I sighed. “I wish things were as simple as daydreams.”
“Me, too.” He squeezed my shoulder. “One day they will be.”
That wistfulness thickened my throat, but I swallowed past it. “Let’s speak as we walk.”
Cyren, the Starsearcher General, led the way down the pale cobblestone path leading from Harlen’s home. He’d been assigned it as a member of the council working to instill a new ruler since Titus’s death. There was a row of twelve identical buildings lining the road immediately west of the chancellor’s manor. Cyren resided in one of the others.
They took us through the manor’s back gates—only two guards stationed here now that there wasn’t a chancellor within—and through the orange groves. My chest twisted with memories. Strolling with Titus as a young girl. Picking fruit in the spring.
Thankfully, Cyren sliced through the reverie. “We got Cypherion’s request for alliance.”
“And?” I asked, voice still a bit shaky as we passed the place where two trees leaned toward each other, and the ache in my chest ripped wider. I used to hide there when I was small.
“You have the Starsearchers at your command,” Cyren confirmed. I shook off the lingering pain, forcing myself to focus.
“But we have to know,” Harlen whispered, “is it truly a god?”
We rounded a bend in the path, and the manor sprawled before us. My throat constricted, but I tried to keep my eyes on the others as we approached the back porch.
As Cyren climbed the stairs, Jezebel said roughly, “Yes, he is. And he’s taken my sister and Malakai captive.”
“What?” Cyren gasped, frozen on the top step.
“We didn’t want to put that bit in writing,” I explained, and I told the whole story as we stood outside the manor I grew up in. I even explained the reading I saw when the Angels emerged—or what I could of it, given that so much still didn’t make sense to me.
The gods hadbeen there. They’d looked at me—Moirenna had spoken to me.Fatecatcher, we will see you soon. I hadn’t been able to piece together any of it, but I had a sickening feeling the gods were much closer than we’d thought.
Cyren’s face paled as we finished explaining Valyrie’s recent visit, not even the fearsome leathers and decorated medal on their chest rebuilding their armor. They exchanged a look with Harlen. “We’ll have to tell the rest of the council.”
“The god’s return is no longer a secret,” Jezebel said. “Tell whomever you must in order to prepare them.”
Cyren breathed in that truth and recovered themself, putting the face of general back on in light of the need for a strategy. “We may have something that can help.”
The seeingchamber looked nothing like the last time I was here, but still all I saw when I crossed the threshold was Titus’s body falling at my feet. Heard the way his bones crumpled.
We entered through the opposite door—the one Malakai and Mila had been escorted through on that fateful night—but that only gave me a perfect view to impose an image of myself slicing a triple blade across my captor’s throat.
His blood pouring across me.
A phantom tinge in a bond that no longer existed.
A hand landed on my shoulder, and I jumped.
“Okay?” Harlen asked.
“Yes.” I tried to wipe away the memory, but all that did was smear a crimson sheen across it.
“You never were the best liar, Vale.”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I shook my head and gestured around us. “What’s happening here?”
Because there certainly was something different.
The walls on one half of the chamber were being deconstructed. Warriors with pickaxes and wheelbarrows chipped away at the white marble that shone with an iridescent moonstone sheen.
“We’re still testing it,” Cyren began as one warrior pushed a wheelbarrow across the chamber to where they’d set up a temporary forge and deposited a pile of white rubble. Cyren led us to the fireside, picking up a triple blade that had recently cooled and holding it out to us. “The walls are imbued with precious resins and minerals from the mountains.”
“That’s what Titus used to crack open my readings,” I muttered, taking the weapon.
