Redemptor Read online

  The oil lamps smoldered low, making wisps of fragrant smoke in the air. An open arch led out to my balcony, where the hum of cicadas drifted in from the night.

  “Well,” I said. “We should get some sleep.”

  “We should,” he echoed.

  “Busy schedule tomorrow. Sparring practice. Court sessions.”

  “Full day,” he agreed.

  And then my arms locked around him. His lips found my neck, collarbone, earlobe—every inch of me that could sing and shiver. When my hands peeled off his shirt, a crackle of energy danced across my skin. He was using his Hallow. Tracking the pleasure as it strummed through my body—targeting areas he knew would be weakest.

  “That’s not fair,” I mumbled.

  His voice was thick. “Neither was that necklace.”

  He lifted me from the ground. I could feel his pulse against mine, pounding and erratic as he climbed the short steps to my sleeping dais and we fell toward the silk-covered pallet. As my council siblings tended to migrate between bedrooms, I had barely slept on the dais twice before . . . and I wasn’t about to now.

  Sanjeet suspended himself above me on a clublike arm. His eyes burned shades of murky amber. My fingers found the peaks and caverns of his chest, savoring my favorite parts. Rosewater glistened on his burnished copper skin. His free hand caressed my lower legs, and my shift moved slowly up my thigh . . . until he stopped.

  “Tar.” He was still. “Do you want this?”

  I fought to gain control of my lungs. “I love you,” I squeaked, and he gave me that rare, butter-melting smile.

  “I know, sunshine girl. But we haven’t done this before.” He dropped a kiss on my shoulder, and his fingers drew intoxicating circles on my leg. Still, he watched my face. “I want you to be sure.”

  The back of my throat burned. I felt his Hallow scan my body with the precision of Aritsar’s High Lord General, mapping territories, campaigns to set my skin alight.

  The answer to his question was yes. I wanted everything about him. But . . .

  A vision flashed in my mind. A bundle with soft hair and tea-colored eyes; the Ray glowing in a new, tiny body.

  I stiffened, and Sanjeet’s hand dropped immediately from my leg.

  Heart racing with indecision, I reached for his chiseled face. He turned to catch my fingertips in his mouth, and I swallowed, fighting to retain my focus.

  “There are risks,” I said at last.

  “Mm.” He nodded thoughtfully. “There are herbs for that, you know. Droughts. Potions.”

  “Yes. But we don’t have those right now. And I don’t feel like sending a servant to get them.” There were enough empress-related rumors circling the servants’ quarters tonight. “So . . .” I withdrew my hand. “Not tonight, Jeet. I’m sorry. For not knowing how I felt until—”

  “Don’t apologize. Not for that.” He kissed the top of my head and fell beside me, chuckling ruefully. “Though in the future, if you’re planning to wear that necklace . . . we might need a backup plan.”

  I snorted, leaned to kiss his cheek, and then buried my face in his shoulder. “Is it . . . strange, do you think? That I’m not sure about having babies? After all, I was supposed to have Dayo’s. You’d think I’d get used to the idea by now.” I scowled into the darkness. “Why am I always so different?”

  Sanjeet was still for a long time, staring at the lavender sprites twinkling through skylights. “For what it’s worth, sunshine girl,” he said at last, “you have always been my kind of different.”

  I sighed, shutting my eyes. “That’s only because you’re as strange as I am.”

  His chest rumbled with laughter. I settled against his cavernous heartbeat, savoring my time as a love-drunk girl before dawn transformed me, once again, into the mad Empress Redemptor of Aritsar.

  CHAPTER 9

  I had worried about court gossip for nothing: My antics at the Peace Banquet was old news by morning.

  “A volcano did what?” I demanded, after Dayo shook me and Sanjeet awake.

  “Destroyed one-third of Oluwan City,” gasped Dayo, thrusting travel clothes into my hands. “Well. Not yet, exactly. But soon.”

  Dawn had barely flooded the suite as Sanjeet and I stumbled into the hallway behind Dayo, joining the rest of our council in the main salon.

  “What’s going on?” Sanjeet demanded.

  Our siblings were darting in circles, stuffing packs with clothing, weapons, and healing droughts.

  “Umansa’s tapestries,” Dayo breathed. “He just deciphered the prophecies. He didn’t spot the pattern until he finished the last one, just an hour ago.”

