Page 86 of Vilest Things
As soon as she makes the command, though, Anton halts in his step, disrupting the flow of the festivalgoers. He isn’t being difficult on purpose. He’s just noticed that his breath is coming out opaque.
“Shit. What’s going on?”
Calla stops short too, her eyes turning wide. The province goes cold—suddenly and without warning, as though an air-conditioning unit has been switched onto the maximum setting from the heavens. Some of the festivalgoers nearby shudder, mumbling in confusion. Actia isn’t known for this sort of weather. The winters may be brisk in the desert, but not with such abrupt drops.
“In Rincun,” Calla says, “it happened like this as well.”
“The cold?”
Calla sucks in her cheeks, biting on them inside her mouth while she considers their surroundings. Her lips burn crimson red. Dehydration, most likely. Anton shouldn’t fixate on the picture, but he does.
“The cold,” she confirms. “And then we found an entire barracks of dead soldiers. Let’s get inside.”
They identify a tavern by the banner waving outside, and Calla ducks in first, her long hair swinging from the movement. Anton glances over his shoulder, checking their surroundings closely, before following her. At the bar, Calla is already speaking to the woman behind the counter, passing over cash.
“I didn’t realize you were carrying any.”
“Only enough to pay for room six upstairs,” Calla mutters, propping her elbows against the bar. She taps her finger on the stone surface; Anton follows the direction of her subtle pointing and registers the man sitting at the end of the counter seats. He’s the only lone figure present. The rest are families or groups, getting in a late meal. A thin set of uneven stairs goes to the lodgings upstairs. When one of the barkeeps ascends with a tray of food in his hands, the staircase groans like an instrument being played underfoot.
One possible threat, but quick exits in their favor.
“There you are, dearest.” The first barkeep sets down two glasses of water in front of them. She pauses a moment, wiping the spilled drops, then says to Calla, “You look familiar.”
“Thank you. I get that a lot.”
The barkeep goes to clean another part of the tavern. Calla pushes the other glass nearer to Anton. He finishes the water in three gulps. Riding north through Laho meant the air was only getting drier and drier. Though he and Calla traded off on steering the horse forward, there wasn’t any rest to be found in between.
“We need to talk about Otta.”
“We’ll find it before she does,” Anton assures, but he should have known Calla couldn’t be taken for a fool, because just as quickly, she replies:
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.” She summons the barkeep for more water. After the woman pours another glass and turns away, Calla reaches into her pocket, retrieves a piece of paper, and slaps it upon the stone counter.
Anton takes in the map slowly.Come alone,it says at the top, marked by a blackXdeep in the middle of the borderlands.
“This has nothing to do with my personal distaste for Otta Avia. Too many strange events have happened on this delegation, starting with why she took us out here claiming she wanted the crown for you, and why the Dovetail weretargeting the delegation on August’s behalf this entire time. They may be working together, Anton. If we’re turning adversary against August, we have to prepare to counter Otta too.”
Anton sighs. Of all times to have this conversation, it has to be now, when his head is pounding and his stomach is growling. Nonetheless, he’s too worn to be sniping at Calla when she’s the closest thing he has to an ally, so he’ll entertain it.
“If you’re asking whether I think they plotted together before she fell sick, I don’t know,” he says. “I couldn’t tell you why Otta does anything she does, except that I turned down her offer to rule through me like some puppet king while we were in Lankil, and that’s the last time I spoke to her.”
Calla’s expression turns thoughtful. She downs another glass of water. If she’s trying to make sense of what sort of relationship Anton had with Otta, the truth is that he’s never really understood it either. Otta always treated the world like it was play-pretend, like nothing she did had consequence and people’s views toward her were record tapes she could rewind at will. Maybe she never actually wanted to run away with him: as much as she bemoaned the palace, she built her very sense of identity off how well she maneuvered it, and when the day came that they enacted their plan to raid the vault, perhaps there was some other ploy in progress he hadn’t been privy to. Perhaps if they had been successful, Otta would have left him for dead and used the money she’d reaped.
“It must feel terrible,” Calla states matter-of-factly. “You spent all this time keeping her alive as someone to hold on to, and you didn’t actually knowwhoyou were holding on to. You didn’t have a clue she could use qi that way. You were none the wiser that she alone possessed the location to some mythical object capable of uprooting the entire kingdom.”
Anton sets his water glass down. “Room six, was it?”
He’s walking toward the stairs before Calla can reply. He hears her tut, and seconds later, her footsteps are clattering after him.
“Did that make youupset?”
“I didn’t say anything.” The tavern trills alongside his climb. After one sharp turn and one almost-wrong pivot, Anton walks into the room labeled with a6. A small gas lamp in the corner burns to provide dim light. There’s no lock. One of them is going to have to keep watch.
“You didn’t have to say anything. You just stomped away like a petulant toddler.”
Calla comes in after him and closes the door. Maybe he’s going delirious, but he doubts he can find sleep despite his exhaustion. He wants to run the rest of the distance to the borderlands. Climb onto the top of the highest mountain and take a leap—see if that’ll make Otta come back and claim to care about him, or if it’ll prove that he was truly nothing more than a resting perch.
Seven years. He should have pulled her plug and sent himself into the incinerator alongside her corpse, saved them this trouble later on.
