Fists rained down on the door, making Eris jump.
“Who’s in there?”
Eris stared at the door, watching it shake with each pound of a fist. The table wouldn’t hold it shut for long.
She was out of time.
Eris drew out her spindle and crouched down. Drawing a line across the floor, she waited for it to flare silver. Waited for the mists to rise.
Nothing happened.
The door inched open.
Eris drew a second line, and then a third. The mists didn’t come. The way across didn’t open for her.
She looked to the walls around her. They shone silvery in the starlight. Like steel.
Stardust steel, she realized, her panicked thoughts humming like bees.
She remembered the cuffs Kor had locked around her wrists.
Stardust steel prevented her from crossing.
I’m trapped. Trapped a thousand steps into the sky, with nothing but a door between her and a pack of soldiers. Soldiers who were throwing all their weight into it now.
The door shuddered, and held—but only barely. A loud crack was followed by several voices counting in unison. The next time they threw their weight against that door, it would not hold.
Eris looked to the only other possible exit: the narrow window. She pushed her way through broken, toppled furniture until she stood before the cracked glass, looking out. The walls of the tower were perfectly smooth. There were no handholds to climb, and the fall would kill her.
But even if she could somehow survive it: the window frame was too narrow. She couldn’t fit through it.
Behind her, the door heaved with the weight of the soldiers throwing themselves against it, forcing the table to move enough to let them through.
The Lumina crawled into the room.
Before Eris could turn and face her enemies, they had her by the shoulders.
This can’t be happening, she thought, staring at the broken loom, thinking of the dying words on Day’s lips.
When the enemy surrounds me . . .
They forced Eris to her knees, checking her for weapons. She felt the cold kiss of stardust steel as they locked her wrists in manacles.
. . . I know your hands hold the threads of my soul . . .
They growled an order. But Eris didn’t hear them.
. . . and there is nothing to fear.
Except the goddess of souls wasn’t here. She wasn’t where she should be: at her loom, spinning souls into stars.
Day’s prayer was a lie.
The Skyweaver had forsaken them all.
Forty
They dragged Eris down the citadel halls and up several sets of stairs, stopping sharply before a cylindrical room where two teak doors carved with frothing waves were thrown wide open.
“Wait,” hissed the soldier who held Eris’s arm in his meaty grip, halting her before the doors.
The walls of the room beyond them were deepest blue, like the depths of the sea, and painted with all manner of creatures: from crabs and spiny urchins to schools of shimmering fish to majestic humpback whales. In the center of the room, the slender white steps of a throne twisted upward like a conch shell, to where the empress sat on a cushion the color of seafoam.
At the base of the throne stood a young man in a golden tunic, his back to Eris.
“. . . I told her if she insisted on keeping company with fugitives, I couldn’t have her commanding my soldiers.”
“And?” came the empress’s voice, cold as the sea. “Where is she, then?”
“She fled,” he said. “I’m here to take her place. I accept full responsibility for Safire’s actions.”
Eris’s heart thumped at that name. She knew who this was, suddenly recognizing his tall stature, broad shoulders, and dark curls. It was King Dax before the empress’s throne.
“You’re here to take her place?” The empress’s voice trembled with barely restrained anger. “You had time to speak with her, demote her, but not detain her?”
“My cousin doesn’t make errors in judgment, Empress. She has impeccable instincts. It’s why I made her my commandant. So perhaps you can help me understand why she would believe in Eris’s innocence so resolutely.” Dax’s voice was perfectly calm, belying the rising tension in the room. “Is it true that Eris was only a child when the scrin burned?”
“That child was a danger to us all.” Leandra’s voice trembled through the room. “If you knew what she was, you would fear her. You would dread the thing she can unleash on the world.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said softly.
The empress rose to her feet, then slowly descended the steps of her white throne. A hush fell over the room as the sound of her boots echoed eerily through the silence.
“I’m disappointed in you, King Dax,” she said, standing before the dragon king now. “I invite you into my home. I promise to help your people. I look the other way when your cousin flouts my laws and opposes my soldiers . . .”
“Your soldiers were beating a civilian to death in an alley,” said Dax, his voice tightening with restraint. “If I had been there, I would have opposed them alongside her.”
“I see,” she whispered, studying him. There was a sparkling silence. To her captain, she said: “Caspian? Arrest this man.”
All of Dax’s guards drew their weapons in unison.
“Detain them,” the empress ordered without looking away from the king, who said nothing. He made no move to fight her. Eris watched the Lumina descend on Dax’s soldiers, who were outnumbered and easily overpowered.
“You have no idea what I am,” the empress told Dax. “Nor the things I’m capable of.”
“I’m beginning to see that.” Dax’s gaze locked with hers. “And I’m suddenly glad I made Safire run.”
As if in answer, the wind howled from beyond the citadel, beating its fists against the walls. The room smelled like the sea in a storm, and Eris’s skin prickled like it often did before a lightning strike.
“Caspian.” The empress turned to her captain. “Take the king away. He will take his cousin’s place until she can be hunted down and made to pay for her crimes.”
“And the dragon queen?” Caspian asked, already binding Dax’s wrists.
Dax went rigid at the mention of his wife.
“Leave his queen to me,” she said.
They turned the dragon king toward the doors and marched him—along with his captured guards—out into the hall, where Eris stood. At the sight of her, Dax looked, then looked again. As if not believing his eyes.
“Eris . . .” His voice was no longer so controlled. “What are you doing here?”
She raised her own bound wrists in answer.
He opened his mouth to say something more, but the Lumina forced him past her. Eris glanced back over her shoulder, only to be shoved forward and into the room beyond the doors. There they threw her at the foot of the throne. When she tried to rise, the soldier behind her pressed his stardust steel blade to the back of her neck.
“Stay down, dog.”
So Eris looked up instead. Several paces away stood the empress. Leandra wore a gray fitted jacket, fastened down the left. Its silver buttons caught the flames burning in the sconces and threw them back into the darkness. Her ash-blond hair was pulled tightly back.