The door closed behind her.
The evening air was cool against their skin as they sat on the palace wall, watching the chaos below.Men ran through the courtyards, armour clanking, voices raised in urgent commands.
Orda Naiman was advancing.Three days became two.Two became tomorrow.The army that had waited at the border was now marching, and the Borjigin scrambled to meet them.
At the centre of it all, Somadina strode through the crowds of soldiers, issuing orders, clasping shoulders, and projecting the confidence of a king even though he could not yet sit on the throne.His armour caught the torchlight, gleaming gold and crimson, and his voice carried across the courtyard like a war horn.
Azul watched him with an unreadable expression.
Beside her, Chidinma watched too.
They had not spoken for nearly an hour—had simply sat together in the gathering darkness, two sisters who had never been sisters, watching the man who was husband to one and perpetrator to them both prepare for battle.
"The army will hold," Chidinma said finally."The generals know what they're doing.And with the Valthorne reinforcements coming, he might actually survive this."
"I hope he survives this," Azul said with a sip of tea."I haven't finished with him yet."
Chidinma glanced at her and then down at her tea.
"I went to see Father," she said.
Azul’s gaze flickered."Did you?"
"Yes."
"And?"
Chidinma was quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts."I wanted to speak to him.Just once.I wanted to know if...if my feelings would change.If seeing him there, in that cell, waiting for death…I wanted to know if I still loved him."
Azul waited.
"I don't.I don't love him.I don't hate him.I feel nothing.He's just a man who used to be my father."
"And has that changed anything?"
Chidinma shook her head slowly."No.Nothing has changed."
Azul dropped her cup with a clink.
"Are you willing to kill him?"
The question pushed all awkwardness between them away, forcing strangers to contend with the fact that they had been raised by the same man.
"Yes," she said."I am," She continued."When I saw him, the very first thing he said to me, before he asked how I was, before he asked if I was safe, before anything—was to beg me to ask Somadina to spare him."She laughed, pained.
"He didn't care that Somadina hurt me.He didn't care what I endured.He only cared that I might be able to save his worthless life."She looked at Azul, and for the first time, her eyes watered."What a hollow man.What a pathetic, selfish, useless man."
Of her father’s three daughters, only she, Chidinma, was born from his seed.Azul was taken in, Kamsi was a Djinn, and yet he raised them all with the same care he applied to everything, with the expectation that he would slowly accumulate the power that would one day lift his family above the mud of their village origins.
The first he raised to be queen.Beautiful, composed, trained in every art that might catch a prince's eye.He had poured resources into her education, her wardrobe, and her very presence, shaping her like a sculptor shapes clay.When the time came, she would marry well—better than well—and her rise would lift them all.
The second he rose to support from the shadows.Less visible, less celebrated, but equally valuable.She learned to read rooms instead of books, to track the movement of power through a palace, and to be everywhere and nowhere at once.She was adaptable, she was cold, and she was the one who would hold a knife.
The third he raised to support from the spirit realm.A Djinn, like Borji—but where Borji had been left to find his own path, Kamsi was guided, shaped, and aimed.She learned the old ways, the rituals and prayers, and the language of gods and ancestors.She would be their connection to forces beyond mortal comprehension.
Three daughters.Three purposes.Three paths to power.
Chidinma resented it.She was the only true daughter — why had he given the most prestigious position, the one of queen, to another.But standing here, walking through corridors she had mapped in her mind years ago, watching her sister dismantle a kingdom piece by piece, she understood the difference between her and Azul wasn't just whose bed they ended up in but who they were willing to kill.
