Crystal Crowned [ARC] (22 page)

The more time that passed, the fuzzier that night became. Vhalla finally stopped fighting it and let the memory hide away into the hazy shadows of the back of her mind. It happened more slowly for Aldrik, but they soon stopped talking about it. By the time a letter from Sehra arrived with the status of the North’s preparations, it had faded away into little more than a dark spot on their journey to Norin.

What had not faded, however, was Vhalla’s elation at regaining her magic. At every opportunity, Vhalla called upon her winds. Things were lifted and pushed, opened and shut. She demanded to sleep with the windows open just to feel the night breathe across her skin.

There was so much to do that the days slipped away from them, and they were late to leave the Crossroads. The last letter they received from Ophain began to question if they had any intention of coming to Norin or if they intended to make the Crossroads their headquarters. Vhalla broached the idea with the Emperor that night.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to stay?” She pointed to Ophain’s letter.

“Why?” Aldrik glanced up from the other end of the table where he had been working on finalizing troop numbers.

“Because Sehra will bring her army here, to the Crossroads.” Vhalla rummaged, looking over one of the maps that had been marked and crossed one too many times. “If she’s going to start her journey shortly, then we could tell your uncle and the troops from Norin to do the same. They should arrive within days of each other. It would save at least . . . at least two weeks of travel compared to us going to Norin and back.”

“We must wed.” Aldrik paused his quill, giving her his undivided attention.

Vhalla stared at the map for another long moment. She knew he saw it as such, that it was something they must do as a symbol. Even if she was growing more concerned about the timing by the day, Vhalla continued to concede.

“Then we will do it here,” she suggested.

“Impossible.”

“Are there no Crones who could perform the ceremony in the Crossroads?” She laughed at the ridiculousness of the notion.

“It must be done in the Western Sun Temple in Norin,” Aldrik insisted. “That is where my father wed.”

“Now hardly seems like the time for sentimentality,” she gently pointed out.

“Far from it,” he agreed. “But now is the time for putting on the right display for the lords and ladies, for the world. We are strong, and we do not allow a false king to force us to wed in hiding. Or hint that there is something illegitimate about our union that we should do it in a small chapel on the run.”

“I’m sure we could explain . . . It’s just so much time to lose.”

Aldrik considered it for several slow breaths. Making up his mind on something, he reached forward and grabbed a slip of parchment, beginning to scribble as he spoke, “We shall write to my uncle and tell him a date. We’ll invite the lords and ladies in advance so that the amount of time we must spend before the ceremony is limited to necessary preparations and appearances.”

Vhalla glanced back at the map, thinking of the waste it seemed. “Thank you,” she said finally.
It was something.

They replied to Lord Ophain that night with the request of the date along with their promises to depart the Crossroads before he received their reply.

Shortly after, Aldrik started the task of making them new armor. It was a good distraction from the worry that blossomed in her chest by the fact that Lord Ophain had yet to make any mention of her father. Vhalla kept her fears in check and her hands busy with helping Aldrik in the smithy. Just like she couldn’t allow Jax’s presence to distract her, she couldn’t allow fears over her kin to distort her priorities.
Her father would be all right
, she assured herself. He’d been a soldier once and knew how to handle himself. There was nothing else for her to believe.

Vhalla’s first experience with the craftsman habits of her Emperor was enlightening. Aldrik tested and felt each piece of steel before he began working with it—he was nothing if not particular. Not one smelter denied him, naturally, and he was finally satisfied with his base materials.

They worked together to make flames hotter than he could alone. Aldrik worked in simple clothes, and Vhalla appreciated the look of the man with his hair pulled back from his face and soot rubbed into his nose. It was an elegant orchestration of their magic, but it was one that held melancholy notes. Had they still been Bonded, his flames wouldn’t hurt her and they could’ve been far less careful. His magic was no longer in her, but there was still something different about it. Vhalla knew it like an old friend. She recognized every spike, every subtle flux in his power and could account for it.

They were not Bound, but they were not separate either. They had become something new yet again.

