of that old gilded age, the Blood Queen pulled the oceans from their beds, called down the sun’s fire, uprooted the mountains, and all that Celdaria once was, all that the world once was, collapsed under the weight of her rage.
With Remy’s dear voice echoing in her mind, Eliana realized that the chasm was where mountains had once stood. Mountains her mother had obliterated on the last night of her life.
Once again, Eliana flexed her bare hands and called for the power she had fought so ferociously to understand.
Nothing answered.
She nearly resumed laughing. Of course nothing answered, for she had become nothing, a wreck of her former self, and it was a relief to know it. A powerless Sun Queen would be of no use to anyone. But if they returned her castings to her, that would be the real danger. Her mother’s power in her blood, her castings around her hands once more, and the Emperor’s mind directing her exhausted one. His control supplanting hers. His will consuming her own. Encouraging her to try again. Insisting she try again, and again, until eventually some exhausted spark of power would alight, and it would all be over. He would have her—a Sun Queen puppet to play with as he liked.
A frightening giddiness overtook her as she imagined the angels clawing at the scraps of her mind, searching for a weapon they would never find.
Fists clenched in her chains, Eliana bit her lip until it bled.
She would take her own life before she allowed her power to rise for the Emperor’s use.
They passed through a white archway, then across another stone yard and down a flight of steps into a series of tunnels. They were dark and cold and twisting, clearly designed to confound intruders, and in the close, damp air, Eliana began to feel as queasy as she had when she and Harkan had first boarded the Streganna, when the black lily’s poison sat thick in her veins.
Thinking of him—his warm, dark eyes, his arms steady around her, how he had accepted her even on her meanest days—Eliana’s eyes grew hot. She stumbled; a guard caught her elbow. It was possible, she told herself, that Harkan hadn’t died. She hadn’t seen him on the beach in Festival. Simon hadn’t shot him as he had shot so many others.
It was possible. It was a tiny, timid hope. It turned in her heart like a tender bud working hard to open, and she clutched it with every ounce of tired strength left to her.
The world around her was changing. She noticed it dully, her vision unfocused. A polished marble floor. Ceilings high and dark, glittering with painted stars—silver and gold, violet and crystalline blue. Tall windows of painted glass cast streams of colored light across a tall, narrow room. Amber and rose, turquoise and jade.
Admiral Ravikant led the way, hands clasped behind his back, his gait easy and sickeningly familiar. Her father’s steps, slightly altered. Then Simon after him, quiet but clearly comfortable, the tension missing from his shoulders. He had been pretending before, Eliana realized, and now he was not. Now he could relax. Now he was himself.
A wash of human-shaped color to her left, startlingly near, caught her eye.
She faltered, foundering in the grip of her guards.
It was a statue. A woman.
One of many.
“Come, come,” said Admiral Ravikant. His voice bounced with glee. “No dawdling.”
The guards pushed her onward, and Eliana obeyed—but she hardly noticed any of them.
Instead, she stared at the women.
It was a gallery of women, some carved out of stone, some blown from glass, others assembled from thousands of miniscule colored tiles. Women of golden brass, women fashioned from plates of steel and copper wires, women painted with splashes of color and hung from the walls.
Eliana’s skin prickled as they passed between the frozen figures. They seemed too exquisite to be real, even the grotesque ones boasting a strange sort of beauty, and there were too many of them, so many that Eliana felt unbalanced, as if the world had tilted askew. It was an obsessive collection, packing the room from wall to wall with seemingly no logic to their arrangement.
And then, passing one, Eliana stopped, jarred to a halt by a sickening realization.
She stared at the sculpture before her—a woman of glittering black stone, her limbs impossibly delicate, her proportions elongated and alien. She was on her knees, her body arched in obvious agony, her arms and head flung back and left vulnerable to the fury