chin up to Con. “What did you tell everyone?”
“We kept the news as quiet as we could,” he told me gravely, a hint of doubt in his face. “I know how hard you’ve worked to keep your—our—people from panicking. Not many know you disappeared from the Battle at Cradysica.”
“What do they think happened to Me?”
“That you were injured and needed time to recover,” Con replied.
“Your other ladies went to the temple, Your Highness,” Ibolya added. “They’ve gone into seclusion, and we let everyone believe You went with them. To heal.”
The way she added that last, so tenderly and hopefully, sorely tested my precarious poise. To heal. It sounded as far beyond me as the sky.
“Lia.” Con at last let go of the rail and gazed down at me very seriously as he ran a gentle hand over my bald scalp. “You should know—Tertulyn is with them.”
I nearly staggered. Would have, if Con hadn’t been supporting me still. “I didn’t see her,” I managed to say, “at Yekpehr. I looked for her in Anure’s court, but she was here all along.”
Con nodded, then shook his head. “It’s a long story, and you’re weaving on your feet. Let’s get you inside and take this slowly.”
I looked past him to the horizon I couldn’t see, the night and storm obscuring it all. But I felt the gazes of those wizards streaming through the distance, the hot glare of their obsession following me. I’d vanquished their wave, but they’d be back with more and better.
“Taking things slowly isn’t an option,” I observed. Ambrose stepped into my line of sight and inclined his head in apparent agreement. “Unfortunately,” I added with a nod to Kara, “time is what we don’t have.”
2
Lia at last agreed to let me carry her into the palace, conceding only because no one was awake to witness her weakness. Not that she had much of a choice about it. The woman might possess the courage and will—and the obstinate pride—of a person ten times her size, but her ordeal had weakened her to the point that she couldn’t stand without me holding her up. I hadn’t gone twenty steps carrying her before she’d slipped back into sleep. Or unconsciousness. A fine line there, but the flesh only responds to will so far as physical laws of the universe allow.
Though if anyone could bend those laws, Lia could.
Ibolya, wearing a cloak like Lia’s that hid all vestiges of the woman beneath, led us up to the palace via a path that was little more than a deer trail through the woods. The storm had escalated again. Lightning snaked through the sky, rattling us with sudden, intense cracks of nearby strikes, thunder shaking my bones. At least the canopy of broad, tropical leaves blocked most of the rain and tearing wind. Orchids danced in the waving limbs, trailing lush and luminous in the shadows. Vesno, at first delighted to be freed from the small cabin we’d stuck him in to keep the wolfhound from being swept overboard by the storm, whined at every boom and huddled so close to my leg I kept nearly tripping on him.
Runoff streamed down the trail from above, making the sometimes steep path treacherously slick. Rain lashed in a downpour through breaks in the canopy, startlingly chill. Still, I’d tromped through worse, with heavier loads. Lia weighed basically nothing—something I tried not to worry about.
I had zero experience with the dead coming back to life. I had no idea how to cope with this fresh terror that she might die all over again. Could I survive Lia’s death twice? I doubted it.
And then Rhéiane … I’d thought my long-lost sister dead, too. I’d lived all these years with that grief, had hardened myself to that reality along with everything else that lay in dust at the bottom of my burnt-coal heart. If Agatha’s “Lady Rhéiane” at Yekpehr was truly my sister, she’d have been Anure’s prisoner and probably his plaything all these years. If she was really alive, that meant what she’d endured … I shook that thought away.
I hope she’s dead, because the alternative doesn’t bear contemplating, Sondra had said. I didn’t know what I wanted, but “hope” didn’t enter into it.
When I’d thought Lia dead, yeah, there had been a restfulness to that loss of all hope. I shifted her in my arms so I could better see her face, so pale, luminous as her orchids in the thrashing trees. Her petal-thin skin had sunk over