Page 81 of Still the Sun

“I already have,” I whisper, though Casnia knows nothing of the tower. “I’ve already remembered. I need to find Salki.”

I start to turn, but Casnia grips my wrist and yanks me back. Her bright violet eyes lock with mine. Shesnarlsat me.

“No.Remember,” she snaps, jerking me off balance. As I topple forward, she presses her palm to my forehead. Heat like the moving sun shoots through skin, muscles, and bone.

And I remember.

Chapter 27

I duck under the bough of a tree, into the little grove that Cas’raneah indicated. Twilight deepens the colors of the sparse wood, highlighting the cluster of green and pink emilies growing nearby. She’s already here; Cas isn’t one to be late. Gauzy fabric hangs off her shoulders, and her long, messily plaited hair cascades over one shoulder. She comes to life when she sees me, crossing the way so swiftly she barely gives me space to enter the small clearing.

“What?” I ask. “What now?”

She looks up at me with her vibrant purple eyes. “We’re going to lead it here.” She speaks in Thestean, one of the languages of the gods.

“It? Ruin?” I sputter in the same tongue, and she hisses for my silence. “You want it to come to Tampere?” I grab a tree branch as the Serpent moves, rumbling the ground beneath our feet. The glowing emilies recede back into the earth as it does.

She nods. “It’s a newer world. Less known, and safer. Unpopulated.”

“Wepopulate it, Cas.” Our city has grown since the goddess’s last visit. We have mills and forges and an apothecary. A second cistern, even a small courthouse. Our people aren’t as numerous here as in other places, but we’re thriving, building, growing, learning. That’s what she and the greater godsaskedus to do. It’s why they created us.

But Cas’raneah shakes her head. “It has to be here. Ruin doesn’t know this place, not yet. It’s small and new; your Serpent hasn’t even shed it yet.”

I gawk at her. “What?” Step back and look at the ground I’d just been standing on, as though it might open a window into the planet’s core. “It’s still here?”

She gestures to the emilies. “Where the flowers grow, the Serpent spins. I will—”

“You moved us to a gods-damnedunshed planet?” So many more words fight to climb up my throat, but only a few nonsensical syllables make it past my tongue.

Holding up radiant fingers, she stalls me. “It’s perfectly safe—”

“No wonder we get so many tremors.” I knit both hands into my hair. “Our whole city could fall when it sheds—”

“The Serpent does not destroy what it so laboriously creates.” The edge to Cas’raneah’s voice warns me of her thinning patience, though in truth, she should be more concerned about mine. “I will rehome—”

“Thisis our home.” I switch to the Ancetti language without meaning to. The language my people formed for ourselves.

She frowns. “And Elet’avar was your home before this.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You complain about the Serpent and then refuse to leave it?” She clasps her fingers under her chin, pleading, and steps closer. The top of her head only comes to my sternum. “None of this isfair, Pelnophe. There will be no Tampere, no Elet’avar, if we don’t stop Ruin. We can’t destroy it—we haven’t figured out how. But we can imprison it. Far away from the other worlds. Here. I know I’m asking you to leave your city—we will imprison it far away. Preserve your city, if we can.”

I scoff. I don’t want to share a world with the Devourer, no matter how they build its prison.

“Ruin is old and powerful,” she continues. “We need your magic to seal it.”

I gawk at her, waiting for the punch line, but none comes. A cool breeze blows gold hair into my face; I swipe it back. Time to hack more off, I guess. “It isn’t magic,” I explain. Again.

But the goddess merely smiles. “To Ruin, it will be.”

Cas’raneah hesitantly peeks into the small vat. I’ve set it up in the camp that our war party—for lack of a better term—has established in the middle of nowhere, halfway between our evacuated city and the location the gods selected for Ruin’s prison. But simple bars and stone will not hold the Devourer.

She, Arthen, and I crouch around the steel pot on its little burner, watching large bubbles form in the thin, liquid silver below. It casts a soft glow, almost like that of the emilies, against the sides of the vat. “It’s that brine silver I discovered when we moved out here,” I explain. Cas’raneah splits her time between Tampere and the battlefront itself; I haven’t seen her in almost fifty of Tampere’s days. “That shiny stuff at the bottom of those salt pots?”

“You went in there?” she asks. “Are you hurt?”

“I usedmagic.” I wiggle my fingers, which earns me an eye roll. The salt pots are filled with variations of blue and green boiling liquid. I don’t know what the World Serpent did or ate that created such a phenomenon in its skin, but it’s unsafe to touch bare handed. Nothing a drainage system and excavator can’t handle.

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