“So…” He frowned. “Calanthe is a monster inside the island?”
“No. Calanthe is a monster who lay down to sleep in the sea and became an island we live on.”
Sondra made a little sound. Kara looked as if a light had dawned, and Agatha wrapped her arms around herself. Ibolya nodded, smiling ruefully.
“So the earth tremors,” Con said. “If the monster is the island, and She wakes…”
I met his gaze. “No more Calanthe. Everyone on Her falls into the sea.”
“Maybe we should go back to Yekpehr,” Con said, only half joking. “Or … anywhere else.”
“Percy will haunt you if you take his life raft and leave him to die,” Agatha said quietly.
“This is Percy’s yacht?” I asked, incredulous. “How did you pry it out of his grasping hands?”
“We needed it,” Con replied grimly. “I managed to destroy every other seaworthy vessel and we had to come after you. How did you get to Yekpehr?” he asked Ambrose.
He smiled, terribly pleased with himself. “It’s a long explanation, full of fascinating theories concerning time and space. You see—”
Con held up a hand. “Maybe later. If we haven’t drowned under Calanthe’s fins.”
“Lord Percy loves Your Highness, too,” Agatha said with a shrug. “You saved us. So did Calanthe. How can we help save Your island?”
“I don’t know yet.” I turned back to Con, squeezing his hand. “I have to try.”
“I’m not arguing,” he said, shaking his head. I could see the hollowness in him, how utterly he’d exhausted himself. “I’m not arguing with you ever again.”
“What?” I demanded. “Did Ambrose steal My wolf and put someone else in your body?”
He looked startled, then grinned crookedly at me. “I’m just so glad to have you alive again, Lia.”
“I’m just so glad to be alive. And to be with you,” I replied softly.
“Good.” He took a breath. “If you ask, I’ll give up my vengeance for you.”
“You’d let go of killing Anure?”
“For you, yes.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Well, let’s think about that. I doubt those wizards will let Me go easily. We may yet have to fight.”
“Oh yes,” Ambrose put in. “And now we have renewed connections inside the citadel.”
Agatha nodded. “Lady Rhéiane promised to help in any way possible.”
My heart shivered in my chest, cold dread making it stutter in its newly recovered beats. That was nothing to the look on Con’s face.
“Rhéiane?” he asked, very carefully. “A woman named Rhéiane was your contact at the citadel?”
Agatha hesitated at the thin scratch of his voice. “Yes. She was my mistress when I lived there. She’s about Lady Sondra’s age and…” She trailed off. Sondra looked like she might vomit. “You know her,” Agatha finished flatly.
“We didn’t know, Conrí,” Sondra said, pleadingly, her expression aghast. I was sure if she was excusing him or us.
“No, we didn’t.” He lifted his head, the ocean breeze catching his dark hair and tumbling it around his face, eyes blazing gold with renewed fervor. “But we do now. We’re going back for her.”
“Not yet,” I cautioned. “After careful planning.”
He smiled at me, ruefulness and amused affection in it. He smoothed a hand over my skull, warm and rough, achingly familiar. “First we save Calanthe. Then we can plan.”
I nodded and, when Vesno nudged my hand with his cold nose, I stroked his head. The scent of Calanthe, lush with blossoms, floated by on a warm breeze, and I allowed my eyes to drift closed. Con pressed a kiss to my temple.
“I need to sleep a few moments.”
“Then do.”
“Wake Me when we get to the reef, and I’ll guide us through.”
Kara snorted. “I can do that, Your Highness. I solved that riddle.”
“And I can assist,” Ibolya volunteered.
I smiled at them. “Then wake Me at the dock. I have to see about Calanthe.”
“Rest now, Lia,” Con murmured. “I’ll see you safely home.”
Wrapping the dreamthink around me, I trusted that he would.
Read on for an excerpt from the next spellbinding book in the Forgotten Empires series
The Promised Queen
By Jeffe Kennedy
Available Summer 2021 from
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
1
“Lia? Wake up.”
The voice reached me deep in the dreamthink, where I slept wrapped in the verdant cloak of Calanthe’s maternal embrace. For a moment, I thought all was well, that my realm was at peace, safe and protected—and that I was, too. That things were as they’d always been, and my ladies had arrived to wake me for the morning rituals.
But no … that wasn’t true at all. Calanthe roiled with restless anger and furious hunger. All that blood, violently spilled in battle saturating the waters and soaking into the very bedrock of my island kingdom, had awakened Her. And that same ravenous rage filled me. That and pain. So much death, including my own.
I screamed. The bloodcurdling shriek ripped itself from Calanthe’s bones to rise from my stomach and rake my throat with rending claws as it tore from me.
Con wrapped himself around me—a man, not an island, made of sinews, muscle, and hot skin—stilling my thrashing limbs with his overpowering strength. “Lia. Lia, no. It’s me. You’re home. You’re safe. It’s all right now.”
