Excerpt: THE SEA ETERNAL by Emery Robin
From one of the most original voices in science fiction comes the spectacular sequel to the epic, interstellar love story that began in The Stars Undying (US | UK).

Read the first chapter from The Sea Eternal (US | UK), on sale March 11, below!
Goddess, tell me the story.
PART I
IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS—
CHAPTER ONE
One fine summer day, when the birds were singing and the lindens had flowered and the sun had come to rest on the ripples in the river, a woman bashed her sister’s skull in with a rock. So the city of Ceiao was born.
Don’t like it? Well, it’s only one story. Here’s another: Long ago, so long ago that the days were too new to be counted, a great ship landed on a fine and fertile planet. Out streamed the people, men and women, noble and brave. They had come from a faraway city by the sea, these brave and noble people, a city where a war had been lost and all their fine towers had burned. They had fled a long way. And their leader was the noblest and bravest of them all, because building Ceiao was his destiny, and because he was the son of a god, and because he always did as he was told.
When I was young, my neighbors would tell me that the people of the second story made Ceians in their image, strong and disciplined, upright and hardworking, uncorrupted and chaste and dutiful, enlightened and enlighteners and explorers and leaders of men. For all I know, it may have even been true. That was beside the point. It was for children, and so it wasn’t the truth but the lesson that mattered: Home is wherever you can take it. This is the beginning of empires.
You asked for a story. Before I begin, let me tell you the truth: I think now that the woman of the first story made Ceians in her image, too.
At the highest point of heaven there was a spark, and the spark danced, and as it danced it grew and licked with a red tongue out at the dark and at the jagged half-moons, and it spat out light and shouted, and the seagulls cried and hurled themselves off the ships and the harbor-gate and beat frantically toward the west. Through the light shot one—two—three dozen steel dots, flashing through smoke, weaving, screaming toward the town below.
“A message for you, Disciple,” said a servant into my ear. “Urgent news from Ceiao.”
“Go away,” I said, and emptied my gun at the sky.
The drones burst. Where they’d hung in the sky, scraps fluttered, ashes falling—then, as they drifted toward the torches and strings of lanterns and flashing violet lamps, the light caught them, and the crowd that had gathered before the royal palace shrieked and leapt up, hands scrabbling in the air, snatching the flakes of gold to their chests, turning up their faces to let them fall into their open mouths.
A palace official threw her hands up. “Twenty-one confirmed hits to Admiral Decretan!” she bellowed. “The Honored Disciple wins again!”
The noblemen around me burst into applause. So did the crowd, hooting and whistling, waving cups and tankards in my direction. I let my gun fall, and so did the Szayeti next to me, a long-haired young man in the palace guard. The official stomped her feet for attention. “The prize!” she shouted, gesturing. Around the side of the steps, puffing and panting, came two of my soldiers, carrying an enormous silver platter stacked with bottles of wine.
Fire streaked across the sky again, green this time, then blue. Behind it, an eye opened up in the black, and resolved itself into a glittering golden falcon, which spread its wings and became two leaping cats, four silver crocodiles, eight asps winding down the sky toward the horizon, a holo-forest of shining kelp curling back up from the sea and bursting into sunflowers.
I thrust my fist in the air. “Give them to the people!” I bellowed.
The Alectelans roared, surging up. The platter tumbled immediately and vanished. A dozen hands reached out and bore me up onto the people’s shoulders, a riot of hot flesh and drunken voices, the river of stars rolling and swaying above me, the buildings of the Bolvardo del Tombo bobbing along the corner of my eye. Women smacked kisses onto my cheeks. Wine spilled over my mouth and down my shirt collar. I whooped, shouted, stuck my tongue out for people to drop sweets onto it, and somewhere around the third street corner fell out of their arms and into a circle dance. The dancers were screaming the words to a song I didn’t know, something Sintian, and when I howled nonsense syllables in time they shrieked with laughter, tugged me back toward the palace, and shoved me toward the woman waiting at the base of the steps.
“My lady,” I called, swaying, and held out a hand.
Fireworks burst again. Szayet’s smile flared gold. She seized me and spun into my arms.
When we had come down to the streets of Alectelo this morning to begin the festival day, her hair had been braided tightly back, her kohl in neat wings beneath the jade on her eyelids, her crown straight and gleaming on her brow. Now that we’d paraded up and down the Bolvardo del Tombo, cheered on the footraces, feasted on fish and beer and fresh cherries with the crowd at the Summer Market, and rowed out into the harbor to light the first fireworks, the kohl had smeared across her temple and the pads of my fingers, the crown sat askew, the hair hung loose and sweet-smelling over her bare brown shoulders. I’d been dragging my fingers through that hair not half an hour ago, when we’d ducked into an alleyway near the Summer Market, and she’d walked me up against the wall and pushed her thigh between my legs and her hands under my shirt.
“What is this,” she said into my ear now, “the fifteenth time you’ve won an athletics contest against the Alectelans this week? The sixteenth?”
I tilted my neck invitingly. She laughed and kissed me there, lingering to dig her teeth briefly into my pulse. “Fortune loves me,” I said.
“Someone certainly loves you,” she said, took my chin in two fingers, and caught my mouth in a long, slow, hungry kiss, her hand sliding round my waist and drifting down with interest.
Her mouth was bittersweet with wine and magnificently warm, and the rain spattering my neck was a nasty shock of cold. I shivered and pulled away. Deep clouds were collecting over the palace, blurring the poppies and monkey flowers still sketching themselves in light across the sky. Weather always came on so damn quick in this town, I thought—you couldn’t trust its sky any more than its queen. At the palace door stood the messenger who’d said Ceiao to me before I’d shot at the drones. She’d been waiting; now she grimaced at the sky, pulled her hood over her head, and turned to duck into the dry hall.
Szayet caught the direction of my gaze. Her hand stopped moving, to my great annoyance. “The courtiers will want to celebrate your victory,” she said into my ear. “Your officers will want to celebrate, too.”
“We don’t have to go in,” I said to her dark eyelashes, her half-open lips, the wink of quicksilver pearl in her ear. “We could just stay here, you and I, until it all goes dark.”
“You always say that,” she murmured.
“It’s always true,” I murmured back.
We were drunk with sun as much as we were with wine, and with laughter more than either. When I blinked, I could still feel flecks of gold on my lashes. The shadows of the great sandstone statues leaned over the palace steps, peering thoughtfully at Szayet’s crown. To my left, smooth-faced and pale-eyed, its mouth hooked up in a sneer: Alekso of Sintia, called here the Undying. I had never seen that face outside of statues and paintings. Only two living people ever had, and one was locked in a cell on Itsaryet, and the other was striding ahead of me toward the palace’s double doors.
To my right, though—older than Alekso but no less handsome, a long scar curving along his jaw, his smile faint and unreadable—a face that I knew as well as I knew my own. Sometimes I thought I’d known it better. It was five hundred and fifty-one days since I had found my friend Matheus Ceirran’s hacked-apart corpse, and three hundred and forty days since I had last touched Ceian soil, and twenty-nine days since I had last gone to bed sober. Nothing in the world was wrong with me, and I was spectacularly happy.
