WHEN ISSA RETURNED to the palace in the bright light of morning, it was abuzz. There were servants in every hallway, but they looked away when they saw her. At last, she heard voices and flattened herself around a corner to eavesdrop.
“Prince Edik. Yes, cold as stone this morning. He was to be gone, but the guard called and called for him. Finally, someone went to fetch him out of his bed to ask if he wanted to meet the executioner with his sister—”
With a sinking heart, Issa moved toward the servants who were speaking and demanded more information. “Tell me what you know. Did you see him yourself or is this a rumor you are passing about?”
The man seemed affronted. “I didn’t find him, if that’s what you mean, but I saw him on his bed, still as death. His lips were closed, but his eyes were open. He looked like he’d been covered in ash.” He did not seem to realize he was speaking to Princess Marlissa.
“Did you call the physician?” she asked.
He shrugged. “He came and said the same that we all knew. Dead hours ago. Poisoned.”
Just as his mother had been poisoned. Edik was dead, not merely banished. Issa should have known it would happen this way, no matter what King Haikor had promised.
The man continued, “The only question now is—who did it? Duke Kellin, do you think? To show the king his loyalty? Or one of the other nobles?”
Issa was angry enough that her neweyr sprang up out of her. A vine grew from the edge of the palace through the cracks in the walls and up the floor beneath the servant’s feet. It pressed him back and pinned him against the wall.
She was ashamed of herself, using the neweyr in this way, and let him go. He and his companion fled silently down the hallway.
She went to Edik’s rooms herself, realizing only then that she had never been to them before. She knocked, but no one answered and the door was not locked. She stepped inside, smelling something sweet and rank. She wrinkled her nose. She saw no sign of Edik’s body in his inner chamber. The bed was stripped, but the room looked as if it had not otherwise been touched. There were metal soldiers on the floor, as if Edik were to return any moment to play with them. She noticed a piece of paper and bent down to see a crude drawing of a hound. It was Midnight, the black puppy she had given Edik. Had the king poisoned Midnight, as well? She would never be able to ask Edik what he thought now. Issa wiped away tears at the sight of this last memento of the prince.
“Good-bye, Edik,” she said quietly, and stepped out of the room, returning swiftly to her own chambers.
Issa sat before her fire and thought what she might do while Ailsbet was still alive. There was only one choice that had any hope, but it felt wrong, a betrayal of all she had ever believed in, but she could not leave Rurik knowing that she had not done all she could for the other princess. The execution was set for the morning of the following day, so she did not have much time.
Issa put on her best gown, made of golden silk. She struggled without the help of maids, to do up the stays and put on the sleeves. At last, she put on her stockings and shoes.
When she was finished, she perfumed herself with rose water and rouged her cheeks. She tucked tiny wildflowers that she drew up out of the floor of the palace into her loose, unbraided hair and went to the Throne Room to appear before King Haikor. Lady Pippa was sitting in the queen’s smaller throne, but Kellin was not there, and Issa felt relieved at his absence.
“I have come first to ask you of your own free will to release Princess Ailsbet from the Tower,” said Issa to the king.
“Release her?” said King Haikor. “She is a princess no longer and therefore qualifies for no royal mercy. In addition, she is ekhono, and all my life, I have hunted and killed her kind. What reason is there for me to do differently with her?”
Issa raised her chin and spoke loudly enough that no one could mistake her words. “Because I am the woman with taweyr.”
The effect on King Haikor’s court was immediate. Lady Pippa shrieked and stood up, pretending to swoon. Her ladies cried out and hurried to her side. The men of the court drew back as if Issa had threatened them physically, raising their weapons.
King Haikor was the only one who remained calm. “Impossible,” he said. “We all saw what she did.”
“Did you? I was right there, on the horse directly behind her. And besides, with the taweyr, there is no need to be close enough to touch, is there? You have killed men a battlefield away, have you not?”
