Heron tries to distract me, pointing out other buildings that survived the battle. Food is rationed and served in the old mess hall, he says, and a group of men and women who stayed behind have volunteered to hunt and gather to keep our stores from depleting too quickly. When we leave to catch up with the troops, we’ll take more food with us.

Even the old slave quarters have been put to use, though understandably no one is keen to sleep there—instead, they’ve been cleared of furniture and shackles and repurposed as weapons storage and places to train away from the overwhelming heat of the sun.

“Who is training?” I ask Heron when he points out one of the newly repurposed training rooms to me. “I thought the troops left.”

“Not all of them,” he replies carefully. “Most of the people we found who’d been blessed in the mines took to the training quickly, and there were a couple of elders who went along to help continue their training, but there were others who needed more assistance.”

Blessed. There were over a dozen blessed Astreans the Kalovaxians had been keeping in this camp. Experimenting on, I remember, though the thought makes me shudder. I saw the evidence of it myself: sliced skin, cut-off fingers and toes—one man had even had his eye taken out.

“They trained so quickly?” I ask, surprised. When I went into the cave, none of them had been fit to walk across camp, let alone fight.

“I helped with the physical healing,” Heron says, shrugging. “But the mental and emotional wounds are another matter. Many of them viewed the training as a way of healing. They wanted to. Art, Blaise, and I saw to it, along with a few of the Astrean elders who were familiar with the training, even if they weren’t Guardians themselves. They aren’t fully trained, of course, but they made good progress during what little time we had. And they should be continuing, even as we speak.”

Artemisia once told me what she feels when she kills, how it feels good to take something back. It seems she isn’t alone in that.

“I’ll have to start training soon, too,” I say.

“Let’s focus on getting you walking on your own first,” Heron replies.

I’m jolted out of my thoughts by a pair of arms coming around my waist and lifting me off the ground, whirling me around. A scream rises in my throat, but before I can let it out, the owner of the arms speaks, and I recognize his voice.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Erik says, setting me back down.

I turn to face him and throw my arms around his neck.

“Would you believe I missed you?” I ask him with a laugh.

“I wouldn’t believe you didn’t,” he replies, hugging me tightly.

“Careful with her!” Heron chides. “She’s a bit fragile at the moment.”

Erik scoffs. “Queen Theodosia? I’ve seen boulders more fragile.”

I smile but gently wriggle out of Erik’s embrace. “I appreciate that, but he isn’t wrong.”

As soon as I say it, Erik steps back and looks me over from my head to toes. “You do look like you’ve been through a hell or two,” he says.

“Maybe three,” I admit.

“Theo!” a new voice cries out, and I turn to find Artemisia jogging toward me, gleaming dagger sheathed at her hip and cerulean hair streaming behind her.

Unlike Erik, she knows not to hug me. Instead she gives my shoulder an awkward, light pat. “How are you?” she asks cautiously.

“I’m alive, which is more than we had any right to expect,” I tell her with a smile. “And it worked.”

Her smile broadens. “I should hope so,” she says. “Or it would make your new nickname quite unfortunate.”

I frown, looking between her, Erik, and Heron. “My new nickname?” I repeat.

They exchange knowing smiles, but it’s Artemisia who sweeps into a dramatic curtsy, followed by bows from Erik and Heron.

“All hail Theodosia,” she says. “Queen of Flame and Fury.”

The three of them rise with matching smiles, but it isn’t a joke, no matter how light she tries to make it. Queen of Flame and Fury. It is a hard nickname. A strong one, yes, but brutal as well. For the first time, I understand that, succeed or fail, this will be my legacy. I think of all the paintings of my mother done in soft watercolors, her dressed in flowing chiffon gowns. I think of the poems written in her honor, odes to her beauty and kindness and gentle spirit. The Queen of Peace, they called her. A different sort of queen altogether.

Something sparks in my memory, fighting through the fog of the mines.