There were two guards at the door, one Szayeti and one Ceian. The Szayeti fell to their knees. “Holiest Oracle,” they shouted over the noise of the flutes. “A blessed Feast of the Ship Bokapalo to you,” and when Szayet gestured them up, they scrambled to their feet and bowed deeply to me. “Beloved Disciple.”
The Ceian guard was rolling a sílfion cigarette. She caught my eye and smirked. I grinned back. “You keep telling me so,” I said.
Almost a year of breathing her air meant that Szayet no longer had to glare at me. It was just as good a thrill, anyway, to know that she wanted to. I grinned at her, too, and slipped my hand around her waist.
“We’ve received an urgent message from Ceiao, Disciple,” said the Ceian. “It says—”
“Not now, it doesn’t. Like hell Ceiao is seeing me before I’ve had a bath,” I said. “We’ll eat at the dice tables, I think. Does that suit my lady?”
“Well enough,” said Szayet, though her expression had grown still flatter. “Tell the kitchen to bring up whichever boar has finished roasting.”
They bowed again to her and pulled the doors open. Noise tumbled down the steps, into the night.
A dozen Szayeti nobles burst toward us in a cloud of thick perfume, laughing and shouting tuneless love songs, clinging to one another’s arms. They paused to sweep deep and elegant bows—first to Szayet, then to me—and went swaying toward the street, calling out to strangers, waving bejeweled hands. From within the hall two dozen more arms reached out to us, encrusted with rings and bracelets—a jungle of bright eyes, pipes shrieking, incense billowing out into the dusk, blue and red light, Holiest, Anita, Oracle, Anita, Queen, Anita—
Szayet caught an outstretched hand and was gone. I struck a match on the doorframe, lit the Ceian soldier’s cigarette, and paused briefly at the Szayeti guard’s side—how’s your latest lover, that’s a crying shame, cards tomorrow night in the cellars, I won’t forget—and went without haste into the throng.
Once I had charged through this hall in the middle of a gunfight, and pockmarked the granite pillars with fire, and torn the tapestries, and smashed the mosaics on the floor. Now the pillars were green marble, the ceiling was new curved glass, the walls were scattered with lanterns winking in every color, and the floor was scuffed with five hundred moving feet. Bodies pressed close on each side of me, hands on my shoulders, hands on my thighs. One of my soldiers pressed a wine cup into my hand. I tossed it back at once and reached out blindly for another.
Here were drummers, here were timbrel players. Here were dancers on the balconies, dressed in gauze and necklaces of lilies. Here were basins of ice carved in the shapes of women, their bellies stacked high with black grapes and white melon and their arms and feet already melting onto the floor, dancers splashing barefoot in the puddles. I snatched an infant squid from a platter spilling over with shellfish, stumbled, fell into a platinum tree stretching its arms up to the ceiling—here were leaves made of gold and fruit of diamonds, here were living ivy and bougainvillea hanging down from their branches between twisting silk ribbons. Four dozen hummingbirds fluttered round the ceiling and darted down to light on the branches.
Up the stairs, to the landing where mechanical ostrich-feathered fans waved clouds of perfume down across the crowd—from this height I could see the whole curving shore of Alectelo: a handful of Ceian ships with wings folded up in the harbor, the crowd on the boulevard still dancing as the sky flashed from bronze to honey and the rain shimmered down, horses galloping round the new racetrack, noblemen diving in the marble-lined hot springs in the courtyard, a pair of tigers pacing through our rooftop garden. Around the side of the balcony, a three-headed stone serpent spouted wine, frankincense-scented water, honey. I dunked my cup in the foaming mixture at its base and threw it back. Down the stairs again, and here were more fireworks, little ones, green and violet sparks spitting up from the floor, stinging the bare thigh of a Sintian girl who shrieked with laughter and fell into the arms of a palace guard. Here a circle dance, tripping left toward the musicians—here two more of my soldiers and a Szayeti girl, pressed up against the wall together, hands moving over one another’s hips—and here my lady again, sandwiched between two wide-eyed noblewomen, rolling her dice in her hand.
I slipped my arms around her waist. She startled and threw: two ones, two fours.
“Your luck’s run out,” I whispered into her ear.
She twisted in my arms and cupped my jaw with her free hand and kissed me slow, slow, until I shivered and gave in and opened up for her, and then she pulled back and said, “What did you mean, You keep telling me so?”
“What? Nothing,” I said, and went to catch her mouth with mine again, but she laid her hand over my lips and I had to settle for flicking my tongue over the pad of her finger. “If you mean to begin whipping me when I blaspheme, you’re a little late,” I said against her palm. “There’s a few years’ worth of it to catch up on by now.”
“I don’t believe in too late,” she said.
The swift and unwanted thought came to me of the scarred sandstone face outside. “That’s where I part from you, I’m afraid,” I said. At that her face tightened, and I grinned an easy grin and said swiftly, “Well, it’s too late for you to strip me down and have your way with me back in that alley by the Summer Market, isn’t it?”
“Hm,” she said. The girl beside her had thrown four threes, and was pulling gleaming stacks of dekar into her bust while her friend laughed. Szayet scooped up the dice without looking and threw again: three sixes. The dealer burst into applause, but Szayet slipped out of my arms.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.
The noise of the party did not fade when we were in her rooms. The noise of the party never did. It drifted sometimes, to the shore or to outlying taverns, or it dimmed to the faint murmur of laughter and one flute—that was usually when I would muster up defiance against my hangover and descend again, dressed in a pink feather coat and bearing three bottles of Ceiao’s best in my fists, roaring for all my best soldiers to come and see. But to my knowledge, whether we were there or no, whether it was market day or a holiday or a day when any decent person would have been working, whether it rained or shone or blew hurricanes from the west, the party had never yet died.
Now, while the kitharas thrummed under our feet and muffled whoops echoed over the sea, my lady held her hair away from the nape of her neck. I untied the fastening on her dress, pausing occasionally to kiss the curve of her shoulder, the high knob of her spine. Ordinarily, she would even let me leave marks on her here—one, fading purple, stained the nape of her neck like wine—but now, when my mouth lingered too long on her jaw, Szayet pushed away from me and let the loose fabric unfold itself down from her breasts to her hips to her legs.
She stepped out of the pooled cotton and went to the mirror by her window. I allowed myself to sit still and look at her, which I had not yet had my fill of today: her dark red mouth, her wide soft thighs, the long and nimble fingers of her hands. She was looking at me, too, but if what was in her face was hunger, I didn’t recognize it. I could think of no reason for her to be hungry, in any case. My hair was stiff with salt wind from the harbor, my arms and legs the usual mess of old scars and muscle gone soft. My clothes were fleet clothes—a blue tunic, a soldier’s belt, well-worn boots. I looked, I thought, exactly as I had looked every single day since she’d met me on the Ceian docks when we’d both been young. From the tablet I’d left on the bedside table, a red seal blinked urgently: a message from my sister, Flavia. I stepped casually to the left, so that her shoulder obscured it from me.
“Disciple,” said Szayet.
“Yes?” I said.
“You answer to it when it suits you, then,” she said.
