“I hear a lot of things,” Akila said. “But none of them have been about Ceres.”
Thanos saw him shuffling papers.
“Shall I tell you some of the reports I have?” he asked. “I have reports of General Haven, who’s still up in the hills, causing trouble. This foolish old man you claim to have sent is causing me more trouble than anyone else could have. I have reports that Lord West and the rebellion joined together to attack Delos, but you’re not with them, helping them. I have reports that they were mysteriously betrayed, and are dying one by one as we speak. At the same time, you’re here saying that you were on the Isle of Prisoners and that you escaped before you could be sent there. You tell me that the biggest snake of a noble in Delos hired a boat to get you away from there, and you abandoned her, that Lucious caught you and let you go… do you know how crazy your story sounds?”
“The part about the Isle of Prisoners is true at least,” Felene said. “I was there. He got me off the island with him.”
“But I don’t know you either,” Akila pointed out. “And even if it is true… what are you doing here, Thanos? It’s not just Ceres, is it? What do you want?”
“I wanted to talk to you again,” Thanos admitted. “I wanted to try to persuade you to bring your men to Delos. It’s all very well succeeding on Haylon, Akila, but what good is it if you let the Empire keep thriving on your doorstep? If you write off everyone else’s chance to be free?”
He could understand the other man’s reluctance, and even his concerns about Thanos’s commitment, but Thanos could also feel that this moment mattered. The Empire was teetering. Another push, and it might fall. Get this right, and they might all be free.
“I know you’re worried,” Thanos said, “but this is our chance. You have the ships. You have the men. Come now, and you will be able to write your own relationship with the Empire as a friend, rather than as the man who stood by to look after himself.”
Akila stood there in silence. Finally, though, he shook his head.
“You ask too much, Thanos,” he said. “And I told you before that you aren’t welcome here. My men will escort you back to your boat, but then you need to leave. I have a rebellion to run.”
“A rebellion that isn’t willing to fight,” Thanos said.
He saw a flash of anger cross Akila’s face. “Go, while you can.” Akila turned to Felene. “If it’s true that you broke free of the Isle of Prisoners, then there is a place for you here if you want it. Thanos’s mistakes are not yours to pay for.”
“Oh, I have plenty of mistakes of my own,” Felene replied. Thanos saw her look around. “And if you’re turning away the likes of him, this really isn’t a place for those who’ve done the kind of things I have.”
They walked back in the direction of the docks.
Thanos was silent for most of it.
“So much for Haylon,” Felene said. “So, my prince, where to now?”
Thanos stood there, shocked. He could not believe he had been turned away. He had expected to have been greeted as a hero, and instead he had been treated as a criminal.
And without their help, there was no way to take the Empire. There wasn’t anywhere he could go. There wasn’t anywhere left where he would be safe.
He slowly shook his head and took a deep breath. If they wouldn’t help him take Delos, then he would have to take it on his own.
He gave her a hard look, feeling the resolve firm within him.
“Delos,” he said, his voice hard. “We’ll sail for Delos.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Even in her dreams, Ceres could not escape the dead. No matter how much she wanted peace, no matter how much she sought freedom, they plagued her.
She looked about and found herself in Delos, in the middle of the Stade, the sands there all too familiar beneath her feet. Except now the sands were gray ash, and the stone of the stands was the marble of tombstones. Ceres stood in the armor she’d worn as a combatlord, the only shining thing in the arena.
The dead sat there in row upon row, looking down with the silent passivity of those beyond the realm of the living. They opened their mouths, and instead of the cheering of the crowd, Ceres only heard the screams of the dying. Each scream brought memories with it, of men and women dying in battle, of those Lucious had executed.
Ceres recognized faces there. She saw Anka sitting in the royal box, with the marks of the ligature still fresh around her throat. She saw Rexus beside her, who had died what seemed like a lifetime ago. There were so many there, but every face was one that brought a flash of pain to Ceres as she saw them. The sight of Anka staring like that brought tears to her eyes, and those tears only continued to fall with the others there, turning the ash beneath her feet to something like mud.
A figure stepped up in front of Ceres. The Last Breath swung his crescent blades at her, and Ceres barely leapt back in time, skewering him with a sword that already seemed to be slick with blood. He fell, then rose again.
This time, he was a soldier, striking with a broad-headed spear. Ceres sidestepped easily, but cutting him down only meant that he rose with a different face. All the time, the crowd roared its approval with the screams of the dying.
There were more of them now, coming not just one at a time, but in twos and threes. Worse, there were figures there Ceres hadn’t killed, not directly. Garrant was there now, with an arrow still sticking from his throat. A member of the rebellion joined him, the ghost in the dream reaching for Ceres.
Ceres didn’t want to fight them, not even like this, in a place that couldn’t be real. She hesitated, wanting to stop the violence and the pain. That hesitation was all it took as they grabbed her.
Ceres cried out as the dead bore her to the floor of the Stade, the weight of them as they piled atop her feeling as though it was crushing the life from her. Ceres felt as though she couldn’t breathe, every effort to expand her lungs stopped by the pressure there on her, but also by the weight of the grief that ran through her, threatening to wash away every vestige of herself.
