Rae Carson - The Crown of Embers

We round another switchback to find the vaguest hint of light. As one, we hurry forward, desperate to lose these walls. The light strengthens. One more corner, and light explodes full in our faces. I blink and raise my forearm against it.

The night bloomers snap closed. Gradually my eyes adjust, and I lower my arm.

We look out over a high mountain valley, green and gently rolling, hemmed in by summits that catch the clouds. They are the same mountains I saw from the ship, I’m sure of it. But now I view them from the other side, and from so much higher up.

Exactly five narrow peaks jut into the sky—the holy number of perfection. One is a little shorter and squatter than the others, like a thumb, and with a start I realize that from a certain angle, I could almost imagine I’m staring at God’s righteous right hand, and the streams cutting through the valley are the creases of his cupped palm.

It’s a huger, greener version of Lutián’s Hand of God sculpture in Brisadulce.

Storm clutches at his chest, and his breathing comes hard, but not, I think, from exertion. The astonishment in his face is stunning to see; it shifts his angled lines into something a little wilder and nearly beautiful.

“You’re sensing it very strongly now,” I observe.

“Oh, yes. It’s almost painful. We’re supposed to go down into that valley.”

I peer down at the incline in dismay. It’s too steep to descend safely. Maybe by using the vines and ferns that hug the slope, we can lower ourselves gradually.

“There,” Storm says. “Steps cut into the rock.”

I look in the direction he’s pointing and decide that calling them “steps” is generous. They are more like handholds, overgrown with moss. After scraping the dying night-bloomer vines from my forearms, I scoot down, lodging my heels into the indentions, clutching plants for support.

Sharp pain pierces my finger, and I yank my hand back. A drop of blood wells on my forefinger. With my other hand, I push aside a fern frond to see what pricked me.

A rose vine, not quite blooming. Deepest red peeks from budding green tips. Thorns wrap around the stems, much longer and harder than those of common roses.

Tears spring to my eyes, for I feel like God has given me a gift.

I have no priest to guide my prayer, no sizzling altar to accept my blood, no acolyte to bathe my wound with witch hazel. But I can’t help but feel that this moment was meant to be, somehow, and so I decide to do what I always do when I am pricked by a sacrament rose: pray and ask a blessing.

In the past, I have asked for courage. Or wisdom. This time, I close my eyes and mutter, “Please, God. Give me power .”

I open my eyes, turn my finger over, and let the drop of blood fall to the earth.

Something rumbles—whether it is the world around me or the prayer inside me I cannot tell—and the earth tilts. The air shifts, like a desert mirage, and for the briefest instance, I see lines of shimmering light, Godstone blue and thin as threads. They race from all directions through the mountain peaks, across the valley, to meet at a central point where they are sucked into the ground.

I blink, and the vision is gone, leaving me breathless and puzzled and frightened.

“What just happened?” Storm demands. “You fed the earth a bit of your blood. I felt it move.”

“I’m not sure. I saw something strange. Lines of power. But they’re gone now.”

He stares at me suspiciously. “Let’s go. I become impatient.”

It doesn’t take long to reach the valley floor, which is a good thing given how my legs are shaking from exertion. There are no palm trees here, just sprawling cypress and towering eucalyptus and a tree I’ve never seen before, with such huge broad leaves that a single leaf would cover my whole body. Birds flit among the branches; dappled light catches on them and shoots away in prismatic facets. It’s so startlingly odd that I peer closer.

No, not birds. They’re giant insects, as large as ospreys, with downy white abdomens and gossamer wings.

Misgiving thumps in my chest. This valley has a wrongness to it. It is alien. Other .

And there is something about it that inspires silence. We move quietly, as if in expectation, or perhaps reverence. Piles of stone like crumbling altars litter the forest floor, some as tall as I am, covered in green lichen and dust. A cypress tree clings stubbornly to the side of one, its roots prying open cracks in stone.

We round a bend and find another pile, but this one is as tall as a tree and square shaped, with arched openings for windows. A ruined building. I look around in awe at the other piles. Ruins, all of them. This was once a city of stone, its shape now worn down by sun and wind and tree roots and time.

“This must be centuries old,” I breathe.

“Several millennia,” Storm says, and there is a quiet sadness in his voice I’ve never heard before.

I regard him sharply. “That’s impossible. God brought people to this world—”

“Yes, yes, he rescued you from the dying world with his righteous right hand less than two thousand years ago. I’ve heard you tell it.” The anger in his voice is palpable. “Little queen, don’t you realize? We Inviernos have always been here.”

I stare at him agape, even as the rightness of his words spark inside me. Behind him, one of the insect birds flits through the branches of a eucalyptus, alights atop the ruined building, and begins to groom its rainbow wing with a spindly black leg.

“Your people came, bearing magic we’d never seen,” he continues. “They changed us, made us less than we were. Changed themselves too, the legend goes, though I don’t know how or why. They scattered across the land now called Joya d’Arena, and we fled before them into the mountains. After that, they changed the whole world . Your country wasn’t always a desert, you know.”

I’m shaking my head, with uneasiness rather than denial. If what he says is true, then my ancestors were interlopers. No, thieves. But surely one cannot be considered a thief when one is taking only what God gives? God offered us this world. All the scriptures say so.

My old tutor did tell me our great desert was an inland sea before a mysterious cataclysm forced the water deep below ground. So maybe what Storm says is partly true. Maybe we created the desert somehow. But how? “That makes no sense,” I say aloud. “God wouldn’t—”

My Godstone leaps, and the tugging on my navel becomes a dagger in my gut.

Storms gasps. “I don’t like pain.”

I bend over, clutching at my stomach with one hand, even as I grab Storm’s shoulder with the other and push him forward down our path. “Just . . . keep . . . moving.” I can hardly put one foot in front of the other. All I want to do is drop to the ground and curl up, knees to chest. Maybe this is what Father Nicandro meant when he said my determination would be tested.

I have a lot of determination.

But a few steps farther and the vise on my abdomen twists suddenly, and I tumble to my knees, panting. I will crawl if I have to. I will—

“It’s worse for you, isn’t it?” Storm says, looking down at me with irritation.

I nod, unable to speak.

He stares at me a moment. Then he sighs, squats down, grabs one of my arms, and loops it over his shoulder. He stands, pulling me to my feet. “Just a bit farther, Your Majesty.”

I swallow my surprise and concentrate on moving my feet as he drags me down the path.

Just when I think the pain can’t get any worse, when my body wavers between vomiting and passing out, we break into a small clearing. In the center is another ruined building, as perfectly round as a tower. But its summit has long since crumbled, leaving it merely the height of a man.