“What is it you fear, Finnikin?” the holy man repeated.
“I was the childhood companion of Prince Balthazar,” he found himself saying. “And many times he said to me, ‘Finnikin, when I am king, you’ll be captain of my Guard. Just as your father is captain of my father’s Guard. But then some days we will swap so you can be king and I can be Captain Trevanion.’”
“Child’s talk.”
Finnikin shook his head. “Each time Balthazar spoke those words, a fire would burn inside of me. I wanted to be king, and I began to envy Balthazar for it.”
“Then your desires were small, Finnikin.”
Finnikin made a sound of disbelief.
“When I was eight years old,” the priest-king confessed, “I wanted to be a god.” The holy man looked around the ragged tent. “Perhaps this is my punishment, but between you and me, I do not believe that the desires of young boys cause catastrophic events. The actions of humans do.”
But Finnikin knew there was more . Her blood will be shed for you to be king.
“Take Evanjalin north to our king, Finnikin,” the priest-king said. “But know that if we follow her, we take a path to salvation paved with blood.”
“There is nothing for us north,” Trevanion said firmly from the entrance. He was standing alongside Sir Topher. “Isn’t that right, Finnikin?”
Finnikin could not reply. He could feel his father’s fierce stare, but his eyes were on Sir Topher. His mentor had been respectfully distant since Trevanion’s return, but Finnikin needed his guidance now.
“She bewitches you,” Trevanion said. “And she is yours for the taking. Any fool can see that. So take her and get whatever needs to be gotten out of your system.”
Still Sir Topher would not meet his eyes, and Finnikin knew he would have to make this decision on his own. That perhaps he already had.
“I stood in a pit of corpses yesterday. Stepped over the body of one just my age. Do you know what went through my mind? Rebuilding Lumatere. And as I watched the lad carrying the dead, I thought the same. I imagined he would be a carpenter. I could see it in these,” he said, his hands outstretched. “In a pit of death I imagined a Lumatere of years to come, rather than of years past.” He was staring at his mentor. “We have never done that, Sir Topher. We collect the names of our dead, we plan our second homeland, and we construct our government, but with nothing more than parchment and ink and sighs of resignation.”
Sir Topher finally looked up. “Because any hope beyond that, my boy, would be too much. I feared we would drown in it.”
“Then I choose to drown,” Finnikin said. “In hope. Rather than float into nothing. Maybe you are right, Trevanion,” he said, turning back to his father. “But it is her hope that bewitches me, and that hope I may never get out of my system, no matter how many times she’s to be gotten. Can you not see it burning in her eyes? Does it not make you want to look away when you have none to give in return? Her hope fills me with . . . something other than this dull weight I wake with each morning.”
Trevanion’s eyes bored into him. Had he found his father only to walk away from him?
“She says the young girls inside Lumatere are dying,” Sir Topher said quietly.
“Why do we hear so little about these walks she takes in her sleep?” Trevanion demanded. “If she has the power, why do we know so little about Lumatere? Because she lies.”
“She has a gift —” the priest-king began.
“A gift for deception, unable to bear my presence for she knows I understand the nature of her vice,” Trevanion snapped. “What of her lies about Sarnak?”
“There was no lie,” Finnikin said.
Trevanion made a sound of frustration. “Finnikin, she could not even tell us where those people came from, let alone what happened.”
Finnikin swallowed hard, remembering the perfect handwriting in the Book of Lumatere. “Most were from the river village of Tressor,” he said quietly.
He watched his father falter. The people of Tressor were Trevanion’s people, the people he had grown up among. He had visited them each time he was on leave from the palace, sat with them at their tables, and listened to their stories with his son on his knees.
“The girl is an empath,” the priest-king said. “She cannot bear your presence, Captain Trevanion, because you feel too much. Hate too much. Love too much. Suffer too much. It is why she was happiest in the cloister. The novices of the goddess Lagrami are trained to keep emotions and feelings to a minimum. There she found peace.”