“Oh, I do everything if it suits me,” I said, coming toward her. “I eat and drink, if it suits me, and I come when I’m called, if it suits me. And if it suits me—” I took her hand, ducking my head to press my open mouth to her palm, but she pulled away.
“I told you I bought a new dress, didn’t I?” she said. “From that new weavers’ studio down by the Winter Market.”
Bewildered at the change of subject, I retreated to her bed. “You told me,” I said. She had a thousand pet businesses springing up around Alectelo and all the southern islands: tailors here, painters there, pearlsmiths and vintners and glassmakers and starfighter racers. Szayet, as the letters piling up in my tablet from the Merchants’ Council informed me in tones of increasing irritation, needed less from Ceiao than Szayet ever had. That was well enough, to my mind. Why was I meant to give a damn whether there was Ceian steel hanging in the skies, or whether I spoke Ceian with my men at the harbor, or whether I treated with Ceian merchants at the Summer Market? It wasn’t life-and-death, this place. It was only Alectelo.
Szayet went to her wardrobe, bare feet silent on the carpet, and lifted the dress carefully out. It was a liquid silky red thing, a low-cut collar and ribbons floating out at its back. Around its hem and up the skirt, gold and black crossed and crisscrossed: Sintian shape and Szayeti pattern, a mixture unmistakably of this place.
She held it out and looked at me. It took me a moment to understand what she meant. When I did, I grinned, uncertain.
She didn’t smile back. My humor died. I swallowed. “It won’t fit,” I said.
“Perhaps not,” she said, face unreadable. “Still. You’ll do as you’re told, won’t you?”
Fortune help me, I thought, and I shed my clothes and stepped into the skirt of the dress. She smoothed the fabric up my sides, over my chest—it was too big, I’d thought, and I had been right, but she pulled the ribbons sharply at my back, and I gasped, and then the dress was tight against me, as tight as binding rope.
“Sit,” she said, turning to the wardrobe without looking to see whether I would obey her.
I sat. On my knees, over my thighs, the silk ran as smooth as water. When I looked down at myself, it was like seeing two sheets of glass laid over each other: from my knees downward, my own familiar legs and feet, and then up, my belly and my breasts, Szayet, Szayet as she must appear to her own eyes.
She turned back, now holding a terra-cotta pot in her hand, and she came toward me and settled herself on my thighs, a warm weight. “Be still,” she said, “and don’t blink.”
The kohl stick trailed over one eyelid, then the other. When she leaned back and I blinked at last, I could feel the heaviness, faint and wet.
“Open,” she said.
I opened my mouth. Her right thumb pressed into my lip. Her left took my chin, holding it steady. In her eyes was a look of focus I rarely saw. Now I was not breathing.
She slid off my lap, went to the table again, and returned with two strings of pink pearls. “Bow your head,” she said, and when I did, she looped one around my throat and lifted my wrist to fasten the other. At last she stood back.
“Come to the mirror,” she said.
When she had begun, I had thought I would laugh. I would look grotesque, I thought, like a costume party, a theater clown. The reflection in the mirror was not ugly. It was unrecognizable. The mouth that twitched redly in its face, the hips and waist under the delicate silk, were not a soldier’s, they were not a Ceian’s. The black eyes within the black kohl were hardly human. They were the eyes of an insect—of a creature I did not know.
“Now I am Ana Decretan,” she said, just behind my shoulder, “and you are Patramata.”
“I’m not,” I said, turning.
“You are,” she said, and laid her cool hand on my cheek and kissed me and bit hard at my lip. Her mouth came away red. “You are my client queen, and I am the lady of the Swordbelt Arm. Lie back on the bed.”
I stepped back and fell onto the pillows. She took the hem of the skirt and lifted it, and then her hand was on me, fingers working, and I swallowed and swallowed and could not speak. “Do you like this, Madam Oracle?” she said. “Do you like it, Altagracia?”
“Szayet, please,” I managed to gasp.
“But you are Szayet,” she said. “Open your legs, dear heart.”
I threw my hand over my eyes. The pearls moved coldly and roughly over my skin. I could feel the kohl smear against them. My legs were open, and her hand was between them, and her naked animal’s body clambered over mine and held it down, and I opened my red mouth and said nothing at all.
When I woke, my head was pounding. Grey morning slanted in through the window, prickling warm air. I’d slept through the storm.
In the palace wing that Szayet had rebuilt after her civil war, a solarium jutted out precipitously over a maze of priests’ quarters and palace gardens. Its roof and three of its walls were clear glass, tessellated with golden wire into hexagons, so that when I came through the door I felt I was walking into a wasp’s nest. A dozen cages dangled from the ceiling. Hoopoes cooed inside, sidling along their perches in flutters of orange and black.
Szayet was sitting cross-legged on one of her silk cushions, wearing a loose blue robe embroidered with peonies and eating a peach. Cushions had to be replaced rather more often than not in an aviary, but she’d told me she judged it a worthwhile expense. “Sit down,” she said. “There’s bread and honey left for you.”
I approached carefully, eyeing her to see if she intended any sudden moves, and sat. She bent over my hands and began to apply honeycomb carefully to a brown slice of bread.
“An ambassador from your colony Cherekku came to court the day before last,” she said. “You remember, of course, the war brewing between the puppet king Ceiao installed on Cherekku ten years ago and the priests’ council there.”
“Mmph,” I said in knowledgeable tones around the honeycomb.
“Well, the ambassador was from the priests,” said Szayet. “They’re very low on funds, as are their enemies, and they’ve come to me for help. The ambassador says, if the priests are victorious in convincing Ceiao to install a different puppet king, Cherekku can offer very favorable trade deals to Szayet. But my foreign minister suggests we can do better than trade deals. He says that we could convince the priests to permanently accept a Szayeti into the council.”
About one-fifth of this speech I understood. I blinked politely at her. “Mmmmph.”
“Two hundred years ago, Szayet had colonies,” said Szayet. “We lost them when we were poor. We became Ceiao’s client state in those days, and we fell into Ceiao’s debt. Now we are still Ceiao’s client, but we are wealthy beyond imagination. Our neighbors beg us for favors, and we may force them into whatever terms we find favorable. Of course, now our neighbors are all Ceiao’s colonies—” She paused for me to interject. I did not. Her mouth flattened. “Should I do it, then?” she said. “Arrange to install a representative of Alekso and Ceirran Undying in one of Ceiao’s possessions?”
My eyes went involuntarily to her ear. A silver pearl sat in it, gold wires curling around her helix and into her temple. In the pearl’s center shone a deep black fingerprint.
I’d seen her dip her finger in ink and press it to the pearl herself. I’d seen her proclaim to her people and to my gathered soldiers that this pearl held the soul of Matheus Ceirran, the immortal and undying—that Ceirran had chosen her as his Oracle, so that for the rest of her days she would be the bearer of not one god, but two. I’d seen her show the priests a smooth, unmarked pearl in her ear, and tell them that this was Alekso’s soul, and the marked one was Ceirran’s, and the mark would tell them which of her two Pearls she bore that day, and which of Szayet’s two gods spoke through her now.
