Page 96 of Vilest Things
Anton doesn’t take any offense at her tone. He presses a palm against the wall, almost reverent in his inspection.
“Princess,” he whispers quietly. “You’re everywhere.”
There’s a line of text at the bottom of the mural—archaic Talinese, again. Most of the script is gibberish to her eye. Most, except the names, because those do not change, even when the other words move on.
Tuoleimi, Tuoleimi, Tuoleimi, again and again.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Calla says. “It was the same on the plaque outside. Talin has never expanded into the borderlands. Even Rincun wasn’t conquered until fifteen years ago, so how did they end up building something out here?”
“It’s trying to tell you, isn’t it?” Anton points to the first panel. “Birth. Three children.”
The mural shows three swaddles, golden crowns floating above their heads. Calla always hated art history lessons. The art that remained after the war was terrible at saying what it meant, and the interpretations the tutors told her never made intuitive sense.
Anton points to the second panel. “Battle.” He pauses. “Civil battle?”
The panel has the same colors on both sides. This mural actually doesn’t seem so hard to decode. A river runs down the middle, parting the battle lines. Calla leans in closer.
“I think that might be the Jinzi River.”
Anton frowns. “Surely not. What battle would that be depicting?”
The war with Sica is the only one that makes sense. The next panel shows a crowd of people witnessing an address by a royal on a balcony. It looks like… the Palace of Union, actually.
“That’s the sigil.”
Calla startles, blinking hard. She feels a peculiar flash of familiarity: some overlay on her vision, as though she’s been here before, she’s stood on the same floor, she’s heard those same words. She hasn’t. She knows that. Her entire body jolts regardless when it follows Anton’s line of sight and finds a small, familiar shape hovering over the head of the royal giving the address.Left dot. Long and slanting curve with a dot above. Another dot to the right.
A chill sweeps into the hall. Calla strains her ears, listening hard through the howl of wind outside the palace. Without saying anything, she breaks from the mural and heads toward the spiral staircase, eyeing the structure. The metal groans when she yanks off her gloves and touches the handrail.
“Something isn’t right.”
Calla turns over her shoulder. Anton can’t seem to help getting distracted by every item in the palace. He must know that she’s preparing to tell him off the moment she opens her mouth, because he waves at her frantically.
“What?” Calla, sparing one more glance up the staircase, takes her hand off the rail and hurries to where Anton stands. “What is it?”
“Tell me this isn’t the war with Sica.”
He’s found a map: a topographical map constructed to scale on a tall table. Each village is marked with a small white pin. Each mountain rises off the table surface with painstaking detail. The only peculiarity is how tiny the borderlands are. Most maps of the kingdom will depict the entire length of the borderlands, then extend the rendering to show a slice of Sica on the other side.
Here, the map ends curtly after the borderlands, as if the mountains drop right into the sea.
“This is definitely the war with Sica,” Calla says plainly. She doesn’t know why Anton would say otherwise. “Look at the arrows.”
She’s seen enough war plans during her time in the Palace of Heavens to know how to read them. Whoever was using this map last, they had arranged a configuration that shows one side advancing from the north and one side fleeing into the southeast. Certain sections have been marked with green. Others with red. Calla touches the plot of land where Ximili Province is, circling her finger along the green figurines there.
“Calla,” Anton says. His enunciation is slow, gentle. As though he’s trying to deliver bad news to her. “The colors. They’re on the wrong side.”
In truth, she knows what he’s saying, but her mind refuses to make the conclusion. Ximili is marked in green. A victory. During their war with Sica, the first territory they lost in the initial invasion was Ximili. Then they would keep losing, and losing, and losing, until the tide of the war turned with their retreat into San-Er and brought hard-won victory.
This doesn’t make any fucking sense. What could this beexceptthe war with Sica? Yet if that were the case… this war plan is from Sica’s side.
“I keep wondering about a Sinoa Tuoleimi,” Calla says slowly.
Anton’s eyes flit to the other side of the hall, to the mural and its archaic script. “Someone erased from Talin’s history.”
Calla touches her chest. On this body, the sigil has moved over as a faint marking of light. The real sigil is painted on the body collapsed at the border of Rincun, motionless with the rest of the province. Her stolen body. Her greatest heist.
Long live Her Majesty. Long live Her Majesty ten thousand years. Long live Her Majesty ten thousand years.
