Safire paused, about to correct her. It was no mistake. Those soldiers had been severely abusing their power. She had seen it.
But when Safire looked to Dax, she saw hopeful relief in his gaze. The empress had invited them here for a purpose. Leandra had heard of the suffering in the scrublands, and she wanted to help alleviate it.
Safire had undermined Leandra’s soldiers, then botched things further by losing Eris. She didn’t want to sabotage Dax and Roa’s visit further.
So she held her tongue.
“You must all be tired,” the empress said, leading them forward. “I’ll show you to your rooms so you can rest before dinner.”
Being inside the citadel felt like being underwater.
Every room and hall was painted a shade of the sea: from velvety blues and cold grays to bright teals and turquoises. The lintels and crown moldings were the pale beige of sea-foam and the sound of trickling water came from nearly every room, due to the fountains at their centers. Each one featured a marble statue of a ship in full sail or a mermaid hiding behind her hair or a breaching whale.
It was why, when the empress led them down the next hall, Safire paused.
This hall was different.
The walls were hung with floor-to-ceiling paintings that swept from one end to the other. Safire followed Dax and Roa, studying the shining brushstrokes that transformed the paint into a froth of white waves or swirling dark eddies. In the beginning, the pictures inside the frames depicted squalls and tempests and maelstroms.
“Some time ago,” the empress said to Roa from several paces ahead, “news of the blight in your homeland reached me.”
Safire was only half listening. Because now the paintings depicted monsters, too. Dragons and kraken and sea spirits with their needlelike teeth, crunching the bones of sailors whose ships they’d wrecked.
It made her think of Eris saving her from the creature on the dock—a choice that came at the cost of her freedom.
Unless protecting Safire had been a calculated move, like the dancing and the kiss. Both had been a way for Eris to blend in, unseen by Lumina. What if protecting Safire—just like giving her a contradictory account of the night the scrin burned—was a way to make Safire sympathetic to her cause, ensuring she got what she wanted?
And now Eris was loose in the Star Isles. Hunting down Asha this very moment.
The walls felt too close suddenly. Safire didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be out there, looking for her cousin.
“I invited you here because I know what’s killing your crops in the scrublands,” the empress was saying from much farther ahead, making Safire realize she’d fallen behind. “It’s the same disease that struck these islands when they were under the Shadow God’s dominion.”
As Safire’s pace quickened down this hall, out of the corner of her eye she noticed a reoccurring image in every painting on the walls: a looming shadow on the horizon.
Slowing again, Safire looked from one painting to the next. The first depicted a ship in the distance. In the next, it was joined by several others. Then a whole fleet. And leading them all, standing at the helm, was a younger empress. Her cheeks red with windburn, her hair tangled by wind and salt.
The paintings showed her mooring on the Star Isles, climbing the rocky gray cliffs, traversing dark boreal forests and mossy meadows, then finally arriving at a tower with a thousand steps. And all the while, the shadow on the horizon grew bigger and more ominous.
“I have a solution to your problem,” the empress said.
At the very top of those thousand steps, sitting at a loom, was another woman. A crown of seven stars rested atop her head, and her hand held a spindle.
Skyweaver.
It was a near-identical image from the tapestry hanging in Safire’s office. The one Asha gave her. The one Eris stole.
“What is this?” said Roa, at which point, Safire looked to find the empress lifting a silver chain over her head. Instead of a pendant, a small egg-shaped capsule hung down.
“My gift to you,” Leandra said, letting it drop into Roa’s cupped hand. “The reason I invited you here.”
Safire tore herself away from the paintings and came toward them, staring as the empress clicked the capsule open and a tiny seed fell out and onto Roa’s palm.
“Salvation for your people.” She studied Roa as she said this. “It’s impervious to the blight. I have several granaries full of that same seed. Before you leave, I’ll have my soldiers fill up your ship.”
Roa’s fingers trembled as they curled closed around the seed, holding it tight. As she looked up into the empress’s face, her eyes glimmered with tears.
“You don’t know what this means to us. To me.”
The empress smiled kindly back. “I think I do.”
“There must be something we can give you in exchange,” Dax said, his arm curling gently around Roa’s waist. To a stranger, he would seem calm and composed. But Safire heard the smallest tremor in his voice. “To show our deep gratitude.”
Ever since the news arrived of Roa’s father, of Lirabel and her baby, Safire had watched Dax retreat inside himself. He wasn’t just failing the scrublands, he was failing his wife—who’d stopped eating due to grief. Before the empress’s invitation arrived, Dax could hardly look Roa in the eye.
Now, as Safire watched the horrible weight of the blight lift from her cousin’s shoulders, as Roa’s face shone with hope, Safire knew whom she believed. And it wasn’t Eris.
As the empress refused any kind of payment for her gift, Safire returned to the last portrait hanging in this hall. It showed Skyweaver descending the steps of her tower to meet the young empress. This time her hand gripped not a spindle but a knife, curved like a slivered moon.
As Safire’s gazed traced the blade, her thoughts were on Asha, who was carrying a similar-looking knife at this very moment, trying to locate its maker here in the Star Isles.
It’s only a matter of time before Eris finds her, thought Safire.
She needed to get to her cousin first, then bring her here to safety. Because if there was anywhere Eris would never set foot, Safire was certain, it was inside the citadel of the enemy she’d spent seven years running from.
Safire didn’t go to dinner. The empress had no sooner escorted them to their rooms when Safire knocked on Dax’s door and told him she was leaving to find Asha. Still overjoyed with Leandra’s generous gift, Dax was eager to put the issue of Eris behind them and forgive Safire’s mistake. More than this, he wanted Asha safe as much as Safire did, so he gave her the letter Torwin sent him, along with a map of the Star Isles, showing her the small village on the southern tip of Axis Isle, where the letter said they were heading. Dax told her to take Spark—his golden dragon—with her.
One of the conditions of Dax and Roa traveling with dragons was that they had to be stabled inside the citadel for the duration of the visit, ensuring they wouldn’t be flying over the city and scaring the people of Axis, who were not familiar with the massive monsters. Permission therefore needed to be granted from the empress for a rider to fly a dragon into and out of the citadel.
But when Safire arrived at the covered courtyard where the dragons were kept, she found them not stabled, but muzzled and chained to the floor.
She nearly dropped her letter of permission.