But Trevanion would not listen. “I travel south,” he said, his voice heavy. “And I will do all I can, Finnikin, to convince you to travel with me rather than take a path that may destroy you.”
“If you travel south, I am already destroyed,” Finnikin said.
Sir Topher’s eyes met his. “Froi!” he called out. The boy came to the entrance. “Make yourself useful and fetch Evanjalin.”
“I am here,” she said softly from the flap of the tent. She looked past Sir Topher to Trevanion. “What would you like to know about walking the sleep, Captain Trevanion? That I journey with a child of no more than five? We are as real to each other as you are to me. No illusion or ghosts. Flesh and blood. This child belongs to the living and she has always been the guide, but we have never been able to hear each other or converse. We do not pick and choose who we visit. We hold each other’s hand through our walks; hers is soft and tiny and trusting and strong. Sometimes I sense another who walks with us. I believe they are there not for me but for the child. We see only what our sleepers see and think. They are unaware of us, and most of the time we stumble through a gray mist. Last night I dreamed of the chandler who finds it strange that it’s his work to provide light, yet all he can see is darkness. The armorer despises himself, for he makes weapons for the impostor king and his men, knowing they will be used against his own people. I have walked through the sleep of the plowman and the blacksmith and the tanner and the weaver and the merchant and the nursemaid. But my favorite sleep is that of the young, for they still know how to dream and they dream of the return of their king, believing that the captain of the Guard will guide him home to Lumatere.”
Trevanion shook his head and turned to go.
“Her strength, it comes from you,” she said quietly.
“What?” The question was like a bark, but she did not shrink back.
“Beatriss.”
There was a sharp hiss of breath, and Finnikin found himself in his father’s path as Trevanion advanced toward her furiously.
“Beatriss is —”
“Do not speak her name! Do not dare taint her memory,” he raged.
Evanjalin did not move. “Sometimes when people sleep they agonize about decisions made. Other times they think back on the past. She spends much time doing both. I do believe it is Beatriss who has worked through the dark magic to find me.”
“You lie to taunt me!”
“Enough, Evanjalin,” Sir Topher ordered. “Beatriss is dead.”
Finnikin felt his father flinch at the words, but Evanjalin held Trevanion’s gaze.
“Most nights she is restless. There are too many people to worry about, and she wonders how she will be able to make things right. How can she be someone other than Beatriss the Beautiful or Beatriss the Beloved? But then, just when she’s about to lose hope, she remembers what you would whisper to her, Captain Trevanion. That she was Beatriss the Bold. Beatriss the Brave. To all others she was a fragile flower, but you would not let her be.”
Finnikin’s hand was still against Trevanion’s chest; his father’s heart was beating out of control.
“She remembers the nights you lay with her when she worried about something happening to you. ‘What would I do without you?’ she would cry. Do you remember your response, Captain Trevanion? ‘What needs to be done, Beatriss.’”
Trevanion shook his head with disbelief.
“You ask why I do not talk of the sleep,” Evanjalin s
aid. “Because most days it is dark. Their souls are sad, and our goddess is weeping with despair for her people. However, Beatriss the Beautiful has become a sower, this despite the fact that each time her crops grow, the impostor’s men destroy them. But Beatriss the Bold refuses to stop planting.”
No one dared break the silence until Trevanion pushed Finnikin’s hand away. “You know things that only I could know.”
“No, Captain. You are wrong. I know things beyond what you know. Things that even I cannot understand. But my heart tells me to go north. Every waking hour and every sleeping moment tells me that there is life within Lumatere and that they wait. For us.”
Trevanion took a ragged breath and walked to the entrance of the tent. Finnikin watched, wanting to go to his father and plead with him to join them. Offer him comfort. But he had no idea how.
“There is a village of rocks in Yutlind where I’ve been told my Guard has settled. South,” Trevanion said.
Finnikin’s shoulders slumped. “Father, please . . .”
“I will not return to Lumatere without my men.”
