The back of my throat burned. I felt his Hallow scan my body with the precision of Aritsar’s High Lord General, mapping territories, campaigns to set my skin alight.

The answer to his question was yes. I wanted everything about him. But . . .

A vision flashed in my mind. A bundle with soft hair and tea-colored eyes; the Ray glowing in a new, tiny body.

I stiffened, and Sanjeet’s hand dropped immediately from my leg.

Heart racing with indecision, I reached for his chiseled face. He turned to catch my fingertips in his mouth, and I swallowed, fighting to retain my focus.

“There are risks,” I said at last.

“Mm.” He nodded thoughtfully. “There are herbs for that, you know. Droughts. Potions.”

“Yes. But we don’t have those right now. And I don’t feel like sending a servant to get them.” There were enough empress-related rumors circling the servants’ quarters tonight. “So . . .” I withdrew my hand. “Not tonight, Jeet. I’m sorry. For not knowing how I felt until—”

“Don’t apologize. Not for that.” He kissed the top of my head and fell beside me, chuckling ruefully. “Though in the future, if you’re planning to wear that necklace . . . we might need a backup plan.”

I snorted, leaned to kiss his cheek, and then buried my face in his shoulder. “Is it . . . strange, do you think? That I’m not sure about having babies? After all, I was supposed to have Dayo’s. You’d think I’d get used to the idea by now.” I scowled into the darkness. “Why am I always so different?”

Sanjeet was still for a long time, staring at the lavender sprites twinkling through skylights. “For what it’s worth, sunshine girl,” he said at last, “you have always been my kind of different.”

I sighed, shutting my eyes. “That’s only because you’re as strange as I am.”

His chest rumbled with laughter. I settled against his cavernous heartbeat, savoring my time as a love-drunk girl before dawn transformed me, once again, into the mad Empress Redemptor of Aritsar.

CHAPTER 9

I had worried about court gossip for nothing: My antics at the Peace Banquet was old news by morning.

“A volcano did what?” I demanded, after Dayo shook me and Sanjeet awake.

“Destroyed one-third of Oluwan City,” gasped Dayo, thrusting travel clothes into my hands. “Well. Not yet, exactly. But soon.”

Dawn had barely flooded the suite as Sanjeet and I stumbled into the hallway behind Dayo, joining the rest of our council in the main salon.

“What’s going on?” Sanjeet demanded.

Our siblings were darting in circles, stuffing packs with clothing, weapons, and healing droughts.

“Umansa’s tapestries,” Dayo breathed. “He just deciphered the prophecies. He didn’t spot the pattern until he finished the last one, just an hour ago.”

Umansa’s prophetic tapestries lined the salon walls. A tall loom rested in one corner, shadowed in the weak morning light, where Umansa had spent every evening weaving in a fugue. His Hallowed tapestries—which featured the only images his milky white eyes could see—told stories in fractured pieces, each blazing in a chaos of glyphs and constellations, empires rising and falling with the capricious turn of planets.