Mantis thought she heard Leroh gasp, but it might have been a sigh or a sob. She’d lost autonomy of her actions, despite knowing that she was indeed making these decisions herself. She was both sickeningly appalled and maniacally enlivened, terrified and delighted.

  Teela tried worming her way into her thoughts but Mantis pushed her away. There was no better method than this, and if they all had to die in her attempt to fulfill the girl’s wishes, then so be it.

  The Sun God was quiet for a moment that stretched beyond Mantis’s spark of insanity. She went from being fully ready to strike, whether that made sense or not, to waiting in resigned anticipation before long. And she kept waiting. Again she fought the need to look at him, to gather what kind of repercussions she’d brought upon herself. When the God finally spoke, Mantis felt oddly relieved to resume their nightmarish interaction, if only to have something to do with the churning mass of energy that had rapidly built inside of her, demanding release.

  “Your Goddess shall not tolerate this offense,” the Sun God declared, now without his fatherly tone, “and I shall not tolerate the insult of your not realizing your promise to me. I do not believe you capable of stealing thirty-two souls from your master, so I must assume you purposely affront me, Sitryn.”

  “That’s right. And you purposely misunderstand me,” Mantis’s voice came out smug, uncaring for the consequences of her actions, and she wanted to hit her head against the cold, hard floor to shut herself up. “I do not intend to bring you a single life to pay for what I’ll take today. You will grant my request and forgive my failure to reciprocate the act of generosity, because that’s the best outcome you can hope for now, seeing as I’m withdrawing my initial offer.”

  She felt through the marrow of her bones that she had touched a nerve. He understood what she was getting at; he knew what she’d say next. He let her, maybe dared her, by remaining silent, although thrumming with a searing ire that was likely to make the whole castle vibrate.

  “How many unsworn women would you say live on our island? Surely, you’ve counted,” Mantis voiced her question with mock sweetness. “It would be unnerving for that number to surpass your following, large as it is, wouldn’t it? I think I counted correctly, myself. It’s a staggering amount, but hardly surprising. Women constitute half of all people, after all, and I understand the majority of Yriaans are still free of allegiances to the Gods. Now, would you say they could pose a threat to your standing if they were to pool together for a cause they support, these women? The ones already loyal to me in spirit if not yet with a soul-tie. All it would take is a name. Just one word, and they’d be mine.”

  The Sun stilled, dimmed. It gave Mantis the distinct feeling of a viper retreating before lunging forward. “You work alone,” he stated, still unsettlingly tranquil. “It is your will to allow those souls to remain unsworn. You reject the possibility of taking their freedom.” He sounded unaffected by her threat, but it was obvious from his aura that it was not so. It was only a guise, and the knowledge of that brought a smirk to Mantis’s trembling lips. He was agitated, wrathful, but more than that, panicked. He hadn’t believed she’d go this far. He’d thought she’d stay behind the line invisibly drawn between them to mark the limits of her free rein. She herself was having trouble believing that she was capable of crossing it. He continued, “You would not condemn the fate of hundreds of thousands of innocents. We both know this. I tolerate your minor intrusions and your involvement in matters of my jurisdiction as a sign of respect to your Goddess, and because you have proven disinclined to overstep your boundaries. Do not toy with the natural balance of the kingdom in your insolence, Sitryn.”

  “I won’t. Everything will stay as it is,” she brushed his words aside like she’d not meant any of it, like it was all just a game. “Those hundreds of thousands of souls will remain untethered, and your balance unaffected—needless to say. There is no need for conflict between us. All I want is one thing, one small favor that I’m sure is nothing to…His Holy Majesty. And then we can all go back to our roles like nothing happened here today. But I find it necessary to clarify, just to be sure we understand each other: I am perfectly prepared to act on what I said, if you so chose. There are people awaiting my safe return, people with whom I’ve shared this one sharp secret, and who are under instructions to carry out my wishes were I to fail to leave this castle: to summon a new religion on my behalf—the new largest religion, that is. Like I said, it’s just a name they need, an easy enough message to spread. The necessary measures have already been taken to make it happen. All there is left to do now is to call it off.”

  Mantis steeled her back and stood firm, quelling her body’s urge to shake and shiver, to scream and to retch, to look at him or to turn the other way and run. There was a battle raging inside her mind and soul, but she had to make her body appear as though that wasn’t the case.

  The Sun didn’t need to know what was and wasn’t true among the many revelations and warnings she’d spewed uncontrollably like an active volcano. He had no way to know, if she didn’t let her inner struggles become evident.

  “You would do this,” he stated in an indecipherable tone of voice. “You would hand over the people you swore to protect to your Goddess, just to release two souls from my service.”

  “I would.”

  “This is your leverage against me.” There was a question in the way he worded the sentence. Mantis detected disbelieving relief in his human-like voice, and she didn’t like it.

  She found herself momentarily at a loss for a response, bristling and frowning, confused and unable to hide it in that instant of recognition. There was an unmistakable twinge of…satisfaction in his question delivered as a statement, like something in what she’d said had pleased him. His aura was mollified, now humming with peaceful watchfulness, wholly without its ground-shaking tension from before. He’d lost his edge of terror and ire, his wariness that had so invigorated the deranged part of Mantis which kept taking over and escalating the situation.

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  Mantis was too surprised to be as frightened as she knew she should be feeling by this unexpected reaction.

  What had she done wrong? Had he seen through her lies?

