Page 80 of Eyes of Kings

Anton pushes through the troops until he’s almost directly behind August. He stares into the back of his head, bleached once more, a gleaming white blond.You can’t have the kingdom in reward, he fumes silently.You don’t deserve it after what you’ve done.

It is as if August hears him. He glances over his shoulder, his nose wrinkled. Anton does not look away.

And August meets his eyes.

When Anton jumps, he is caught in momentary darkness. Lankil’s dull daylight turns to nothing. He’s floating. His arm burns—the sigil stutters. It is hissing in tongues, whispering something that he cannot catch, that he cannot hold no matter which way he twists and turns while he is still in a void.

Then he’s back in the manor. Staring up at the mural, lying supine on the cool floor. Calla sits beside him, her legs crossed. Her hair pouring off one shoulder, her head propped on a fist. As soon as he moves his head, signaling that he has returned, Calla grows alert.

“His forward march is a distraction,” Anton says before he does anything else, before he sits up, before he wipes off the blood smeared on his arm. “He halved his army and sent a force to block travel in Janton while he continues into Actia. He’s starting on the siege sooner than we thought.”

Calla takes a beat to digest his words. She blinks. Then she offers her hand, helping him up.

“Okay,” she says. “We will meet his army in Janton and wipe them out.”

CHAPTER 37

Finally, Rincun.

Five days on the road, rotating through their drivers so that there was no pause. Five days, the window to the carriage caked with dirt because they passed rural dwellers who decided to hurl mud patties at the traveling noble from San-Er.

Venus was surprised when they rode into West Capital and found it in good shape. The province is quiet. The rain doesn’t fall at the same intensity as it does in San-Er, but when it comes down, it’s sleet scattering in front of the horses. The freeze has lifted off Rincun, yet its residue clings to the cracked roads, the frost on the village houses.

Venus and her attendants did not stop at the yamen first. She was told she needed to act in a way that seemed separate from Calla Tuoleimi’s war, so the carriage proceeded ahead, into the borderlands first. Their drivers stayed parked at the base of the mountains. Venus, with five palace girls, started her climb.

The path has started to level out. The terrain hums faintly, but when Venus tries to pinpoint where exactly it’s coming from, she fails to trace it. Through all the time she has spent sitting in the carriage, she has considered whether this might be a joint effort by Calla and the Crescents to get rid of her. Some ritualistic execution. A quick death is too kind for the lineage she comes from. She needs to be lured into the borderlands and torn apart by wild animals hiding in the snow.

Surely Calla would not do that to her. She is not kind, but she is practical.

Venus tugs her jacket tighter. She wishes she were dressed more warmly. Snow has soaked into her shoes. Snow sticks to the edges of her trousers. She can’t get the incessant humming out of her ears. At one point in time, the kingdom believed that the borderlands granted entry into the heavenly plane. This was where all the old gods went when they disappeared from the mortal world.

“There’s the next flag,” one of her attendants calls. The path up to the palace in the mountains has been marked indeed. It is easy to follow the small yellow flags planted in the ground.

It wasn’t long up the incline before they started to encounter the bodies too. Blue and half-buried in the snow, shoved off to the side to keep the path clear, and to remind them that they were proceeding in the correct direction. There were many casualties during Rincun’s freeze. During the search for the divine crown.

They veer to the right, following the path as it bends. The better part of an hour passes in the cold. Huffing, puffing, staying in single file to avoid skidding on the gravel. At a certain point, Venus finds herself frowning, reaching out to cup some snow off the side of the mountain. Why is it so clean on the path? Nobody uses this passage up to the abandoned palace. The villagers in Rincun are afraid of the mountains. Where is the buildup, then? Where are the dirty layers that have packed one atop the other with each bout of snowfall?

“Councilmember,” an attendant huffs behind her, “shouldn’t we be there already?”

“I don’t know,” Venus says.

She keeps shuffling forward. She doesn’t have a choice in the matter. She isn’t welcome in San-Er; she isn’t welcome in Rincun.

Venus doesn’t see the gate when it appears to the left. One of her attendants has to get her attention, yelling, “Look!”

They all halt on the path, turning. The slope teeters lower, leveling intoa short ditch before rising again to show a plain wooden arch. It’s sovereign ground, inscribed with archaic Talinese characters that Venus cannot read.

Beyond it: the stacks of bodies.

There’s a gasp from one of the attendants. The rest of them keep their composure. Venus knows it’s rude that she hasn’t learned any of their names across the journey. But each time she considers making conversation she remembers the overturned carriage when it pushed into San-Er. She sees the cavity blown into Councilmember Rehanou’s chest.

The mountains are dead quiet as Venus leads the charge, pushing the back of her hand into her nose to hide her disgust. Her legs sink knee-deep into the snow. It is no longer the occasional corpse appearing along their path, but hundreds of them, piled before the palace to form a semicircle, disappearing on either side of the perimeter. There is no avoiding it. In order to approach the palace, Venus wades right up to the bodies and, wincing, picks her way between two of them.

“Come on,” she calls. “I’ve cleared the way.”

The appearance of the palace worsens the humming in her ears. The mountains alone offered a light ambient sound, but as Venus nears the plain white turrets, it heightens to a sharp peal. When she climbs the steps toward the entrance, she walks as though in a dream, barely perceiving her attendants rushing by, pushing into the vestibule and getting started. They carry burlap sacks and oversized bags.

Ready to pluck offerings.