26. Adustio

adustiō ~ōnis, f.

1. the act of burning

2. heatstroke, sunstroke

The tourney hall’s noble box hovers high above the arena stands, lined with velvet seats and servants holding trays of champagne and fresh fruit. Rax Istra-Velrayd sits in the far corner, crimson brocade on his broad chest and umber fur on his cuffs, blinking tiredly. The dream didn’t spare him last night, showing him gold-haired children splashing in a fountain of a Mid Ward park. He’d ignored it as he always did, called it overactive imagination, but his hovercarriage passed that same park this morning—the same fountain—and he’d never once been there in his life.

He’d dismissed it as the years had taught him to; he must’ve seen it before, and his mind cobbled it together in his dream. His parents never let him go to Mid Ward or Low Ward, but he’s been there, of course, on nights out with Yavn and his other friends keen to party in rags and wheat ale when old Earth brandy and fucking on redwood tables became stale. Drunken rampages are the only explanation for how he knows where the bakery by the Laurel Street church is, and how much flour it orders a week, and how to make its famous cinnamon twists—left hand over right, right hand under left and up through. It must be how he knows that in order to deliver a baby, you need to keep your pressure steady on the mother’s navel and count—one two three, push, one two three, push—and how he knows the pink-painted walls in the butchery-district apartments are so thin you can hear your neighbors whispering about joining “Polaris.”

Rax laughs into his hands and mightily rubs his face. The dream has only gotten worse since the Cup started. It gets worse when he thinks about Synali, how she rides without anything protecting her, and so he handed the kerchief over to Sevrith and prayed to a god who had long abandoned him in the darkness of Sunscreamer’s cockpit.

Please, Lord. Let her take it. Protect her as no one protected me.

The nobles around Rax eat delicately and talk delicately and watch the match delicately, but when the Lithroi man walks in, they all go quiet. He sits back and watches it unfold; he doesn’t know the full story between the exiled prince and the king—it began before he was born—but it echoes here and now. The Lithroi man, unremarkable in his paleness and gray breast coat, walks in slow increments to the king’s seat, his remarkable silver-sapphire cane tapping thunderously in the silence. The guards tense on their projection swords, but with a flicker of the king’s liver-spotted hand, they stand down. The Lithroi man stares at the seated king, but His Majesty stares only ahead—at Synali von Hauteclare.

And then the Nova-King speaks, commanding voice soft enough for only the Lithroi man and Rax, straining his ears, to hear.

“You will not win, Draviticus. Even with someone like her.”

Rax feels the air go sharp, unseeable glass underfoot, and the Lithroi man smiles so big it reminds him of a hungry fox.

“’Tis not my victory I am concerned with, Your Majesty—but rather, your loss.”