He avoided my gaze. “Say what?”

I sighed and reached to lace my fingers behind his neck, smiling up at him. “Whatever you’re thinking, Sanjeet of Dhyrma, that you don’t know how to sugarcoat.”

He scanned me with those deeply steeped brown eyes. Goose bumps sprouted wherever his gaze landed, from my exposed collarbone to the lurid blue marks on my forearms. Then his lips lowered to mine, rousing an army of dragonflies in my stomach. The kiss was slow, thoughtful. A meditation.

“Nice distraction,” I gasped, knowing his Hallow could sense my heart hammering. “But you still have to say it.”

Sanjeet laughed softly, resting his chin atop my hair again. “I was thinking,” he said, “that you should get used to people dying for you.”

I stiffened in his embrace. “Because I’m a cursed Raybearer? Who brings death wherever she goes?”

“No.” He fed me a memory then: the day of my First Ruling, only through his eyes instead of mine. He had watched the crowds packing the tiered seating of the Imperial Hall, his heart teeming with fear and wonder as they all had chanted my name. Idajo. Idajo. Tarisai Idajo. “You should accept it, because people die for what they believe in. You’re used to everyone hating you. But Tar . . . someday, you’ll have to carry a burden much, much harder.” He gestured down to the courtyards glimmering with festive torchlight, where a hundred souls waited to be seduced to my cause. “You’ll have to prepare for everyone loving you too.”

CHAPTER 5

Within an hour, I stood in a vast, gaily lit corridor with Ai Ling, Kirah, and Dayo, waiting before the two-story-high Imperial Hall doors.

“At your signal, Your Imperial Majesties,” boomed an Imperial Guard warrior.

I swallowed hard, willing my elaborately painted palms not to sweat. “Just a moment, please,” I croaked.

The guard waited patiently, ready to order that the massive doors be hauled open: a feat made possible by a dozen burly servants and a pulley system of thick rope looped through rings in the noses of carved lions, which shone from the polished wood. Ever since the Treaty Renewal, the doors made me shiver every time I saw them. I hadn’t told anyone why.

Somehow—after I had ridden across the empire and Melu rejuvenated me, bringing me back from the edge of death—I had managed to open those doors myself.

I had burst through what was likely several tons of solid wood and iron, desperate to stop Dayo from completing the Treaty Renewal. In my feverish determined haze, the massive doors had seemed to spring open at my touch, creaking forth with a deafening roar. Since that day, they had not opened on their own again.

Wooden doors were rare anywhere in Oluwan, as they were impractical in the heat, and far more expensive than linen door flaps. Legend dictated that an Oluwani alagbato—a fairy guardian like my father, Melu of Swana—had crafted the Imperial Hall doors centuries ago, sacrificing sacred trees of golden-white mahogany. The alagbato commanded that the trunks hew themselves into smooth planks, and then she had pulled iron from her own heart, fashioning it into nails. As a finishing touch, she had carved intricate glyphs and patterns into the door, symbolizing an ancient pact between alagbatos and the Kunleo dynasty, who had been the first humans to raise cities on Oluwan’s fertile plains. But what that pact had promised . . . no one seemed to remember. Apparently, the alagbato had now been dormant for generations, as often happened to nature spirits after industry thrived and land was heavily developed. Occasionally I had touched the doors out of curiosity, but only human memories seeped through: the clamor of sumptuous court celebrations and the volleying voices of nobility and Anointed Ones, holding centuries of Imperial court.