I open my eyes to the twilight, the purpling sky slipping through the distant treetops. Not so different from that little bit of sky in my cell window. Only instead of one tiny square, these are shards, fragments, wisps.
I shift, testing my body. It’s still aching, but nothing screams as if sprained or broken—a miracle, I suppose, or the luck of the piles of duff and redwood needles carpeting the ravine slopes.
I look down at my side, where Rat lays half on me. I scratch his ears. I’d probably have grown dangerously cold if he hadn’t found me a few hours ago, snuffling me out in this nest of bracken. He settled down against me, lending me his warmth.
“Goo’ boy,” I rasp. He stretches against me, giving a little hum of satisfaction.
The stream trickles nearby. I’ve already drunk from it once today, when I crawled from my original landing spot. I must have left a trail in the underbrush three feet wide all the way down the hillside, and I didn’t want to make it too easy on anybody who might come looking. But nobody did. I don’t know if they didn’t see me fall, or assumed I’d died instantly.
I haven’t died, though. I’ve lain, silent, dozing in and out, and thinking. My slate is broken, cracked into pieces by the fall. And the carriage and guards on the road are gone. I’m not sure where anybody is, or whether Lark escaped the coach.
But I have figured one thing out.
Kimela was the wrong audience.
The ashoki has been the most influential position in Moquoian politics for centuries. Tales are told of how they seeded wars, or ended them . . . how good ones made poor monarchs great, and how bad ones brought the greatest monarchs to their knees. This country has been run, tugged, lofted, and buried, not by its monarchy, but by its ashokis.
I had great visions for my career. I envisioned myself lauded and praised, my statue raised alongside the others in the Hall of the Ashoki, my words carved into marble and set down in Moquoian lore. I envisioned my name in history books, my achievements written out by scribes as they told the story of our country.
And I used Iano to get there. I can’t deny it. If he was blinded by his adoration for me, then I was all too ready to accept it as a stepping stone to greatness. A monarch and an ashoki at odds has never gone well. A monarch and an ashoki smitten with each other, as evidenced by the last six weeks, is a recipe for disaster.
What a dangerous amount of power for one person.
Which made me realize who I should have been talking to all along.
I pat Rat again and push myself up, my battered muscles protesting. I take things slowly, crawling again to the stream for another drink. I’d slipped a few of Soe’s huckleberry cakes in my pouch this morning. They’re crumbs now, ones I’ve been snacking on throughout the day, and now I allow myself a meal of the biggest piece. I swallow, wash it down with another drink, and then get slowly to my feet.
“Okay, Rat,” I say. “Come.”
We follow the stream, moving slowly through the darkening woods, until the valley sides grow less steep. I turn upslope, breathing heavily, but it’s not far until we reach the place Lark and I left Rat this morning. Her horse is still there. Kobok’s horse, rather. I grin painfully.
The horse has been grazing all day, so I bring it down to the stream to drink, and then I clamber onto its back. I nudge it uphill. Rat follows.
There’s evidence of a lot of activity on the road, churned earth and trails of hoofprints all crisscrossing each other, but we meet nobody. By the time we reach Soe’s house, it’s fully dark. I turn the horse into the paddock, and then I realize that the two mules are gone, along with their tack. The cart is still there, though. I’m not sure what to make of this until I get to the cabin door and go inside.
The place has been—not exactly ransacked, but at least searched thoroughly. Cupboards are open, furniture is moved, and rugs are peeled back and piled in corners. Soe’s bed is pushed along one wall, and her wardrobe and cedar chest thrown open, the contents strewn over the covers. The dulcimer lies under a pile of shawls. I clear them away and pull it out, setting it on the bedspread.
In the workroom, my scattered papers have been moved into piles so that the presses could be shifted around. But nothing seems to be broken or taken. If anything, whoever was here seemed to be looking for places in the floor that might hide a door. They were looking, not for goods, but for people. Me, probably.
Well, they missed me, and now I have Rat to sound an alarm. Still, it adds to my sense of urgency. Hastily, I turn up the lanterns and shove the big press back into the middle of the room. I warm the jars of tacky ink in my hands and neaten the stacks of blank paper. I unearth the three big blocks Lark carved, set with their lines of stamps, painstakingly cast and crafted, from the tidy rows of text to the bold title font. THE PATH OF THE FLOOD. So much work for one meager little pamphlet. So much effort, to be read by only one person.
But not for much longer.
Rain cannot soak dry ground. When met with arid soil, it runs off and races onward, becoming destruction.
My metaphors had been good, but slightly off. Tolukum Palace has always been the dry ground, but the destruction doesn’t have to be just its making. It’s the rain, after all, that strikes the unyielding surface and then goes tearing off, joining forces, becoming rivulets, then streams, then floods. And it’s the flood that destroys—reshapes the arid land to something of its own making.
The enormity of what I’m about to do—what I’m about to undo—strikes me, and I stare at the hulking wine press. If my idea works, am I turning it into a machine of creation, or a machine of destruction?
It’s both, I decide. Such is the nature of justice. Iano and I had been focused so much on the creation that we ignored the fact that something had to be destroyed first.
The achievement of justice relies first on the destruction of injustice.
I push up the sleeves of my dress, eat another of Soe’s cakes, and get to work.