Page 28 of Eyes of Kings

And now the rest of the kingdom is going to hear that Calla’s performance suffered tremendously. Why follow her if she is on course toward losing? Why fight for her if she is powerless despite wearing the divine crown?

Calla exhales, rising to her feet. Her head stings. She’s not sure if it’s her bleeding wound or if it’s strain from the crown, worsening the pressure on her skull. Anton grabs her elbow to help her, and without thinking, Calla tugs from him again.

Anton gasps. He felt it this time.

“Are you all right?” Calla asks quickly.

“Yes,” Anton replies, frowning. He is puzzled for a moment. Then, visibly, he brushes off the sensation, unable to place it. “Yes, of course. I should be asking you that question.”

“I’m fine.” Calla pulls away. She already feels better. Her head wound lighter, less persistent in its throbbing. “We need to move. Return to San-Er and regroup.”

Anton watches her. She thinks, perhaps, he will confront her about what she’s been doing, how she’s been sapping away his qi every time it strengthens.

Instead, he asks:

“Do you… feel like yourself?”

“I wasn’t invaded,” Calla says wryly, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

Double qi can’t be invaded. Anton should know better—Anton knows the truth. But he folds his arms, his expression shrouded in the shadows, and she feels his doubt, his wavering.

“I had to ask.”

“It may beyourfirst trick, but it doesn’t work on me.”

“Would you take a moment before getting defensive?” Anton lowers his voice, glancing over at the Crescents to ensure they’re not listening. “Every time I blink, the rules have changed again on our qi. Maybe Otta can—”

“Shecannot,” Calla interrupts in a low, violent hiss, “invade me. She is not capable.”

Being in the provinces does, inevitably, bring back remnants of her early dread: her first year in the Palace of Heavens, when she was constantly paranoid that either someone would realize she was an intruder, or the princess would gather enough strength beneath her to boot her into oblivion. As time passed, the dread hardened into something existential. She started to comprehend the feat she achieved. She decided that she would die before she gave up this bodily conquest. Anton does not understand, because he was born into aristocracy, and this power has always been promised to him.

“You’re not invaded,” Anton states, “but you dropped like you were dead, Calla. What did Otta do to you?”

Whathasn’tOtta done since she woke, that’s the better question. These slow embers of fury have been burning in Calla’s stomach since the day Otta was brought into the Palace of Union, but upon retching, there’s molten resentment and embarrassment alike on her teeth now. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Calla wields the divine crown. She’s supposed to emerge victorious againstanyoneshe goes up against.

“I don’t know.” She hates that it is an honest answer. She hides no agenda up her sleeve while admitting to her shortcomings. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense, does it? She overpowered me in the palace in the mountains,fine. But with the crown? In what world—”

And, suddenly, Calla remembers what Otta said. She’s implied it before too. Back when they regarded a mere replica as the divine crown. When Anton was the one walking around in August’s body, trying to stop Otta from revealing the truth to the kingdom. Otta had warned Calla. It was only that Calla did not want to see it.

You have takeneverythingfrom me.

Her stomach drops out from underneath her. She must still be weak from the battle, because Calla’s knees buckle, and she staggers in response.

Anton rushes to catch her. “Calla?”

The air is drier in Rincun—it’s the mountains, looming like sleeping giants. She is eight years old. She is starving. She sights the princess from San-Er walking toward her, surrounded by nothing but empty fields and deep troughs of mud, and she wants to be her. Wants it more than anything in the world, wants it enough to break herself apart.

“Yes,Calla,” she says emphatically. She lowers her voice. “It’s her.”

Anton is not understanding. He couldn’t. Even after he’s walked away from her, there is no world in which he imagines Otta Avia as anyone other than the girl who fell through the Palace of Earth by chance.

“What—”

Calla takes his shoulders, shaking him once. “It’s always been her. The real Tuoleimi princess.Sinoa.”

In the aftermath of revelation, while marching through the night at the head of their army containing bruised and beaten Crescent Society members, Anton is left alone to trawl through his memories. Every incident with Otta where she spoke or acted in a manner too strange for their circumstances. Where does he draw the line? What was real—what was rehearsed? Were they ever going to run away together, or was it one additional step in the grand recovery of her body?

Her behavior never struck him as odd. It’s this that he turns over, chewing on every encounter until they’re barely intelligible. Healwaysthought Otta Avia fit the image of the person she was supposed to be. During her first few years in the palace, before he had truly entered her orbit, he heard from August that she was a hypocrite: she told him off when he jumped because putting his qi in a common body was unsuitable for their new stature. Anton remembers coming across Otta in one of the sitting rooms and daring her to jump into one of the attendants—you won’t do it, he goaded—and she did it and returned in a flash, one brow quirked to say,I’m hardly afraid of you.