Caspian gave her a swift account of the events leading up to this one. He tilted his chin toward Safire. “We were punishing a miscreant when this girl interfered.”
Safire narrowed her eyes at the wordgirl. In Firgaard, she was commandant. Had they been there now, she would have shown him just how greatly she outranked him.
“In interfering,” he continued, “she lost the fugitive we were bringing to your gate.”
At the mention of her fugitive, something flashed across the empress’s face. Annoyance or disappointment. Maybe both. After all, she’d spent years hunting the criminal who burned the scrin.
The empress turned to Safire, her hands linked behind her back. “And do you wish to give your own account?”
For someone who—according to Eris—despised the truth, this woman seemed deeply interested in it.
“All of what he said is true.” Safire threw the captain a look. “I saw six heavily armed men beating a defenseless woman. It didn’t occur to menotto intervene. But, yes. Unfortunately, I lost your fugitive in the process.” She tried not to look at Dax, whose gaze was currently boring a hole in her. And because she needed to fix this mess—and still needed to stop Eris from finding Asha—she said, “I captured her once; I’ll capture her again. That’s a promise.”
The empress went quiet, her lips pressed in a thin line as she studied Safire. Finally, she turned to Caspian. “Release her.”
Caspian’s jaw twitched, as if he wanted to argue. Instead, he looked to the soldiers detaining Safire. With a swift nod, the pressure on her arms let up as the soldiers stepped back.
“My army has been unable to catch this criminal,” the empress said to Safire, who was massaging her upper arms where her captor’s fingers had dug in. The skin was tender, already bruising. “I’d like to know howyoucaught her, as well as what you’ve learned. Perhaps we can find a time to speak more about it while you’re here.”
Safire nodded. “Of course.”
“As for the rest of it”—the empress looked to Caspian, waving her hand dismissively—“an honest mistake, I’m sure.”
Safire paused, about to correct her. It was no mistake. Those soldiers had been severely abusing their power. She had seen it.
But when Safire looked to Dax, she saw hopeful relief in his gaze. The empress had invited them here for a purpose. Leandra had heard of the suffering in the scrublands, and she wanted to help alleviate it.
Safire had undermined Leandra’s soldiers, then botched things further by losing Eris. She didn’t want to sabotage Dax and Roa’s visit further.
So she held her tongue.
“You must all be tired,” the empress said, leading them forward. “I’ll show you to your rooms so you can rest before dinner.”
Being inside the citadel felt like being underwater.
Every room and hall was painted a shade of the sea: from velvety blues and cold grays to bright teals and turquoises. The lintels and crown moldings were the pale beige of sea-foam and the sound of trickling water came from nearly every room, due to the fountains at their centers. Each one featured a marble statue of a ship in full sail or a mermaid hiding behind her hair or a breaching whale.
It was why, when the empress led them down the next hall, Safire paused.
This hall was different.
The walls were hung with floor-to-ceiling paintings thatswept from one end to the other. Safire followed Dax and Roa, studying the shining brushstrokes that transformed the paint into a froth of white waves or swirling dark eddies. In the beginning, the pictures inside the frames depicted squalls and tempests and maelstroms.
“Some time ago,” the empress said to Roa from several paces ahead, “news of the blight in your homeland reached me.”
Safire was only half listening. Because now the paintings depicted monsters, too. Dragons and kraken and sea spirits with their needlelike teeth, crunching the bones of sailors whose ships they’d wrecked.
It made her think of Eris saving her from the creature on the dock—a choice that came at the cost of her freedom.
Unless protecting Safire had been a calculated move, like the dancing and the kiss. Both had been a way for Eris to blend in, unseen by Lumina. What if protecting Safire—just like giving her a contradictory account of the night the scrin burned—was a way to make Safire sympathetic to her cause, ensuring she got what she wanted?
And now Eris was loose in the Star Isles. Hunting down Asha this very moment.
The walls felt too close suddenly. Safire didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be outthere, looking for her cousin.
“I invited you here because I know what’s killing your crops in the scrublands,” the empress was saying from much farther ahead, making Safire realize she’d fallen behind. “It’s the same disease that struck these islands when they were under the Shadow God’s dominion.”
As Safire’s pace quickened down this hall, out of the corner of her eye she noticed a reoccurring image in every painting on the walls: a looming shadow on the horizon.
