“Very secret ones. You shouldn’t have brought the others.” Emissa sounds anxious as she adds the remonstrance, casting a glance back toward the anchoring point of the Transvect. The brooding monolith splits the skyline. We can’t see the Transvect itself, which is being realigned for the journey to Solivagus. Nor Livia, Aequa, or Eidhin, who will be waiting on the platform for me. “Veridius—”
“Veridius doesn’t get a choice.” Truth, though sneaking off to this meeting alone would have been all but impossible anyway. Livia was Tertius Ericius’s stipulation. Aequa was mine. And Eidhin, when he found out the plan, was his own.
Emissa’s mouth quirks in the smallest of wry smiles. An achingly familiar expression. I look away.
We walk without talking for a minute. Emissa leads us away from the graves, along the base of the mausoleum-covered mountainside. We are still alone.
“It was meant to be me,” she says suddenly, so quietly that I almost think she’s talking to herself. “Not Belli. Running the Labyrinth, I mean.”
I process it, then, “I’m glad it wasn’t.” Whatever has been lost between us, I want her to know that much.
She smiles sadly. Glances at me, and exhales. “I met Veridius when I was fourteen.” Quiet and heavy and slow. “He came to Villa Corenius to interview me. My tutors had been bragging about how well I was doing in my studies, and he’d heard. He was impressed, too. A few months later, between the Academy cycles that year, I was invited to visit Solivagus along with a few others. Belli, Iro, Prav. We stayed for the entire summer, and almost all we did was learn to run the Labyrinth.”
I grunt. Unsurprised. “He was preparing you for the real thing.”
“We didn’t know that, though. When I went home again, he told my father that he’d place me in Class Three, maybe even favour me for Domitor if I studied hard enough over the next couple of years—but only if I didn’t go through the Aurora Columnae until after I graduated. That was the price I had to pay for getting a head start.”
Our crunching footsteps echo off the stone cliff to our right. The path ahead is straight for hundreds of feet, no one along it. “Your father would have been happy.” Her stories of Magnus Quartus Corenius—who earned his long-overdue promotion, I heard, about a month ago—were inescapably about how hard he would drive her to succeed, before the Academy.
“He was. A little too much so.” She gives a small, melancholic smile. “He was planning to marry me off, before that, but after … that’s when he started pushing me. Every day. When he wasn’t there, our Dispensator had strict instructions to do the same. I was training or studying from waking to sleeping. Most days, I wouldn’t see the sun unless I was sparring or running.”
There’s no self-pity in the words, though I wouldn’t expect that of her. I knew some of this already, but she’s always glossed over it. A period of her life that was devoted to the monotony of education, and thus not worth a great deal of conversation. This is the first time I’m seeing it was something more. Something worse.
“I kept it up for nearly a year,” she continues. “And then it … started to get too much. I was lonely. Always tired. So my father decided that the best way to keep me focused was to put me through the Aurora Columnae anyway. Secretly, so that Veridius wouldn’t find out. That way I could have a few people cede to me, and focus for longer. Train harder.”
I grimace. It’s a big admission to make; the Magnus Quintus must have spent a fortune on bribes, because the penalties for sneaking someone through the rites are second only to violations of Birthright. Part of me wants to tell her how sad I am for what she was put through. Iamsad for her. But I know her. Know she doesn’t want that. So I just listen.
“He made it happen, of course. Didn’t make me any happier, but it worked. Then after my application got accepted, Veridius asked me to come to the Academy a couple of months before first trimester began. I assumed it was going to be more training, that the others would be there again too. But it was just me.” She breathes out the memory. “He’d chosen me. Out of everyone, hesaid I was the best candidate. You have no idea how good that felt. The relief. Like the last two years hadn’t been for nothing. I didn’t even ask what I was a candidatefor.”
She slows to a stop, though I can’t see why. The path ahead stretches on. “What is it?”
“We’re here.” She gestures to a triangular archway to our right. Set back into the shadow of the mountain and carved from the rock itself, almost invisible. It’s narrow. Old. The opposite of ostentatious. But it still very much looks like all the other tombs.
“Really?”
Emissa doesn’t dignify the question with a response, and I trail after her.
There are two lanterns hanging at the entrance; Emissa takes one and lights it. The warm yellow illuminates the triangular arch better, revealing an inscription across it. Vetusian, unusually. I study it.Mors janua vitae.
I freeze.
Emissa notices my pause. “What’s wrong?”
“You know what that means?”
Emissa glances at the inscription curiously. “Death … is the door to life?” Almost as good at reading Vetusian as I am.
Death is a doorway.
It could be coincidence. The quote here is a famous one, as far as Vetusian texts go.
Still.
“Does it mean something to you?” Emissa continues, turning her gaze back to me with a puzzled frown.
“Just seems a bit out of place, for the Republic.”
“I suppose.” Emissa gives me another look, unconvinced, but sees she’s not getting more out of me.
