A War of Swallowed Stars by Sangu Mandanna

Author:Sangu Mandanna
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510733831
Publisher: Sky Pony
Published: 2021-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Esmae

Princess Katya passes my transmission on to Alex. It’s just a place, a time, and the word please. It’s difficult for me to say that word to him, when I’m still so angry and bitter, but I do it for the memory of a man who, in the end, loved us both.

Even so, as I wait on the bank of a hot spring, while warm water nips at my boots and yellow trees make hush-hush noises above me, I’m not sure he’ll come. Maybe he’ll think it’s a taunt, that I asked him to come back to this place on the edge of the ruins of his city. Or maybe he’ll see it for what it is: an echo of a time when we were happy together here.

His footsteps crunch in the snow behind me. I turn to see him, thin and wary, just a boy in the woods.

“Why am I here?” he asks. His voice is steady but carefully blank. The last time I saw him, he was about to pack me away into oblivion and I jabbed him with stasis serum.

But he came.

“If I offered you what I once offered before,” I say, biting each word out. “The throne of Kali, shared between you and Elvar. Would you accept?”

He makes an incredulous sound in his throat. “Why would you be okay with that?”

“I’m struggling to think of reasons,” I admit. I make an effort to unclench my fists and say, “No matter what either of us does, it’ll never feel like enough. I don’t think I’ll ever feel like you’ve paid enough for Rama, or Sorsha, or the fact that you would have put me back in stasis and left me with a woman you know would have killed me—”

“I didn’t want that,” he protests. “I didn’t want any of that.”

I smile ruefully. “You say that a lot. You didn’t want it. You didn’t know. You didn’t mean for it to happen. But it still keeps happening, doesn’t it? Because you never say no. You never stop her.”

“This isn’t about our mother,” he says wearily. “And if we’re going to talk about how we’ve wronged each other, Esmae, I have a whole list for you, too.”

“I took Titania from you,” I say, nodding. “I destroyed Arcadia right after you told me you loved it. I know. That’s what I meant. Nothing we do will ever be enough. We’ll always hurt just a little more than we can bear, so we’ll keep lashing out until there’s nothing of either of us left. Don’t you want it to stop?”

“You swore you’d destroy me,” says Alex.

“I said that to our mother. She just happened to look like you at the time.”

Alex lets out a breath that puffs white before fading into the air. He takes a step forward, but his shoulders are stiff. “It’s not enough,” he says. “I won’t come back and share something with Elvar that was never meant to be his. It’s not just you, Esmae. It’s him, too.

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