Page 60 of Eyes of Kings

“It wasn’t just your memories,” she says, pulling on her shoes. “It was you. Your qi that is so much more potent than everyone else’s. Do you know that I can pullpowerfrom you, Anton?”

She looks over to him. He is rooted where he stands.

Since Calla took that crown, there has been distance in her gaze. A murkiness while she’s lost to her thoughts, never fully disappearing even when she blinks and pulls herself back into the moment.

There was a time before Anton’s exile when August got an eye infection that took him out of school for a week. The infirmary forbade him from walking around lest he infect others, but Anton slipped into August’s rooms nonetheless, bored once his work was done, wanting accompaniment. August, because he was August, showed no distress. It hadn’t even looked like he was sick, short of the way his left eye would film over lightly.

Either Calla is not as skilled at hiding her affliction, or hers runs too deep to try.

“Is that what this was?” Anton asks. He lifts his hand. Scrunches. Tries to envision jumping, and a low, leaden alarm bell knells from his chest.

“The crown demands sacrifice,” Calla says. She turns away and shrugs on her jacket. “In case you forgot, you were the one who told me to take it—”

“I was the one who asked you to consider that a coup was our last resort,” Anton corrects. “That there was no option in which August ruled and we quietly slithered off into exile. I didn’t offer myself up as a sacrifice to your crown. I didn’t put myself forth as—”

“You didn’t, yes.” Calla spins around. “You were born into my path. You werebornput forth.”

Anton wants to claim he hardly recognizes Calla anymore. But that promptsa new fear: the question of whether he’s ever perceived her as she is, whether there has invariably been some veneer or another shielded over his eyes. The Calla before him now could be the same as she’s always been. Perhaps he has only never looked properly.

“Stop,” he breathes. “My father was not a god.”

“Anton.”

“He was an aristocrat born into the Palace of Earth,” Anton insists. “The Makusas are old. We can trace our family line back before the war.”

“The man you called your father was not the same man he was born as,” Calla snaps. “He was invaded. By the time you were conceived, your father possessed great qi that he could not fully access in mortal form. But you inherited some. And with the divine crown’s return, heavenly qi rushes to earth. The old gods awaken, and a part of you does too.”

A nerve twinges in Anton’s knee. He steps forward and almost collapses onto the rug. This war was his machination. He blew the first breath of life into the coup, knowing it would descend into madness, yet he never would have imagined these circumstances for their game board. He has never had his hand over the queen piece. He barely knows where the borders of their battle are anymore.

“You are pulling something out of a children’s storybook.”

“I witnessed a man detonate every building at San’s wall.” Calla gestures out. In the direction of the window and its gray clouds. “Then Chami, someone I have known since childhood, someone who spent years in the palace as the most ordinary attendant, killed him with a gesture. These are all storybook events. There are gods in our war, and there are gods in our kingdom. Long before I’d even left Rincun, this entirestorybookhad started, and it does us no good to deny it.”

Anton is lost for words. Where is any of this coming from? Hismemories? Over the roar in his ears, he can only stagger, and then he does drop fully onto the rug.

“Anton,” Calla says after a while. She does not come to him. She remains where she is, at a distance.

“You say I was born into your path,” he intones. “I was not. I chose this. I chose you.”

“But it makes sense now, does it not? First, Otta. Then, our…” Calla trails off.

“What? Ourlove?” He grips the bedpost at his side, his palm cutting into the grooves. “You can say the word, Calla. It is not poison.”

“I asked for yourlovebefore we fought in the arena. Forgive me if I cannot identify it, given you were willing to kill me for Otta at that moment.”

Anton can hardly breathe. It is his qi, he realizes. His lungs are tight and his throat is closing, and the reserve of his power inside him isempty.

“No,” Anton says. “That’s not how it was. You cannot dredge that back up—”

“It was me or her. And so it was her. Out in the provinces, as August’s prisoners, it was me or death. And so it was me.”

“Stop.Stop!”

His shout echoes harshly. Anton closes his eyes. He reaches in, tells his body that perhaps he is to jump, and there—a flicker. This emptiness is not permanent. It is only a matter of time until it fills to the brim again.

Anton forces himself to his feet.

“I promised myself as your general, Calla,” he says, gathering his composure. “It is too late to resist it. We are no longer mere allies in a tyrant king’s games. We stand on a grand battlefield. I don’t… I don’t…”