Chapter 668: The Hills Above Ithen

Nyx had been dreaming about these hills for fifteen years, and in every dream they were green.

They were brown when she saw them again. It was early spring, and the grass had not come back yet, and the long slopes rolling down toward the river lay bare and dun under a pale sky, scattered with grey outcrops of stone like the backs of sleeping animals. The Lark came down onto one of them in the middle of the afternoon, because she had asked it to, and Sarai Vell held it there a few feet above the grass while Nyx climbed over the rail.

She did not wait for the gangplank. She dropped the last few feet and landed badly, on her hands, and stayed there for a moment with her palms flat in the cold dry grass.

It smelled the same. That was the first thing. She had not expected that. Fifteen years and a Dark World and four years at Zenith and a whole winter in a Palace made of wind, and the hills above Ithen still smelled of thyme and stone and sheep, as they had when she was nine.

She had told herself she would not cry. She did not, quite.

"Nyx?" Vane, from the rail.

"I’m fine." She got up and brushed off her hands. "I’d like to walk. By myself. For a bit." She looked up at him. "You can follow. Not close. Just..."

"I know," he said. "Go on."

She knew the way. Her feet knew it before her head did.

Down the long slope, past the outcrop shaped like a sleeping dog, where she had once hidden from her tutor for an entire afternoon. Along the line of the old wall, which was lower than she remembered, because she was taller. Through the gap where the gate had been, which was gone, and the stile beside it, which was not. Over the crest of the hill.

And there was the city.

Ithen lay in the bend of the river below, where it had always lain, white stone and red roofs on both banks, with the old bridges arching between them and the round dome of the palace on its hill in the middle. It was smaller than she remembered. Everything was. But it was still Ithen, still recognizable, still the city she had been born to, and had looked down on from this hill every summer of her childhood, riding up with her father to see the whole of it at once.

Except for the flags.

They hung from every tower. Gold on white, the crowned sun of Aurelia, so many of them that from up here the whole city seemed to have broken out in a rash of gold. There was a new wall around the eastern bank, square and grey and ugly, built in the Imperial style. There was a garrison where the market had been. And the dome of the palace, her palace, the one she had been born under and had expected all her life to die under, had been regilded in Imperial gold so bright it hurt to look at.

Nyx stood on the hill and looked down at it.

This was the spot. She knew it was the spot because of the stone beside her, a flat grey slab where she had sat that morning with her knees drawn up and her mother’s last words still in her ears. Run, Nyx. Don’t look back. Whatever you hear, don’t look back. The queen of Verath had said it on her knees in a servants’ passage, with the doors already shaking, and had pushed her out into the dawn. And she had run, all the way up to this hill, and then she had stopped, and turned, and sat down on this stone, and watched the gates of Ithen open.

She had watched the soldiers go in. She had watched the smoke start on the eastern bank. She had sat on this stone until it was dark and there was nothing left to watch, and then she had got up and kept running, east, until she couldn’t anymore.

She sat down on the stone now.

It was colder than she remembered. Everything was smaller and colder and duller than she remembered, and also just the same, and she did not know how both of those things could be true at once.

After a while, she heard Vane come up the hill behind her. He did not say anything. He sat down on the grass a little way off, close enough that she could feel him there and far enough that she did not have to look at him, and waited.

"I used to think," Nyx said eventually, "that if I came back, I’d feel something enormous. That it would all come back at once and knock me flat. I used to be afraid of that." She looked down at the gold flags. "It’s just a city. It’s just a city with the wrong flags on it."

"It’s your city."

"It was." She was quiet. "I don’t know what it is now."

They went down into the city at dusk, because she asked to.

Nobody stopped them. Nobody looked twice at a woman in a travelling coat with her hood up, walking through the streets of Ithen with a tall young man a pace behind her. The Imperial garrison did not know her face. Why would it? The last time anyone in a gold-and-white uniform had seen it, it had been nine years old and running.

She took him up the hill to the palace by the back way, the servants’ way, along a lane of steps between high garden walls that she had climbed ten thousand times as a child, usually when she was supposed to be somewhere else.

The palace had been cut in two.

She saw it from the top of the lane. The great main hall with its golden dome belonged to the Imperial governor now; his flags hung from it and his guards stood at its doors. But the eastern wing, the long wing where her family had lived, the wing with her mother’s library and her father’s study and the nursery with the window seat where she had learned to read, had been walled off from the rest with new grey stone, and given a gate of its own, and a carved crest over the gate.

Nyx stood at the end of the lane and looked at the crest. She knew it. She had sat across a dining hall from it at Zenith for four years.

Whole eastern wing was a gift, a broad-shouldered boy had said once, gesturing with his fork, while she held on to the edge of a table until her knuckles went white. Commendation for the Verath pacification. There’s a portrait of him in the main hall looking absolutely miserable about it.

"It’s this one," she said. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. "The portrait. It’s hanging in my mother’s library."

Vane did not answer. He put his hand on her shoulder, very lightly, and left it there.

She was turning to go when a small door in the garden wall opened, the old kitchen door that the new owners had evidently never bothered to wall up, and an old woman came out with a basket of kindling on her hip.

She was small and bent and brown as a walnut, with a grey scarf tied over her hair. She stopped dead on the step when she saw them. The basket slid off her hip and spilled across the stones. She did not look down at it. She was looking at Nyx’s face. At Nyx’s eyes.

Her hand came up to her mouth.

"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, no. Oh, it can’t be." Her knees were shaking. She began, slowly, to go down onto them on the cold step. "Highness?"