“But, Your Majesty, you were here. I’m afraid I may have bored you to sleep—”
Leo straightened.Had it been a dream?
Samson offered him water, and Leo drank greedily.
“Are you all right?” he asked, eyes curious.
“Yes, yes.” Leo waved him away as the hoverpod began to descend.
The Badala outpost was a series of sand-colored buildings that blended into the landscape. Long ago, this site had once kept and trained the Desert Spiders—a fierce coalition of warriors handpicked by Alabore Ravence himself. But the warriors had fallen out of fashion after Alabore’s rule. Now, they were fairy tales meant for Ravani children.
A ring of soldiers stood around the landing pad, their arms crossed over their chests in salute. When the hoverpod docked, Leo shakily rose to his feet. The pain in his head came in waves. In one moment, it grew so gruesome that he felt he would disintegrate on the spot. In another, he could see the world with razor-like clarity.
Leo gritted his teeth and slowly walked out, determined not to appear weak before his men. He motioned for the soldiers to be at ease.
“Muftasa,” Leo greeted his intelligence officer as she walked forward.
The small woman was dressed in the garb of a soldier, and she would have easily passed for one if not for her noodle-armed salute.
“Your Majesty,” she said. “Arish, Samson. There’s something you need to see.”
She led them into the dark, quiet halls of Badala to the main room of the largest building, where a wall of holos curved up the domed ceiling. Each holo was a part of a photograph that spanned the length of the room. When Leo saw the image they created, he froze.
The two runes stared back at him.
“I saw this,” he whispered, shaken.
Muftasa turned sharply. “That’s impossible. Our drones found them not fifteen minutes ago.”
But Leo shook his head. These were the runes in his… dream or hallucination or whatever it was. A wave of nausea swept over him, and he swayed.
“Saayna,” he said through gritted teeth.Only she can make sense of this.“Take me to her.”
Muftasa studied him for a long moment. Then she pressed a panel, and a chamber opened to their left. “This way.”
Leo and his party followed Muftasa into a white, circular room with skylights. Soft shadows slunk down the bare walls. At its center, Saayna sat cross-legged on a floor cushion. She opened her eyes as they entered.
“So you’ve seen them,” she said, a smile in her voice.
A distant roar commenced in Leo’s ears. He staggered forward, but his knees buckled and he sank to the floor.
“What are they?” he asked, spots dancing in his eyes.
“Something the Eternal Fire wished for you to see,” she said. Her eyes were wide and bright. “You have sat in the flames, tasted their ash. They can send visions and call to you any time they please.”
“But what of the runes? What do they mean?”
The high priestess looked up, and Leo followed her gaze. He thought he would see what she saw, perhaps a shining emblem of the Phoenix or the heavens themselves, but he saw only the dark underbellies of storm clouds.
“They say, ‘The Prophet shall be reborn.’” She fixed him with her dark eyes. “And she will begin her warpath at the palace.”
Any other king would have balked. Any other man would have pleaded for forgiveness. But his father, before he had fallen into madness, had taught Leo how to root out a lie.
Leo heard it in her voice—the slight tremble, the hitched breath. He had suspected deceit from the beginning, when she had first translated the runes. But as Leo looked at Saayna now, as her eyes shifted away from his, he sensed something else: foul play.
“We will map the runes,” he said sharply. “All of them. Join them together and see where they lead.”
He heard Saayna inhale, and he smiled. The high priestess had mapped the first two runes and declared that the Prophet was in the capital. But if they led somewhere else? Somewhere the high priestess did not wish him to look.
