Page 43 of Each Their Own Devil

“A week?” Aleja snapped. “Why haven’t you— What have you been doing to stop this?”

“It’s a new development. Besides, I told you at our first meeting that your priority was returning my son to me. Instead, he’s been kept in a cell, completely useless to our cause.” The Messenger finally lowered her fork and turned to her son. “Val, now that you’re here, what will you need to get to work?”

Val did not return her gaze. “I’ve explained this to the Lady of Wrath many times. Our best chance was to allow me to study the Second, but I’m afraid that opportunity has been lost.”

“Perhaps not,” the Messenger said. “As Violet said, there are still some in the Astraelis armies who are loyal to me. We could create a distraction. An attack far south of the Second’s mountain range—one large enough to force the Knowing One to direct all of his Dark Saints to respond. Even with a small band of my soldiers, we would meet little resistance.”

“We’re not causing a distraction that will lead to Otherlander deaths,” Aleja said at the same time that Val spoke.

“It won’t be enough time. It took me decades to gather what research on the First that I could. Even with proximity to the Second—orthe Third—it might be months before a breakthrough.”

Violet shoved her plate aside. She had hardly eaten more than a few bites of the potatoes. Instead of steak, she had been served some sort of grain patty that she had sliced into strips but left untouched. “You still haven’t told her, Messenger.”

“Told me what?” Aleja said sharply. She’d retrieved her fork, but with the magic emanating from her hands, it was superheated and uncomfortable to hold. A week. In a week, her husband would be dead. Her friends among the Dark Saintswould be dead. Every person she had ever met in the human world—from gossip-spouting Paola to whoever remained among the cultists that had once kidnapped Violet—would be dead. She dropped her hands under the table to stop the Messenger from seeing how much they were shaking.

“The Third has been asking for you,” the Messenger said, as if she were letting Aleja know that one of her cousins had rung to catch up.

“Excuse me?” Aleja said. This information hardly seemed to register; the dread in her felt bottomless. What was one more piece of terrible news?

“The Third has been asking for you,” the Messenger repeated slowly, like that had been the issue with Aleja’s misunderstanding the first time. “In fact, it’s all he will say. It’s infuriating.”

“You didn’t think to mention this to me in the Hiding Place?” Aleja snapped back.

“It was a surprise for when you paid us a visit. Can you imagine how it might have galvanized your fellow Dark Saints to think that the Third was desperate for a rescue?”

“He’s hardly safe here either. Do you not remember that your own fucking soldiers broke into this place not hours ago?”

“The situation is admittedly not ideal,” the Messenger said, turning her teacup slowly. A lemon slice rotated at the liquid’s surface. “More soldiers than I expected have taken up the Authorities’ cause. A hundred or so remain loyal to me and always will, but?—”

Aleja swallowed so fast that she had to cough before speaking. “A hundred or so?That’s it? I wish you had told me this sooner. I might have actually been able to talk the Otherlanders into an alliance if they thought you had any actual power left.”

“As I said, it’s not ideal, but we do have some advantages. The soldiers loyal to me are long-time veterans, well-trained, and disciplined. And you, dear Wrath, did a wonderful job of incinerating the only potentially strong leadership the mutineers had. With Merivus’s death, there will be a power vacuum and many scrambling to fill it. The Principalities are born and raised with the concept of absolute obedience to the Messenger; there are few natural leaders among them.”

“They don’t need an organized army if they have all of the Authorities on their side!” Aleja said, shoving her plate aside. “That’s like saying that it doesn’t matter that the opposite side has fighter jets and a nuclear bomb because you have a thousand well-trained foot soldiers.”

“I’m going to assume that is a human reference and bears no relation to our situation, Wrath, but I will concede that you’re right. Yet there might be a temporary solution to this problem. Over the years, I have kept my best mages close—kept them happy. There will be mages among the mutineers who are adept at getting through the Otherlanders’ wards, but not at scale. It will be hard to convince them to wage an all-out attack on the Hiding Place for now. Secondly, your Dark Saint of Gluttony has been cleverly growing dense forests all around the Otherlanders’ palace for centuries now. It makes it difficult for the Authorities to get close without risk of attack from the Avisai, who can fly higher and quicker than they can. The Authorities will do everything they can to avoid a fight near the palace.”

“What are you trying to say, Messenger?”

“That you should host me and my loyalists there.”

Aleja’s fingers twitched out of her control, dancing with orange and blue flames. She had to shake her hands out to dispel them. “Of all the things you’ve said in the past few hours, that is the most ridiculous. Even if we could somehow convince theDark Saints, there are thousands of people living in the Hiding Place who would rather die than see Astraelis on our territory.”

“Theywilldie,” the Messenger pointed out. “Tell them we come as refugees, evicted from our own lands. Tell them we come as prisoners—I will swallow my pride and arrive in chains, if that is what it takes.”

“It might be the only thing that gets me back in their good graces,” Aleja muttered.

“Then do it.” The Messenger waved her enormous hand. Aleja had never noticed that she still wore a wedding band. “If you can ingratiate yourself back into the Dark Saints by claiming that this pesky act of treason was committed because you saw it as a way toget to me, then I won’t contradict you. I will hate every moment of it. I will plot my revenge in secret. But I will do it.”

Aleja thought back to Orla’s argument, back in the war room. Was this a ruse? Was the Messenger really willing to be escorted into the Hiding Place in chains, or was this bait she knew that Aleja—who would surely be shunned by her own friends—would find almost irresistible to take? “I’ll think about it.”

“Think quickly. The words hurt enough to say. I can’t promise I won’t change my mind. Now, go see the Third, please. He’s getting annoying.”

9

DEATH KINDLY STOPS

“The blade does not sever; it carves the path to a realm unseen.” —The Book of Open Doors, Book VI: The Crossing of Worlds

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