Page 25 of The Light Between Worlds

16

“YOUR SISTER WANTS A WORD WITH YOU AND YOURbrother, up in the study before dinner. She’s had a letter from the Tarsin heir,” Alfreya says to me one autumn afternoon, five years after our arrival in the Woodlands. I’ve come up from the castle farmstead and I’m still sweating and grimed with dirt.

“Is Jamie home?” I ask, delighted. He’s been away with Hector and a contingent of the army we all swear the Woodlands doesn’t have. We’re still not at war with the Empire—not officially, not yet—but for a long time now, things have been strained between us. Philippa may have managed to stall the raids four years ago with a flurry of letters between her and the Tarsin heir, but new outposts have gone up on the far side of the southern border. Barracks have been built. Troops are waiting. It can’t be long now. It worries Philippa, I know—for months, she’s been quiet and withdrawn, and I catch her watching me in the evenings with a sorrowful look in her eyes.

I hurry up to my room to take a bath and change, slipping into a clean woolen kirtle belted with green. The door to the study on the top floor of the keep is half open. I pause outside, the sound of voicesstopping me in my tracks. I shouldn’t listen—I should know better at sixteen, but curiosity gets the better of me.

Hector’s inside, standing in the center of the room, which is mostly taken up by an enormous desk. She sits behind it, in the attitude I’ve grown so used to, her chin resting on one hand, a quill still held in the other.

“—wrote to me and said that unless his father receives oaths and an initial tithe by then, it’ll mean a declaration of war,” Philippa tells Hector. She sets her quill down and rubs at her forehead. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’d hoped—well, I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. Not here, too.”

Philippa turns to the long window beside her that looks down at the plangent grey sea and the little square-sailed fishing boats coming in for the evening. For a moment, she seems a world away.

“The tides of war are sometimes impossible to turn,” Hector says. “But we’ve done everything we could to keep peace in the Woodlands. Even you’ve played your part.”

“The tides of war,” Phil says, half to the view of the sweeping sea. “What grim tides I’ve seen, Hector. Not battles or border skirmishes, but a war that stamped its mark on my entire world. No matter which way I turned, I couldn’t escape the reminders of it. The air raids, and blackouts, and hiding in bomb shelters. The boys on street corners, missing limbs, without a bit of hope in their eyes, not knowing how they were meant to live. I don’t want to see such things again. I don’t want my sister to—that war hurt her even more than it hurt me.”

“Philippa,” Hector says. “It’s not too late for you to go home.”

“Isn’t it, though? I—”

Booted footsteps sound on the staircase, and Jamie appears in the hall.

“Steady on, Evie,” he says. “What are you doing, skulking up here?”

“Oh, shut up,” I grumble, hoping Hector and Philippa haven’t overheard and learned I’ve been eavesdropping. Jamie smells of horses, wants a shave, and still wears his faded and mud-stained travel clothes, but I throw my arms around him anyway. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“So am I. Did you talk to Phil yet?”

“No, I was waiting for you,” I say, somewhat dishonestly. “But I don’t think she has good news.”

Jamie shakes his head. “No one has good news in the Woodlands right now. Things are very tense in the south. Should we go in and hear the worst of it?”

I nod, and we walk in together arm in arm, passing Hector, who’s on his way out.

Philippa stands at the window now, still staring out at the mournful sea and the boats being dragged up on shore. I go to my sister and put an arm around her waist. For the briefest moment, she rests her dark head on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Ev,” she murmurs.

“Sorry for what?”

Philippa doesn’t answer. Instead, she sits down at the desk so that it stands between her and Jamie and me.

“Venndarien’s coming back to the Woodlands one last time on the Emperor’s behalf,” she says. “A fortnight from today. I couldn’t hold him off any longer, though heaven knows I’ve tried. He wants our allegiance and a yearly tithe or his father will declare war on the Great Wood. I’ve just told Hector. Alfreya already knows.”

“We can’t pay,” I tell my sister flatly. “That’s all there is to it. This is the Woodlands—we can take care of ourselves, but a wealthy country we’re not.”

“Don’t tell me. He wants payment in timber rather than gold.” Jamie’s mouth turns down at the corners as he speaks, and my skin crawls. No one fells a tree in the Great Wood unless it’s already standing dead.

Philippa nods. “To fuel their other war effort, against the Illyrians in the west, and which we’ve already contributed iron ore to behind the Empire’s back.”

“The Empire will have to wipe out every Woodlander in the Great Wood if he wants the forest’s tinder,” I say. “Surely Venndarien knows that.”

“I think he does,” Phil answers. She knits her hands together, an unconscious and anxious gesture. “He’s pressing the point for exactly that reason. He was willing to play games for a while, and dance around the question of whether or not we’d leave the Woodlands for the Empire. But that was before fighting on the Illyrian front took up so much of the Empire’s time and resources—the Illyrians are desert folk, and their land and people withstand Heraklean fire far better than the Woodlands will. The Empire needs timber to feed their flames if they’re to prevail in Illyria, which means the Emperor won’t wait for the Great Wood any longer.”

“This is it, then,” I say.

My brother nods. “I suppose so.”