I was the only person in the world besides her who knew that there was only one Pearl of the Dead. The one that should have been Ceirran’s immortal soul had been dissolved in a cup of wine by Cátia Lançan, one of Ceirran’s assassins. Alekso had helped her build that Pearl in exchange for a promise that she would abdicate the throne and proclaim her sister his Oracle. She had broken that promise, and she and her god had not spoken in over a year.
Honey dripped onto her first knuckle. She put it absently to her mouth and sucked, and I saw a black streak on the calloused pad of her finger. The memory of my own eyes in the mirror, kohl-stained and unrecognizable, floated back to me. “Fine,” I said.
“That’s all?” said Szayet. “Fine?”
“Put whoever you like in whatever government you like,” I said through a mouthful of bread. “Don’t raise troops against me, I suppose. Why should it matter to me?”
“I have no interest in raising troops against you,” she said with strained patience. “I thought it might matter to you whether or not we have a man loyal to Ceirran Undying in the government of one of Ceiao’s colonies. Loyal to Ceirran Undying, Anita. Not to Ceiao.” I still said nothing, and she said, “Does Ceirran’s disciple think Ceirran wants Cherekku to liberalize its sex laws? Does Ceirran’s disciple think Ceirran wants Cherekku to buy six thousand imperial tons of pearl from Szayet at outrageous rates?”
“What do you think he wants, Oracle?” I said.
“For Alectelo to be the crossroads of trade across three galactic spiral arms,” said Szayet. “For a Library overflowing with books, and a sea overflowing with pearl, and land overflowing with green. For Sintian officials to speak both the Sintian and Szayeti tongues in official business—and for the Szayeti tongue to come to Cherekku, too, and even the court of the Kutayeti emperor, and Itsaryet, and all the rest of the neighboring worlds. For new philosophy, and new theater, and new poetry, to suit a strange new future. For the Szayeti people to have power they haven’t known for some five hundred years—for them to come out of the shadow of not only dead, broken Ostrayet, but out of the shadow of Alekso’s Sintia, and Ceiao’s shadow, too.”
I shrugged, reaching for the honey pot. “You talk like you expect me to object.”
She slid the pot away, and my hand closed on empty air. I grunted, outraged. She hissed through her teeth. “I speak in the hopes that you’ll tell me what you want our god to say!” she said. “Greater financial support to the poor? Relaxation of immigration control? Hymns sung to his name at every morning and evening?”
Ceirran would have very much liked that last, I thought, and found myself suddenly in an ill temper. “Szayet, you and I are acting out a bad play. Write the lines for your god that you like best. Why should I care?” I said.
She’d let go of the honey pot. I snatched it up, dipped two fingers in it, and stuck them between my teeth. Szayet looked as though she wanted to smack the pot out of my hand. “Why should you care?” she said. “Anita, the people ask you to bring me their blessings at the docks. They bow to you in the gaming halls. They call you Honored and Beloved when they buy you drinks. They let you win sixteen athletics contests in the space of a week.”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “More fools they,” I said.
“More reverent,” said Szayet warningly. “I have spent a good deal of gold and pearl, and risked a good deal of their love, asking them to be reverent toward Matheus Ceirran. Will you try to tell me that you don’t understand how they feel?”
My first urge was to stand, call her one of the words I’d learned in the Szayeti bars, and stalk out of the room. I did not move. The air was too warm and thick, and my belly felt too full and sour, and my legs and my head too hot with last night’s drink. Sweetness was suddenly cloying. I put down the honey and hunched over myself.
“Whenever you can’t find a weakness in me, Szayet, you never hesitate to make one,” I said.
At that her face went flat, and I knew that she, too, was thinking of last night. “What is that meant to signify?” she said.
“I’m not a clown from Diajunda,” I said, “or one of these caged birds. I make a fool of myself on my own terms. So they call me Honored, so they call me Beloved—well, let them. Let them believe that Ceirran’s turned from flesh and blood into some invisible magic. They can believe that I’ll speak to him again. I’ve only ever called myself lady of the Swordbelt Arm.”
“Who’s calling you a fool?” Szayet said. “Who has called you a fool to your face in the last year? Ceirran’s bones, Anita, you’ve slept near three hundred nights now in my bed, and you’ve slept a dozen more on the Alectelan streets to boot. How long do you mean to fear Ceian mockery? How long do you mean to laugh at my people behind their backs for naming you part of my cult and my court? How long do you mean to keep your wine and your laughter here, and your life somewhere else?”
“What’s the difference?” I said, stung.
Her eyes grew cold. She opened her mouth, but before she could call me whatever name she meant to, there was a knock on the door. “Admiral Decretan,” said a voice. “The morning’s reports from Ceiao are in. You have an urgent message.”
“Love and mercy,” I muttered, wiped my sticky hand crudely on the cushion, and went to the door. “Galvão,” I said, “I swear if Fortune herself tied her blindfold round your eyes, you wouldn’t notice it was dark. Tell my sister this: She can take her message and—”
“It’s from Admiral Otávio Julhan, sir. It’s Patrícia Laubian,” said Captain Galvão without ceremony. “An informer reported from an asteroid not three thousand light-years from here—Khramya, he says it’s called. She’s dug herself in there under a false name.”
My hand fell to my side. “You’re certain?” I said.
He nodded. “Disguised, but it’s her,” he said. “The informer’s sure of it.”
Councillor Patrícia Laubian. I could see her without having to think: a pigeon-chested frame, a dozen chestnut braids, a face under a dozen layers of bad cheap powder and worse expensive paint. I had used to mock her behind her back for that, after meetings ended, when he and I had been going down the stairs.
A year and a half ago, I had sat down with a boy called Julhan and made a list of two thousand names. A thousand chases across the Swordbelt Arm, a thousand across the Crossbar; a battle, a raid; a slit throat, a gut wound, a severed head. One by one, the names on the list had dwindled, some by others’ hands, many by mine. Only one remained.
The last time I had seen Patrícia Laubian, there had been two fat fingerprints of blood just below her temple, pressed into the cheap powdered red. I had thought: She must have touched her face, after she let go of the knife.
“Anita,” said Szayet’s voice behind me, sounding as if it were coming from the far shore of the sea.
“Find four ships,” I said to Galvão. “The fastest we have on the beach. Videiran for a flagship, and then—Irene? Too vulnerable, maybe, her engines are unarmored—no, that little snake won’t bring any guns. A hundred men for each crew.”
His perpetual stiff expression cracked, and he grinned a soldier’s kind of grin, wolfish and without teeth. “Sir,” he said, saluting.
“I want them ready to break atmosphere in ninety minutes,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the civilian harbor. Three thousand light-years toward the Black Maw, you said? That’s nearly—”
“Anita, look at me,” said Szayet sharply.
“Make haste,” I said to Galvão, returning his salute, and shut the door. I heard his footsteps down the corridor, and waited for him to break into a run before I turned back to the glass walls, the golden cages.
“Make it quick, Szayet,” I said. “As soon as she knows we’re coming, she’ll run like a rat.”
She was very still in the pale sunlight. “You tell me where you’re going when it suits you, then,” she said. “Though you don’t ask.”
