until at last the ceiling broke apart and sunlight poured through. The kehoks kept battering the walls until they crumbled. The outer labyrinth walls crashed down,in a cloud of dust. Tamra urged the silver jaguar forward, and they climbed over the rubble. She kept the other kehoks fanned out around her on either side as they picked their way over the crushed labyrinth.
She faced a doorway, shrouded by the dust-choked air. “Shalla?” she called.
“Mama?” a voice called back, and then was muffled.
A deeper voice said, “This is the point where we compromise. We have your daughter, as you can see. Cease your destruction.”
Stop, she ordered the kehoks.
The deep voice began to list out demands, beginning with her immediate surrender of the black lion kehok—
“And if I refuse?” Tamra called out. Her heart was hammering hard within her chest. She felt every beat. Her skin tingled. She’d never felt more tied to a moment. My Shalla is within that room. With them.
A woman’s voice said flatly, “Then your daughter dies, crushed by falling rock. A tragedy that you caused with the damage to the temple.”
“You cannot hope to win,” another chimed in. “Any moment now, the temple guards will descend. You and your black lion atrocity cannot prevail. You will be outnumbered.”
They don’t know I have an army, Tamra realized.
“Is this the verdict of all the high augurs?” she asked. “Is there none of you who will defend an innocent child?”
The deeper voice again. “There is more at stake than one life. You do not understand what the cost will be to Becar.”
“The cost of what? The cost of people knowing the high augurs are as corrupt as a kehok?” Tamra asked. “Are you afraid they’ll realize you murdered their emperor and arranged for his soul to be eternally tormented, purely for whatever political power play you wanted? That they’ll know you condemned Prince Dar to die for reasons you’ve engineered?”
“All for the good of Becar,” another voice said. “You have a child. You understand the lengths one would go to to protect it. The Becaran Empire is our child.”
“Bullshit,” Tamra said. “You don’t lie to your child.” Raising her voice, she said, “Shalla, are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
There were murmured voices again. Beside her, the kehoks pawed at the rubble. But under her tight control, they stayed silent. She knew the others on the edges of the temple were also paused in their destruction. She could sense them coiled like a spring.
She tried again. “Shalla? Are you there?”
From within the chamber she heard murmured voices, and then she heard Shalla’s sweet voice. “I’m here! Mama . . . Augur Yorbel . . . he’s dead.”
She didn’t expect to feel grief at that, but she did. I trusted him before, and he betrayed me, she thought. But she’d never wanted him dead.
“You see, then,” one of the high augurs said, “how serious we are.”
“Sweetheart, close your eyes,” she told Shalla. “No matter what happens. Keep them shut.” And then she took a deep breath.
Past and future didn’t exist.
Consequences didn’t matter.
There was only this moment, like she’d told Raia when she raced. She had this one moment to change the world. “Do not touch my daughter,” she said.
The high augur within the chamber replied, “We will not harm her if you—”
But she wasn’t talking to him. “Kill the rest.”
She released her mental grip on the nearest monsters. They threw themselves through the door. Tamra rode the silver jaguar through the doorway. Surveying the chamber, she stayed mounted on the silver jaguar as the high augurs screamed.
Screamed and died.
She felt the screams inside her, welcomed them.
In one corner, Shalla was huddled beside the body of Augur Yorbel. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her hands were pressed over her ears. Controlling the kehoks, Tamra kept them away from Shalla. But she let her monsters do as they wished with the rest.
Blood sprayed on the walls, on the ceiling, on Tamra, on Shalla’s student robes, and Tamra bore witness to it all. The head high augur died when a spider kehok tore his head from his body. An elderly man was impaled by the horn of rhino with a hide like a crocodile. A lizard kehok gnawed on the body of a third. Watching, Tamra felt as if she were fraying apart inside, as the images embedded themselves deep in what would become her nightmares. But she did not let herself look away. She was causing this; she had to bear