“I died the Queen of Peace, and peace died with me,” my mother told me. “But you are the Queen of Flame and Fury, and you will set their world on fire.”

I don’t know what that was in the mine, whether it was my mother’s ghost or a figment of my imagination or something else entirely, but I do know that I somehow heard this new name even before it was crafted, and that thought makes me uneasy.

* * *

—

We can’t make a plan without Blaise, so I send the others to gather the leaders remaining in the camp, and I make my way to the training barracks where they told me Blaise spends nearly all of his time. Heron didn’t want me to go alone, but I assured him I was feeling well enough to make it across camp without leaning on him, and he acquiesced.

Truthfully, I’m not sure I can. Though I’m feeling better, each step is a strain. But I would rather deal with the pain than have Heron or anyone else there when I see Blaise again.

“Don’t do this. Don’t leave me,” he said before I went into the mine, his last words to me not long after I’d made a similar plea to him. Neither of us listened.

Guilt swarms me as I remember how his voice broke, how lost he looked in that moment, as if I’d cut the last rope tethering him to this life. As if he weren’t already so determined to leave it.

He left first, I remind myself. He walked into death’s reach twice when I asked him—begged him—not to. He can’t be angry with me for doing the same.

And now? Against all odds, we’re both still here, and now we have to face the consequences of that.

I find the barrack Heron described set apart from the others with the remnants of a fence still buried in the ground. I remember seeing it during the battle, a great black thing that glinted red in the sun. S?ren explained that the fence had been made of iron mixed with Fire Gems, though that’s been torn down now.

When I push the door open slightly, I see that the room is dark, lit only by a large candle set in the center, bright enough to illuminate Blaise, Laius, and Griselda. Those two are still mostly bones, but there’s a new fullness in their faces, and their skin has lost some of its sallowness—though that may be largely due to the candlelight. Even that isn’t enough to disguise the bruise-like shadows under their eyes.

The same shadows Blaise has, proof that they don’t sleep.

They’re stronger than they were the last time I saw them. That much is evident in the way Griselda leaps through the air, throwing a ball of fire as big as my head at the stone wall. It dies on contact, but it leaves a scorch mark in its wake. The walls are covered with them, more black than gray now.

She lands on the ground an instant later, doubled over and out of breath, but there is a ghost of a smile on her lips, thin and grim but unmistakably there.

“Well done,” I say, startling the three of them. Griselda jerks upright, her eyes finding me. She can’t be much more than fifteen, not much younger than I am. It occurs to me suddenly that if two weeks passed since I went into the mines, that makes me seventeen now.

“Your Majesty,” Griselda says, bobbing into a clumsy curtsy, followed by a bow from Laius a beat later.

“No need for that,” I tell them before forcing myself to look at Blaise.

Unlike them, he looks exactly the same as when I saw him last—the same tired green eyes and hard, angry set to his jaw. But it’s the way he’s looking at me that really feels like a punch to my gut. He looks at me like I’m a ghost and he doesn’t know whether to be frightened or relieved.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asked me once, and I was forced to admit that I was. He can’t be afraid of me now—not in the same way—but perhaps he is unnerved. About what I might say, what I might do, how I might break him next.

He left me first, I remind myself, but the thought isn’t the balm I need it to be.

Blaise clears his throat and looks away. “It’s about lunchtime,” he says, looking between Laius and Griselda. “Get some food and come back in an hour.”

“Actually,” I say. “Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off? I need to borrow Blaise for the day.”

Blaise shakes his head. “An hour,” he insists.

Laius and Griselda look between the two of us with wide eyes. I may be their queen, but Blaise is their teacher. They hurry from the room as quickly as they can, before I can contradict his contradiction. The door slams shut behind them, and the sound bounces off the walls, echoing in the silence left in their wake. The silence stretches on long after the echo ends, but eventually I force myself to break it.

“We need to agree upon a strategy,” I tell him. “We’re meeting the other leaders to figure it out. That will take longer than an hour.”

He shakes his head, not looking at me. “My time will be better spent here.”