Page 93 of Vilest Things
“What?” Venus mutters, but she’s lost her fight. Her expression is wholly confused, and when she catches August’s eye, he offers no further explanation. Only a shrug, and then August begins toward the yamen too.
“It’s not the cold we should be worried about, Councilmember,” he calls back. “It’s when it stops.”
“You’re quiet.”
Calla bites her thumbnail while she walks, peering over her shoulder to eye the village fading to a dot. With knowledge of August’s impending arrival, there was no time to fetch the horse outside the yamen, no time to do anything except steal two cloaks from the main office and flee on foot.
They’ve made enough distance now to slow down. She turns back around to face the mountains ahead.
But they’re also coming to the end of the line.
“Princess,” Anton prompts again. “Are you ignoring me on purpose?”
She is. It’s cold enough to freeze her brain from activity. She’s trying tothink, but she can only bump up against the conclusion that it is impossible to get any closer to the mountains, so how the fuck are they supposed to find—
“Princess. Sunshine. Sweet pea. Green beans. Red tea—”
“Are you quite entertained?” Calla finally answers. Her breath puffs out in thick, opaque clouds. “Enough. You’re only naming items. I’m listening.”
“I hadn’t even started getting specific yet.”
Maybe they could goaround, push off the western seaboard of Rincun and ride a boat out into the waters to get to the borderlands, but that would take days. They don’t have days.
“What’s wrong with a littledearest of my heart?”
“Tyrant of my heartis far more fitting.”
Calla’s eyes snap over to him in a glare. He speaks in jest, and yet a poisonous part of her still rears up, spitting acid whenever it is provoked. “Don’t demote me. That role wasn’t exactly occupied well in the past.”
Anton sighs. He can’t counter the allegation, now that Otta Avia is somewhere deep in those mountains doing who knows what. His lips thin, and then he says:
“I still don’t understand it, Calla. Why did she ask you to come, and come alone at that?”
A more careless Calla would have assumed it to be a matter of politics. A spurned woman, trying to prove a point. The Calla who watched Otta throw a knife directly into a man’s neck, though—she isn’t going to say the same. Otta Avia is far smarter than any of them were prepared for.
“I don’t know,” Calla says. “If something seems meaningless, rarely are we looking at it correctly.”
Anton stops abruptly in his step. The wind howls, and his loose hair falls into his eyes.
“Did you see that?”
Calla looks toward the mountains. They are still. Gray giants, sleeping in the distance. “See what?”
“A beam of light.” Anton points ahead, to the left. “It arced from there”—his finger moves slightly across the range, directing her gaze straight ahead next—“to there.”
Calla scrambles to pull the map from her pocket. She smooths out its creases, holds it flat. “Anton, that’s the crown.”
“What?”
“I’m serious. The landing spot matches the location on the map.”
Anton doesn’t seem convinced. He tries to swallow, and his throat moves with a stuttering motion. The more they walk, Calla feels it too. The cold twists and warps her insides in a way she hasn’t experienced since she was eight years old. It isn’t quite right to call it pain. The sensation exists somewhere parallel to it: her organs at odds with her body, struggling to pull free.
“It seems a bit convenient for it to be shooting a light into the sky, don’t you think?”
“Yousaid it was arcing in,” Calla replies, shoving the map back into her jacket. “It’s not shooting light, it’s taking it. Anton, it’s qi. The site is absorbing it across the province. Sacrifice.”
Anton closes his eyes. She doesn’t understand what he’s doing, nor does she think it’s a very good idea when she hears something in the distance and sights movement coming toward them from the village.
