My face was reflected in the mirror. Tousled hair, too-bright eyes, and flushed cheeks. I turned the beetle, placing it gently on my chest, above the sheet that was wrapped beneath my arms. It dug its needle-like legs into my skin, and I turned back to the mirror, which showed the shocked faces of Sig and Herra, and the stunned attendants creeping around the wall to gape at the mirror.
Sig recovered first, clearing his throat and gesturing to Herra. She jumped to her feet, standing beside him as they both directed their attention to the oyntille.
“You are seeing this image because our world is under threat,” Herra announced, her voice calm and strong.
When had they prepared a speech?
I sent a searching glance to Frey, careful not to move my body, and she arched her brows back at me, as if to say would you really have been interested in addressing countless strangers through a magical beetle linked to all the mirrors in Fyrio?
I scrunched my nose in understanding, turning back to Herra and Sig.
“The story of the Fjorn is true,” Herra continued, tilting her chin up. She looked so confident and fierce, her dark eyes shining. “The sectorians know it as the myth of the Fjorn, and the stewards know it as the Tale of Three Worlds. However you have heard the story, know that it is real. There were three women born to this world, three sacrifices to the evil threatening to destroy us all. What you don’t know is that those three women have lived and died. They failed.”
One of the attendants cried out from the side of the room, the others covering their mouths with their hands, their eyes wide in horror.
“The end of the word has begun,” Sig took up the speech as Herra glanced to the attendants. “Most of you will have battled the evil as it flooded our land, riddled us with plague, burned through villages, poisoned our food and split apart the earth, and most of you would have seen the storm that tempered that evil, burning it from the very air we breathe. That was the storm of the final Fjorn. The Tempest.”
“She is our last chance.” Sig spoke so gravelly, his strong tone wavering with so much feeling that goosebumps sprung up along my arms. “This world’s final sacrifice. But she won’t face the evil alone, as the others did, fearing that we wouldn’t believe them.”
“There are five battles she must win, to defeat the darkness threatening this world,” Herra said. “The first, for resilience of the body. The second, for sharpness of the mind. The third, for purity of the soul. The fourth, for strength of the spirit. And the final battle, the most impossible, to cheat immutable fate.” She repeated the prophecy word for word, exactly as Vale had delivered it to me, exactly as I had repeated it to them. “The first battle, many of you have already witnessed. You call it the battle of shivering mountain, where the Tempest proved her resilience by winning an impossible battle, cheating death itself against a warrior feared and worshipped across all lands. The master of the Vold sector, the Warmaster. With the four remaining battles covering the four remaining sectors, the Tempest will have to challenge the great master of each of those sectors in order to prove herself worthy in this, the final battle of the worlds.”
I sat there dumbly, staring at them as their words took effect on the poor stewards still huddled off to the side. After a moment, I stood, awkwardly aware that the mirror shifted view as I did.
“Is that dress for me?” I asked the stewards, pointing to the fabric bundled on the floor in the corner they had occupied.
One of them ran over to it, gathering it up again with a flaming face.
“How will we prepare you?” she whispered, edging to my side, her eyes on the beetle.
I cringed, thinking about the people of Fyrio watching me bathe, before a thought occurred to me. I touched the beetle, muttering its name, and it immediately retracted its legs from my skin, falling pliantly into my palm.
The mirror turned back into a mirror.
“She created this artefact,” Herra answered the question before it even had a chance to burst out of Frey. “So it obeys her word, now.”
Frey nodded, drawing me towards the door. She paused, motioning to the attendants when they didn’t immediately follow.
“You will need to be careful,” she told them as we returned to my bedroom and passed through to the washroom. “People have seen your faces—and they will be much more likely to use a few stewards to get to Ven than they will the rest of us.”
“Get to her?” the dark-haired attendant asked.
“People like the small council members,” I supplied. “By the way, what are your names? I can’t keep distinguishing you by your hair colour.”
“Our names?” one of them squeaked.
“The small council?” another warbled fearfully.
It was the dark-haired, shorter woman who supplied their names. “I’m Nette.” She pointed to the older woman beside her, who seemed to be the most cautious of the three. “This is my sister, Cecil, and that’s Elin.”
Elin had long brown braids and beautiful posture, her smile as easy as the way she grasped Cecil with comforting hands. The other woman trembled nervously, remaining silent. Nette folded my dress over one of the drying racks, turning to the task of pumping the hot water as I unwrapped the sheet. The other two stewards were still frozen, so Frey stepped around them, a familiar no-nonsense look on her face.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Mentally?”
Her bright eyes were so stern, her mouth so rigid and unsmiling, I couldn’t help but laugh.
“You should work on your bedside manner if you’re really going to take on the task of my mental health.”
Frey rolled her eyes as I set the sheet aside. I peeled off my bodysuit before reluctantly releasing the beetle. I set it on a bench by the door and then stepped into the terracotta bath, the water already filled to my ankles.
“If it gets too uncomfortable, just put it to sleep or whatever you just did before. We want the support of the people, but you’ve sacrificed enough already—don’t fall into the trap of thinking you owe them any more than you’ve already given them.”
I tilted my head up at her as she stood beside the bath. In a very Sinn-like fashion, she was ignoring my nakedness as though she hadn’t even noticed me undressing.
“Honestly?” I worried my lip. “I thought you would say the opposite. That I need to do this. That the truth matters more than anything else. That the people deserve to know what threatens them.”
“I never really had friends, before the Sentinel recruits.” Frey’s eyes wandered away, uncomfortable with the private turn of the conversation. “My power makes people really uncomfortable … but you’ve never cared. You don’t hold it against me. I like you, Ven. I like how you care about people. I like that you never stop fighting. You’ve shown me that the best Sentinels don’t need to be Vold … they just need to be brave.”
I couldn’t help the smile that lifted my lips. “You’re definitely the bravest Sinn I’ve ever met.”
She shook her head a little, though there was a matching smile on her face. “Anyway, back to the plan. You need to challenge the Scholar, but you absolutely can’t battle him today. You’ve spent too much energy already. It’s best if we set a date and a location, like the battle of shivering mountain. We want people to feel involved. We want them there cheering you on, seeing you do the impossible with their own eyes.”