Page 248 of Children of Fallen Gods

I looked down. Chains shackled my hands together. I turned my wrists and saw circular symbols tattooed on the insides of my wrists, black ink over dark veins.Stratagrams. The word leapt to the back of my mind with satisfying certainty. I wished my mind would produce something more useful.

“Where are we going?” I asked. The sound of my own voice surprised me. It seemed to surprise the guard beside me, too. He looked at me and opened his mouth.

Blink.

I was standing in a circular room. Hundreds and hundreds of eyes looked upon me. The light shining down on me was so blinding that I couldn’t make out their faces, only silhouettes.

The woman with braided hair was in front of me, facing them. Her voice was loud, echoing off of high ceilings, so powerful it reached even the people crowded into the back of the room.

“We face an enemy more powerful than any of us have ever imagined,” she was saying. “The Fey are monsters. And Maxantarius Farlione sold his own people out to them. We will find Tisaanah Vytezic and her fellow traitors. But today, we are able to find one shred of justice.”

Tisaanah Vytezic. The name shook something loose.

The woman turned to me.

“We should have known,” she said, “what Farlione was capable of, after he slaughtered so many innocents in the battle of Sarlazai. But so often, we do not see the ugly truth of people until it is too late.”

Sarlazai. Fire. Corpses. Decimated buildings. Blink. When I opened my eyes, I was shaken. DidIdo that?

My knuckles were white.

Wait, I wanted to say. But I wasn’t sure what I would say. I remembered so little. Perhaps I was guilty of what she accused me of.

The woman’s voice cut through the air again.

“On seventy-two charges of murder, for the Syrizen killed in the battle of the Scar and the civilians killed in the collapse of the towers, we find Maxantarius Farlione guilty.”

Wait—

“On the charge of high treason, for inviting the Fey into the country of Ara, and undermining his own people in a war the likes of which we have never seen, we find Maxantarius Farlione guilty.”

No — that wasn’t right. Something was very, very wrong. I just didn’t have the words to describe what.

The woman with braided hair looked over her shoulder at me. Her gaze was sharp on the surface. But there, a little deeper, there was something else, something that ran deeper than cold leadership.

I closed my fingers around a fragment of memory.

“And, in light of new information, to bring justice to all those who lost loved ones in the fall of Sarlazai,” she said, “we now find Maxantarius Farlione guilty of war crimes, resulting in the slaughter of four-hundred and thirty-two known Aran lives, and countless other missing persons.”

Four-hundred and thirty-two?!

The protest that I’d been about to unleash died in my throat. The smell of burning flesh hit me so vividly that it might have been happening here, in this room. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

Stop. Something is wrong.

“And in fitting punishment for the severity of these crimes—”

Wake up, Max.

“—and in light of the grotesque power obtained by ex-Captain Farlione—”

Come back.

“—for the protection of all Arans, as the Arch Commandant of the Orders and the acting Queen of Ara, I sentence him to life imprisonment in Ilyzath.”

Ilyzath.

Blink.

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