In the next, she bargained away the life of her friend.
She celebrated her sixteenth birthday in the evening alone in her small palace room. No one knew, or no one cared, and her passage to womanhood went wholly unnoticed. She slipped from her balcony and climbed up onto the roof. She lay back onto the tiles, feeling the latent heat of them burn her shoulders through her thin silk top. She stared up at the sky.
She had waited for the gods. Waited and waited for them to uphold their end of the bargain. But her years in the palace had slid unremarkably by. She was no closer to being Empress than she was when she first made her vow.
She had decided to stop waiting. The crown prince had died that morning in a hunting accident, and with the Empress almost a decade gone herself and the Emperor unlikely at this point to remarry, there would be no more heirs. It was rumored that Eda herself was the Emperor’s illegitimate daughter, and though she had found no proof of that, she could use it to her advantage.
Perhaps the gods had been waiting on her all this time. They’d given her the pieces she needed. She just had to act.
She drew a small vial from the pocket concealed against her breast, and studied it in the moonlight. It was odd, to hold a man’s death in her hands.
The room was hot. Stifling. The Emperor lay dead beside her, his body already stiffening. She looked at him without regret and stood from her chair, calling for her attendants to make her resplendent. A sense of rightness burned in her; this is what was owed to her, this is what the gods had promised. She went to take what was hers.
She was climbing a cliff, driving spikes into the rock. Sweat dripped down her back even though the air was frigid. There was music on the air, brimming bright with gold. There were wings beneath her, wide and warm.
She was wandering through the dark and the shadows had teeth. They sank into her, gnawing her ankles down to bone. But a light in her burned and burned. It drew her onward.
She stood on a high mountain, the sun blazing hot above her, the wind slicing through her thin frame. She was hollowed out by age and time. Her body was frail, brittle. She could feel the life in her ebbing away, bit by bit. But she had wanted to see this view one last time: the sun from the mountains. Tears streamed down her face but she didn’t mind them. They dampened her cheeks and made her think of her life, everything she had done and undone. Every wrong she had righted.
“The gods can take me, now,” she whispered. “I am ready to travel the Circles once more. I am ready to go home.”
And she shut her eyes and let herself fall from the cliff, fall and fall, as Uerc had done long ago.
The air rushed past her. It was time, and she welcomed it.
She fell and fell. Her heart rushed into her ears. Darkness folded over her, and she was screaming.
She lay in the dark.
The shadows had teeth.
They were eating her.
She couldn’t get free.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“EDA,ARE YOU LISTENING? SOMETIMESISWEARon Tuer himself I don’t knowwhereyour mind goes.”
Eda turned from the window, where she’d been looking down at the sea. She’d lost herself for some moments in the mesmerizing waves, watching them break with white foam on the rocks. She must have slipped into some kind of daydream, but not the pleasant kind. The kind filled with darkness and shadows and fear. She didn’t want to think about it.
And yet—and yet shemustthink about it.
She hopped down from the windowsill and passed her father’s chair, wandering out into the rest of the house, that sense of darkness pressing down and down.
She stepped through the door into a world of swirling shadow. There was no sun, no wind. The sky was dark and writhing. The grass was brittle underneath her feet.
She turned back to the house but it crumbled away at her touch, falling to dust.
She stood alone in a whirling void, the darkness clawing at her hair, her clothes. She bowed her head and fought her way forward. She knew she could not stand still—she would be ripped apart.
She walked for an eternity, and another after that, and she thought she saw ahead of her a glimmer of shadow, but not the kind she feared. It was luminous somehow, and she knew she was meant to follow it.
She did, quickening her pace, desperate not to lose the shadow into the nothingness of the void. It turned back, once. She saw sad eyes in a kind face, and she remembered stepping through the door into the Circle of Time, jumping from memory to memory. She remembered her journey. She remembered herself.
“Wait!” she cried, as the shadow turned away from her again and winked out like a candle flame. “Please wait!”
But the shadow had brought her where she was meant to be: a wide green valley, mountains stretching above her to graze the brilliant sky.