Ceres found herself looking up toward the royal box, where Anka and Rexus sat in some grim parody of the king and queen.
“Please,” Ceres begged. “Help me.”
“You didn’t help us,” Anka replied. “You led me to my death.”
It wasn’t the real Anka, because Ceres knew she would never have said something like that, yet the pain at the words was real, for one simple reason. She deserved them. Ceres knew it. She deserved every iota of pain they heaped on her.
She wasn’t surprised when Anka extended her hand, turning her thumb toward the floor for death.
Ceres had thought that the weight of the dead was crushing before, but now they piled over her in such numbers that they seemed to block out the light. They formed a sky in themselves, holding Ceres in place, stealing the life from her while she struggled.
As quickly as the moment came, it passed. Ceres found herself being lifted up, the dead raising her like a leaf on the wind. Then it was the wind raising her, and Ceres found herself floating up over Delos, seeing the Empire spread out around her like some patchwork blanket of fields and settlements.
She saw more than that. Ceres saw herself on a battlefield, dressed in golden armor. She saw a throne, while voices chanted her name. She saw ordinary people standing there, looking as happy and at peace as Ceres had ever seen anyone.
The scene shifted, and this world was the same, but different. Where the last had been green and gold, this one was made from rainbow colors. Below, she saw creatures that she took to be deer at first, but at second glance had the torsos of humans rising from their bodies. Ceres looked up at the call of a bird, only to find one crossing the sky with a plume of flame following it.
The world beneath her changed again, the color leaching out of it, leaving something gray and dead behind it, with people who moved like sleepwalkers, and guards on every corner. It was a world that seemed more like a prison. Ceres didn’t believe that it
could be any worse.
Then the world shifted again, and as she saw the blood running through the streets, she realized that it could.
“I don’t understand,” Ceres said to the sky she floated in. “What’s happening? What is all this?”
“They are possibilities.”
Ceres recognized her mother’s voice instantly. The landscape around Ceres shifted again, and this time she recognized the place where she stood. She’d stood there only a little time ago, on a hill looking out over the ocean, surrounded by towers of elegant stone. In her dream, the towers weren’t ruined though. The Isle Beyond the Mists looked vibrant and whole in a way it didn’t in real life.
She felt a wave of love and peace as she saw her mother standing there among the buildings. There were others there, moving from tower to house, laughing and dancing in the streets. Ceres couldn’t make out their faces, but her mother’s was pristine and clear.
She stood there, and Lycine reached out to put her arms around her. Even like this, it was enough to ground her and bring her back to herself. More than that, it was enough to persuade her that at least one aspect of this wasn’t a dream.
“What do you mean, possibilities?” Ceres asked.
“You have a destiny, and a role to play,” her mother said. “But you still choose how you play it. So much depends on what you do. There are so many ways the world could end up.”
Ceres shook her head.
“It’s too late,” she said. “I’ve already tried. I already lost. I tried to take Delos, and it all went so wrong. My powers… they weren’t there when I needed them. I couldn’t save people.”
“Sometimes you can’t,” her mother said, and there was the ghost of something more in her tone. “Sometimes, you try to make things better, and there is only pain, but you have to be patient, and you have to trust that eventually you will be able to help.”
“How can I do anything?” Ceres insisted. “My powers are gone, mother.”
Lycine’s smile was gentle. “Not gone, Ceres. Just… strained. Overused. There are limits on all of us. Sometimes limits based on who we are. Sometimes limits based on destiny.”
“You mean that my powers wouldn’t come because it wasn’t part of my destiny?” Ceres demanded.
Her mother shook her head. “It’s better not to speculate. Let me look at you. Yes, you’re worn thin. It happened to us, sometimes, when we tried too much, and you have only just come into your powers.”
Ceres felt her mother’s hands as she coaxed the energy from within her. She ran it between her hands as something like shadow, examining it the way someone might have examined a length of cloth for holes or missed stitches.
“Things feel broken right now, but what is broken can be repaired,” she said.
“Some things can’t be,” Ceres replied, thinking of Anka, and all the others who had died.
“That’s true,” Lycine said, with another of those strange notes of sadness, “but things can still be made better. Remember that this gift protects you, but it is not the only thing you possess.”
It didn’t feel like enough.
“I’m still not sure I can do this,” Ceres said.
“You can,” her mother insisted. “Remember that I love you. Remember who you are. If we had time… but there is never enough time. You have to go back, my daughter.”
“Back to my chains,” Ceres said.
“Back to your destiny. Remember what you saw. What might be if you succeed, and if you fail.”
Ceres wanted to say more. She wanted to stay there, both to spend more time with her mother and to put off the moment when she had to find herself in chains again. Already though, the dream was fading. Light was coming in through her cell window, making her blink in the morning sun as she started to wake.
Ceres could hear the sounds of booted feet outside her cell as she hung in her chains. She tried to raise her head to see what was happening, but she barely had enough strength to do it.
