As if her entire world hadn’t just been upended.
With nowhere else to go and nothing to do, she had no choice but to try.
The barracks was quiet as she entered, save for the steady breathing of several others who’d managed to slip away for some sleep. Veronyka supposed it made sense to split up the work, to allow some people to rest now so they could relieve the others later.
She sat on her hammock, swaying gently as she reached into her pocket for her braided bracelet. When she lifted it out, something clanged to the ground and rolled several feet away.
Veronyka dropped lightly onto the floor, spotting a fat golden bead attached to an auburn braid.
Fingers trembling, she picked up the piece of hair, knowing it was Val’s. When had that gotten inside her pocket? Veronyka flashed back to when she’d woken up alone with Val, after fainting outside the enclosure. It would have been easy enough to put it inside her pocket when she was unconscious.
The bead was familiar, yet Veronyka had never really looked at it closely before. Though Veronyka was usually the one to brush and braid Val’s hair, Val was particular about her beads and embellishments, insisting on knotting them in herself. Veronyka had always assumed the golden trinket was fake, some painted piece of wood or stone, but it was heavy in her hand. Turning it over, she realized it wasn’t a bead at all but a ring, knotted into the strands of hair to keep it in place.
Clutching it tightly, Veronyka climbed back onto her hammock, carefully unweaving the braid and holding the ring up to the light filtering in through the window.
It was a thick band, though it slipped snugly onto Veronyka’s finger. The face was flat and unadorned, except for an emblem carved into the surface, like a seal.
Or a signet.
Veronyka marveled as she recognized the familiar design—spread wings wreathed in flames, with two A’s at its center: the sigil of Avalkyra Ashfire. She’d seen it before, stamped into bits of leather for sale at back-alley markets or painted onto phoenix dedications on the very outskirts of the empire. And, of course, she’d seen it in her dreams.
Veronyka called up her most recent vision, the moment when Avalkyra pressed her golden seal into the document that her sister then ripped in two.
Could this be that same ring?
Slipping it off her finger once more, Veronyka noticed a further engraving on the inside of the band, so small that it was difficult to read, but she managed to pick it out.
Avalkyra Ashfire, the Feather-Crowned Queen
B: 152 AE–D: 170 AE
The numbers were written in the same way they recorded years in the empire—AE stood for “After the Empire,” and the dates ranged an eighteen-year span. Not her supposed reign, then, or even the length of the Blood War. It was a lifespan. Birth: 152 AE. Death: 170 AE.
Veronyka’s heart thumped as she noticed a second set of numbers below the first.
RB: 170 AE–
RB? What could RB stand for? But even as the question popped into Veronyka’s mind, the answer landed on the tip of her tongue.
“Rebirth,” she whispered. Morra said it was possible, and it would explain a lot about her sister, about her extensive knowledge of history and magic, weapons and warfare, language and politics, as well as her sense of privilege and obsession with control.
Their conversation from the solstice festival surfaced in Veronyka’s mind, when Veronyka had asked Val why Ignix wouldn’t have revealed herself if she was still alive.
Maybe she is afraid. Maybe the world has changed too much.
Val was Avalkyra Ashfire. Veronyka felt the truth of it deep in her bones, in her heart—the certainty of it as strange and wondrous as her bond with Xephyra. But for some reason Val kept this secret to herself. Why?
Not completely to herself, Veronyka realized, sitting up straighter. Her maiora knew. Ilithya Shadowheart had served Avalkyra Ashfire in the Blood War and had continued to serve her after her resurrection. That was why she had always deferred to Val, always let her rant and rave and spit cruel words. Ilithya was a soldier, and even as a child, Avalkyra Ashfire was her queen.
Was Morra looking for her fallen queen when she’d been ambushed and lost her leg? Did Ilithya find Val, or was it the other way around? The memory of the day with the snake reared up again, and Veronyka understood why Val had seemed a stranger to her in that moment—because she had been. Ilithya had stood up to protect Veronyka until she’d recognized Val as Avalkyra, her dead sovereign. Val must have used her shadow magic to seek out other animages, trying to find friends and allies, trapped in a child’s body and burdened with the secret of her true self, waiting, searching for her chance to be a Rider again, to be herself again. Val would want to announce her identity from a position of strength and power, not as a penniless, powerless peasant girl. She’d most certainly have been hunted by the empire if she came forward, and besides, she had no bondmate. What kind of Rider queen could she be without a flaming phoenix beneath her?
Val was as stubborn and prideful as they came, and she might well live and die in anonymity rather than admit who she was and how far she had fallen.
It had already been sixteen years. Clearly Val had lied about being seventeen, if she had indeed been born the night of the Last Battle. How much longer was she planning to wait?
Even as the theory started to ease the confusion in Veronyka’s mind, a spool of doubt unraveled in her chest. If Val was the supposedly long-dead Ashfire heir . . . then who was Veronyka?
The younger sister, Pheronia, didn’t have any magic, and so therefore had no bondmate and no means of resurrection. Besides, Veronyka didn’t have memories of some past life; the visions she’d seen in her dreams, they were Val’s, from Avalkyra’s point of view, not Pheronia’s.
Veronyka threw herself back onto her pillows, the signet ring clutched tightly in one hand. Though exhaustion had turned her limbs to lead and her thoughts to water, sleep eluded her.
Instead she stared at the ceiling, watching the shadows shift and grow and lengthen, until darkness swallowed the room. When she couldn’t stand being alone with her thoughts for one second longer, she went in search of a distraction.
It was late and most of the work had halted for the night, but Veronyka wandered toward any signs of noise or action, eventually walking through the open doors of the temple infirmary. As she entered the space, the healers, visitors, and mildly wounded moved about the hall, voices hushed as people tried to rest and sleep.
Large pillars created separation in the wide-open space, outlining a central place of worship, flanked by hallways on both sides. In the middle, priests and acolytes would normally chant prayers amid smoking incense and the ever-burning hearth that represented the Heart of Axura, but they had been recruited to help the solitary healer and the handful of midwives who had volunteered their services.
Veronyka found Sev on a pallet in the hallway to the left, reserved for those with stable injuries who were on the mend, while the opposite hall housed people who were dying or who hovered on the edge of life and death.
She was immensely relieved to know he was going to be okay and happier still to find him awake as she approached, propped up against a stack of pillows.
She crouched down on the floor next to him, feeling awkward and unsure what to do with her hands. “Hi, uh . . . do you remember me?”
He didn’t seem surprised to see her. “Of course,” he said, turning stiffly to face her. “You saved my life.”