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the back door, skirting past an old hut and a small pond where a dozen geese watched us with lazy disinterest. The environment was quite different from the center of the city. Old King Achlev had wanted to make his wall into a perfect circle, and that meant enclosing parts of the cliffs and forest and mountain.
“Where are we going?” I asked, looking up at the towering pines.
“Not long now,” he replied, helping me down into a depression that must have been left by a creek on its way to the fjord, before it was dammed to make the pond.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Look.” He parted some tall reeds and pointed to the underside of the bridge.
“I don’t see—?”
He moved me two feet forward, and an opening came into view. It was little more than three feet high, framed into a square by old timbers. Probably some kind of defunct culvert. “It requires a slight change of perspective to find it,” he said, ducking inside and motioning me to follow.
The interior of the passage was dark and musty, smelling strongly of mold and muddy soil. “After the wall was erected, a system of canals was built under the city to irrigate the vegetation growing on the inside of the wall. As the city grew, the earliest system was no longer sufficient, so three hundred or so years ago they blocked off some of the old water lines and built newer, stronger ones. Watch your head there. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time reading old books from the archives, and I came across the plans for the old system.”
“That’s what this is? Some old canal?”
“Yes. This is one of the better ones. Most are collapsed or flooded, and impassable. This way.”
The passage forked, one side slanting off sharply to the right, the other carrying on straight forward. We took the right passage, which seemed to descend for a long while before angling back up and winding in a narrow circle. Then, with little warning, we stepped out into the light.
We’d come to a rocky inlet. The water lapped moodily against the shore, sheltered by an overhanging outcrop of stone. In the distant stretch across the fjord, I could see the third of Achlev’s gates, topped with three crowned figures. King’s Gate.
Zan was already going up the rocks, but slowly; they were slick with water and very steep. I followed him, the stitches in my side pulling painfully. From the top, he helped me onto the last big step and then up over the ledge.
We were at the base of a standalone tower, separate from the castle and taller than its turrets by half. It stood in isolation on the edge of the water, cloaked in a thatch of vine that snaked all the way to the pinnacle; it took a second glance to discern that it was, indeed, made of stone and was not a massive structure of greenery that grew tower-shaped on its own.
I toed the vine at my feet. “Is this . . . ?”
“Bloodleaf,” Zan said. “Yes. Best not to get any closer. Most people won’t come near here because of it.”
“What is this place?”
“A monument,” Zan said. “To Aren. Do you know who that is?”
I thought of Toris’s surprise at the Harbinger in the Ebonwilde. He’d called her Aren. I’d been too distraught to consider it then, but was it possible that the Harbinger and the fabled queen were one and the same? “Yes. I do. She was a high mage and the queen of Renalt. She and her brothers were casting a spell when Achlev killed her . . .”
“This is the site of the spell,” he said, “but in our legends it was Cael who killed Aren. They were closing a gateway between the material and spectral planes when he heard a voice from the other side, an enchanting voice that convinced him to kill his sister to stop the spell.” He turned his chin up, wind whipping his hair around the cut of his patrician profile, stark against a gray sky. “Achlev was a feral mage, but his true gift was transfiguration, not healing. He used every ounce of his magic to stop Cael and save Aren, but it didn’t work. Full of guilt at his failure, he constructed this tower in her memory, and then built the city and the wall to protect it.”
“In all of our stories, Cael died trying to save Aren from Achlev, and the Empyrea brought him back to life to serve as her messenger.”
Zan scoffed. “Do you really think that if the Empyrea was to grant immortality to one person in all of human history, she would choose the man who would someday found the Tribunal? No, if I have to blame one of the brothers for what happened that day, I’m going to go with the one who made a career of murder afterward.”
In Renalt the Empyrea was both the benevolent creator of our spirits and the vengeful decider of our fates. It never occurred to me to consider how contradictory each version was to the other. I struggled to reconcile with this new idea, even as I was relieved by it. “I’ve never thought of it that way,” I murmured. “My whole life, I just assumed . . .”
“That the Goddess supposedly responsible for making you who you are despised you for it?” Zan paused, giving me an assessing stare, and I had the distinct impression that he could see into me. Through me. Like I was little more than a glass case, with every cast-off thought and childish emotion cluttering my shelves on clear display. “It’s not hard to guess why you’re here, Emilie. Especially now that the princess and prince of Renalt have recounted the Tribunal’s attempt to dethrone your queen. The city of Achlev has ever been a place of refuge for people targeted by that organization. Most are not endowed with any special gifts, magic or otherwise; they come simply because the mere suspicion of witchcraft in Renalt is enough to warrant investigation and execution. The princess seems to be one of these unfortunate few; it’s obvious she has no real talent for magic, no matter what the Tribunal has insinuated.” He stopped. “But you do.”
I closed my eyes.
“You worked in the castle, didn’t you? That’s how you met Simon. And that’s why you didn’t want to be seen when the Princess Aurelia and Prince Conrad went by; you knew they’d probably recognize you, and that frightened you.”
This was my chance. I could tell him everything. My hands were clammy, my heart pounding. Zan could bring my case to Valentin—?they were cousins, after all. I could let it all out right now. My story was on the tip of my tongue. I simply had to open my mouth and speak it. I could tell him my real name, tell him about Toris’s betrayal, about Conrad, Lisette . . .
Lisette. If I revealed her now, what would be done to her? She’d committed treason of the highest order, but she seemed to think she was doing the right thing, protecting Conrad and Valentin . . . from me. I remembered her bright eyes when she was ten years old, clutching my letters from Achlev’s prince. She was the one who’d answered them, not me. With her golden hair and bright blue eyes, she resembled Conrad more than I did. There was a chance that, if I did confess my identity, they wouldn’t believe me. I could be punished, jailed, hauled off into a gibbet just for the insinuation that Lisette was an impostor.
And if they did believe me, then Lisette could face as much or worse. Despite everything that had happened between us, I could not forget that for the last seven years, she could have borne witness to my witchcraft and didn’t.
I realized Zan was watching me, waiting for a response. I swallowed and commanded my hammering heart to be still. “How are they?” I asked. “The prince and . . . the princess?”