“If I’d stopped to speak with you last time, we’d have lost Thiago Veguion behind an asteroid storm,” I said. “Would you rather have had my farewell kisses than his head? Fortune bleeding, I’ll let you have your fun with Cherekku, but I’m the lady of the Swordbelt Arm, not your vassal to be ordered about! Only let me know, and I’ll give Szayet a thousand apologies for presuming to do as I please in my own damned spiral arm.”
“Farewell kisses!” she said. “As if I ever saw his head! Where did Flavia bury it, Anita, in his flower farms in the outer Ceian system? No, don’t answer. Undying Lord, as if I cared. What about Councillor Cipon?—Councillor Branquon?—Sévero Selon? What haste did you need to find them? When you left from Szayet’s harbor to kill Ceirran’s killers, when you returned to Szayet’s harbor to wash Ceirran’s killers’ blood from your hands, what did you tell the Oracle of Matheus Ceirran, except hello and kiss me and give me more wine?”
“It wasn’t the Oracle of Matheus Ceirran that I swore an oath to when I was eighteen,” I said.
Her nostrils flared. “Indeed it wasn’t,” she said, getting up. “Excuse me.”
I went down to the beach in a bewildered rage. There I shouted murder at the hull-scrubbers and engine repairmen and weary hungover crew, was sorry for it less than a minute later, promised them each an extra portion from Laubian’s loot out of my own share, and was immediately sorry for that, too. At last I managed to wrangle the ships Videiran, Estrelan Polar, Irene, and Surpresan into a lean bright column along the civilian harbor dock. Alectelans urgently offered me bread and salt. I batted them away, climbed into Videiran’s guts, and gave the order for takeoff.
The Szayeti atmosphere was one thing that hadn’t much changed since I’d first come to this world: It still buzzed with swarms of Ceian ships. My men were flung out over the Swordbelt Arm and the Crossbar—fanatical Cherekku, old Sintia with her academies and abandoned temples, Itsaryet, Belkayet, Medveyet where Ceirran had once been a prince’s lover—but the bulk of them patrolled the planet where their admiral spent her days. Nearly all the soldiers here were veterans. To Szayet, I’d made out that this was in deference to Szayeti sensibilities—the Swordbelt worlds thought it was grotesque for citizens to join the army as soon as they grew strong enough to fight, and they liked to delay that day until the poor soldier was nearly twenty. I privately felt that if I’d had to be sixteen on this world, I would’ve gone mad. The truth had nothing to do with respect. I wanted the older veterans near me because they were Ceirran’s men, and had been Ceirran’s men in Madinabia and Far Madinabia and in the streets of Ceiao. I loved them for that, and they loved me because I was one of them. Now their ships parted before us with admirable haste—Galvão must have told them our purpose. Hastily, as if it, too, knew my ends, the sky faded: first the paleness of worlds, then night blue, and at long last that deep sweet cracked-open black that meant what it had meant since I’d been a little girl: I was nowhere again, and I was in motion, besides.
Videiran was a spirited ship but a finicky one, riding high on the accretion-tide and nosing in unexpected directions when she caught her fellows’ wakes. In the changes I’d made to her bridge in the last year—ceilings carved with Szayeti birds, consoles speckled with cheap bright gemstones and gold—she was a joy to give point. I ordered the navigators to set her prow toward the Black Maw and let myself devote nearly ninety minutes to the little pleasures: sitting with the crewmen at their breakfast, giving them advice on their love affairs, revisiting in painstaking detail every last maneuver, ambush, and bloody triumph of the Battle of Micavalli, and quietly promising to loan five or six of them money. Then, at last, I gritted my teeth, shut myself in the captain’s quarters of the ship Videiran, and called my sister.
“I tried to warn you,” she said, before I had so much as said hello. “Will you ever bother to answer your messages again?”
“Warn me, hell,” I said. “Give me a present, more like. Uncharacteristic of Julhan to be the bearer of good news, isn’t it? Maybe the boy’s got an ounce of humor in him after all.”
“Wishful thinking,” she said. “He’s only given you half the story, hasn’t he? He sent you off in the direction of Khramya without telling you how far you’d be going.” I raised an eyebrow, and she shook her head. “It’s across the Kutayeti border, Anita,” she said. “It’s the Kutayeti emperor’s rose garden.”
I drew back in shock. The Empire of Kutayet’s fingers reached throughout the Swordbelt Arm—even, if you believed the wailing from the council, toward unknown and uncharted kingdoms in Arqueiran. More and more thickly their patrollers stalked the border with our empire every year, and more and more thickly our own ships came to meet them, squadron after squadron stretching out through clustered stars, noses pressed to an invisible window.
Four different clippers had crept into the orbits of our colony planets in the last year. Merchant vessels, by their markings. Small things, gunless things, barely a few dozen civilians aboard.
What responsibility can we take for the lost and the unwise? the messenger from the Kutayeti imperial house had said in the holo that Julhan had sent me, spreading her hands wide. What responsibility for those who unlawfully flee our orbits? Admiral Julhan, in your youthful enthusiasm, you insult the King of Kings. Why would he want to put warships on your side of the border?—how could he possibly place intelligence towers? By the Eternal Flame of Alekso of Sintia, the imperial family desires only rule of law at the border, order in the galaxy, peace for the spiral arm. Of course, she had added with wide eyes, if we wanted to allow these trespassing vessels to return home, and face the emperor’s justice—
I’d swept the holo away, then. “Justice!” I’d said. “A slow death, rather than a quick one, at the end of a different model of gun? I can tell why the poets write about it! So principled, your neighbors, I’d nearly think they were Ceian themselves—” and I’d waited for Szayet’s answering silvery laugh.
But the shock at Flavia’s news only lasted for a moment. “So it’s a quick-change job, then,” I said. “No matter. We’ll run over the border, catch her, and be back on the beaches before the emperor can blink.”
“You’re missing the point,” said Flavia. “Anita, the reason he didn’t tell you is because he wants to set you up for humiliation at the hands of Kutayet’s fleet. The only part of your reputation that’s still sterling on Ceiao is your military record—he wants to land you in trouble, then come and rescue you. He wants to make you a laughingstock.”
“Doesn’t add up,” I said. “If there’s any piece of the Kutayeti fleet capable of thrashing me, they’ll be twice as capable of thrashing him. Besides, since when do I care if I’m a laughingstock on Ceiao?”
“You didn’t care when you could tell yourself there was only one Ceian who mattered,” she said. “Back then, maybe it was even true. But when you spend all your days at plays or games or just plain drunk on a foreign shore, Anita, it matters to the people in the Inner City. You used to have friends in this part of the city. It wouldn’t matter so much if you were here—if you’d bother to charm them, or call them, or act as though you want to hear a word from them—”
“I don’t,” I said. “Chicken-tongued paint-caked hypocrites, the whole Avenuan Libeirguitan. Who gives a damn about the Inner City? It was the Outer City who were Ceirran’s friends. They don’t care if I’m a laughingstock to the Merchants’ Council. They burned the Libeiracópolan in Ceirran’s name. Now you’re asking me to love the people who barricaded their doors and prayed they’d stop?”
