“Sometimes,” Verene says, “it’s good for people to die.”
I notice suddenly the way Theo is looking at his sister. His hand is outstretched, but he’s hesitating, like he’s not quite sure what’s going to happen if he touches her.
I know that the mob is coming for us. I know that if I want any chance of getting Verene under my control, I have to attack her now. But I’m suddenly certain that if I try to fight her, I’m going to lose.
I can’t face her like this. I need more. I need more magic.
So I run for the foyer. I push Ale ahead of me, through the short hall with the vase of white roses, and slam the front door.
I have to stop to catch my breath, because I feel like I’m going to faint. My hands are strangely tingly. I just want to get this blood off.
And I can hear footsteps behind the door. They’re following us, of course.
I’m about to keep running when my eyes catch on the small statues guarding either side of the door. They’re carved to look like Verene, naturally, with her billowing skirts and her graceful neck. They’re each holding a large glass lantern with a flame inside. They’re so pretty and so perfect.
I lunge at one of the statues and push it over.
The lantern shatters. The flame leaps onto the door and starts to spread, much quicker than I thought it would. Instantly, I feel the heat on my face.
I push over the other statue.
“Emanuela,” Ale says.
“What?” I say.
Verene and Theo can escape through their underground well. But they don’t deserve to stay in their grandiose hiding place. This is what happens to people who steal from my city and get in my way.
I start down the stairs. But Ale is lingering, wincing at the heat, like he thinks there’s anything he can do to stop it.
There’s not. There’s nothing I could do either, at this point, even if I wanted to. And I don’t.
“Ale,” I say.
I turn back and grab his hand.
He resists. “I—”
“The mob is coming,” I say.
And he follows me, because he has no choice. We race through the dark halls of the cathedral and climb out of the same broken window we used before.
But the moment our feet touch the ground outside, we can’t evade the mob. There’s too many of them, coming out of every dark street. Three grown men surround me, yanking my arms behind my back and binding my wrists. It’s chaos. Everyone is yelling and crowding around, trying to catch a glimpse of the faces of the famed attackers.
I decide not to fight. I let them lead me away. Because a little time in prison has never stopped me before.
FIFTEEN
IN THE DARK HOURS OF THE EARLY MORNING, I PEER OUT OF my cell window and watch Iris burn.
I’m surprised the city has a jail at all, but I suppose even Verene has to lock people up when they commit crimes. It’s a tiny hall in the Parliament buildings, and Ale and I are the only occupants. We’ve been put into two cells across the hall from each other. Mine has a barred window that looks out onto the cathedral, which happens to be a very lively view at the moment.
The banner I made is still hanging on the balcony. Behind it, the cathedral is on fire, bright and smoky against the black veil. For a city absolutely doused in water, they’re doing a very bad job of putting it out. People are running every which way with buckets of water and bags of dirt, but it’s not enough. In the nearby manors, the nobles are peering out of their windows, watching with grave faces.
I haven’t seen Theo or Verene. But every time I think I hear a noise, I jump, certain that it’s going to be her. The hall remains empty.
Every so often, I glance over at Ale. At first, he’s sitting on his cot, staring at the wall. Then he curls up on his side. I hear his soft little wheezing snores.
Ale thinks that all we need to do to save Occhia is stop the vide. At first, that’s what I thought, too. But the more I learn, the more obvious it is to me that we can’t rely on anyone else for our water. We can’t rely on a capricious spirit in the catacombs or the mysterious rulers of the other six cities. We need something that’s all our own.
We need someone all our own. We need a savior who’s so powerful that no one can ever hurt us again.
I sit down by the bars of my cell. I pull my stolen journal out, angle it to catch the lantern light glowing in the hall, and start at the beginning.
Most of the entries are short and matter-of-fact, and the purpose of the journal is immediately obvious. The Eyes is chronicling the lives of her family. She never talks about herself except in relation to them.
She probably didn’t have much else to talk about. She was alive for almost a thousand years, and if she was anything like the watercrea in Occhia, she spent every single day taking scared, unresisting prisoners and turning their blood to water.
I’ve never thought about what the watercrea’s life must have been like. But for the first time, I do. I wonder if she got bored. I wonder if she felt trapped.
She had so much power. She could have done so much more, but she didn’t. She just stayed in her tower. The thought almost makes me sad, but I refuse to be sad for her.
I flip through the journal, reading quickly as the Eyes paints a picture of her children growing up. She writes about keeping watch at Theo’s bedside when he had a terrible fever that took away his hearing in one ear. She writes about how Verene wouldn’t stop making friends with her assigned guards even though she’d been told to keep her distance. She writes about how after his father’s death, Theo disappeared into his room and stopped eating. Then the journal is taken over by an exhaustive account of every disobedient thing Verene ever did. She chopped off her own hair. She showed up drunk to her lessons. She lit a fire in her bedroom—though it was hastily smothered by the housekeeper.
At the mention of housekeeper, I skip the rest of the page. I scan and scan, and every so often, I find something that gives me pause.
They’re both disappointments. They don’t seem to understand how important this is. After a thousand years, I’m going to hand over the city. If they can’t handle it, everything will fall apart.
She makes it sound like she was preparing to give her children her magic. As if it’s something that could be given. Or something that can be chosen.
Perhaps I should just stay. If the others find out I’m going to turn my city over to an heir, I don’t know what they’ll do. This isn’t what we agreed on.
But it’s been so long. And I’m so tired.
I turn the pages faster and faster. Then I reach an entry from two years ago.
Tomorrow morning, I’m going to bring them into the study and tell them everything. It’s time for them to do the ritual, and then I’ll have my heir.
I just snuck over to check on them. She was in his bedroom, bouncing around and talking his ear off while he tried to read. They’ve changed so much over the years, but at the same time, they haven’t changed at all.
I thought raising them in isolation would be better. My heir doesn’t need to worry about the mundane concerns of life in the city—not when they’re going to live forever. It’s forced them to cling to each other, because they have no one else, especially now that their father is gone. I expected that.