Page 218 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“Maxantarius. Tisaanah. Sammerin.” His accent plucked at our names like strings. “And…my, is that Brayan Farlione? Welcome home. I hope you’ve all had a safe and blissfully uneventful journey.”

The idea of describing anything that was happening now as “blissfully uneventful” was incomprehensible. Instead, I grasped Iya’s outstretched hand, gave him a smile that felt manic but I hoped looked reasonably calm, and said, “Thank you, councilor. Now, where’s the coup?”

* * *

“Where’s the coup?”Tisaanah hissed in my ear, barely holding back her laughter.

I shrugged defensively. “What else was I supposed to say? Don’t answer that,” I added, when her lips opened. “We all already knew I have poor social graces. If that’s disqualifying for this entire thing, then we’re in trouble from the start.”

Tisaanah rolled her eyes, and Sammerin let out a scoff that sounded a bit too much like agreement for my tastes.

Still, I clung to that one little sound of almost-amusement, because we needed it as Iya led us through the streets of the Capital.

I had never thought of myself as a particularly patriotic person—I had witnessed too many times what such attitudes cost—but seeing Ara in this state left me nauseous. I had seen some of the damage when Nura would pull me out of Ilyzath, but what had been hairline fractures then had now become massive rifts. Entire districts of the city were dark—Iya told us it was because certain areas were hit hard by attacks from the Fey’s creatures, and residents were afraid to return—and we passed many buildings with shattered windows or crumbling walls, claw marks gouging them like curtains shredded by a house cat. Mourning flowers were pinned on most doors, intended to mark households that lost soldier relatives—sometimes the red of a lost husband or father, the white of a lost friend, and too many of them, the black of a lost child.

We were solemn as we walked through the streets. Iya glanced back at us. Our expressions must have said what our silence didn’t.

“It has been a long few months,” he said.

“I want a briefing on this,” I said, gesturing to—well, all of it. “I need to know the context of everything that’s happening.”

“Already arranged.”

Iya, to my surprise, led us to the foot of the Towers. Up close, their state was much better than it had appeared from a distance. The entrance and the first twenty floors or so seemed to be perfectly intact, albeit far quieter than I was used to seeing them. The few people who were present in the Towers’ lobby stopped and looked at me as soon as we entered, which, on instinct, made me seize up.

“What?” Iya sounded amused. “Do you expect to be apprehended?”

I had to admit that a part of me did.

“This is the Orders,” he said, quietly. “These areyourpeople.”

Now that was a sentence that, two years ago, would have made me burst out laughing. The idea that the Orders would ever be “my” people again had been incomprehensible.

“Surely at least some of them are Nura’s people.”

Iya’s expression hardened. “Not many. Not anymore.” He led us through the familiar hallways of the Tower of Midnight, bringing us to the platform and bringing us down, to the archives and libraries below the lobby.

My body tensed as the platform lowered. The last time I had been here, it was to be subjected to hours of torture that nearly killed me. I was stiff as we walked through the halls. I didn’t quite expect the bolt of irrational panic that shot through me as Iya started to open the door.

“Wait.” I grabbed his shoulder, too abruptly. “Vardir. Is he here?”

Iya’s mouth thinned in disapproval. “No, thankfully. Nura started to get more paranoid over these last months. She moved her more… controversial projects outside of the Towers.”

“Where?”

“Even the Council doesn’t know. I suspect no one does, except her and Vardir.”

“And the people she has locked up there,” Tisaanah murmured.

I felt ill at the thought of it.

“We’ll take care of that,” I muttered, and Tisaanah nodded and squeezed my hand.

The door that Iya opened had never been one of Nura’s labs, anyway. This one I had been in before, long ago, when I was competing for Arch Commandant the first time—it was an archive room, one of the largest, with hundreds or perhaps even thousands of shelves of books and records lining the walls and packed into narrow aisles.

Iya gestured to the closest bookcase, and the only one that was partially empty.

“Records,” he said. “Detailing military operations, casualties, forms of attack, preparations, results… anything and everything that was considered worth writing around the conflicts with the Fey. If you wanted to read before the briefing tomorrow.”

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