“Of course not. I only wish you’d pretend to,” she said. “Yes, Ceiao’s poor are your friends now. We’re all very grateful to Matheus for that, I’m sure. But will they stay your friends if you don’t do something to keep them? You don’t have a commander anymore, Anita. You live and die by your own name now.”
Before I could think how to answer that, the glass beneath her began blinking: a new holo coming in. I laughed under my breath. “My apologies,” I said. “The infant wants to talk.” Her brows furrowed, but I said over her reply, “Don’t worry about me, Flavia. When have you ever had to worry about me? I’ll call you when I have Laubian’s head.”
I flicked at the tablet. Her lovely face crumbled into light and resolved into a different one: a thin, angular, shaven-headed man with very dark skin and shadows under his eyes. “The schoolboy!” I said. “What a pleasure.”
“Must you speak Sintian?” said Otávio Julhan.
I shrugged. “Nice bit of sabotage, not warning me there was a border in between me and my prey,” I said in Ceian. “Did you think of it all on your own?”
He gave me a long look, but by now I was too well accustomed to his long looks to be fazed by them, and only grinned back. “How would it benefit me to sabotage you?” he said.
“It’d give you a laugh, I’d say, if I thought you knew what the word meant,” I said, mainly so I could enjoy watching him try not to roll his eyes. “What is it you want?”
He frowned, peering over my shoulder. His end of the holo would be showing him the star-stained portholes of my quarters—from his expression, he hadn’t expected to see them. “You’ve already left for Khramya?” he said.
“Where else would I be leaving for, the Black Maw?” I said.
“I called to ask you to come back to Ceiao,” said Julhan.
I laughed at him for a while. He waited until I was done, hands folded in front of him as primly as a matron, which both entertained and irritated me enough that I went on laughing for another few seconds to spite him. “Tell me,” he said once I’d run out of breath, “what does the Oracle of Szayet claim my cousin has ordered you to do today? Does she say he wants you to cross the Kutayeti border? Does her god claim you should wage war?”
I sat back and folded my arms behind my head. “This is about your little shrines, isn’t it.”
“They’re the people’s shrines, Admiral,” said Julhan.
They were huddled collections of cairns, roughly carved statues, and painted icons of Ceirran’s face. They had sprung up in empty lots and markets around the city as soon as we’d abolished the laws against religion, back in the heady days just after the proscriptions had ended, when every councillor had been gratifyingly terrified and still more gratifyingly pliable.
Flavia said, in no uncertain terms, that Julhan had paid for the shrines to be built. Julhan denied this categorically. In the end, they seemed to have come to an uncomfortable truce on the subject: When a few brave members of the Merchants’ Council had tried to tear them down, they’d soon found that their dinner invitations had dried up, their creditors had come calling, and their friends in the Outer City gangs, who had been Flavia’s friends since before her husband’s death, had very much ceased to be friendly. “They have a purpose, Anita,” Flavia had said tiredly when I’d protested. “It settles the people to worship Matheus. It makes them feel that being ruled by Ceirran’s captain and Ceirran’s heir rather than the Merchants’ Council is no bad thing. Isn’t the Oracle doing exactly the same thing in her own kingdom?”
She didn’t know that there was no Ceirran in the Pearl—Szayet had persuaded me not to tell a single Ceian, with great difficulty—but to her it would not have mattered. She didn’t feel that Alekso of Sintia was alive, either. A computer program could imitate a dead person as precisely as it liked, in her view, but that did not mean Flavia had any obligation to pretend the person was living in any real sense. In many ways my sister had the last truly Ceian mind left in the galaxy.
“Ceiao knew Ceirran,” I’d said to her. “They cheered for him. They cared for him. The Alectelans are only—” The Alectelans saw me passed out on the street, the Alectelans saw me accept prizes for athletic contests I didn’t deserve, the Alectelans saw every side of me that I had not bothered to make nice or neat or worth seeing. Szayet could spit and curse and weep about it if she liked, but the fact was that her world was a Ceian client kingdom in a half-colonized spiral arm, and the fact was that the spiral arm was mine to do with as I liked, and what I liked was to do nothing at all. “They’re only Szayeti,” I finished. “But how can Ceians—Ceians, who should know better—how can they not tell the difference between kissing a painted picture and, and—”
“And the person you knelt to at his triumph?” Flavia had said. “Anita, do you dislike the shrines because you’re angry that Matheus isn’t really a god, or because you’re afraid that if you come home to Ceiao, you’ll find out he is?”
“There’s no such things as gods,” I said sharply.
“Keep telling yourself that, please,” she had said. “For one thing, it’s true. For another, I’ve seen you brokenhearted over Matheus twice now. Three times would be a little much for your poor sister to bear.”
“Admiral,” said Julhan now, startling me back to Videiran’s cabin, “a barbarian Oracle may demand what ceremonies she likes from a barbaric Swordbelt court, but what compels a decent Ceian like you to indulge her fantasy that she speaks with my cousin’s voice? I bear Ceirran’s name. You were his officer by oath. Among civilized people, it is our voices that should say what my cousin would want.”
“What would my friend want? Enlighten me,” I said.
“Come to Ceiao,” said Julhan. “Open negotiations with the emperor of Kutayet. We can bargain for Laubian’s peaceful transfer to Ceian custody.”
I tapped my fingers on the table. Through his half-transparent head stars ran like dust toward the top of the porthole. “Zero marks for the schoolboy,” I said. “I saw Ceirran’s plans for invading Kutayet. Spoke about them with him not long before he died, as a matter of fact.”
“Indeed?” said Julhan tightly. He hated when I called him a child. He’d turned twenty a week or so ago, but as long as I’d known him, he’d behaved as though he were forty-five. I had only six years on him—but they’d been a long six years, in my opinion. “It wouldn’t be possible for me to see those plans, I suppose.”
I had all of Ceirran’s plans, and all of his unfulfilled orders, in my own personal papers. In the first few weeks after his death, I’d loudly taken on the burden of fulfilling them. A few unpleasant-minded councillors had mentioned that they would very much like to have independent confirmation that those orders said what I proclaimed they said, and had found themselves promptly added to the proscription lists. “Afraid not,” I said.
Julhan sighed through his nose. “Kutayet will still be where it is in a month, or a year,” he said. “Invade it then. Be my guest. But, Admiral, if you tell me Ceirran intended to launch his invasion from Szayet, I’ll call you a liar. Medveyet is less than a day’s journey away. Itsaryet is hardly farther. These and Ceiao’s other colonies are governed by reliable, loyal Ceian troops, clean, law-abiding, frugal, sensible, sober, rather than—”
“Careful there,” I said.
“Rather than an independent sovereign queen,” said Julhan coolly. I stretched and began to pick at my nails with my combat knife. “I have your measure,” I said. “The emperor sends Laubian home in a prison transport, and then you take half the credit for executing her, is that it?”
“I’m not interested in credit,” he said. “My cousin, as far as I can tell, attempted to destroy his enemies by sheer force of personality—”
“And cannons,” I said, blowing on my blade.
