Asha’s story clanged in Safire’s mind.
“I think I’ll keep your precious king and his wife,” said Leandra. “At least long enough to coax your cousin down from the sky.”
Safire narrowed her eyes. “Asha is the Namsara. Kozu will eat you alive before he lets you anywhere near her.”
“We’ll see,” said Leandra, clasping her hands behind her back. “She has something that doesn’t belong to her. Something I’ve been hunting for a very long time. In the wrong hands, it could unleash a monster. One I thought I put to rest a long time ago.”
The Skyweaver’s knife? Safire wondered, thinking of the blade sheathed at Asha’s hip.
“Now.” Leandra turned toward Safire. “You have been a thorn in my side since you first walked through my gate uninvited. You will need to be disposed of.” In the window at her back, thunder cracked, followed by a flicker of lightning. “Before you leave us, though, you should know: I did what you failed to do. I captured your precious Death Dancer.”
An uneasy feeling twisted in Safire’s stomach.
“Liar,” she said, her hands bunching at her sides.
The empress continued, as if she hadn’t heard her. “Tomorrow I’ll give her the same punishment I give every enemy of the Skyweaver. Do you know what that is?”
Safire heard the breath of the soldier behind her. Felt the shadow of them fall across her back. Her spine straightened and she reached for her throwing knife—but they’d taken it from her.
“No,” said Leandra. “Of course you don’t. Let me tell you.”
A cloth sack came down over her head. Safire gasped for breath as something tightened around her neck and a familiar bitter smell filled her nostrils.
Scarp berries.
Safire held her breath, trying to resist their poison.
“First,” the empress said as Safire struggled to fight the soldiers off, “I’ll take Eris to the immortal scarps.”
Safire couldn’t hold her breath forever. Soon enough, she felt her arms growing heavy and slack. Felt her legs giving out beneath her.
“There, I will cut off her hands.”
At those words, Safire struggled harder, even as that dull fog crept over her mind, lulling her, insisting that she close her eyes and sleep.
“And then,” the empress said as the world began to fade, “I’ll watch the daughter of my enemy die a slow and agonizing death.”
Forty-Two
Eris watched as one of the soldiers took out a ring of keys, slid one into the lock, and turned it. The door swung open. The room beyond was much smaller and darker than the throne room, but just as high. It was also empty—or so Eris first thought.
When they nudged her inside, she found herself at the edge of a marble platform, its surface damp and slick. Below her, water surged and Eris could just make out shadows moving beneath the dark surface. Things with spines and jagged teeth.
She looked up.
High above, a dozen cages swung from the ceiling like hideous ornaments, their chains secured to huge iron hooks in the walls. Eris watched as one of the soldiers unhooked one. A heartbeat later, a swift rattling sound filled the room as it plummeted downward, halting just before it hit the water. Bouncing on its chain, the cage swung in frantic circles.
Using what looked like a long shepherd’s hook to grab it, a second soldier pulled it to the platform they stood on and swung the door open.
That was when Eris realized she was meant to get in it.
There was no point in fighting them. Her hands were bound in stardust steel, and she wasn’t a fighter. But she fought anyway, digging her heels in, and when that didn’t work, dropped to her knees. They threw her inside easily, and locked the cage behind her.
Safire would have lasted longer, thought Eris miserably, staring out at them between the bars. Safire would have taken a few of them down before they overcame her.
But Safire wasn’t here. Safire was long gone—or so she hoped.
Most of all: she needed to stop thinking about Safire.
The cage lifted off the floor as the soldiers heaved on the chain, pulling it up toward the ceiling. It swung back and forth as it rose, spinning and spinning, making her dizzy. Between the spinning and the increasing distance to the churning water below, Eris had to shut her eyes, feeling nauseous.
It was only when the cage stopped rising that she opened them. Other cages—all of them empty—hung aloft around her. Beyond them, slender shafts of light sifted in through narrow windows high up on the walls.
Looking out between her bars, Eris found the platform impossibly far below and the soldiers filing out—all except two, who now stood guard. As if they expected her to make an escape attempt.
The door slammed.
Sitting now, Eris slumped forward, letting her forehead rest against the bars of this cage, waiting for it to stop spinning. An eternity seemed to pass before it slowed. When it finally did, she opened her eyes . . .
And found herself staring into a woman’s face.
Eris shot upright.
The other prisoner sat across from her, locked inside her own cage, bathed in a beam of silvery light. Into the silence, the woman said, “Dear child. Why have they brought you here?”
“I . . .” Eris looked around them, but all of the other cages were empty. “Who are you?”
She looked back to the prisoner, and her gaze caught on the woman’s hands. Or rather, the place her hands would have been, if she’d had any. The fact that she didn’t, that her slender arms stopped just above her wrists, told Eris what she needed to know.
This woman was a traitor. An enemy of the Skyweaver.
Eris looked from the stumps of her arms up to the woman’s face.
And that was when her breath caught.
The woman’s eyes were pale green, like a meadow in late summer, and set too far apart—one of them looking in the wrong direction. Her body was knobby in places, as if she’d been assembled differently than other people.
Her presence wasn’t the startling thing, though. The startling thing was that Eris knew her.
This was the woman from the tapestry at the foot of her bed. The one Day made her.
“My name is Skye,” said the woman, studying Eris back. “What’s yours?”
Sacrifice
Another contraction made Skyweaver cry out. Pushing away from the empress’s table, she rose to her feet, stumbling. Leandra turned to look and saw what Skyweaver had worked so hard to keep hidden: a belly swollen with child.
Accusation darkened her eyes.
Skyweaver fled, needing to escape her true enemy.
Needing to set the Shadow God free.
Her servant, Day, helped her climb the steps of her tower. But halfway to her weaving room, Skyweaver collapsed in the pains of labor. She could go no farther. So Day lifted her into his arms and carried her.
Inside the weaving room, he set her down and barred the door, trapping them both inside.
The baby came, wailing and beating its fists. As it did, Skyweaver gave it what was left of her immortality.
In the world beyond, the wind rose. The rain pummeled the panes. The sea raged.
The god of tides was coming.
Day looked below to find Leandra approaching the tower with an army at her back.
“I know a place you can hide her,” he said, taking the baby and swaddling it in a blanket. “But we must go now.”