“I know what I saw,” said King Haikor. “I was there. Many witnesses were there.”
“Yes, but I purposely misled them, and you. I have both the taweyr and the neweyr, and I come to show them to you today.”
“Impossible,” said King Haikor.
“Ah, but it is not.” Then Issa made sure that all in the room heard her clearly, for she wanted no mistake about the prophecy. “There is a prophecy that I learned of years ago, that the two islands will come together as one when the two weyrs are again joined in one person.”
“The two islands come together? But the land itself has changed. Even the taweyr and the neweyr working together cannot alter that,” said King Haikor.
“Can they not?” asked Issa. She thought of the servant she had trapped with her vines not long ago.
“Prove it, then,” said King Haikor. “Prove that you have taweyr.”
Closing her eyes briefly in order to focus, Issa pulled vines from the palace garden toward her, climbing them up the outer walls and into the mortared stone, keeping them hidden until they were underneath the marble floor directly beneath King Haikor’s throne.
Issa made sure the vines did not grow spindly, but kept their full heft and strength. Then with a cry, she opened her eyes and pulled them violently up underneath the marble floor where the throne was. The heavy, ashen chair, carved with roses, was thrust suddenly into the air and came crashing down. The marble floor beneath it was cracked, though the vines themselves could not be seen. Issa was relieved, for she could not reveal that she was using only the neweyr, and making it appear to be the taweyr.
King Haikor stared at the throne. “You—you are ekhono.”
“I am a woman with both weyrs,” said Issa, holding her head high, thinking of the prophecy and how it might frighten King Haikor that she had begun to fulfill it.
“A throne destroyed—that is a simple thing. Easily done,” said King Haikor. “It means nothing.” But his voice trembled.
He might not feel the power she had used as his own familiar taweyr, but he could not believe it was anything else. As far as King Haikor wished to believe, the neweyr could not do something like this.
“Do you wish me to prove myself a second time?” asked Issa. She had expected this, had prepared for it as much as she could.
King Haikor looked around the Throne Room, into the eyes of his nobles. He could see that they were astonished and afraid, terrified of the ekhono in their midst. Only Haikor himself was defiant.
“Yes,” he said. “And do it unmistakably.”
All this time, Issa had assumed that the taweyr was stronger than the neweyr, at least when it came to brute force. But she had never tried to use neweyr as a weapon before. Perhaps no one ever had.
Issa poured all her energy into her neweyr, and into the vines that she had sent under the throne. Now she threaded them back to the gardens where their roots lay and then toward the Tower itself. The first half of the distance was easy because the vines had already lengthened that far. But once she had to go beyond that, her neweyr felt strained.
When she felt the first stone of the Tower begin to shake under the onslaught of her vines, she let out a little gasp, noticing that the nobles in the Throne Room were suddenly looking out the windows. It took another stone falling before one of them realized that it was the Tower she was targeting.
King Haikor strode forward. “You cannot do this,” he challenged her. “I know you cannot.”
But he was wrong. He did not understand the neweyr. How could he? He had spent all his life ignoring it. He had not wanted to see that there was any part of power that was not his own. And that would be his downfall.
Issa told herself the neweyr here had long been buried, but only needed some coaxing to return to its normal strength. The courtyard of the palace was empty of visible greenery, but that did not mean the lifelessness went into the soil itself. She could feel the female animals around the palace and in the city as distinct pulses of blood and life. They seemed to recognize her in return, and welcome her, as her own animals would have done in Weirland.
The vines grew as she wished them to, as if it were spring, and she were drawing them out of the earth. But the violence she intended them to be used for made them harder, stiffer. She had changed them to the very core in some deep way, and she did not know what the results would be, in those vines or in the neweyr itself. She did not know if this change would be permanent. She continued forward with it anyway.
Still hiding the thick vines from sight, Issa broke open the door to the Tower and felt the outraged cries of the guards within. The one who had laughed so nastily at Ailsbet was the first to flee, with one glance up at the palace where King Haikor watched him. Eight other guards were at his heels.