Aldrik finished the armor the day before they were set to leave. He put on the final touches alone while Vhalla spent the day bidding farewell and reaffirming the loyalty of the lords and ladies in and around the Crossroads. When she returned to the room that night, the matching sets waited on stands. Aldrik smoothed over portions with his thumbs, unable to stop working the metal.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked, finally.

Vhalla tilted her head. Sitting cross-legged on one of the chaises, she studied the pieces on the stands. Something was off, and it took her too long to put her finger on what it was. “The color.”

“You don’t like it?” Aldrik sat down at her side.

“It’s not that I don’t like it.” Vhalla struggled with how to encapsulate her feelings.

The armor was indeed lovely, very identical in craftsmanship and style to her prior suit with some additional embellishments. Smaller shoulder pauldrons matched his, gold detailing lining their edges. The scales were more angled, giving it a sharper and stronger look. The outer steel had been layered with an alloy that shone white, setting off the gold detailing—like the pair of wings that sat with a sun in their center at the armor’s collar.

“It’s white.”

He laughed, but it sounded forced. “White is the Imperial color.” The man was nervous by her reaction.

Vhalla knew he understood her statement, but she played along. “You’ve never worn white, on anything.”

“That’s not true,” he objected.

“I’m not counting in private,” she hastily clarified. “Why not black?”

“Because—” He paused, abandoning the quick remark he’d been readying. Aldrik turned back to the two suits of armor and took a deep and slow breath. “Because that time is over.

“I need to lead my people—our people. I must be someone they look to, and I must
look
like that person.” Aldrik waged an internal battle with the armor. “I have no more family, so I am no longer a black sheep. I no longer have my life overshadowed by my father’s missions and visions for his Empire. I cannot afford to let a personal tantrum, or bitterness, distance me from the subjects whose trust I so need. I need their loyalty, and I would rather earn that through admiration than fear.”

He peeled his eyes away from the simple thing that had caused him so much introspection. He looked to her, and the man still managed to look uncertain at the exact moment that Vhalla thought he had attained clarity. He was no longer a wildfire burning with rage. He was now the fires of the forges he’d stoked. He burned for a purpose and remained focused on that singular goal.

Vhalla rested her hand on his, initiating touch for the first time since the night she had traded with Vi. Aldrik’s eyes darted over her face. It had been so long since she was nervous around him that the butterflies in her stomach were awkward, though not unwelcome. She reached up to touch the face of the man she adored, to pull it toward her. To hook his chin and guide his lips to where they belonged—against hers.

Delicate exploration paid quick dividends as a breathless chorus filled the room when they pulled apart. Neither of them were ready yet, Vhalla realized, to be as intimate as they had once been. But the fact that something was still there, given all that had happened, the fact that he was still capable of wanting her and that her body had not forgotten how to want, it returned to them a level of closeness that had been woefully missing.

For the first time in nearly two weeks, the Emperor and Empress slept peacefully through the night—completely folded in the other’s arms.

Despite knowing the armor’s color and the reasoning behind it, nothing could have prepared Vhalla for the next morning when Aldrik strapped himself into it for the first time. His hair was combed back and his helm had been attached to a saddlebag so that the people could see him on their ride out. Vhalla did the same, following his lead in their departure from the Crossroads.

He was radiant, every bit of the leader Vhalla had always known he could be. He was a seedling that had been transplanted from the dirt in his father’s shade and placed in the sun for the first time. He greeted the assembled masses and waved to merchants and lords alike as the Emperor’s company wound its way out the main road. Vhalla witnessed their people finally seeing what she had known all along: he was born for this.

On their way out of the Crossroads, Fritz had his first opportunity to comment on her armor. “Your symbol changed.” Fritz fingered a corner of the cloth that went down to her waist, somewhere between a cape and a cloak with a slit in the front for mobility. It was fixed by the sun and wings at her collarbone. Vhalla touched the new symbol, the same one that was emblazoned in gold on her back.