  Umansa’s prophetic tapestries lined the salon walls. A tall loom rested in one corner, shadowed in the weak morning light, where Umansa had spent every evening weaving in a fugue. His Hallowed tapestries—which featured the only images his milky white eyes could see—told stories in fractured pieces, each blazing in a chaos of glyphs and constellations, empires rising and falling with the capricious turn of planets.

  “Nothing’s been destroyed yet,” cut in Umansa, turning his ear toward Dayo and me. “The volcano may not even have erupted. My visions aren’t clear on timelines.”

  “But we have to stop it,” Dayo said, wringing his hands as I pulled off my satin sleep scarf, still groggy from dreaming. “It could happen at any moment.”

  “Can’t we at least wait until after breakfast?” mewled Emeronya. Amidst the packing chaos, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, peering into her glass scrying orb. “I’ve searched the city borders. No sign of fires, lava, anything. If Umansa’s vision is so urgent, why didn’t he say something earlier?”

  “I did,” Umansa retorted, crossing his tattooed arms. “Or at least, my hangings did. But they weren’t clear until now.” He gestured at the sandstone salon walls, where his last few weeks of tapestries glittered in black, ochre, and crimson. The latest tapestry still hung from the beams of the loom. It appeared to depict a mountain with teeth, flashing claws, and unsettlingly human eyes. The rocky beast reared on its haunches, spewing lava from its mouth. Glyphs and planets bordered the tapestry—coordinates of the monster’s location.

  Zathulu, my bookish council brother and Archdean of the Imperial Academy, scribbled furiously on a slate, glancing up at the tapestry and squinting over reference scrolls. “That can’t be right. Umansa’s tapestry puts the volcano in the same place as Olojari Temple.”

  I frowned. “The Ember mountain forge?”

  The Ember religious sect revered Warlord Fire, one of Aritsar’s principal deities. His devotees built mines and holy forges all over Aritsar, hoping the elemental god would bless their efforts with rich veins of gold, iron, and coal.

  “The forge belongs to the Ember,” Umansa said. “But the quarry beneath it is imperial property.”

  “Oh.” Yet another place that Dayo and I owned. I supposed the nobles ran the quarry for us too.

  “I’ve been tracking its shipments to the treasury,” Umansa went on. “Recently, some rebel group has been interfering with supply lines. I thought my prophecies pointed to some kind of bandit uprising—but I guess I was wrong. Looks like the real danger is that mountain exploding.”

  “But Olojari is seventy miles from here,” Kirah said. “Something that far away couldn’t destroy Oluwan City.”

  “Not something,” Sanjeet murmured. “Someone.” He had already found and tightened his weapon halter. Wordlessly, he crossed the room to Umansa’s new tapestry, grimacing as he traced the mountain’s livid features. “I’ve seen a face like that before,” he said, sending an image down the Ray bond.

  My siblings stiffened as Sanjeet’s vision flooded our thoughts: a tall, pole-like being with wings of cobalt fire and blazing yellow eyes that slanted all the way to his temples.

  “I don’t understand,” said Ai Ling. “Why would Swana’s fairy guardian set off a volcano in Oluwan?”

  “That isn’t Melu,” I protested, swallowing hard as I examined
the tapestry. “It is an alagbato, I think. But that creature isn’t my father.”

  “If not Melu, then who?” Zathulu objected. “Oluwan doesn’t have nature fairies, at least, none that I’ve heard of. Most alagbatos died when we razed the land to build cities.”

  “It’s Malaki,” said Kirah.

  We all turned to stare at her in surprise. She worried the edge of her prayer scarf, blinking with shocked realization.

  “Malaki the Mad, Malaki of the Mountain . . . there are songs about her. I’d forgotten until now. No one’s sure, but . . . High Priestess Mbali believes Malaki’s the alagbato who made the doors to the Imperial Hall.” With a jolt, I remembered the legend—an alagbato had fashioned the Imperial Hall doors with iron from her own heart. Kirah brushed her chin to ward off bad luck. “No one talks about her. Some elders think it’s bad luck to say Malaki’s name within the palace walls. Anyway, no one’s seen her for a century, though she’s guarded that mountain range for millennia. Mbali wasn’t even sure she was still alive.”