A sob of excitement escaped Evanjalin’s lips. She flew into Trevanion’s arms and then remembered herself and jumped back. She fell to her knees at his feet, but Sir Topher pulled her up.
“You will have no regrets,” she said to them all. “I promise you. On my life.”
Four days later, they began their journey alongside the priest-king and the exiles. A handful of the exiles stayed behind to tend to the fever camp, but Sir Topher and Trevanion had been firm that the priest-king would not be one of them. Their groups would separate when the road diverged. The priest-king would take his people west to Belegonia, and Finnikin and his party would travel south in search of Trevanion’s men. But for a day they walked side by side.
Finnikin found himself looking at his father again and again. When Trevanion caught the look, he frowned.
“What?” he asked gruffly.
Finnikin shrugged. “Nothing. Just that I heard Evanjalin say a family of sparrows has petitioned the king of Sorel to be freed from your hair.”
The priest-king gave a snort of laughter, and after a moment Trevanion joined in and Finnikin’s heart warmed at the sound of it. Trevanion wrapped his arm around his son’s neck like a shepherd’s hook and dragged him along playfully. When he let go, Finnikin thought he would have liked his father to hold on a moment longer.
When the road split in two, Finnikin watched the exiles go, a mixture of fear and hope on their faces.
“Until we meet again in Belegonia,” the priest-king said.
“In the town of Lastaria on the coastal road,” Finnikin reminded him as they embraced. He stood with Sir Topher, watching as Evanjalin led the way south with Froi and Trevanion.
“Salvation paved with blood, you say?” Sir Topher asked the holy man with a sigh.
The priest-king nodded. “But salvation all the same, Sir Topher.”
The flooding rains of Sorel pounded the earth for days, forcing them to spend the week lodging in a barn when the road to the south became impassable. It was a painstakingly slow beginning to a search that would take them into the most war-ravaged kingdom in the land. While Sir Topher taught Froi the language of Lumatere, the others pored over their maps, searching for alternative routes to reach Trevanion’s men, who he believed were hiding in one of the rock villages of Yutlind Sud. The most common route was to cross back into Belegonia, which bordered Yutlind from the north. But Trevanion was an outlaw in every kingdom of the land, and the road into Belegonia was too dangerous. If they traveled west through Sorel to its port, they risked having to pass through the mines as well as deal with a treacherous waterway, the Gulf of Skuldenore.
“Pirate ships,” Finnikin said. “Tipped off by corrupt port officials who take a cut of anything plundered.”
“Corruption in Sorel? Surely you jest,” Sir Topher said, walking over to join them.
“Even if we manage to land in Yutlind,” Finnikin continued, “the heaviest fighting is in the north and the Yuts always attack first and ask questions later. I say we cross the mountains. To get here,” he said, pointing to the independent coastal province of Sif, south of Sorel. “We pay passage on a merchant cog that travels south. There is a small port on the Yack River in Yutlind Sud. From there we travel up-country.”
“The south is a mess, Finnikin,” Sir Topher argued. “No one knows who is in charge or who is to blame or who is an ally or an enemy.”
“So the last thing on their minds will be a party of Lumateran exiles and an escaped prisoner.”
“Then we travel to Sif,” Trevanion decided.
After the dark world of the mines and the fever camp and the dampness of the overcrowded barn where the stench of body odor permeated every one of his senses, Finnikin was relieved to see the snowcapped mountains in the distance. Though the mountains looked invigorating from afar, he never imagined how terrible their beauty would become as they ascended. Nights were bitterly cold, the icy wind numbing their faces, cloth swaddling their mouths and noses, where saliva and mucus feasted together.
They spoke little during the day. The wind was too severe and the trail too backbreaking to waste energy on talk. Sometimes, when his fingers ached from the stinging cold and his skin felt torn to shreds from the bluster, Finnikin imagined the life he would have had if he’d settled for a role as an advisor to a foreign king. Instead, he was trekking across the land for a Guard that may not want to be found, on his way home to a kingdom that no longer existed.
