a gap in the studs and framing large enough to provide a hideout, away from the adults.”
Bending, Arit squinted into the cramped space, hardly lit by the lantern or his flashlight. “You could have hidden.” He dropped to his knees to crawl with Nick.
“When the rebels came for us? Possibly.” Arit’s mate carefully made his way forward, through decades’ worth of spiderwebs and mouse turds. “If the imperial family wasn’t where they expected, fully accounted for down to baby Elba, the soldiers would’ve torn the palace apart to find us, though.” He stopped and awkwardly pivoted. Sat in the filth. “Hiding would’ve changed nothing except perhaps costing us this.”
Arit plunked down beside him. “What?”
Nick shined the lantern on piece of wood.
Squinting, Arit directed his own flashlight at the panel to examine it more closely.
“A safe place for the imperial children’s final legacy,” Nick said.
Minding the low strut threatening to bash his head, Arit wiggled for a better vantage point. The flashlight beam swept the panel at the right angle, and the engraving buried under a heavy layer of dust was finally discernible. He leaned forward, blew on the surface, and coughed through the cloud of dust before, frustrated, he finally used the arm of his shirt to wipe away the dirt.
Names. The wood panel, almost certainly taken from the classroom, had been etched with names. Arit’s heart turned over at the seventh on the list—his mate’s. He traced his fingertip over the crudely scratched letters. “You did this?”
Nick nodded. Reaching for the panel, Arit scooted to one side and helped him retrieve it. “Toly, Lyssandra, Catterin, Allena… We all took turns making our mark as the artillery from the rebels grew louder and louder.” He swallowed. “We weren’t sure they wouldn’t blow the palace to smithereens in the shelling and us with it, but—” He patted the wood. “Just in case.”
“You hid the panel and then waited for them to capture you.”
“We agreed if any of us survived the war and made it back, we would rescue this if we could. If the palace wasn’t still standing at war’s end, we made another epitaph.” He smiled at the wood. “Its twin is engraved in a tree beyond the formal gardens, a copse looking onto the ballroom. Rolan and I discovered it during the last gala event, before we arrived in the Urals. We children weren’t able to complete that list of names. This epitaph includes Elba, though.” Clutching the jagged piece of paneling to his chest, Nick told Arit how his brothers and sisters had guided their baby sister’s claws to etch her mark as the shelling drew near. “We wanted something to prove we existed and, at the end, we loved each other.”
“You honored them. You never forgot.”
“How could I? Elba’s cries when the bullets punched through me and into her… She was two, didn’t survive until her Saints Day to be formally recognized as a princess of the peoples.” He shuddered. “The sounds she made as she died will never leave me.”
“The tribes will never forget her, either.” Grief for what his mate had suffered clogging his throat, Arit squeezed Nick’s thigh in quiet support. “We’ll name our first daughter after the sister you lost.”
Nick laughed. “We’ve an empire to rebuild, elections to organize, a constitution to amend. We won’t have time for childbearing for many summers.”
“You won’t have time to bear our children. As your consort and temporarily unemployed from my resort in the Urals, I’ll have time aplenty for starting the next generation of Mariseks. With the blessing of the Goddess, one of them will win the faith and confidence of the tribes like their father. Become the next emperor. Because there will be a next emperor.”
“You have to meet my mom.” Chuckling damply, Nick rubbed his burning eyes. “She’s desperate for grandchildren.”
“Then by all means, open the borders. Let the humans come, yours and others. Our future begins now.”
THE END