“I knew the churail was speaking the truth,” the boy said reverently.
“You can’t live,” I said, watching his eyes shine, the dread sinking in my stomach as my conjured vine crept up his chest.
“If the Viceroy has you,” I continued, holding his gaze despite how much I wanted to tear myself away. “He’ll empty your memories and turn your mind against you. And he’ll torture your entire family for the information. He’ll make you turn on your neighbors, your friends.”
I’d seen it happen, over and over again. And I couldn’t stop it.
At least not yet.
My voice shook. “And I can’t get you out. Your family, yes. But not you.”
Not if I wanted to stay in the palace under this mask.
He nodded, his face solemn. “I’ll live in the River, like the ancient peris,” he whispered, before my thorn pierced his heart.
I clutched the ring he gave me, the gold cutting into my palm as his body slumped to the ground and rage poured through me.
We couldn’t fight salt with water, but maybe we could drown it.
Chapter 3
The savages native to this land are human too, but you wouldn’t think it.
They bury their dead in the ground to rot and pollute the earth, they scoop food with their hands, believing in herbs and seeds as home remedies, and sacrilegiously, they worship the life magic imbued in ancient fae artifacts found throughout Astola.
Their condition is a barbarous one.
—The History of Astolaby Henry Wiltshire
Yaseema
We trudged through the frigid night, the air turning colder as Astola had begun to move away from the summer months. That meant whatever meagre harvest we could produce would be limited and taxed by the Angrezian Empire even more.
People were going to start getting desperate.
I clutched the rusted shovel in my hands and tried not to think of Bair’s hungry gaze when he inhaled the lentil soup I’d set out for him.
Perhaps we were already past desperate.
All the more reason to keep searching for a way across the River and through the wall to the fae world.
With every buried fae relic the Citadel stole for the Empress, the famine in Astola got worse. But the Empire didn’t care about what happened to the people of Astola after they’d taken all our life magic.
Which meant I needed a way to counteract what they were doing. I needed to bring down the wall separating the fae and the human world in order to return the life magic to our soil.
Or we would all die.
But right now I couldn’t dwell on that fact, nor that the Citadel was on their way to unearth yet another fae relic in the morning.
One I had been searching for months. Now, I was burying the bodies already impacted by the famine. Already taken from us by the Empire.
Bair led me on a familiar path, through the diseased fruit trees of the mango orchard and back toward the village.
It wasn’t so late that everyone would be sleeping, and yet there was no one standing in the streets, given the curfews imposed by the Citadel to stop the uprisings. There was no line for a funeral procession, no curious aunties watching what we were doing.
The fear of the Empire was too great.
In fact the houses were eerily quiet, the few gas lanterns installed by the Citadel all turned low. No one wanted to draw attention to themselves, not when it was past curfew and Citadel sentinels could be doing unannounced patrols, searching for dead bodies to burn, people to beat, or insurgents to execute.
