One
The crows were gone.
Every day, I said those words to myself, but they didn’t feel real. The world didn’t feel real. Each breath felt like a lie, as if I’d climbed out of a cocoon into another realm, one of ash and shadowed memories that tore at me like talons.
Without the beat of a crow’s wings, the air stood still. Silence smothered the castle garden, the charred royal rookery standing like a headstone in the distance. Even the sunlight looked wrong, rebounding sharply off the castle as if afraid to get too close.
I sat at the patio table, tracing a finger along where the red and white splotches of months-old burn scars met my skin, and tried desperately to ignore the man standing across from me.
The Illucian messenger wore rich, finely cut blues lined in gold, the material too thick for the Rhodairen summer sun. He wasn’t a soldier, but he carried a sword nonetheless and would know how to use it. He’d been allowed to keep it, since asking an Illucian to give up their weapon was akin to asking a wolf not to bite your hand while you pulled out its teeth. As a compromise, two castle guards stood within easy striking distance.
The Saints must hate me. It’d been nearly six months since the Illucian Empire destroyed my life. I’d barely left my room since. I’d hardly gotten out of bed. Even now, I wanted to burrow beneath my blankets and disappear into the darkness. Then the one day I managed to drag myself downstairs, convinced it could be a decent day, I got stuck watching an Illucian.
His gaze bore into me, and it took everything I had not to look at him. I was afraid of what I might do if I did.
A spark of fury rallied against the prison of grief and pain that had grown inside me layer by layer over the last few months. I hated that he’d been allowed into Rhodaire, allowed onto the castle grounds. Hated that we had to hear out his queen’s demands, that I didn’t have a crow to seize him by his perfectly manicured uniform and lift him high, high into the air…
“Will the queen be here soon?” he asked for the second time, his accent light.
It sounded like a crow’s talons on stone, and the back of my neck prickled with a chill despite the sun. We’d been waiting for my sister for nearly ten minutes.
“If you ask again, maybe I’ll suddenly know.” Not the diplomatic response, but politics had never been my strength.
“Will the queen be here soon?”
My eyes snapped up, locking with his. He smiled, and I gritted my teeth at giving him that small victory. Ignore him. Forcing my gaze out across the castle gardens, I exhaled slowly. I’d promised myself today would be a good day. I needed a good day. But faced with an Illucian, all I could think about was what they’d taken from us. What they still took. Terrorizing our borders, attacking our trade routes, sinking our ships.
Looking at the garden didn’t help. My eyes naturally found the spots where the flowers had started to droop, stains of brown spreading among the green. Without the earth crows’ magic, plants like the bright flowering delladon vine that climbed the latticework along the castle were a breath away from dust.
Rhodaire was dying.
I looked away, blinking slowly. Without storm crows to manipulate it, the hot, humid summer weather persisted unrelentingly. The sweet scent of fruit trees hung heavy in the air, pressing in on me from all directions. Only the messenger kept me alert. What did he want?
Voices filtered out through the open door. I straightened as my sister stepped onto the patio, a striking figure with her immaculate posture and dark hair loose to her waist. Kiva followed, the sun reflecting off the metal buckles of her silver-and-green guard’s uniform. The tension in my shoulders eased as she slipped to my side.
“Your Majesty.” The messenger barely inclined his head.
Caliza’s steel-colored eyes evaluated him quickly, her face an impassive mask. “We can speak inside.”
I frowned as the messenger followed her into the sunroom at the back of the patio. What didn’t Caliza want me to hear?
Kiva dropped into the seat beside me, her hand falling to its natural position on the crow-shaped pommel of her sword. “Sorry it took me so long. She was in a meeting.”
“Not your fault. Besides, we were having such a wonderful time.” I slumped in my chair, leaning my head back.
Not a day passed where I didn’t think about the crows. I couldn’t shut out the memories. Scenes of visiting the royal rookery to tickle storm crow chicks until they buzzed with lightning or walking under the glow of a sun crow in the dusky moonlight played over and over in my mind. Seeing the messenger just made it all worse.
A flash of red made me flinch, but it was only a pair of summer tanagers flying by, their feathers the rich ruby of a ripe pomegranate. You’re fine. Don’t think about it. I rubbed my scarred arm in an absent motion.
Kiva eyed me intently. I sighed, straightening and readjusting the silver bracelet on my right wrist. “I’m not going to climb back into bed, all right?”
“Good. I don’t have time to fetch a bucket of water to dump on you.” She smirked, and I glared flatly back. She was joking—mostly.
“You would enjoy that entirely too much,” I said.
Kiva’s smile faltered. “I don’t enjoy any part of seeing you like this.”
I clenched my jaw but didn’t respond. I’m just sad. I’ll get over it soon. I repeated the mantra in my head, ignoring the quiet voice that whispered it had been nearly six months. While I hid, the world went on without me.
Guilt prickled low and hot in my stomach. I hated knowing Kiva worried about me. Hated knowing I was the cause of her pain. It’d taken me months to confide in her, convinced the moment I told someone how I felt, as if the world had split apart and swallowed me whole, they’d call me ridiculous. Dramatic. Weak. Instead, she’d listened, and then she’d held me while I cried until my throat turned raw.
Kiva leaned back, flipping her braid of white-gold hair over her shoulder and lifting a hand to shield her face from the sun. She’d been born in Rhodaire, but her pale Korovi skin burned easily. “What do you think he wants?” She nodded in the direction the messenger and Caliza had gone.
“Nothing good.”
I hadn’t seen an Illucian since Negnoch. Since Rhodairen traitors helped Illucian soldiers set fire to the rookeries, their elite archers shooting any crows that escaped the flames.
Ronoch, people called it now. Red Night.
If the Illucian army hadn’t been spread so thin the night they attacked, they might have conquered Rhodaire then and there.
At first, I’d wanted revenge. Deep inside, the part of me that hated the defeated person I’d become still did. Now, I recognized we didn’t stand a chance. Illucia had conquered nearly half the continent for a reason—their army was unstoppable. Soon, they would have Rhodaire too.