She heard the sound of wood slamming into stone as the door opened. Four guards piled into the cell, all with expressions that promised violence, despite the half hoods they wore.
“It’s time to die,” one said.
“Almost,” another added. “We’ve got a little time first.”
“Enough time to make you scream, at least,” a third added.
“Enough time to have some fun,” the last one said. “Prince Lucious said we needed to kill you, but he didn’t say how long to take about it.”
The four of them moved forward, and Ceres struggled against the chains that held her. She felt real fear then, not just because of the fact that these men had come there to kill her, but because of everything else they obviously intended.
“Can we cut her before we start?” the first one asked. “I always like it when they’re bleeding a little.”
“After,” the second insisted. “After, we can beat her, whip her… whatever we want.”
“Or just cut her throat,” the third said.
The second shook his head. “And what will Prince Lucious say when he inspects the corpse and finds no marks on it? No, we do this thoroughly.”
He reached out for Ceres then, his hand brushing her cheek. Ceres cringed back then, pushing herself back against the wall as if she might be able to push herself through it if she only tried hard enough.
She felt the hands of the others on her, pushing her into place on the wall, holding her there as firmly as the chains, so that she couldn’t even begin to move to escape them.
“They say she was Prince Thanos’s favorite,” one said.
“They’re all the same once they’re screaming.”
Ceres told herself that she wouldn’t scream. That she would find a way to fight, even if all that did was make them kill her quicker. Maybe it would even be better that way.
She felt it then: the same feeling that she’d had when her mother was there with her in her dream. The same feeling that she’d had when her mother had run Ceres’s energy through her hands as casually as breathing. Ceres felt her mother’s presence in that moment, and in the same instant, her power flared into life.
The energy roared up through her, feeling as familiar as a loyal dog coming running after too long outside. It snapped like dark lightning through Ceres’s veins, and she felt the strength that came with it, the vitality. In that moment, all the tiredness and the weakness fell away from her.
More than that, it was easy to shape the energy that crackled up through her, easy to send it out almost without thinking about it, arcing through the contact between her and the vilely questing hands of the guards. One moment, Ceres was reeling back beneath their touch, the next, they fell still, so very still.
As still as the stone that now sat in place of their flesh.
Ceres stared at the statues there, their expressions caught, perfectly and permanently, between cruelty and shock. She tried to feel some hint of regret for what she’d just done, but there was nothing there but hate for them.
Ceres summoned her strength to her. Now she had enough to snap the chains that held her, leaving their trailing ends dangling as she shoved the statues away from her. Ceres stood there for a moment, feeling the power rising within her.
She ran.
She didn’t know enough about the layout of the castle to be certain about her way out of there, but she could guess. Ceres headed down, and out, heading for the extremities of the castle, trying to avoid servants and guards.
Even so, she started to hear shouting voices behind her.
Ceres kept running, taking turnings at random, reasoning that if even she didn’t know where she was going, her pursuers wouldn’t. She ran the length of a corridor, coming out onto a small balcony. Below it, a waterway ran in deep, murky silence.
“Wrong way,” Ceres said, and turned round, trying to think of a better way to go.
It was too late for that though. There were already guards making their way along the corridor, swords drawn. A
part of Ceres wanted to fight, but the truth was that she didn’t know if her powers would hold or not. She couldn’t take the risk.
There was only one thing she could do.
Carefully, almost delicately, Ceres raised herself onto the edge of the balcony, looking down at the waterway.
I hope that’s as deep as it looks.
She jumped.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
For the first time since setting sail from Delos, Thanos didn’t know what to do. Leaving, he’d had a mission: he was going to find Ceres. Then, when she hadn’t been on the Isle of Prisoners, it had seemed obvious to go to the rebellion on Haylon.
Now, he drifted, unsure what to do next. The boat was doing the same, with Felene fishing off the bow, apparently happy enough to waste the time with the sail down, drifting close to the small islands near Haylon. While Thanos watched, she pulled up a spiny rainbowfish, apparently unconcerned by everything around them.
Thanos wished things were as easy for him.
“Where to then, oh prince?” Felene asked with a glance back over her shoulder. “Still Delos, or do we just drift until we bump into land?”
“Is that a nautical term?” Thanos asked, but the attempt at humor didn’t disguise the indecision behind it. He’d said Delos only because it was his home. He hadn’t thought beyond that.
“I could shout ‘land ahoy’ when we do, if it helps.” Felene gutted the fish expertly, and Thanos saw the gulls gathering above the boat. “Seriously, though, do you have a plan that’s not going to get us both killed, thrown off an island, or imprisoned?”
Thanos could hear the concern there. He had to admit, he shared some of it. Haylon had been the safest place to go. Delos… well, Delos was anything but safe.
“You didn’t have to come with me,” Thanos pointed out.
“It’s my boat.” As if to reinforce the point, she started to raise the sail, putting the boat into motion.
“I could have found another,” Thanos said. “Akila would have done that much, at least.”