I was searching for something. I was missing something. I didn’t know what. In my dreams, I saw the girl with mismatched eyes and spotted skin. Sometimes, she was laughing or talking or buried in a book in utter concentration. Other times, she was leaning towards me, her face serious, her hands on either side of my cheeks.
Come back, Max. You have to come back.
And then she would lean over me, her white hair tickling my eyelids, brush her lips against my ear, and whisper something I couldn’t hear.
Blink.
Making my way to consciousness was a battle every time. I fought it valiantly. But once I got there, I didn’t know what to do with it. Reality shifted constantly. I was in the white room. I was in a crowded room in a little cottage. I was crouched in a garden, surrounded by flowers, turning around as someone called my name. I was in a beautiful golden hallway, being jostled by bickering dark-haired children. I was in the same golden hallway, surrounded by dark-haired corpses.
Blink.
I was in the white room. A slender woman with braided silver hair stood there, arms crossed over her chest. “Check again,” she was saying, to other people here. “They cannot have fled that fast. They’re traitors, and we do not let traitors escape in wartime. Not alive.”
My brow furrowed. I strung together pieces of memories. Traitors. Tisaanah. The Scar. Nura — the woman in front of me was Nura. And she was trying to find Tisaanah. Trying to…
Panic leapt.
I tried to sit up, tried to say something. But the moment I moved, the word unraveled like burnt paper.
Blink.
I was walking down a long hallway. I was wearing a stiff jacket that didn’t fit me. The edges of my vision were fuzzy. My head ached. There were soldiers on either side of me. I turned my head. Two behind.
I looked down. Chains shackled my hands together. I turned my wrists and saw circular symbols tattooed on the insides of my wrists, black ink over dark veins. Stratagrams. The word leapt to the back of my mind with satisfying certainty. I wished my mind would produce something more useful.
“Where are we going?” I asked. The sound of my own voice surprised me. It seemed to surprise the guard beside me, too. He looked at me and opened his mouth.
Blink.
I was standing in a circular room. Hundreds and hundreds of eyes looked upon me. The light shining down on me was so blinding that I couldn’t make out their faces, only silhouettes.
The woman with braided hair was in front of me, facing them. Her voice was loud, echoing off of high ceilings, so powerful it reached even the people crowded into the back of the room.
“We face an enemy more powerful than any of us have ever imagined,” she was saying. “The Fey are monsters. And Maxantarius Farlione sold his own people out to them. We will find Tisaanah Vytezic and her fellow traitors. But today, we are able to find one shred of justice.”
Tisaanah Vytezic. The name shook something loose.
The woman turned to me.
“We should have known,” she said, “what Farlione was capable of, after he slaughtered so many innocents in the battle of Sarlazai. But so often, we do not see the ugly truth of people until it is too late.”
Sarlazai. Fire. Corpses. Decimated buildings. Blink. When I opened my eyes, I was shaken. Did I do that?
My knuckles were white.
Wait, I wanted to say. But I wasn’t sure what I would say. I remembered so little. Perhaps I was guilty of what she accused me of.
The woman’s voice cut through the air again.
“On seventy-two charges of murder, for the Syrizen killed in the battle of the Scar and the civilians killed in the collapse of the towers, we find Maxantarius Farlione guilty.”
Wait—
“On the charge of high treason, for inviting the Fey into the country of Ara, and undermining his own people in a war the likes of which we have never seen, we find Maxantarius Farlione guilty.”
No — that wasn’t right. Something was very, very wrong. I just didn’t have the words to describe what.
The woman with braided hair looked over her shoulder at me. Her gaze was sharp on the surface. But there, a little deeper, there was something else, something that ran deeper than cold leadership.
I closed my fingers around a fragment of memory.
“And, in light of new information, to bring justice to all those who lost loved ones in the fall of Sarlazai,” she said, “we now find Maxantarius Farlione guilty of war crimes, resulting in the slaughter of four-hundred and thirty-two known Aran lives, and countless other missing persons.”
Four-hundred and thirty-two?!
The protest that I’d been about to unleash died in my throat. The smell of burning flesh hit me so vividly that it might have been happening here, in this room. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
Stop. Something is wrong.
“And in fitting punishment for the severity of these crimes—”
Wake up, Max.
“—and in light of the grotesque power obtained by ex-Captain Farlione—”
Come back.
“—for the protection of all Arans, as the Arch Commandant of the Orders and the acting Queen of Ara, I sentence him to life imprisonment in Ilyzath.”
Ilyzath.
Blink.
Salty ocean sprayed my face. I was standing on a stone walkway. My arms burned. I looked down. More Stratagrams had been tattooed on my skin. My hands were bound. So were my ankles.
The guards on either side of me pushed me forward. The woman with braided hair stood beside us. The air felt wrong, putrid. I looked up. A smooth ivory tower loomed, rising into grey mist. The ocean thrashed