“I suppose it did.” Vhalla glanced over to Aldrik. He wore a similar garment, though his only had the sun of the Empire on its back.

“Why?” Fritz mused aloud to no one in particular.

“A second wing, because the Windwalker has been born again,” Aldrik answered. “The whole Imperial sun because she will wear this armor after she has formally become my Empress.”

“No longer cutting it in half and pretending it’s not obvious?” Jax grinned.

Aldrik rolled his eyes.

“He has a point,” Elecia teased her cousin. “It’s unlike you, Aldrik, to have given her something so overtly Imperial.”

Vhalla remained silent through the teasing. It hurt. Her friends didn’t mean for it to. But they didn’t know that her watch, the one Aldrik had given her, was gone forever. Judging from the long look Aldrik gave her, he was thinking much the same.

Then the wind shifted and, with it, her Emperor’s expression.

“This is what is obviously Imperial. It’s a new dawn for us both, and she wears my craftsmanship upon her once more,” Aldrik spoke only for her.

“As I should,” Vhalla replied gently.

They set a good pace through the desert. The East-West Way made an easy path from the Crossroads to Norin, and they once more found themselves spending time in the company of lords and ladies along the way. The further West they went, the stronger the culture of old Mhashan became.

Vhalla was on-edge the first time she saw the Western phoenix with a sword in its talons. No one questioned her decision to ride hard into the next day for the next opportunity for shelter. Like the scar on her shoulder, there were some wounds that could be mostly forgotten day to day, with enough time and healing, but would always be tender when probed.

As summer came early to the desert, Vhalla and Fritz used their magic in tandem to keep them from cooking alive in their armor. Fritz applied thin layers of ice atop the metal, which Vhalla’s winds quickly evaporated. At first, they were wet and windswept. But Vhalla and Fritz managed to get the hang of it enough that soon the five of them were not only kept cool, but they were comfortable as well.

The ride progressed without problem, and they woke before the sun on their final day of their ride into Norin. They’d stayed with one of Aldrik’s distant cousins, sending word ahead to Ophain that they were only a few hours from the city proper. Vhalla had wanted to keep pushing, but Aldrik was insistent that certain conventions must be observed, and their arrival would be one of them.

Normal butterflies were replaced by a whole flock of birds in her stomach as the city began to grow around them. Sunlight sparkled over their recently polished armor, and they had all washed properly at the lord’s home before the final leg of the journey. Elecia was all smiles at the idea of returning home, but Jax had grown quieter and quieter as the days progressed.

The man had reduced himself to nothing more than a silent shadow. The lords and ladies along the route had maintained only the bare minimum of etiquette toward the man. A select few treated him with as much respect as the rest of his noble company. However, there was a moment when the lords and ladies first saw his face, a moment where they had to check their reactions at the sight of him.

All thoughts of Jax’s odd mood vanished like pennons flapping in the wind. Sand changed to a more soil-like consistency, and large palms appeared in the growing density of the city. Norin waited before her.

It was a city unlike any she had ever witnessed before, and it had surely been built by giants. The outer wall of Norin was so tall that Vhalla wondered how they had engineered mechanisms to carry stones that high. The houses within the outer wall were constructed of clay and wood, simple structures packed one atop the other in a mission to rival the wall with their height. Vhalla remembered Master Mohned’s history, and she wondered if this was the place that he had grown up. The thought was quickly accompanied by a pang of sorrow at the fact that her master likely met an untimely demise at the hand of Victor.

The inner wall of Norin separated the squalor of the slums from the working and middle classes. At present, men and women lined the streets in the first section of the city; common folk, lords, ladies, merchants, dignities, and all shades between them encroached on Vhalla and Aldrik’s forward progression. Vhalla would have felt uneasy by the mass had they not been happily crying her name alongside Aldrik’s.

They threw rose pedals from rooftops and sent tongues of flame into the sky. They waved small pennons, all crying for her attention. Men, women, children, all reached for those who had returned from the dead to lead them. Vhalla was thankful for the strong legs of the horse beneath her.