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‘Time to go look for Alyra, then,’ Tared said, interrupting my thoughts as he hauled himself up from his bench with a look of regret at his empty plate. ‘I suppose she’ll be around the fields? And I’ll let Agenor know we’re leaving in a bit.’
‘Out of general decency, of course,’ Lyn added dryly.
‘Exactly.’ He grinned at her. ‘Not at all because he threatened to disembowel me if I allowed his daughter to sneak out before he’d woken up. Back in a minute.’
He’d faded before I could figure out how literal that depiction of Agenor’s fatherly sentiments was. Something about Lyn’s smile suggested it had not even been that much of an exaggeration.
I ate my next slice of bread a little more happily.
Tared returned just as I finished my breakfast, a loudly excited Alyra on his shoulder. A sleepy-looking Agenor arrived at the Skeire home five minutes later to tell me to be careful and let them know immediately if something seemed off inside the city walls, and also, had I brought a warm coat for the colder northern nights?
My affirmative answer hardly appeared to reassure him. It seemed Creon was not the only one worried about the consuls’intentions, even though I’d summarised the contents of their letter to my father as optimistically as possible.
But no one spoke up to share their concerns and no one stopped me as I checked the contents of my bag one last time and swung it onto my shoulders. Lyn nervously reminded me to send Alyra over the wall with a message at least once a day. Agenor told me to shout at the consuls as convincingly as I could. Hallthor finally shoved his sketches aside and gave me a wordless slap on the shoulder by way of goodbye, and Ylfreda, returning from her patient with bloodied fingers, grumbled something about please not returning with any broken limbs or bones sticking out of me.
I told her I’d try my best. Like Agenor, she didn’t seem terribly impressed by that resolution.
And just like that, we were ready to go – no luggage left to pack, no tasks left to be completed. It was only then that my nervousness surged, suddenly and violently – enough to make my mouth go dry. With nothing else to focus on, I had no choice but to face the truth of just what I was about to attempt: walking into a city where my very existence was a breach of the law, bringing word of war into a place where peace had ruled for centuries, and somehow convincing the civilians that this was the moment to step back into the ugly, grief-ridden world outside. A lunacy, frankly. Had anyone asked me a year ago whether the White City would ever go to battle, I would have laughed in their face.
Then again, blinding and escaping the Mother had been impossible, too.
So I steeled my spine, pasted a smile onto my face, and said, ‘Time to leave, then?’
Alyra screeched and plummeted to her seat on my shoulder. Tared held out his hand without another word, his sword already on his back. I wrapped my fingers around Creon’s black-clad elbow first, then took that offered alf hand with a sensation eerily similar to the moment I’d put the key to cell 104 into Naxi’s hungry fingers – a fluttery feeling in my stomach that reminded me that there would be only one direction to go from this point on, and that was forward.
The subtle tug of fading magic behind my navel did not help.
The world went blurry before I could blink, dissolving into the usual disjointed jumble of impressions – flashes of a peachy pink sunrise, the smell of dew on grass, the warm, comforting yellow of grain ready to be harvested. My pulse thundered in my ears. One, two, maybe three heartbeats, and yet it seemed an eternity had gone by when the world pieced itself back together around us, colours and sounds and smells sliding into a landscape I’d dreamed of but never seen with my own eyes before.
A rocky coast.
A stretch of summer-dry grass, covered in messy tents.
And beyond that quiet morning vision, glowing with an almost unearthly gold sheen in the light of the rising autumn sun, the fabled white walls of the world’s last bastion of freedom, stretching out on either side of us and twisting like a ribbon between the island’s misty, shrub-covered hills.
It was …enormous.
I’d known – rationally, at least – that the White City was more than just the town that made up the heart of it. There was farmland behind those walls, enough of it to survive years of siege, if need be. There was the harbour. There had to be some decent source of fresh water, too, lakes or rivers, anything that the Mother hadn't been able to drain during her past attempts to get rid of this last little blemish on her universal and absolute power.
Yet even in my wildest dreams, I’d never been able to imagine much beyond the scale of Ildhelm’s cities, the largest settlementsI’d seen in my life. Some humble fields, I’d unthinkingly assumed. A little haven like the one we used to have at home, just enough for a dozen fishing boats and the occasional fae ship coming to demand the empire’s tributes.
Nothing likethis, a walled area more expansive than double the surface of Cathra.
And this … this could have been my home?
It was that thought, more than even the sheer size of the complex before me, that kept me glued to the rock-strewn earth for a few moments longer than I’d have liked. These walls, house-high and unnaturally white even after over a thousand years of summer sun and winter rains, should have been my final destination in life, a goal leaving nothing else to strive for. And instead, I stood here as an illegality, vessel to a power the world hadn't yet found a place for, human and at the same time … not human at all.
Not like the small, ragged shapes rummaging around between those mucky tents, waiting for their chance – their only chance perhaps – to escape their fleeting existence of work and hunger and fear.
The twinge of my stomach made me regret having eaten breakfast at all.
Creon and Tared were silent by my side, waiting for me to act. And Ishouldbe acting – I should say my goodbyes and start walking to that towering gate on the other side of this dry, sandy field, where the watchers would surely be waiting for me, ready to follow their consuls’ orders. War was coming, we had no time to lose – Iknewthis was not the moment to dawdle.
But I did not manage to draw my eyes away from the small, pale shapes moving through the human camp, looking so strangely small, so strangely colourless. The wail of a child rose from behind those brown and grey tent-clothes as I stared. A dog barked. Someone shouted at it to shut up; the baby cried harder,and an agitated woman’s voice did away with the last illusion of serene morning quiet.
Like home. Like all I’d ever known before my village had burned and a world so much greater and stranger had opened up around me – a cruel, deadly world, yes, but a world of such agonising beauty, too, of places and creatures and colours not even a painter’s daughter could ever have imagined.
Only now did I realise I had not met a single living human after the morning we’d fled the Crimson Court.