“I am trying to destroy our enemies with treaty and law,” said Julhan. “What I’m interested in, Admiral, is a little peace. A little rationality—a little duty, self-restraint, a little Ceian virtue, the same things that those shrines are meant to instill in the people. You wouldn’t need to take the lead on negotiations, if the idea horrifies you so deeply. Even your presence, the threat of your troops, would show the emperor—”
I had stopped listening. Julhan was only talking the way his elders and betters had taught him to—hell, he’d been friends with Túlio Cachoeiran, once upon a time—but it filled my mouth with bitterness to hear those words: virtue, duty, peace.
I was, I thought—not for the first time—missing some essential thing within me: that thing that Flavia had had many years ago, when she’d stood before a mob with her husband’s body behind her, and turned the great blazing force of her mind to the desires for which he had died; the thing that this boy had had not so long ago at all, when he had sworn to hunt down the enemies of a cousin he scarcely knew; the thing that Jonata Barran had had, when they had put aside their love for Ceirran, and called on the name of Liberty, and put their knife between his ribs. There was a scratch in my mind where something should have been. I was missing that thing that let people say, and believe, duty, rather than obedience, or freedom, rather than self-interest, or peace, rather than exhaustion. Or justice, rather than revenge.
When Ceirran was alive, I hadn’t needed to think about peace. I hadn’t needed to think at all.
“Admiral,” said Julhan, sounding tired, “will you explain to me why this isn’t holding your interest?”
“My deepest apologies,” I said, flicking the combat knife shut. “I shouldn’t have called you a schoolboy. You’re a schoolteacher, is that it?”
“Will you explain to me why my cousin’s cult on Ceiao doesn’t interest you,” said Julhan, less patiently now. “Certainly a cult of Ceirran interests you on Szayet, when it comes with night after night of—” He visibly bit his tongue. “I say again,” he said, “it’s one thing for the Szayeti to worship a dead pearl. As long as they remain loyal to Ceiao, they may name a seagull Ceirran and praise the heavens when it steals their bread, for all I care. But you—you are not a barbarian. You are Ceian, you are educated, you are a councillor’s daughter, you fought for justice against Barran and Lançan. You knew Ceirran. You spoke to Ceirran. Have you forgotten his voice so soon, that you can really mistake that Szayeti computer for him?”
That was far too close to my own thought about how the Ceian people acted at his shrines, and it stung. “Of course not,” I said, feeling my ears grow hot.
“Then why won’t you give your own people—decent, hard‑working people—the same kind of attention and care that you give to foreign drunks?” said Julhan. “Why don’t you want to help me, Admiral? What is it that you want?”
I hesitated a long while before I replied. Interest was entirely the wrong word. Julhan was right: Watching the Szayeti worshipping Ceirran was like watching children play with dolls. I playacted along with them, but when my men and I were in private and they laughed at Szayeti ceremony, I made no protest. I had told Szayet her people’s foolishness was on their own heads, and I meant it. But Ceiao mattered. I had mocked Ceiao to the ends of the earth, I had fled from Ceiao and I had hated Ceiao, but I could not laugh at Ceiao, not in my heart.
What did I want? What I wanted was to return to the days when I had never had to decide what I wanted. What I wanted was to stop waking up every day in a world where I did not have him. In lieu of that world, I had love, when Szayet would give it; blood, when I could spill it; and drink, which was abundant. And one day I would learn how to stop waking up.
“I want Laubian’s head,” I said at last. “And I’ll have it very soon.”
“Admiral—” said Julhan.
“Laubian will flee before Videiran puts one wing over the border,” I said. “If she doesn’t, well, I’m grown, Julhan. I can handle myself. I’ll run back to Szayet if I get myself into trouble, how’s that?”
“You can’t live forever with a foot in two worlds, Admiral,” said Julhan.
“Nobody can live forever,” I said, and ended the call there for the petty satisfaction of having the last word.
My men had gathered on the bridge, those who could be spared standing at attention, those who could not working busily at navigation displays. A few of the navigators had pinched expressions—they’d looked carefully at the maps, then. “Hello, boys,” I said. “Some of you might have heard we’re due to cross the border today.”
The officers murmured. I stretched and ambled down the bridge steps toward the captain’s chair, making my gait deliberately loose, deliberately unhurried. “Spineless little flea, is Laubian,” I said, “burrowing under Kutayet’s skin when she sees trouble. Or perhaps it’s that she thinks we’re the cowards. That we’re all milksop children here in the Ceian fleet, eh? We’ll see an emperor’s rose garden and we’ll go whining and weeping home without so much as wetting a knife?”
“No, sir!” said one of my flight lieutenants, when I caught her eye, and officers behind her chorused, haphazard but hearty: No, sir; no, sir; no, sir.
“Well, then,” I said. “We’re on the hunt. If any one of you hears some soft-handed Kutayeti desk pilot complain about our crossing, tell ’em I made all of you do it at gunpoint.”
Those shoulders that had still been hunched relaxed, those brows that had been furrowed smoothed. Not a one of my men would ever consider saying anything of the sort, under threat of death or torture. I’d eaten with them, thrown dice with them, smeared unguents on their scars. They were obligated by oath to follow me, but they were willing to do it, too—or, at least, I would have been willing to do the same for any of them, and that amounted to the same thing. They were the last real thing left in the world.
Julhan meant well, but he was a child. Negotiate with the Kutayeti? Go back to Ceiao? Beg the emperor, his children, his sisters, his grandchildren, the whole of Dom Harsaky to condescend to give me a woman who’d had Matheus Ceirran’s blood on her hands?
Before us, bright through the wide viewscreen, hung endless, depthless stars, which no one but computers had numbered and no one but gods could name. When I stared out into the black, I fancied I could see a mote of burning green.
“Open a diplomatic communication with Szayet,” I said.
“What will we tell the planet, sir?” said my flight lieutenant.
“Tell her I’m sending her flowers.” I turned. “More fuel to the engines. I want to be at that garden in the morning.”
To the usurper Altagracia Caviro, the wicked and bestial, the thrice-cursed heretic, the she-dog of Alectelo, she upon whom the heavens spit, she upon whom the heavens pile misfortunes, she upon whom the heavens visit pestilence, the enemy to the throne, born of the foulness of the earth, doomed into dust and wickedness, unbeloved before the face of God, self-styled Patramata:
Happy birthday!
You’d be surprised how accommodating these priests are when it comes to arranging parties. Ours were always such ascetics! Though I must be misremembering: If that were true, how could you have ever won them over?
Let me see: pink-salted trout, flat fragrant sesame cakes with fig syrup, venison liver in a date sauce so thick you would choke to death on it, quail’s eggs boiled in honey and piled in dripping heaps, buttered young cattails and walnuts and goat’s cheese, rows of plump crispy ducks on silver dishes, wild boar stewed in beer and gone so soft that the bones showed white, olives and fennel and little cured mackerels and oil and garlic over fat white slices of bread, and wine, wine, wine, wine. Wine, and then wine, and then, for a change, wine. I didn’t know it was possible to drink so much wine. The women crush herbs into it, and powdered bone treated with yams in some secretive little factory at the foot of the mountain, and they pray to be made fit in mind and body for the spirit of the god. How they pray! You could never pray like these women—not if you tried for a thousand years.
