To Kill a Kingdom(83)

“Not yet,” I say.

Yukiko turns her steel gaze to mine. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Elian go suddenly rigid. When Yukiko takes a step toward me, his hand moves slowly to his side. To the knife I know is hidden there.

“Is there something else?” Yukiko asks.

Many things, I think.

The way she looks at Elian being the worst, like she’s better than him. Manipulating a prince to get her hands on his kingdom, just as my mother manipulated me to steal mine and extend her reign. Just like I fell into the Sea Queen’s trap, Elian is going to fall into Yukiko’s. Maybe it was different once, but now I know there’s no way I can steal the eye and let my kingdom rise while Elian’s crumbles beneath his debt to her. There has to be a way for us both to win this battle.

We are not na?ve little heirs to be molded as they wish. We are warriors. We are rulers.

“Elian may not be a king,” I tell her,“but you’re not a queen, either. Not unless you kill your brothers.”

“Who has time for murder these days?” Yukiko says. “Better to just take another kingdom than wait around for this one.”

The insinuation is not lost. She thinks she can goad me with the deal she and Elian made. And I suppose she can. Because I can’t help but hate seeing him stand submissively by her, not giving him a choice in his own future. Using him for her devious plans, just like I intended to. It’s too much of a reminder of my life before the Saad. Before Elian made me realize what it was like to be free. The very person who gave me a glimpse of hope is now so willing to sacrifice his own.

“You should be careful,” I tell Yukiko. “The thing about taking something that’s not yours is that there will always be someone out there ready to take it back.”

“I suppose I’ll have to watch my back, then.”

“No need,” I tell her. “I can see it perfectly.”

Yukiko bites down on the corner of her lip, half-amused, half-curious. When she turns from me, I dare a glance at Elian. There is a dangerous corner to his smile, and I count the seconds while he looks at me. Green piercing through the new white of the world. Until, finally, Kye clasps Elian’s shoulder and pushes him onward.

When night falls, we set up camp on the flattest part of the mountain. Tents stapled into the ground circle a quickfire station. We crowd around it and cook what sparse remnants of food we have left. The cold seems worse when we sit still, so we hover our hands over the fire so closely that we risk getting burnt.

The wind wails harder, and the crew warms their throats with the rum Madrid brought in place of more food. When night deepens and the crew’s laughter fades to heavy breathing, I listen to the sound of the wind, knowing I won’t be able to sleep. Not with the Second Eye of Keto so close. My mission to overthrow my mother and Elian’s fate threaten to intertwine, and I can’t close my eyes without thinking about how this war will end.

After a while, the snow begins to fall more softly against the tent, and in the dying wind I make out a pair of soft footsteps approaching. I hear them before I see the shadow, drawn on the shelter by the fading glow of my lantern.

When the door unzips, I’m not at all surprised to see Elian crouching beside it.

“Come with me,” he says, and so I do.

I’VE NEVER SEEN THE stars. Not the way Elian has. There are so many things I haven’t done. Experiences Elian seems to have that nobody else, especially me, could dream of. The stars are one of them. They’re Elian’s in a way that they’re no one else’s.

Elian doesn’t just look at the stars, but he imagines them too. He draws pictures of them in his mind, creating stories about gods and wars and the souls of explorers. He thinks about where his soul will go when he dies and if he will become part of the night.

All of this he tells me at the height of the Cloud Mountain, with the moon and the wind and the empty space of the world before us. The crew is sleeping, along with the Págese princess. It feels like the entire world is asleep. And us – just us – we are finally awake.

“I’ve never shown this to anybody,” Elian says.

He doesn’t mean the stars, but the way he sees them. They are his secret just like the ocean is mine, and when he speaks of them, his smile is as bright as they are. I wonder if I’ve ever had that look. If it glittered in my eyes when I thought of home, washing over me like a wave and transforming me as I was so easily transformed before.

“I think there are a lot of things you haven’t shown anybody.”

We don’t talk about Yukiko, or the marriage that seems as impending as our war. We don’t do anything but pretend there’s something other than darkness and choices woven from the nightmare ahead of us both.

Elian takes in a breath. His hand lingers beside mine. “I had this idea that when I found the crystal, I would feel something,” he says.

“Victorious?”

“Peaceful. But we’re so close, and I feel the complete opposite. It’s like I’m dreading the moment we open that dome.”

Something shifts in my chest. Hope, maybe.

“Why?”

Elian doesn’t reply, and that’s enough of an answer. Despite everything, he doesn’t want to be responsible for destroying an entire race, no matter how evil he thinks we are. I want to tell him that I feel it too: the sense of dread mingling with the pull of duty. I want to tell him that we weren’t all born monsters.