The posthouse is a flurry of light and bustle. I throw Kuree’s reins over the hitching post and splash to the door, dripping from head to foot. Inside, porters are hauling luggage out the side door to the carriage shed. Rou is standing in the midst of everything, arguing with the post manager and looking angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Eloise is past him, curled in a hardback chair by the fireplace, wrapped in a quilt.
By the Light, she’s lost weight, her normally appled cheeks hollow. Her skin has paled to chalky beige under her freckles. Her eyes are closed, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths under the quilt.
I start to creep forward, hoping Rou is too distracted to notice me just yet, but it’s no good. His sparking gaze falls on me, and his whole body seems to spasm in shock.
“Veran!” he exclaims. And then, again, in more of a shout. “Veran!”
I toss up my hands. “I’m sorry—Rou, I’m sorry, but if you’ll let me explain—”
Eloise’s eyes slit open, and she lifts her head slightly. “Veran?”
Rou is plowing past the porters, advancing on me, and I can’t for all the world tell if he’s going to hug me or throttle me.
“What the blazing, blinding Light were you thinking?” he yells.
Throttle, then, definitely. I use the hapless interference of a few porters to skitter around the periphery of the room toward Eloise, dashing for her chair like it’s a safe zone in a game of Tag the Buck.
Rou doesn’t miss a beat, pivoting to follow me. “Running off into the desert alone?” he roars. “Do you have any idea what your mother will do to us both?”
“But I’m fine,” I gasp, hovering behind Eloise’s chair. “I’m fine, and I did it—I got Tamsin back, the ashoki, the reason everything was falling apart—”
“Oh, it’s come apart.” He wavers, trying to gauge which way I’m going to circle around the chair, before planting himself firmly in the middle. “It’s come apart into an international incident—we have been officially deported, and that’s not the worst of it. You’re being named as a conspirator against the Moquoian throne and an enemy of the court, and it was only by a spark’s luck I was able to argue for deportation and not prison for all three of us. Did you think at all? Did you think what running off with the prince just weeks before his coronation with the court on eggshells would look like?”
“I thought it would help,” I croak—he’s rivaling Mama for sheer lung power. I cower behind Eloise. “Eloise and I . . . we thought it would help . . .”
But no, that isn’t fair—Eloise had nothing to do with me running away. She rouses a little from the quilt and turns her head toward me. Her voice is soft enough that I think maybe she’s going to try to back me up, to calm things down. But in the brief moment that Rou’s taking a breath, she whispers, “I am so angry at you.”
This seems to inflame Rou all the more. “You put everyone in danger, Veran. If you were my son—”
“I’m not, though,” I say, straightening a little. “I’m not, and . . . and I did what I thought was right, and I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t. If you would just listen, and sit down and let us all talk—Iano and Tamsin, the guards, whoever it is who’s tugging all these strings . . .”
“Blessed Light, no,” Rou says. “We’ve been given to the end of the hour to leave Moquoia before we’re arrested. We’re getting in that coach and we’re setting the land speed record across the Ferinno. You can answer to the Alcoran Senate, and then your ma and pa. I’ve got Eloise to take care of now, and we’re lucky enough for that.” He stabs the air with his finger. “You sit down and don’t leave this spot until we’re ready to leave.”
He storms back toward the porters and out the side door, slamming it so hard behind him a map of the desert jumps from its peg on the wall. I sink miserably into a chair beside Eloise.
“I’m sorry, Eloise—I just . . .”
“I thought you were going to talk to Iano,” she whispers, clutching the quilt tighter under her chin. Her curls are damp with sweat, darkening the deep golds hidden in the smoky brown. She shakes her head. “I was so worried. What if you had died?”
“I didn’t, though, Eloise. I even had a seizure out there, and look, I’m fine.”
Her eyes crack open again, and she studies me. “All by yourself?”
“Well, no, I . . . I went to find the Sunshield Bandit. No, listen . . .” I put up a hand to stop Eloise’s exclamation. “She’s . . . she’s my friend now. She figured out where Tamsin was. She got us across the desert, and in and out of Tamsin’s prison. And she kept me safe while I was seizing. It was all okay. And she’ll be here in just a few minutes.” By the Light, as long as she hasn’t died fighting that bandit. Why had her staying behind been the most logical choice? She should have fled with me.
And then there’s the matter of all my promises—the vow to get her campmates to safety, to get her sentence lifted, to help her figure out a new life outside the desert. How am I going to do that if every government from coast to coast is angry at me?
“I’ll make it work,” I say aloud.
Eloise shakes her head, her shadowed eyes closed again. “I’m not so sure we can,” she murmurs.
The door opens again, and in come Tamsin and Iano, their clothes clinging to their skin. Iano helps Tamsin to the closest chair. She slumps for a moment, eyes closed. She must be exhausted. And she needs to see a healer.
Rou comes back in the side door, spattered with rain. “The coach is ready. Veran, go get inside.”
This is all happening too fast. “Rou—sir—please, can’t we just take a minute, and work some of this out?” I gesture to Tamsin. “At the very least, can we get Tamsin somewhere more comfortable?”
“No, V.” His nickname is used more as a warning than a familial term. “We’re under royal orders to depart the country by three bells, and I am not letting them put Eloise in a cell, or you, for that matter. Go get in the coach. Iano . . . I don’t know what to tell you. Your guards are searching the upper city for you.”
I swivel to Iano, my heart racing with desperation. “Can you stand down the order for deportation?”
He shakes his head. “Not if it came from my mother. The throne is still hers.”
“You could come with us,” I say quickly. “We could talk in the coach—”
“And be accused of taking the Moquoian heir hostage—blazes, Veran, think, think, think.” Rou taps his own head angrily. “Think about this stuff! This isn’t debate class! This could mean international war. Go get in the coach.”
Failure, then. All this to salvage something, and it all led to failure anyway.
Eloise gives a thick, rattly cough. Under her father’s furious glare, I get up slowly from my chair. I look to Iano, who’s folding his wet cloak around Tamsin, who still has her eyes closed.
“I’m sorry,” I say in Moquoian. “I didn’t mean to make such a mess. What will you do?”
“I’m not sure,” Iano says. Despite the crumbling of the world around us, he looks calmer than he has in days, a resolution in his face that can only be described as kingly. “But you helped bring Tamsin back. So things aren’t as dark as we think.”
Tamsin gives what might be a roll of her eyes behind her eyelids, perhaps at Iano’s poetic surety. She opens her eyes and surveys me, lips pursed. She turns gingerly toward the fireplace, looking first at Rou, who is waiting expectantly for me to make a move toward the door. Her gaze moves to Eloise, who is doing her best to stay awake and upright.
Tamsin starts to look back to me, then her gaze stops, and she sweeps back to Eloise. She sits for a moment, her tired, emaciated body suddenly rigid. Her chapped lips part slightly.
And then she’s a flurry of agitation, waving both at me and Iano, motioning around the room.
“Aou’ha,” she says urgently. “Aou’ha.”
Iano takes one of her frantic hands. “What? Tamsin—”
“Parchment,” I say. “Daona—parchment. Here.” I lunge for the map that fell from the wall earlier and scramble for a scattering of quills near a ledger. She snatches the objects from my hands with urgency, grabbing for the jar of ink even as I’m shaking it. She pries the cork out and dips the quill, slopping spots across the map in her hurry. They spread and stain, leaving a trail across the desolate Ferinno.
Iano and I crowd behind her to see her writing. Even Rou, who is readying Eloise to stand, pauses his work.
I stare in shock at the letters forming on the page.
Outside, thunder rumbles.