I thought of asking for some of the herbs and powder. But we both know they would tell me I didn’t need it, and the moment they did tell me, you’d know, and if you knew, you wouldn’t be happy. You see how sweet I’ve become, these last fourteen months? You see how good? Imagine if it were you in prison, instead. (I do.) Would you think of me, and all my unhappinesses, these long empty light-years away?
Then again, if there was any real trouble in this prison, you would have to write to me.
You did care for me, once. I’m sure that’s true, I am, I am. Even when you hated me, you heard me, and when you heard me, you hurt me. Even when you imprisoned me beneath Alectelo, and your traitorous guards patrolled my door, and I heard the footsteps of the captain who would become—perhaps who already was—your lover, scraping on the stone above my head: Even then, I knew I had hold of you. Even then, I knew that every morning and every evening, you were thinking of my voice. Alone you kept me, and alone you meant me to stay. But I was never alone in Alectelo, sister, because I knew that someday you would break.
Perhaps one day, after you’ve crumbled and you’ve come for me and I’ve clawed myself back onto my throne at last, I’ll keep you in this prison for a while. Don’t fret—it won’t be for long. I’m kinder than you. And you won’t mind the wait. It isn’t bad wine, this. You might even like it here. More and more lately, from all I hear. And I hear more than you think.
Of course, the Ceian soldiers don’t like to speak to me. (Did you mean me to think they were priests? You don’t know much about fighting men.) But all soldiers are sometimes drunk, or tired. Or lonely. I’m very, very sure you know that last.
(Then again: Did you know there were soldiers here? Or has some Ceian—I won’t name names—pulled the wool over your eyes?)
Don’t fear. They don’t say much. Only that they would rather be out in the black, chasing down the proscribed with their brothers‑in‑arms. Or that they would rather be in their homes—there’s a stuttering, sickly, soft-handed girl, not a proper soldier but a radio operator or translator or sort of maid‑of‑allwork, who once told me that every night she dreamed she was talking with her father by a river. Or that they would rather be in Alectelo, drinking twice the wine, and making the nights run even later than they do in these halls, and serving under a commanding officer who for the last fourteen months—but didn’t I say I wouldn’t name names?
Besides, why should you be afraid of me? I don’t have a habit of seducing any Ceian officer who crosses my path. All I want is to know something about the world—anything—besides this endless drudgery, this weeding the temple gardens, this scrubbing the temple pillars, this dredging the temple rivers, this drinking and drinking and drinking of wine. Even this tablet can only read books and write journals, and when the power runs down in the evenings, it can’t even manage that. You’ve made a beggar queen of me, Gracia—or these priests have, as priests always seem to, one way or another. Perhaps those barbarians who crowned you really knew something I didn’t. Perhaps I’ll learn what.
The priests tell me you’ve told the Szayeti that even in those months of war, even when you came to that dungeon, you had Commander Ceirran’s soul in your pocket.
So I know a secret: Even though you had your lover to call upon, even though you had a god to put in your ear, when you came to the dungeons, it meant that you still wanted me. It meant you broke. It meant you wanted my help, not his. It means you think of me just as I think of you. So it means you’ll come back for me again someday. All I need to do is wait.
The youngest priestess, Božena, says that as long as I’m in a place of sanctuary, I should reflect on what brought me here. I think I like that word: reflection. At night, I go up the mountain to where the tree line breaks, and I sit on one of the little stones jutting out of the dust, and I stare up into the black. The factory at the mountain’s base makes the stars faint, but don’t worry. I can see you still. I can feel your eyes. Imagine if I reached up—or threw a stone—and watched the ripples go through the stars until you disappeared. I’m so careful, Gracia. I never throw anything at all.
In the morning, that stuttering radio operator takes this tablet away. For the temple’s archives, she says. She goes so red when I laugh.
Why do I speak to Princess Gracia Caviro, in her pride and her heresy, even though she will not answer me yet? I suppose I am trying to speak to myself. I suppose that, in that Pearl you have made His prison, the god who loves me best speaks to Himself, too. And we are not alone, we are neither of us alone, and I know it because I know there was once a day when you chose me over Matheus Ceirran, even though he was a god. And you are faithless, but I am a prophet, and I tell you, one day, you will choose me over Ceirran again. You will send someone to this temple, and they will call my name, and on that day I will know you need something from me at last.
I do hope you enjoy reading over these reports she sends you. I hope the stuttering girl marks them as frightening, or writes Danger Emergency Blasphemy Sedition over their seals. Most of all I hope that reading these gives you as much joy as it gives me to write them, dear heart, and as much joy as it will bring me to one day see the Lord of All Things bite your putrid heart in two.
I remain—
queen of Szayet—
Oracle of Alekso Undying—
your loving sister—
ARCELIA CAVIRO DIOMATA
beloved of God.
Some of this is even true.
She’s not lying in this letter. She’s only missing some of the facts. Admiral Decretan never bothered to sign the paperwork arranging to put Ceian troops in the temple at Itsaryet. Admiral Julhan Ceirran had to send ships in their stead. Everyone stationed at the temple swore oaths to him, not to her.
Not that the princess cared. The agreement between the admirals did say that any intelligence gathered in the Swordbelt Arm would go to Decretan. And who Decretan sent it to, I can guess as well as Celia can.
The original of this letter didn’t go into the temple’s archives, of course. Once Decretan had been sent a copy, the person who collected the letter was ordered to destroy it. I expect no one thought she would care enough to read it first.
But she didn’t destroy it. And she read it, after all.
In any case, in this letter, Celia doesn’t know the difference between one admiral and another. To her it’s all Ceiao: a hundred faces, one mind, one state. It’s just that I do know the difference, and the truth matters to me.
—V.
“Wherever Emery Robin goes from here, I’m going to follow.” —Veronica Roth, #1 New York Times bestselling author
From one of the most original voices in science fiction comes the spectacular sequel to the epic, interstellar love story that began in The Stars Undying.
Goddess, tell me the story.
Matheus Ceirran, commander of half the known world, is dead. For the past year, his loyal captain Anita has hunted down his assassins—that is, when she can pull herself from the bed of Altagracia Caviro Patramata, queen and oracle of the client planet of Szayet. But when Anita’s quest for revenge takes her across the borders of an enigmatic neighboring empire, she uncovers a dangerous secret that could upend the fragile balance of the galaxy.
Meanwhile, Ceirran’s heir apparent Otávio Julhan grows more and more powerful in the capital that Anita has left behind. Caught between home, Szayet, and a new and greater threat, Anita finds herself at the center of a war that threatens to collapse her world.
The fate of empires dances on the tip of a knife, and history will be written by the victors in this sweeping tale of myth, imperial legacy, and the love affair of a lifetime.
Praise for the Empire Without End:
“Dazzling, transportive, boundless, precise—and dares to ask, what if Mark Antony was the hottest butch girl in space?” —Casey McQuiston
“Gorgeously written, impeccably characterized, and profoundly aware of the way the ghosts of history linger.” —Emily Tesh
“A glittering triumph of a book that weaves together history and tragedy into a star-spanning epic.” —Everina Maxwell