“We know it’s important to the Kaiserin,” I say. “That’s good enough for me. But there’s no reason for all of us to stay. You should continue on with half of our troops, meet us back where we camped in the Perea Forest—there are a couple of villages not far north of there that could use liberating. As long as you don’t get caught—”

“We won’t,” Maile interrupts. “Are you sure you want to be here with diminished numbers when the Kalovaxians and Sta’Criverans arrive?”

“Leave me the Water Guardians, and I’ll be just fine,” I say.

Maile nods once. “We should bring Water Gems with us,” she says, and though her voice is conversational, the idea stops me in my tracks.

“Gems?” I ask. “Why would we do that?”

She shrugs. “There are quite a lot of them stockpiled in a storeroom. If I had to guess, well over a thousand gems. It’s power we could certainly use as we go forward.”

It takes a moment for me to understand what she’s saying, what she’s suggesting. Artemisia understands quicker than I do, though.

“You suggested the same thing at the Fire Mine, and you were told no,” she says, her voice soft but with a dangerous edge to it. “Those gems are not to be misused by people who aren’t meant to wield them. The answer hasn’t changed now, and if you prove foolish enough to ask a third time—”

“I expected the sentimentality from Heron,” Maile interrupts. “But the two of you are too practical for that. Those gems can be the extra weight we need to tip this scale. You can’t put superstition over logic.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask, their argument sinking in. “What gems at the Fire Mine?”

Maile and Artemisia exchange looks but Artemisia speaks first.

“We found them when you were in the mine—an underground stockpile with hundreds and hundreds of gems. There was a discussion about what to do with them. Some—like Maile—thought we should use them in battle, the way the Kalovaxians do, that it would level the playing field. Others disagreed.”

“Heron,” I say. Of course he would have disagreed—I’m not sure what I believe as far as the gods go, but Heron believes in them absolutely. He believes that someone who hasn’t been gifted by the gods shouldn’t use a gem, the way the Kalovaxians do. That it’s sacrilege. “Who else?”

“Blaise, me,” Artemisia says, and then pauses. “My mother as well. And though you weren’t there to speak for yourself, we all knew how you felt about the gems. How you refused to use one yourself until…” She trails off, her eyes falling on the Fire Gem pendant around my neck. Ampelio’s gem.

“So what was done with them?” I ask her.

“We left them where they were,” Artemisia says, shrugging. “Sealed the entrance to the underground storeroom so no one could get them.”

I nod. “Good. We’ll do the same thing here.”

Maile frowns. “But—”

“It’s a settled decision,” I say. “One that has already been agreed on.”

“It’s superstition,” she says.

“Maybe,” I say. “But it’s one that Astreans believe. And Astreans still make up the bulk of our troops. If our beliefs—our superstitions, as you so condescendingly put it—are disrespected, people will begin to rebel. We cannot be splintered now, not with Goraki already gone.”

For a second, Maile looks like she wants to argue, but Artemisia speaks before she can.

“Astrea was conquered for those gems,” she says, her voice soft. “Many of us were forced to pry them from the earth until our fingers bled and our minds became frayed at the proximity to them. Nothing good will come from distributing them widely.”

Maile nods, but she still looks annoyed. “There’s something else,” she says after a second.

“I swear to the gods, if you don’t let it go—” Artemisia says.

“Not that. Something else.”

A frown tugs at my mouth. “A good something else or bad?”

Maile rubs the back of her neck. “Hard to say, to be honest. Perhaps it’s better to show you than to try to explain. Follow me.”

* * *

—

I remember seeing the Water Mine only once before the siege, before it was a mine at all and was just a cave with a temple standing, tall and proud and shining, around it. Those memories are distant and faded at the edges, but I remember the priestesses in their pale blue silk gowns that flowed around their bodies like water. I remember my mother standing in front of the temple, small and humble before it. I remember thinking it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, even more beautiful than the palace.

But that temple hasn’t stood for ten years now, and the camp the Kalovaxians erected in its place could never be called beautiful. Its layout is similar to that of the Fire Mine camp, with rows of barracks that resemble blocks of gray stone—one of which Heron carries Blaise to, where he can rest until he wakes up. The Fire Guardians disperse to the dining hall, the twin of the one at the Fire Mine. We even pass the same Fire Gem–infused iron gate that surrounds the area where the Guardians and berserkers would have been kept. I want to ask Maile how many people she found there, but I can’t form the words. My mind is too busy turning over what she could possibly be leading me to.

Artemisia is quiet as well, though I’d guess that she’s less distracted about where we’re going than about the camp itself. I wonder how it looks through her eyes, years after she thought she’d left it behind for good. I wonder if she’s searching the faces of the former slaves we pass, looking for someone familiar. If she finds anyone, her expression doesn’t give it away.

“Are you all right?” I ask her, softly enough that Maile can’t hear.

She turns her dark eyes to me, though it takes her a moment to focus. “It’s strange,” she manages finally. “Being back here. The girl I was when I left is not the girl I am now, but I can’t help feeling like her all over again. I don’t care for it.”

“That girl survived,” I remind her. “That girl became strong enough to save the other people here.”

Her smile is sad. “Not all of them, though,” she says. “How many do you think have been killed since I left?”

“Their blood isn’t on your hands, Art,” I say. “It’s on the Kalovaxians’.”

“I know that,” she says, her hand idly finding its way to the hilt of the dagger at her hip. “And I’m ready to make them pay.” She quickens her pace to catch up with Maile. “How many guards are left alive?”

Maile glances at her, uncertain. “A hundred or so,” she says. “We’re holding them in a couple of the barracks, under heavy watch. We thought they’d be more valuable alive than dead.”

Artemisia looks put out at that, but she quickly recovers. “For now, maybe,” she says. “I want to see them after this. Wherever you’re taking us. Where are you taking us?”

Maile glances over her shoulder at me before looking forward again, nodding toward a building I recognize as the commandant’s office, just next to what must have been the armory, though there’s little left of it now. Artemisia’s aim was certainly precise.

“There were a couple of people here we were…surprised to find, to say the least.”

“Kalovaxian or Astrean?” I ask her as she opens the door and ushers us inside.

“Neither,” she says.

It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim lighting, but when they do, I have to stifle a gasp.

There are two people waiting, their hands bound behind their backs. The man looks Gorakian, with the same golden skin and dark hair as Erik and Hoa, but the woman—at first glance, I think it’s Cress. She has the same porcelain doll’s face, the same gray eyes, the same yellow hair wound into two braids that hang down to her waist. But this woman is older, her expression lined around her eyes and mouth. Though her face is thinner than Cress’s, it’s softer somehow—at least, softer than Cress’s has been the last few times I’ve seen her. Instead this woman resembles the Cress I used to know.

There is something else about her, something familiar that prickles at my memory.

“Who are you?” I ask her, ignoring the Gorakian man entirely.

The woman’s eyes search my face, recognition sparking in her eyes. I don’t know her, but she knows me.

“My name is Brigitta, Your Majesty,” she says, lifting her chin. Her voice is like Cress’s used to be, too, melodic and soft, but the kind of voice that demands to be heard.

It takes me a moment to place the name, but when I do, the world shifts beneath my feet and I remember where I’ve seen her before—a small painting, no bigger than my thumb, that Cress kept as a charm on one of her bracelets, a token of her dead mother, who, I found out later, wasn’t dead at all.

Brigitta is the name of the previous Theyn’s wife, the woman who ran away with a Gorakian man before the Kalovaxians came to Astrea. Brigitta is the name of Crescentia’s mother.