Incendiary (Hollow Crown #1)(4)
The prince closed a fist around her hair, pulling her away from the soldier. “You laugh at the fate of your own?”
Blinking her eyes to focus, Celeste stared back at the prince. “I laugh because you will not win. We are a flame that will never burn out.”
Then she slammed her forehead into the prince’s face.
He released her, reaching for his bloody nose.
In that moment, she was free, rolling away onto the ground; her quick fingers retrieved the hidden contents over her heart. The guard dove for her. She grabbed the oil lamp on the table and threw it. The glass shattered against the guard’s chest, and he screamed as fire caught on his clothes, anointed with oils meant for protection.
It was an ugly way to die, and it would not be her fate. She dug into her tunic pocket and held up the glass vial for the prince to see.
“You’re mad,” the prince shouted, his heavy steps charging to stop her.
Celeste whispered a prayer to the Lady. Forgive me. Forgive me for my past. Welcome me at last.
She swallowed the contents of the vial, slipping the stone that she would protect with her life into her mouth. She gave in to the numbness of the poison rushing through her body, a cold she’d only ever felt when she swam in the mountain lakes near her family home as a girl. When she closed her eyes, she could see that deep blue water, feel the calm of floating for hours, but she could still hear the prince calling her name, the shouting from the guards, the crackle of flames.
Celeste San Marina made a second grave at dawn.
Hers was one of fire.
Chapter 1
After a while, all burning villages smell the same.
From a hilltop, I watch as fire consumes the farming village of Esmeraldas. Wooden homes and sienna clay roofs. Bales of rolled hay amid a sea of golden grass. Vegetable gardens of ripening tomatoes, bushels of thyme and laurel. All common to Puerto Leones, but here, in the eastern provincia of the kingdom, the fire burns through something else: manzanilla.
The deceptively bitter flower with a yellow heart and white mane of pointed petals is prized for its healing properties not only in our kingdom, but in the lands across the Castinian Sea, ensuring a steady flow of gold and food into this tiny corner of the country. In Esmeraldas, where the manzanilla grows so wild it takes over entire fields, its sweetness momentarily masks the acrid scent of homespun wool and rag dolls, abandoned in haste as the villagers run along the dirt paths to escape the flames.
But nothing covers the scent of burning flesh.
“Mother of All—” I start to say a blessing. Words the Moria use when someone is moving from this life and onto the next. But I remember flashes of a different fire, of cries and screams and helplessness. A heavy weight settles around my throat. Taking deep breaths, I try to compose myself, but the blessing still won’t leave my lips. So I think it instead. Mother of All, bless this soul into the vast unknown.
I turn away from the flames just in time to see Dez march up behind me. His honey-brown eyes take in the scene below. There’s dirt on his tawny brown skin from that last scramble through the woods bordering the north of Esmeraldas. His fingers rake through thick, tangled black hair, and his broad chest expands with quick shallow breaths as he tries to regain composure. He touches the sword at his hip the way a child might check for a favorite toy, for comfort.
“I don’t understand,” Dez says. Even after everything we’ve been through he searches for a reason for why bad things happen.
“What’s there to understand?” I say, though my anger isn’t directed toward him. “We turned a six-day journey into four by sheer will, and it still wasn’t fast enough.”
I wish I had something to hit. I settle for kicking a cluster of rocks and regret it when the dust billows around us. The wind shifts, pushing the smoke away. I sink into my boots as if grounding myself to this place will stop my heart from racing, my mind from thinking, Too late. You’re always too late.
“This has been burning for half a day by the looks of it. We never would have gotten here in time to stop it. But Esmeraldas’s exports are worth their weight in gold. Why would the king’s justice set it ablaze?”
I retie my forest-green scarf around my neck. “The message from Celeste said Rodrigue’s discovery would turn the tide of our war. They didn’t want it found.”
“Perhaps there is hope yet,” Dez says. When he turns to the village at the base of the hill, there’s a new fervor in his eyes.
Or perhaps all hope is lost, I think. I am not like Dez. The other Whispers do not come to me for hope or rousing speeches. Perhaps it is best that he is our unit leader and not me. I know two truths: The king’s justice will stop at nothing to destroy its enemies, and we’re waging a war we cannot win. But I keep fighting, maybe because it is all I’ve ever known, or maybe because the alternative is dying and I can’t do that until I’ve paid for my sins.
“Do you think Celeste is—”
“Dead,” Dez answers. His eyes are fixed on the village, what’s left of it. A ripple passes along the fine line of his jaw, his skin darker after our journey in the sun.
“Or captured,” I suggest.
He shakes his head once. “Celeste wouldn’t allow herself to be taken. Not alive.”
“We have to know for certain.” I pull a thin spyglass from the inside of my leather vest pocket and turn back to the forest line, twisting the lens until I find what I’m looking for.