Silence stretched out between us until music began in the background, causing a momentary distraction.
The way Kiyan reacted to his comment made the silence even heavier. Tension rolled off him in thick waves. His shoulders were rigid, his face frozen except for the angry tic in his jaw.
The Viceroy’s hand touched mine, and I looked down. It was the first time he’d really touched me, and a frisson of shock ran up my spine. I wanted to shrink away from him, given that I was trying to get him on my side, so I held myself still instead. I’d expected him to be warm, like his general demeanor had been at dinner, but instead his hand was cold, and his voice low and ominous as he murmured in my ear.
“The Red Jasmine Rebellion wants to thwart me, but they don’t know about you, do they? The rebels don’t know that with you, I’ll finally be able to find the crown, and lay waste to them all.”
He lifted his hand from mine and stared out at the revelry. “Drink. Dance. We will leave in a few days, after the Salt festival.”
Leave in in a few days.
I tried to search my feelings for why I didn’t feel the relief I expected, knowing we were that much closer to finding it. Instead, I followed the Viceroy’s gaze to the celebration in front of us, the courtyard beyond the dining hall filled with masked courtiers spinning around the dance floor in a violent explosion of color.
Lay waste to them all.
His words reminded me of the Angrezian Empire, reminded me of Empress Lorna’s power over Astolans.
Despite their belief in the civilization they brought, they were more savage in their actions than we could ever be.
My food turned sour in my stomach and I excused myself from the table.
Chapter 25
I’m starting to forget your voices, and it scares me. How long until I forget what you look like entirely? Sometimes I wonder if this is a dream,
and we are actually still together.
Then I kill someone else and realize I’m never getting out of this nightmare.
—Letter from Kiyan to his family, unsent
Kiyan
It was time, though I couldn’t shake the uneasiness running through me as I began to pile the bodies I’d been collecting. The greatest asset was the rotting halmasti, at the top of my death creature, forming the bulk of the body of the beast. From there, mulch and leaves and rotting branches awaited my command. I closed my eyes, having never created life out of anything this big before.
This time I was in the forest outside the palace, and the connection to my life magic was stronger with my feet planted in the earth. Even though Reza put limits on our powers, I was at my strongest with nature.
I concentrated on the rot that had begun on the beast first, grabbing that tiny thread of life still working inside, using the decomposing material to my advantage. It was easier this time, linking all the different stages of death. If I could harness a main thread connecting all the different stages of the death cycle, then the rest of the bodies began to fall in line. It seemed that I could amplify the death cycle the more I piled together. And this magic felt strong—stronger than I’d ever felt since Reza had used King Rusul’s crown to drain us.
The he fact that my previous attempt had killed one Salt soldier and injured another gave me the means I hadn’t had in years—a way of fighting back.
I needed this power.
Reza had found the map to Queen Azari’s crown, and with it, a way to destroy the royal family.
He needed to be stopped.
I flooded my energy, the limited spark of my power, into the pile of death at my feet.
Slowly, pieces of it began to snap together, the dead halmasti I’d killed in the forest rearing up on its hind legs and towering over me, a festering, bloody beast. Crusted black ichor clumped its matted fur and provided a landing place of sorts for leaves and logs and mulch and dead sprites.
I had become an expert at collecting death, a gravedigger without graves.
If life no longer obeyed me, then I would command death.
I would use whatever power I had at my disposal to free my kingdom, even if that meant sinking into the stench of rot, becoming a piece of the forest floor that thrived on decomposing bodies.
Slowly, the creature started to form, and I began to see the beauty in what I was doing.
