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Taristan looked pale against the firelight, his own blood running freely from many wounds. Again, Erida cursed the Elder, Corayne, and all their ilk.
When she squeezed her eyes shut again, she reached deeper into herself, grasping for the last drops of her strength.
Taristan murmured something above her, breaking her concentration.
She could barely decipher the words through the weight of the pain, the smoke too heavy in her lungs.
“She burns,” she heard Taristan whisper, gasping down a breath. “She burns with it.”
The Elder had said as much only moments ago, his voice an echo, still lingering though he was long gone. Erida could not understand, the world spiraling red and black, blood and ash.
She burns with it.
But Erida of Galland refused to burn.
She blinked up the grand column of the Konrada, the vaulted spire rising three hundred feet above her. Lanterns hung in the many stained-glass windows, and a few priests peered down from the spiraling balconies. The faces of every god stared from the twenty-sided chamber, their granite eyes watching the Queen bleed. She glared back at the familiar figures. Lasreen and her dragon Amavar. Tiber with his mouth of coins. Fyriad among his redeeming flames. Syrek, his sword raised like a beacon fire.
What Waits did not have a statue in this place, but she felt His presence all the same. Behind every god, in every candle. And in her own mind, lingering at the edges, come to watch her like all the rest.
Smoke clung to her hair and stained nightgown, ashes and blood crusted under her fingernails. Destruction painted her body, and the bodies around her. Her attendants stood out sharply against the pristine tower, most of them covered in soot. Taristan looked worst of all, the whites of his eyes violent against an ash-streaked face. He watched her with a manic look, half-mad with anger.
As her mind cleared, Erida realized she lay against a divan sofa, dragged to the center of the cathedral. Her physician, Dr. Bahi, perched next to her, his focus on her hand.
Dr. Bahi worked diligently to bandage her wound, moving withexcruciatingly slow movements. It still hurt and she hissed a breath, steady hot tears coursing down her cheeks.
She did not weep. The tears would not stop, her eyes burning with the heat of them. But she would not give anything else. Not a sob, not a curse. Her rage boiled beneath the surface, unseen by any of her many attendants.
They buzzed around her like flies on a corpse. Servants, ladies-in-waiting. Lady Harrsing, her nostrils black from breathing smoke. Thornwall and his lieutenants kept a polite distance, with the Queen in her state of undress. Taristan and the physician were the only men permitted to be near the Queen. Even Ronin idled, more bleary-eyed than usual, at the edge of the hall, half-shadowed by the sculptures of the cathedral.
“What do you think, Doctor?” she muttered.
Bahi bit his lip, his voice halting and unsure. Uncertain not in his skill, but in the Queen. She could have his head with a word, and he knew it too well.
“You will not lose the hand,” he finally said. “If there is no infection.”
The weight ofifhit the Queen like a kick in the gut. Erida tried to make a fist, the same fingers seemingly detached from the rest of her. She tried not to imagine the whole hand gone, her wrist ending in a bloody stump.
She saw the bob of Bahi’s throat over the collar of his nightrobe. Like the rest of them, he’d escaped the palace with little more than the clothes on his back.
“I can say you were lucky, Your Majesty,” he continued. “Any lower and the blow would have left the entire hand useless, if not forced amputation.”
“An Amhara did this. She knew where to strike, and how. There was no luck to it,” Erida bit back, the words sour in her mouth. “Thank you, Dr. Bahi,” she added, a little softer for the doctor’s sake.
Grateful, Bahi rose and bowed, slipping away to join the rest of the lingering brood.
Harrsing stood over Erida with a grim look, leaning on her cane. Her unbound hair trailed to the small of her back, wispy and gray. She coughed and drew a borrowed cloak tighter around her thin frame. Old as she was, she looked positively murderous.
“So the Amhara have a mark on you. We should march a legion into Mercury’s citadel and cut the contract out of him,” she said, seething. “We must know who bought your death. Perhaps the Temur? And the Amhara slipped in with the ambassador?”
Slowly, Taristan shook his head.
“This was not the Amhara Guild’s doing, but the work of a single assassin pursuing her own ends,” he rumbled, still staring at Erida’s wound.
The Queen glanced between them, advisor and consort. “The ambassador fled, didn’t he?”
Lady Harrsing nodded. “Along with the rest of the palace and half the ships in port.”
A chill went down Erida’s spine. Ambassador Salbhai had revealed his cards in their last moments together, before everything went to ashes. He had not come to broker peace between their nations, but to bargain for the Temur woman. How he knew about her, Erida could not say. But it concerned her deeply.