  “I don’t see why you’re all so worried,” said Kameron. He grinned, making his freckles pop as he slung a burly arm around my shoulder. “We’ve got an alagbato of our own. Tar’ll talk down Mad Malaki—won’t you, Tar?”

  “I’m not a fairy,” I sputtered, wriggling out of my brother’s embrace. “I’m not even immortal, except for what I get from the Ray. What do you expect me to do?”

  I absently fingered my lioness mask. To my surprise, anointing Dayo hadn’t given me a new immunity. Instead, the lone red stripe on my mask, representing my birth immunity to burning, had grown more vibrant, framing itself in gold. The Ray, it seemed, would allow me to have an extra council member. But just like every other Raybearer, I would be immune to only twelve deaths. It comforted me to know I would die an old woman . . . assuming I survived the next two years.

  Kameron shrugged. “Dunno. But Melu seemed to like you well enough. If I’ve learned anything training magical beings, it’s that species smell their own—no matter what they look like on the outside.”

  “One problem,” Umansa announced quietly. “Olojari isn’t the only disaster.”

  He gestured at the tapestries lining the salon. Slowly, I noticed that every loom depicted a different creature with glowing eyes—some causing floods in lakes and rivers, others rising from quaking grassland, and some charging through blizzards of snow, or bellowing amidst blazing jungles and forests.

  “It’s everywhere,” Umansa confirmed. “Alagbatos are awakening all across Aritsar, threatening crucial raw materials.”

  A dazed pause chilled the room.

  “We have to go back to our home realms,” Mayazatyl realized slowly. “All of us.”

  “We have to stop them,” Theo agreed. “Or at least figure out what they want. It’ll be harder once we split up, but—”

  “Split up?” I interjected, head spinning. “What about council sickness?”

  “There’s no other way to reach all the realms in time,” said Sanjeet, scanning a map on the salon war table. “So we’ll just have to endure. Travel quickly. Treat our symptoms another way.”

  “That’s impossible,” I protested.

  “Not with kuso-kuso,” said Thérèse, tremblingly lifting a vial of smelling herbs to her nostrils. “It won’t be easy. But if we all take my new strain at the same time—the Ray can unite our minds across space. Not forever—the herbs aren’t that strong. But if you take them every day, we’ll stay connected for a while. Five months. Maybe six.”

  “Good.” Sanjeet nodded curtly. “If we’re lucky, Aritsar will never know it was in danger. Prevent the disasters before they happen.”

  My pulse began to race. Five or six months? My council siblings had never separated for that long. Not ever. What if something happened to us?

  Mayazatyl dusted off her hands with satisfaction, patting a leather bundle that bristled with weapons. “Look, I’ll miss you all and everything, but . . . Am’s Story, I can’t wait to leave court. I’ve been streamlining my inventions ever since the abiku attacked Ebujo. My new cannons can shoot twice as much holy water as the old ones, and I’m dying to test them out.”

  “The abiku at Ebujo were demons,” Kirah reminded her. “Holy water won’t work on alagbatos. Besides, alagbatos aren’t evil, or at least they aren’t born that way. We should try to appease them first.”

  “I’ll bring my lyre,” offered Theo. My council brother from Sparti slipped the instrument from a sling on his back and patted the strings. “If my songs can put Kameron’s pet beasts to sleep, I’m sure they can handle a fairy.”

  “Dayo and Tarisai will stay in Oluwan, of course,” Ai Ling said, pacing. “They can handle the alagbato in Olojari, but we can’t risk them going much farther from the capital. Not after convincing all the continent rulers to stay. I’ll stick around a little longer, to help Tarisai manage the monarchs. But after that, I should go to Moreyao.”

  “I’ll delay leaving for Dhyrma,” muttered Sanjeet, staring grimly out at the Oluwan City skyline. “At least for now. There’s too much to do here. If Malaki doesn’t listen to Tarisai, then I’ll have to mobilize the Imperial Guard. Order evacuations. Build barricades, trenches. Camps for refugees.”

  Everyone began to talk at once, faces brightening as they planned their departure, and traded strategies to wrangle alagbatos. They . . . were excited to leave. All of them. My family wanted to flee the safety of our home. They were eager to face danger, eager to leave me. My jaw tightened as I remembered the apparitions of undead children filling the Imperial Hall. Ghostly, lisping shadows crept at the edges of my vision.

