“Princess Fiarca, you say?”
Placing a hand to her mask, Fiarca muttered the name back to herself. The look she shot Tishna seemed genuinely tender, but behind the windows of her eyes shone a deep, unbridled hatred.
“I advise you to choose your words with more care, Princess Tishna. My jealous subordinate over there has more than enough reason to kill you, my fiancée, already.”
Before Fiarca even finished speaking, Elmira—still dressed in her maid uniform—moved behind Tishna and pressed a dagger to her back. One word from Fiarca, and she could kill the princess where she stood.
Yet even though she was completely without means to protect herself, Tishna’s smile did not waver.
“Oh dear, what a terrible fiancée I make, to forget my own partner’s name like that.”
Tishna pushed her cheek out with her tongue in a gesture as calculated as it was devastating. Its primary effect, however, was to cause Fiarca and Elmira to boil with anger. Sensing she’d gone too far, Tishna quickly dropped it.
“Rest assured, Your Highness, I have told nobody of your secret. It was simply the only way I could think of to earn your trust.”
“In other words,” said Fiarca, “you want us to believe that what you’re about to say is really going to happen?”
“I should have known you’d realize it by now,” said Tishna. “The fact that I have traveled back in time.”
The way Tishna so easily expressed her deepest, darkest secret caused Fiarca to loosen up a little. By laying everyone’s cards on the table, it was clear the royal princess intended to have a frank and open discussion. At the same time, her words were a message: “Kill me now, and you’ll regret not hearing me out.”
“Then let us go,” Tishna went on. “There’s something I would like to show you all.”
Elegant despite the dagger at her back, Tishna began walking. To anyone who saw, it appeared just as if the party’s host was showing her most important guest and his escort around the palace gardens. Nobody would have batted an eye, even without Fiarca’s auramancy shielding the five of them from suspicion.
Tishna led everyone through the vast garden until they arrived before a glass-walled greenhouse. Around the back of the structure was a small wooden toolshed, hidden within the basement of which was an underground passage.
“Is this…a secret passage?” asked Kanalayka while eyeing her surroundings, never allowing her wonder to distract from her vigilance.
“Yes,” Tishna replied. “It leads straight from the royal palace to my private villa. Only the king of Charlgia is supposed to know of its existence.”
Tishna sounded like she was boasting, but Ras couldn’t help but sigh. This made twice in one week that Tishna had led him down a secret tunnel.
“I suppose you learned about it in the future, then?” asked Fiarca.
“That’s right.”
“Which means the future is one in which the king needs to use this secret passage. Some kind of terrorist plot or coup d’état, perhaps.”
“What?!”
Ras gasped at Fiarca’s words. Even Tishna looked a little taken aback.
“I should have expected you to piece together as much,” she said, giving a self-deprecating sigh. “It looks like I was right not to engage you in a battle of deception.”
“Oh, did you not? Your games with Ras certainly appeared as much to me.” For some reason, Fiarca shot Ras a contemptuous glare as she said this.
Tishna, meanwhile, seemed eager to tease the imperial princess further, and wrapped her arm around Ras’s. “Oh, you misunderstand!” she said with glee. “It’s simply that a battle of looks is far more stacked in my favor!”
No sooner had she got the words out, however, than a fusillade of ice spears materialized out of thin air around Fiarca, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
“I was joking! I was joking!” Tishna shrieked. “Don’t shoot, I beg you!”
It seemed that despite the conversation finally adopting a productive tone, Fiarca still wasn’t ready to let go of her grudge. Tishna swiftly put some distance between her and Ras, after which Fiarca dissipated the spears. Even so, Tishna kept shaking for some time.
“I didn’t think anyone alive could put together offensive auramancy so quickly,” she said, shuddering. “Why do you get to be so special? It’s not fair.”
“I’d rather not hear that from someone who’s seen the future, thank you very much,” Fiarca replied. Fighting was something she could leave to her armies, and auramancy talent was one gift that the imperial princess had no use for. She would much rather have possessed Tishna’s ability, and rule with foresight and precision when she became empress.
However, Tishna failed to find much hope in Fiarca’s words.
“My gift is useless to me,” she said. “What is the point in knowing the future when you are unable to change it?”
“Is that why you told us your secret, then?” Ras asked after a moment’s thought. “Because you need us to help you change the future?”
The matter had been on his mind for some time: why, after such a long game of cat and mouse, Tishna had finally decided to come clean.
At that moment, a sliver of doubt crossed Tishna’s glass smile.
“I cannot alter what is to come by myself,” she said. “I have no choice but to trust you.”
“Is that why you moved the wedding plans forward?” asked Fiarca.
“What?” said Ras. This deduction was new information to him.
“It was Tishna who petitioned the king to announce our marriage at this party,” Fiarca explained.
The announcement was originally supposed to come after the summit had ended, with the premise that Tishna and Auriol had grown close during their time together.
The royal princess had moved that announcement forward. It could only be because the future she wanted to avert could not be changed any other way.
“That’s right,” she said. “Because of that, we still have time. Precious little, but enough.”
Tishna stopped and slowly turned to face the others. Her smile failed to reach her eyes. The sudden change in her demeanor put Ras on edge.
“Time?” he asked. “Time for what?”
“Very soon, a horde of fiends will assault Barlama.”
“What?”
Kanalayka gasped. Ras shook his head in denial.
“What a crock of shit,” he said. “Are the watchtowers manned by imbeciles? The kingdom would have noticed such a large group by now.”
“Nevertheless, it is the truth,” Tishna replied without a moment of doubt. “The royal guardsmen will be rounded up to assist with the defense of the city, leaving the royal palace undefended. Looters will seize that moment to invade the palace, slaughtering the king and much of the royal court, and even harming the delegates of foreign nations staying there for the alliance summit.”
“Who’s behind this? Is it Registan?” asked Ras.
“It can be no one else,” replied Tishna. “As we speak, the empire is gathering an army on the northern border, under the pretense of a military exercise.”
“A show of force with the entire alliance watching.”
The Shrumland Alliance was a cooperative display of defiance in the face of Registanian expansion. It was no surprise that the power-hungry empire would constantly be seeking opportunities to undermine that cooperation by demonstrating its overwhelming might and thus sow the seeds of doubt among the alliance’s four members. This massing of forces on the kingdom’s border would constitute an obvious threat, and its timing to coincide with the alliance summit was surely no fluke.
Of course, the kingdom was not foolish and would soon prepare an army to oversee the border, should Registan prove daring enough to invade. Assuming, of course, that no sudden calamity threw the chain of command into disarray.
“The Registanian army will take advantage of the chaos in Barlama and stage an attack, beginning a full-scale invasion of Charlgia,” Tishna explained. “That is the future I have seen with my own eyes.”
“What happens next?” asked Ras with trepidation, though he feared he already knew. A kingdom left without its king, just as a land-grabbing empire was poised to attack, was about the worst scenario imaginable. It was entirely plausible that after Registan’s military campaign, there wouldn’t be a Charlgia left at all.
“I do not know,” said Tishna, a faint smile on her lips.
As soon as she said it, Ras gasped. Now that she mentioned it, of course she wouldn’t know. Tishna was from the future, but at the moment of her death, she had been sent back to the present day. Tishna had died and returned to the past.
“The last thing I remember seeing,” she said, “is you, Ras. I saw you and your black Chasseur fending off the Registanian army.”
A deep sadness possessed her as Tishna spoke of her final memories. Ras could find no words with which to speak.