Rae Carson: The Crown of Embers

“You are my loyal subject.”

He stares at me.

“But I’m not powerless.” I continue. “I’ve always had my Godstone and its minor magic. I healed Hector in Brisadulce, you know, so there are things I can still do just by reaching through the skin of the earth.” It would be useless to tell him that I’m done sacrificing other people for my own gain. I won’t whip innocent kitchen workers, I won’t burn down buildings, I won’t ask anyone to give up an inheritance for me, and I certainly won’t leave a friend at the mercy of a mysterious magical force—merely for the sake of my own power. I press my fingers to the stone at my navel, taking comfort in its familiar pulsing. What I tell him is, “And I have me. I will be enough.”

The camp is silent and somber and half emptied when Storm and I step from the trees. Mara sits alone near the fire pit. She holds up a steaming fish speared on a stick and is about to take a bite, but she sees us and lets it drop into the embers, jumping to her feet. “Elisa?” she whispers, and then she’s running toward me, wrapping me in her arms. “Oh, God, I knew you had probably gone off alone, that you weren’t taken, but when I heard all that rumbling a bit ago, I thought that . . . I thought maybe . . .”

I return her hug fiercely. “I’m sorry,” I say.

She steps back. “Did you find it?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened? Did you . . .” she makes a vague gesture with her hand.

“Can I tell you about that a little later, maybe? I need to . . . think.”

Her eyes drift to Storm’s shackles, then back to my face. “All right,” she says, but her gaze is troubled, maybe a little bit wounded.

“Where is everyone?” I ask, though I think I know.

“Looking for you. Hector is sick with worry.”

I wince, dreading the moment I will face him. I say, “I need to walk. I’ll be at the beach.”

“Do you want something to eat first?”

“No, thank you.” I feel her puzzled gaze at my back as I step away.

The half moon sends ripples of gold across the water. In the distance floats the black, battered shape of the Aracely, her main sail hanging limp in the windless night. The air is hot, the water calm.

On impulse, I shuck my filthy boots and blouse. Wearing nothing but my linen pants and a sleeveless undershirt, I wade out into the warm water.

A strange thing happens. Where the water touches me, it glows, Godstone blue. I lie back and float, waving my arms experimentally. The glow is like a shield wrapping around my body, a clinging aura of power. I laugh, delighted, thinking about all the things I’ve seen lately that glow in this way: my Godstone, when I’m about to release its power. The river of energy. The night bloomers. And now this luminescing bay.

And I realize that the zafira is everywhere. I may have destroyed access to its purest form, but it leaks out all over the world.

I see movement along the shore. A dark shape materializes out of the trees, and I catch my breath. I know him from so far away, just by the way he walks. I’m suddenly desperate to see him up close, to look into his eyes, to hear his low, soft voice, even though I know whatever we say to each other next cannot end well.

I swim toward shore until my feet touch bottom; then I walk from the glowing water to meet him.

He stares at me as I approach, his face unreadable to me again, the way it used to be. When he is only an arm’s length away, I say, “Hector, I’m sorry.”

He studies me thoughtfully. Then my whole body goes hot as his gaze travels—slowly, deliberately—from my neck, to my breasts, my hips, down to my feet, and all the way up again. My clothes cling to me like a second skin, leaving little to the imagination.

At last he says, “Sorry for what, exactly?” and his voice is cold, cold, cold.

I swallow hard. “For leaving without telling you.”

“A queen need never apologize to a mere guard.” He makes it sound like an insult, and I gasp from the pain of it.

“Still, I should have—”

“You’re my queen, Elisa. You can do whatever you want. You never owe me an explanation.”

He is reminding me, with patient and lethal efficiency, of how much power I have over him, of why we could never be together.

“Now, if we were lovers, ” he says, “I might feel angry that you demanded my honesty but refused me yours. I might feel insulted that you slinked away to do something dangerous knowing full well that the most important thing I do is protect you. And I might feel perplexed that you lacked the courage to face me, when all you had to do was give the order.”

I’ve never felt so contemptible and small. Part of me wants to flee, to escape his ruthless gaze. Another part wants to wrap my arms around him and beg forgiveness, for there can be no doubt that I have hurt him deeply.

He can’t help adding, “It’s a good thing, then, that we are not lovers, yes?”

It’s like a dagger to the gut. He means it to be his final rejection. He means to hurt me, and maybe to grasp on to some power of his own. It’s cruel of him, and unworthy of the Hector I’ve come to know. And yet the anger melts out of me as quickly as it forms.

I reach up and cup his face with one hand. It shocks some feeling into his eyes, and I watch carefully as he considers whether or not to recoil from my touch. He doesn’t.

I say, “What I did was weak. Cowardly. Unqueenly. But I learned some things about power when I went to the zafira, and you were right. About everything.” I brush across his cheek, memorizing the texture of his skin, the feel of slight stubble against the pad of my thumb. “I do have power. Enough that I don’t need you. But I will miss you awfully.”

He lurches away, and my heart aches to see the torment on his face. He looks everywhere but at me, running his hands through his hair as if to keep them busy. He says, “How do you do that? You always disarm me. You have from the day I . . . And I hate it. I truly hate it.”

From a place of knowledge as old as the zafira itself, from the depths of a feminine power I’m only beginning to understand, I say with conviction: “No, you don’t.”

I want to tell him how much I love him. He deserves to know. But it would be too perilous in this moment. It would sound like I was begging, or saying what he wanted to hear just to diffuse his anger.

So I leave him alone with his thoughts. I return to camp, resolved to face Mara and tell her everything, hoping I can salvage at least one friendship.

WE spend the next week repairing the ship and gathering foodstuffs. We make a rack of mangrove roots and set it in the sun to dry fish. A pile of coconuts becomes a mountain as we forage. I’ve always been handy with a needle, so I volunteer to repair a rip in one of the smaller sails. All the while, we are surrounded by the sounds of ax and mallet.

Hector is unfailingly polite to me, but I miss the way his warm gaze used to linger on my face, the way his lips would quirk when I said something that amused him. We renew our lessons in self-defense, carving out a space on the beach to work. He demonstrates the places on the human body that are most subject to pain. He shows me how to use my own body weight to throw an opponent to the ground. He explains how to shove a man’s nose into his brain with the base of my palm to kill him instantly and has me practice the motion on an unlucky coconut.

He does all this while managing to never touch me.

And though he says nothing, I’m certain he has decided to leave my service and go home to Ventierra. There’s a desperate focus to his teaching, as if he’s shoring me up with as much knowledge as possible before we part ways.