On the fourth night, they camped inside a cave, their bodies convulsing, their bedrolls packed tight against one another. They rotated every few hours to ensure that everyone would have a chance to sleep in the warmth. Finnikin dreamed that he was nestled in a womb, speaking to Beatriss’s baby. When he woke, he found himself in the arms of his father and his own wrapped around Evanjalin. He knew she had been walking the sleep over the last few nights and wondered, as she twitched in his arms, if she was again. Her hair was now a thin dark cap on her scalp, and a strange kind of beauty had begun to appear in her face, despite the grime. Every feature was strong, strangely put together. Although she was thin from their journey, nothing about her seemed delicate. Yet Finnikin had seen brief moments of fragility. A look on her face as if she had just remembered something painful, her breath catching. At times it was as if she could barely raise her head from the demons that weighed her down.
“Sir Topher! Sir Topher!”
Finnikin heard her voice. He hadn’t realized he had fallen asleep again.
“I think I’ve worked it out,” she said.
Sir Topher woke with a start. “Goddess of Sorrow, Evanjalin! Can it not wait till morning?”
“Worked what out?” Trevanion demanded. Finnikin sat up, yawning. The last embers of the fire were glowing, and the dampness was back in his bones.
“They may not be dead,” she said dreamily. “The baker dreamed of cherry blossoms. He lit a candle and made a sacrifice to the goddess Sagrami.”
“Evanjalin, you need to sleep,” Finnikin said. “You’re not making sense.”
But she shook her head. “No, I need to stay awake and put the pieces of all the sleeps together.”
Sir Topher rubbed his eyes. “Froi, make yourself useful and get this fire going.”
Froi grunted, not wanting to leave the comfort of the bedrolls, but was nudged out by Sir Topher. They wrapped themselves in every bit of clothing they had and drew their bedrolls closer to the fire, while Froi stoked the embers, muttering.
“Three nights ago I walked through the sleep of the baker, who was laughing,” Evanjalin said.
“I cannot imagine any Lumateran inside or outside the gate doing such a thing,” Finnikin said flatly.
“Yet the cook’s apprentice mourned the death of the baker’s daughter not three weeks earlier.” Evanjalin’s forehead was creased with lines of confusion, and Finnikin felt an urge to smooth them out.
“Ev
anjalin, you’re not making sense.”
“What kind of man would be laughing three weeks after he had laid his child to rest?” she asked.
“Get to the part where you claim to have worked something out,” Trevanion said gruffly.
“I need to go back, then. About a year. When the child and I walked through the sleep of one of the impostor’s men who was thinking of a girl from the Flatlands who had died that day. He did not share the grief of the mother and father, but her death was enough to make him think. He was doing his sums and he worked out that twenty young girls had died over the past four years.”
“Twenty?” Sir Topher gasped.
Evanjalin nodded. “But I need to go back even further.”
Finnikin made a sound of disbelief, but she held up her hand. “Listen. Eighteen years past, the queen of Osteria presented the queen of Lumatere with a cherry blossom plant. It was a peace offering after decades of mistrust between both kingdoms.”
“Evanjalin, you are not making —”
“But I will. My mother told me the story often. About the queen deciding where to plant the tree.”
“She searched the kingdom high and low for the perfect spot,” Sir Topher said, smiling at the memory. “Drove us all insane. But she was with child. Her youngest, Isaboe. The child was never meant to be and the pregnancy was cursed with illness from the beginning. The queen was sure that if she planted the cherry blossom and made a dedication to both the goddess Lagrami and the goddess Sagrami, then the child would live.”
Evanjalin nodded. “And although many Lumaterans were not happy with her decision to sacrifice to Sagrami, the queen found the perfect spot.”
“A beautiful story, but I cannot see the connection,” Trevanion said.
“There is only one cherry blossom tree in Lumatere. At least a day’s ride from the palace, at the old cloister of Sagrami near the Sendecane border.”
“But that cloister hasn’t been used for centuries,” Sir Topher said. “What are you suggesting, Evanjalin?”