  “Stop it,” I bellowed, and my siblings froze, turning to stare at me. “Sorry. I . . . I just—” I stammered, picking anxiously at my hair, until my coils lay in mats. “You’re moving too fast, all of you. It isn’t safe. Scattering across the continent. Abandoning the capital, abandoning each other? This isn’t how our family is supposed to work. This isn’t right. It’s foolhardy. It’s—” My fear blazed into anger. “Selfish.”

  After a beat of shocked silence, Mayazatyl emitted a sharp laugh. “Well that’s rich. Coming from you.”

  I blinked at her. “What in Am’s name is that supposed to mean?”

  “What do you think?” She avoided my gaze, twisting her silky twin braids angrily in one hand. “Tar, if abandoning our family on a whim is selfish, then . . . then you’re more selfish than any of us.”

  I scoffed, then gaped, waiting for the others to leap to my defense. But instead, my family fidgeted where they stood, avoiding my eyes—even Kirah.

  “You all agree with her,” I breathed. “You’ve been talking about me behind my back. And you think Mayazatyl’s right.”

  “No. It’s not like that,” Kirah said, coming to put a placating hand on my arm. Then she traded a glance with the others. “Well—not exactly. It’s just—”

  “It’s just you offered yourself to the abiku,” Emeronya blurted. She glared at her orb, trying to conceal a trembling lower lip. “You came back from Sagimsan, and called off the Treaty, and swore you’d go to hell. All without asking what any of us thought. Without thinking how we would feel if you d-died—” She broke off, not trusting her voice to continue. I saw her grief mirrored in the rest of my siblings’ faces . . . even in Sanjeet’s. Even Dayo’s.

  “For the last time,” I said. “I’m not going to stay in the Underworld.”

  “You can’t promise that,” Theo said, plucking despondently at his lyre. “And Tar . . . ever since you came back from Sagimsan, you’ve been different. Distant. Angry.”

  My confusion drained away, replaced by a throbbing sadness. “You’re my only friends,” I said. “You’re all I care about.”

  “We used to be,” Zathulu said. “But you’ve changed, Tar. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. We’re just . . . still getting used to the new Tarisai. The one who upsets laws, and plans prison heists, and runs off to Songland to unearth old injustices—”


  “Old injustices?” I cut in, slowly repeating after him. “Like the two hundred children who were sacrificed last year, and the thousands of children before that?”

  My siblings paused uncomfortably.

  “No one’s saying the empire’s perfect,” Mayazatyl said then, crossing her arms. “But you disappeared for months. And now that you’re back, all you care about is changing things. New treaties! New councils! We support you as empress, Tar, but did you stop and think that some of us—well—love Aritsar just the way it is?”

  Kirah’s grip on my arm tightened. “Don’t misunderstand, Tar,” she said gently. “We know you had to change the Treaty. More than anything, we just want you ba—” She bit her lip. “Want you to be happy.”

  But I had caught what she almost said.

  We just want you back.

  I tried to unhear it. Tried to tell myself I was misunderstanding, that I was being unfair. I could fix this. I could give my best friends what they wanted. But when I scanned their guilty faces, realization seared me, like the sun on a parched savannah, the truth a lethal ember among rushes.

  My family missed the love-starved girl from Swana. The one who worshipped her friends, and whose anger could be cooled with a kiss. They missed the tree in its gilded pot. The girl so afraid of herself, and so grateful for a family, the world could burn to ash, and she would smile and call it paradise.

  And though I loved my friends—though I would still die and live for them—I would never be that Tarisai again.

  “There’s something I need to tell you all,” I whispered then, staring emptily at the eye-filled tapestries. “I’ve been getting visions. Apparitions of children like the one who killed Thaddace. I saw one last night at the banquet—and another, after anointing Dayo. I can’t tell if they want to help me or hurt me.”

  “Really?” Emeronya, who studied the supernatural as High Lady Magus, perked up in alarm. “When do the creatures usually appear? When you’re doing something? Thinking, feeling something specific?”

  I considered, chewing the inside of my cheek. The first child had appeared when I was full of hope, thinking I’d succeeded at rescuing Thaddace. And when the second vision appeared, I had been watching the hall full of dancers, basking in the triumph of my Peace Banquet. Finally, moments before I had hallucinated the hall as a mass mausoleum . . . I had just celebrated Dayo’s anointing.