Page 69 of Vilest Things
For the first time in fifteen years, Calla jumps.
CHAPTER 23
Venus Hailira reaches Rincun accompanied by four guards on horses. They don’t take a carriage. They barely take any belongings.
“I’m declaring a voluntary confinement period,” she declares at East Capital’s yamen. The mayor there hurries to send news to the mayor at West Capital. The generals receive the order, but they’re told not to disperse soldiers, which incites great confusion wondering how they are to preserve order for any type of confinement, but Venus puts her foot down. Soldiers are to stay in their barracks too. She wants Rincun to turn into a land of ghosts.
“You know,” East Capital’s mayor says while Venus writes, leaning over her shoulder, “we might get people moving to Youlia because of this. You can’t interrupt their livelihoods.”
The lamp on the desk flickers. Venus puts one sheet aside. That’s the calculation for one week. Next, she’ll do a month. Then six months. By a year, she suspects the math will show that she can’t keep them in anymore.
“I’m not forcing them to do anything,” she replies simply. “They will be rewarded for staying put.”
“What if this invites people to refuse to work after confinement ends?”
Venus gives him a look. “Areyougoing to stop working?”
The mayor grimaces. He hems and haws for a few seconds, but otherwise says nothing more.
Maybe mass migration to Youlia would be for the best. Youlia doesn’t touch the borderlands. Even on the easternmost course toward the borderlands, a traveler must cross miles of Rincun before reaching the mountains. The panhandle-shaped province that the Hailiras govern is the final frontier before the edge of Talin, no matter which path one takes.
Venus turns back to her calculations. The mayor wanders off to tend to his own business. The yamen falls into silence, interrupted every few seconds only by the scratch of Venus’s ink pen nib on lined paper. When an exclamation outside wafts in through the open window, it echoes loudly through the office, and Venus frowns immediately, rising to see what has happened.
“I thought I instructed everyone in the yamen to stay inside,” she says, poking her head through the window.
Two of the yamen workers are sitting on a bench installed along the yamen exterior, cigarettes in hand. They can’t exactly go home, lest they abandon yamen administration. Still, that doesn’t mean they need to be in the open, inviting trouble.
“Councilmember, look,” the one on the left says. Her blue eyes are wide. She points out into the distance.
At first, Venus can’t tell what they’re looking at. The sky is black, hanging with a handful of stars. She searches the clouds for a few seconds before her gaze settles lower, onto the mountains.
The blip is there then gone. She wouldn’t have known that was what she was watching for if the two yamen workers didn’t jolt excitedly.
“There!” they say. “There it is again!”
Venus understands. That was the light of someone jumping. There are people in the borderlands.
She hisses through her teeth, leaning back from the window.
“Get inside, would you?”
CHAPTER 24
The world falls quiet.
Calla exhales. Inhales. The voices disappear. The pain fades. Slowly, her surroundings take shape around her: the temple dusted in gray, the moonlight beaming up the path, the marble steps…
Her body.
Calla doesn’t dare breathe as she approaches. Her head is lolled, her hair splayed. She can’t see her face. She has no indication whether she’s just freed a centuries-old entity onto the world, if Sinoa Tuoleimi was reborn as Calla Tuoleimi and was on a path toward vengeance against her enemies before her plans were diverted by a rural orphan.
Her wrist is still warm when she touches it. The fabric of her shirt rustles, responding to the push she gives her shoulder to turn herself around.
Calla goes cold. Her eyes are wide open.
Wide andyellowinstead of an empty vessel’s white.
With the bewilderment of a child, Calla merely freezes, thinking if she doesn’t move she will not be attacked. But the body before her is unresponsive. Unblinking, even when a gust of wind howls through the night and sends ash flying about. Calla reaches forward and, as though this body is a corpse, she closesits eyes. An empty vessel wouldn’t be damaging its eyes by keeping them open, so it doesn’t matter. But an empty vessel isn’t supposed to have the appearance of an eye color at all, because that signals the presence of a person’s qi, and unless the real princess is still lurking in there,whywould—
