First things first:

1. I am not dead.
2. It has been for-fucking-ever. Sorry. 
3. Yes, there will be more updates.
4. If you stuck with this story even though it has been sitting here neglected for two literal years, thank you, and I hope you like where it's going next. 

I'm back, baby. If anyone has forgotten what this book is about, think of three angry ferrets in a dress fighting a corrupt politician while a boy wearing only flowers runs around an island with an angsty ambassador while his mother attempts to raise an army and retake their country and restore their family honor yada yada yada. That is the past several hundred pages summarized succinctly.

And O'otani, I am very sorry I left you at the altar for this long. You never even wanted to be there to begin with, and it was wrong of me. Please don't kill me in my sleep. 

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         "I wonder," I say as I look out over the crowd. "How many of these well-wishers were at my execution? How many of the women who shake their sweet wrists in my direction cried out hang her, hang the bitch? How many of their husbands screamed their voices hoarse calling out break her pretty little neck?"

"O'otani-" Kaza mutters.

"How many of those children who throw flowers at my feet," I ask "sold sweet rolls and handcrackers at my hanging to make a few coppers?"

"I'm sure they didn't-" Kaza says, at the same time Manit replies "quite a few, I suspect."

"At least one of you Noraya men knows how to tell the truth," I mutter. Kaza barely alters, but I can tell my words have wounded him. His smile looked pained from the start, but it was my pain he seemed to feel. His usually empathetic eyes grow colder and more guarded, and for a second I almost regret speaking harshly.

"The people have always been fickle and easily led," he replies. "Some of them wanted you to fade with the smoke of summer bonfires because they saw you as the emblem of a dying dynasty. Some still fly your flag in their hearts. Does it really matter which is which, when the city has already fallen?"

"Yes," I reply quietly. "Yes, it matters, because I loved them once."

Manit chuckles. He's a quiet man, a serious man, so the sound is strangely discordant. "You never loved us," he says, some mirth still clinging to his inflection, "we were nothing to you Amarins but grains of sand in the desert. Nothing but something to stand on so you could raise yourselves up."

"That is not tru-" I say, but before I can finish the last word he's cut me off with a wave of his hand.

"No, you're right," he says. "Maybe you did love us, in the way a man loves a dog. You cared enough to throw us bones so long as we worshipped you as gods, but as soon as we tried to stand up and walk on our own two legs you disowned us as Vasayaste curs."

"We did not-"

"Oh, you did," he continues calmly. "Be honest with yourself, O'otani, just this once. Did you ever think of us as smart, capable, worthy? Did you ever once look at one of us and think we were as good, as great as you?"

"No," I snap back sharply, "of course not! How could I? How could I compare the direct descendants of Aramizsa Ketoi, the Brightest Sun of Suumaral, the Conqueror of Hroi and the founder of a millenia of prosperity with the descendants of, what, some anonymous goatherd? A silk weaver? You think that just because a few of you got rich on whore's gold and Lirium silver you're suddenly worthy of every honor under the desert sun?" I laugh, a jagged sound that makes Kaza flinch. Or maybe it's just a bump in the road. "We were chosen to rule for a reason, Captain."

"Were you also chosen to die, then?" He asks, raising one eyebrow slightly. I bristle, feeling the anger begin to pool under my skin like blood from a fresh bruise. I could rise to the bait, I think. It might even feel good. I could shout this man down until my voice is hoarse, and maybe then I won't feel so fucking cold.

"Admit it," he says, his voice softening from steel to well-worn leather. I like it that way, I realize. Sholu's voice is like silk: too soft, too manufactured, always slipping through your fingers. Manit's voice may be supple at times, his tongue well-oiled, but he's never caressing. His words never try to slip under my dress, or down my throat.

"Admit it," he repeats. "Admit you never loved us. That none of you did, because you stopped seeing us as human centuries ago. Or maybe you forgot how to see yourselves as anything other than mortal gods. Either way, you never loved us. You loved what we made you. What our powerlessness let you become."

"You're wrong," I reply. Shakily. Damn my voice for that slight quaver, that little bit of give. It's barely anything, but it's enough.

"Of course, Mistress," he murmurs with a knowing glance before turning his eyes back to the empty space. "Whatever you say."

I pull an arrow from my quiver, about to return fire with fire, but whatever barb I intend to throw at him dies on my tongue as I catch my first glimpse of the Goddess-House. Strange, that a building I have seen so many times before could knock the words from my mouth and the air from my lungs, or set my heart pounding like a drum against my rib cage. The Eye of the Goddess adorning the portico, Shikkah's strongest symbol of protection and blessing, suddenly look menacing. I cut myself on the facets of the gemstones at its center. And the tolling bells are every bit as cacophonous and menacing as those feast day fireworks so many lifetimes ago.

I close my eyes and take three deep breaths, then three more. Open them, wipe specks of sand and dust thrown up by the hooves of the horses leading my procession from my lashes, take one more ragged breath. Count to twenty in my head and force myself to see this place as it is, not as my fear paints it. To transform the yawning maw of a portal to hell back into a mere door, and make the walls around it once again sacred. Focusing on the physicality of the building distracts me from the panic threatening to undo the small amount of composure I promised myself I would maintain.