“No! Stop!” the king shouted. He made his hand into a fist, and the fleeing guards shot up into the air, screaming. Then he threw his fist forward, and the guards came crashing down into the dirt.
Issa heard a terrible crunching sound. She looked up and saw that all the men lay on the ground, dead, their necks broken.
Those men died because of her actions, she reminded herself. It was the first time she had felt so guilty. She had done it with the neweyr, and now her father could never tell her that she did not understand what it meant to make the difficult decisions necessary to rule. It was a weighty feeling, and for a moment, the vines stopped growing, and she had to breathe deeply while her vision cleared.
It was another chance for her to stop, but she did not do it. She put herself into the vines again and began to feel that they were like her own fingers. She had them climb the stairs of the Tower, always hidden so that they were beneath the stone and no one watching could see that it was the neweyr doing this work. It would look like the taweyr was cracking the stones one by one.
A gray dust filled the air of the Tower. Issa could see the dim figure of Ailsbet standing and moving to the door, looking out. She did not call for help or show any sign of terror.
She waited.
She trusts me, thought Issa.
And so she went on, using her neweyr from a distance, up and up, until she reached the door of Ailsbet’s cell. With the vines exerting pressure, the door popped open with a tiny sound.
Ailsbet let out a cry of surprise and hurried down the stairs.
Issa made sure that Ailsbet had enough time to get out. Then she sent the vines up to the top of the Tower, and instead of going in a straight line now, they went in circles, boring inside the outer walls, splitting them apart stone by stone. She began to speed up as she realized how easy it was. She had only to look inside the stones for the weakness, the bit of life that remained in each one. For even stones were not fully dead. She had always known that, but she had never used it before.
King Haikor stood open-mouthed, and the nobles of his court let out a combined, hushed sound of awe as the Tower’s uppermost level toppled over and dropped in bits and pieces to the ground.
The dust settled, and now Issa could see for herself what was left of the Tower. The top half had fallen, like a tree whose top branches had been clipped, or a moose with its antlers sheared off, or a man who had been beheaded.
Issa stared at it to make sure that no sign of any vines was visible. Then she found herself smiling, for she could not imagine anything she could have done that would have brought her more satisfaction. It was so right, this end of King Haikor’s Tower, where he had sent so many men to wait for death. The neweyr had defeated the taweyr in the end. And no one knew it was neweyr but Issa.
She thought suddenly of the prophecy, and wondered if this was what it meant, not that the two weyrs would be joined together in actuality, but that they would appear to be joined. Could it be that easy? Had she fulfilled it already, and would the two islands be joined back together?
But there was no feeling of moving ground, of momentous change. The skies were as blue as before, and the silence seemed to grow more profound. King Haikor, of course, was the one to break it.
“My daughter,” he said.
“She lives,” said Issa. Did he care about her, after all?
“She is condemned to death,” said King Haikor. “She is mine to punish.”
“She is yours no longer,” said Issa. “You gave her life to me when you told me to show you my taweyr.”
The king’s face hardened. “I shall not have you here in my court. You must leave now, this minute. I shall not tolerate your presence here. I should have you killed,” he said.
“I shall take your daughter with me. To Weirland,” Issa said.
“Never,” said King Haikor in a low, threatening tone.
“She will go to the continent,” said Kellin, stepping forward. “And I shall make sure she can never return. For she has injured me as much as she has you.” His voice sounded harsh, as if he truly hated Ailsbet.
Issa almost believed it herself.
“Make sure she is gone, then.” King Haikor snapped his fingers at his remaining guards and gestured toward Issa. “Make sure this one is gone, as well.”
Issa followed the guards out of the Throne Room, but when she looked out into the courtyard, she could see a hint of green poking out of the gray dirt, and she knew that whatever King Haikor thought about her actions, what she had truly done was to bring the neweyr back to the palace grounds, where it belonged.