  Just then, twin intakes of breath and their subsequent loud, heaving exhales drew Mantis’s eyes to the young people accompanying her, whom she’d come close to forgetting entirely about. Leroh was covered in sweat like a man drowned and pulled lifelessly from water. His complexion was pale and greenish, and his brown eyes were disproportionately wide in his skinny face. He was staring at his friend, who’d slumped down to his knees and was clutching his chest with a hand as if in pain. Standing beside him was Fala, and she looked similarly affected. Her expression was still shielded but there was a deep furrow in her brow, and her breathing was strained.

  Their eyes had changed in color.

  “It is done,” the Sun God announced, abruptly recapturing Mantis’s attention. “I concede. You have bested me, for the possibility of war far exceeds the importance of a mere two souls in my posession, as you well know. They are of no particular value to me. You can have them, as you said, as a gesture of my benevolence and continued clemency. And now you are free to go, Mantis, with my regards to your Goddess.”

  She couldn’t be sure, for she could not look at him directly, but Mantis thought, for an instant, that she heard a smile in his voice.

  This time, when the doors began to creak and moan with exertion as Sun servants rushed to open them, Mantis was only too happy to comply with the dismissal. She said nothing to the being she’d somehow managed to coerce, and in a blur of awareness, led her stupefied charges out into the hallway.

  The heavy doors closed behind them noisily, and they were all escorted to the end of the long corridor and down a spiraling staircase into one of the many nondescript ornate halls of the castle. The sudden change in temperature was just one of several sweeping rushes of relief that passed through Mantis’s body. She filled her lungs with cool—although smelly—air till they could hold no more and let it all out in a loud sigh.

  “Find your way out,” said the older man with the leathery face and the bright eyes. He’d walked them well away from the Sun’s quarters, and now he simply trod away, turning a corner and disappearing from view without a backwards glance. Mantis was altogether too shaken to really care, but it struck her as unusual to be left to wander the castle unsupervised. She supposed the Sun could see her and her youths through any servant’s eyes if he wanted to, but she doubted he even did. Most likely, he was just done with them, disengaged and now wholly disinterested after somehow winning the verbal sparring with Mantis in a way that had left his opponent bewildered with lack of understanding.

  Mantis couldn’t recall ever feeling so disoriented before. She knew she’d won in a way, and lost in an entirely different one. Her threats had slashed at him, and soothed him in the same swing. Something about what she’d said had been somehow unintentionally revealing, and whatever information the Sun had been able to glean from it had pleasantly surprised him so much that he’d just given her her boon and sent her on her way, contented and oblivious to what she’d accidentally exposed.

  Mantis couldn’t begin to imagine what it was he’d discovered or understood from her deluge of madness, and a surge of queasiness rose in her throat at the mere idea that she’d inadvertently given him a bigger gift than she’d gotten out of him.

  She needed to gather Yilenn and Teela and get far away from the Sun capital right away. Not knowing what could come next filled her with unspeakable dread and claustrophobia, and suddenly all she wanted to do was to run away from a danger she could not possibly defeat by force if it came to it, or even anticipate coming their way. She’d put herself in a very tenuous position with the ruler of the kingdom.

  “We must hurry—” Mantis started to urge the—now three—unsworn children under her protection to move forward and flee, but she froze completely mid-sentence upon sensing something unexpected—something that stirred a combination of rage and surprise so strong in her that she could nearly scream. She’d not been prepared to detect Teela’s presence nearby, all of a sudden, at that least sensible of times. “Slap the Sun’s arse with the Sea’s tail,” she muttered in cold dismay. “What is she doing?”

  “Uh?” It seemed Leroh needed more time to recover from their recent experience, for that was all he managed to say.

  “Your sister,” Mantis rasped out. She was furious, but aware that this could mean something terrible had happened to the people in her care, something immeasurably worse than what Mantis believed to be the truth. Still, it was difficult to not fully trust the most likely scenario and react accordingly: that the stubborn, suicidal girl had gotten their coach out of the stables, and followed them.

  It was an odd thing to want to leave room for much worse possibilities in her mind in an effort to quell a rapidly rising anger at the most realistic assumption, but it was very like Teela to do this, the insufferable child.

  Then something strange happened in the maelstrom of Mantis’s feelings, something that caught her whole attention and made her physically recoil with the abrupt reordering of her priorities. A clashing Wind forced a change of direction, an absolute tipping of the scales. Mantis found she was planted on the spot with her eyes unfocused and a familiar, all-consuming anger spreading through her, tweaking parts of her body into better focus and preparedness. Her pupils grew and her lips pressed together tensely, her shoulders squared and her neck muscles strained. She was all of a sudden overly aware of something she’d only moments ago found unimportant, easy to ignore. Certainties fell into place and their accompanying reactions flooded her like a decimating wave. The feeling was immediately unbearable, rendering every other unrelated concern irrelevant.

  “Where,” Mantis managed to ask through clenched teeth, “are his chambers?”

  “What?” Leroh asked in a trembling whisper.

  “Fala,” Mantis said, not looking at the girl. She could have collapsed in shame and self-hatred to see those meaningfully dead, ashy blue eyes in that moment. “His chambers.”

  It took the relative stranger several breaths to answer, and every instant that passed only served to ignite Mantis’s flame. She was burning again, but now from inside out.

  “The northeastern spire,” the girl conceded an answer at last, and Mantis had to suppress the urge to break into a sprint.