The Goddess-House is a constant reminder of just how easily the new can swallow up the old. Its glittering white stone facade and gold-inlaid archways were built in my great great grandmother's time. In my great grandmother's time, the mosaic path emerged from the sand, and in my grandmother's it snaked up the stairs and sprawled across the floor of the interior's cavernous main chamber. But the foundation is older, as are the inside walls and many of the smaller chambers, some of which are closed off. They're made of a much darker stone, and nobody knows where it came from, much less how the nomadic Harrowin dragged so much of it into the desert to erect their one and only permanent temple.

It was burned by Aramizsa's army and gutted long before even she came to Shikkah if the stories are true. The oldest building in the country, maybe in the entire peninsula. I used to wonder why they let the ugly old stone, so dull and chalky and crumbling, remain visible in our greatest house of worship. My mother told me it was a way to remember the past, the same as the monuments by the river. But she was wrong. This isn't about remembering the past, but remembering our conquest. We've never let anyone forget that our temple was built on the ruins of a much older one, that we subdued the harrowin so completely all those millennia ago that even their gods bow to ours.

It's a threat.

Children throw flowers towards the carriage. At first they're just trodden to dust by the horse's hooves, but as more and more are thrown, not just by the children but by their mothers and fathers, by the bakers and farmers and artisans and all the rest of this dead city trying to bring itself back to life, the blooms begin to cover the sand. Within minutes the entire roadway is covered inches deep with the severed heads of a million desert flowers.

The deep red-black petals of the rhysemia look like spots of blood dripping onto the sand. Beside them lay pure white astrils, brilliant ruby therasita, and the inky blue blooms of the thychi bush. I see the strange flowers of the anthecetum trees, delicate balls of golden fluff that rise up from the ground to float in the air with each passing breeze. We wished on them as children.

"One breath, two breaths, three breaths, blow, whisper your wish so the Goddess might know, I murmur to myself, the words of that old nursery rhyme sounding strangely like an incantation as I roll steadily forward towards the Goddess-House.

"Four breaths, five breaths, six breaths, blow, send the seeds to where wishes may grow," Kaza finishes quietly. Our eyes meet and I swallow, hard. My hands are trembling slightly so I tuck them into the folds of my dress. It's not much help, I realize, because I'm trembling too.

Kaza takes my hand. I surprise myself when I don't pull away. I should, but the gentle weight of his fingers resting against mine helps settle me. He doesn't let go, just moves our joined fingers to his knee and waits in silence as the inevitable conclusion rolls ever closer.

Manit looks over at us, then down to our entertwined hands. I stare back at him boldly, almost hoping he chastises me so I can jump down his throat, but he doesn't say a word. As always, his face reveals little to nothing about what he's thinking. He might look poetic, but like most poems, he's written in another language and often inscrutable even in translation.

"I'd almost forgotten that song," Kaza murmurs.

"Seven breaths, eight breaths, nine breaths, ten, I send my wishes away on the wind,"

And when there's no more breaths left for me, lay me beneath the anthecetum tree."

"Tell me I can do this," I whisper before I can stop myself. "Tell me I can step out of this carriage and bloom like the flowers littering the street instead of quivering like their fragile petals as the horses ride past. Tell me I can smile and square my shoulders and lift my chin and walk with the dignity of Somitu Amarin to meet my fate, whatever it might be, and tell me that the people watching me will not know that my tears are not tears of joy. Tell me!"

My eyes search his, desperate for some small comfort. I sound like a child, like a little girl asking her brother to promise that the beast of the dunes won't crawl out from beneath her bed in the dead of night and eat her alive. Goddess, I'm pathetic. I can't even keep it together for the carriage ride, how can I expect myself to stand before all of the nobility and say those old words without faltering? I can't do this. Why did I ever think I could do this? Why did I think that I was something more than a lost child locked in her room, or an accessory paraded around for weeks on end for dramatic effect?

"You can do this," Undercaptain Kaza Utim O'utena says softly as he offers me his gloved hand. The carriage has stopped in front of the Goddess-House, and the dress is so heavy I need help getting out. I hate how glad I am for the steadiness of him, the gentle edge to brush against while the rest of the world feels so dagger-sharp. I hate how weak I feel, how exposed, as the crowd watches me with ten thousand blinking eyes and the sun beats down my back and nearly blinds me.

"Fuck Somitu Amarin. You will be like Blessed Aramizsa herself, hot-blooded from battles won, riding south on her silver stallion to claim her kingdom."

I close my eyes for a split second and imagine I hold an anthecetum puff in my hand. My lips barely part and my voice doesn't rise above a whisper, but I blow my wishes to whatever power might give them audience.

Please, I pray. If one of us is to be laid to rest beneath the anthecetum tree, don't let it be me.

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After 2020, I feel a lot more kinship with my characters. Having your idea of normalcy shredded by loss and political turmoil has become a reality for many of us, and I hope you're all alright. Please take care of yourselves and each other,  and if you need something to read to forget about how crap the current year is, you have Angry Shikkan Girl Blackmailed into Marrying Her Least Favorite Person of All Time Ever. Now updating semi-frequently. 

Goddess bless x