Page 59 of Eyes of Kings

The Weisanna dismounts. He strides toward Otta, then stops before her.

Otta pulls out a blade.

“Otta,” August warns.

“Relax.” She slices through her own palm. Blood blooms bright red downher fingers, dripping beads to the ground. The Weisanna does not want to step closer, does not want to come within reach. But he shuffles toward Otta when she gestures, because he will not refuse instructions. Otta takes his arm and begins to draw.

She makes two horizontal lines, then a longer, vertical line coming off the second. With a flourish, she adds two slanted lines to either side of the vertical axis.

“Otta…”

The Weisanna’s eyes roll back into his head. August braces, his grip tightening on his reins.

“Otta!”

“At attention.”

The Weisanna stands alert. His silver irises are gone, rolled all the way back inside his head. Angry red veins bulge against his eyeballs.

Otta says, “Walk to the left three paces.”

Exactly as instructed, the Weisanna turns, and walks three paces to the left.

August thought he wanted his sister woken. He thought he could bear the cost of her knowledge and her strangeness. But for the first time since he made such a decision, August wonders if he would have been better off leaving her for dead. Tracing it back a thousand steps, he should have had Anton Makusa killed years ago, and then Otta Avia would have disappeared with him.

“What is this?” he asks.

“The Avia bloodline is nothing special, August,” Otta says. “It’s stronger than most, which I’m sure you take pride in, but leading among mortals has its limits. Against the Weisannas, for example. I should have taken more qi before I tried anything back then.”

August narrows his eyes. She speaks about her attempt at robbing the vaults. Back when Otta and Anton were going to venture out into the provinces on their own, taking as much money as they could before the palace soldiers came after them. Back when they got caught, and Otta failed to invade the Weisannas.

“You are still an Avia,” he says. “What has changed?”

“There’s more qi surging through the earth. Enough to wake everyone. Enough to mess with our war.” Otta clicks her fingers, and the Weisanna jolts. His eyes snap back to normal, his silver color severe in the gray day. He splutters for breath.

The Weisanna has returned to himself, yet he dares not ask what happened. Otta takes her reins.

“No more agreements,” she says. “There are not enough pieces to go around.”

August gestures for the Weisanna to return to his horse. Rain from the previous hour is still caught in his sleeves, and it trickles onto his saddle with the motion. The Weisanna hurries off.

“We can try this your way,” August relents.

Otta whistles a long note. She’s grinning as she rides off. “So much to discuss.”

CHAPTER 27

A god?” Anton repeats. He doesn’t understand. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly that,” Calla replies.

She moves briskly as she fetches her shirt and pulls it on, then tugs her long sleeves straight. Calla doesn’t much look like herself these days. It has taken Anton some time to put his finger on it, because her physical appearance remains the same. The way she walks, the way she tilts her head to prompt an answer. Her habit of biting her thumbnail if she doesn’t catch herself before raising her hand to her mouth. All that remains.

It is, Anton decides, something about the clarity in her eyes that has shifted. When she believed him responsible for plotting a hit on Eno, she’d stormed through his door, each step leaving the sear of a chemical burn. Her presence in the apartment plummeted the temperature. Her touch on the walls burned silver; her grip on his neck threatened to sink through muscle, through sinew, into bone.

“No, Calla, you need to explain further than that.” Anton hurries for his clothes too. He is off-kilter. His foot misses the leg of his trousers. “What did you see?”

He had caught flashes of her in return. Merging qi opens a two-way street, and if she went digging through his very sense of self, then he was left adrift inthe wide expanse that makes upherdistant memories. The fields of Rincun, the cold mountains.The borderlands—why would Calla have been in the borderlands as a child?