I nearly laughed at how wrong he was, but it came out as a moan. None of us was safe and nothing would be all right ever again.
“Lia, wake up. You—”
“I’m awake,” I said, cutting off any further empty reassurances and opening my eyes.
Con held me on his lap, cradling me there. Beyond the flapping awning that stretched overhead, full night had fallen, blackness severed by lightning-streaked skies. Rain poured, the wind howled, and waves rose white-tipped in the torchlight. Calanthe had tasted blood and wanted more. Her longing was mine, intertwined. The insatiable craving filled me. The orchid burned on my arm, drawing life from me, the spindly new fingers of my regenerating hand clicking as I flexed them. They itched and needed flesh.
I had starved, suffered, lost my ring finger, and then my hand. Drained of blood, I’d died …
No, I wouldn’t think about that time when I’d been dead. Besides, I needed to feed. Or Calanthe did. It didn’t matter which—no other thought could withstand that ravening appetite.
“Lia?” Con sounded uncertain, shadows haunting his face from the last few, eternally long days. He’d come for me, and saved me—and he’d never looked more beautiful to my eye. Longing for him filled me, and I wanted. My husband, my love. Mine. I was famished for him. I’d died thinking of him and here he was, for the taking.
His eyes caught the golden light of the torches as he studied me, concern turning to wariness. A blast of wind-blown rain shattered over him, but he didn’t seem to notice. I laid my intact hand on Con’s cheek, his pitted skin rough over his snarled beard, and I trailed my nails over the water droplets on his skin. He flinched slightly. That’s right. My nails had all broken. Untended, they’d been reduced to brittle nothingness, all ragged, sharp edges.
Just like me. An orchid can’t live on its own. I needed and I would have.
“Kiss Me,” I commanded him.
Con might have hesitated, his keen instincts whispering of danger, but I wound my fingers in the hair that trailed over his shoulder, pulling him to me. He lowered his head, arms easily lifting me at the same time, brushing my lips with his. Sweet, hot, so tender. Alive.
I bit. Like a snake striking, I had his lower lip in my teeth, hot blood flowing into my throat. He jerked, but I had him, holding him tight as I drank the salt of him.
Then, instead of fighting me off, he growled deep in his throat, and moved into me. Tongue coaxing me to open to him, he kissed me, sending life and heat into t
he damp chill that lay still in the marrow of my bones, the heat a melting caress. Needing me in return, he kissed me like a man desperate for a deep breath of air only I could give. His arms powerful around me, he held me against the furnace of his body, kissing me as if our lives depended on it. Maybe they did. Because somewhere in there, sanity returned—and I remembered who I was.
Euthalia, Queen of Calanthe. I was Euthalia, not Calanthe. A flesh and blood woman, not an island made of soil and sea.
“Enough, Lia,” Con murmured against my lips. His big, rough hand gripped my jaw, gently but insistently coaxing me away from my prize.
Relaxing into humanity again, I unclamped my teeth, and broke the kiss. Con pulled back enough to search my face. Blood ran from his lip—swelling rapidly—and smeared in his beard. Abruptly, astonishingly, he grinned at me. “They warned me you were a maneater, but I never thought they meant it literally.”
“Bringing the dead back to life can be a tricky proposition,” Ambrose observed, leaning over Con’s broad shoulder to peer at me. The wizard’s sunny curls were plastered with rain around his face, making him look even younger than usual. That deceptive youth made for an odd contrast with his eyes, which held the wisdom—and sorrow—of centuries. The clinical interest in them reminded me of the four wizards who’d tortured me so cheerfully in their pursuit of knowledge, and a shudder of animal terror shook me. “I do hope that there won’t be a problem with—well, no sense worrying about it now.”
“Explain,” Con demanded.
Ambrose smiled wistfully. “We’ll see if such explanations become necessary—or useful. Suffice to say, Your Highness, that it will take time for Your spirit to recalibrate to being in flesh again.”
“Unfortunately, time is what we don’t have at the moment.” General Kara, dark and lean, stepped into my line of sight and bowed from the waist. “Your Highness, we need Your assistance.” He grimaced, looking away to something. “Rather urgently,” he added.
A startling lurch threw us to the side, another wave splattering us with chilly salt water, though Kara, a longtime sailor, absorbed the motion easily. That’s right: we were on a boat. The Last Resort. The name came into my mind. Percy’s pleasure yacht that they’d sailed to Yekpehr to rescue Sondra and me. Though I didn’t remember that part. I only recalled awaking on a couch under this awning, to sunset skies and Calanthe’s flower-scented breezes.
Now waves tossed the ship about, a storm raging. I frowned in puzzlement. There shouldn’t be a storm this violent near Calanthe, should there? But we were near Calanthe’s shores; I knew that like I knew my hand moved at the end of my arm.
“We might be fucked.” Sondra strode into view, her smile nearly gleeful. “It’s total chaos out there. Your Highness—good to see You awake. And alive,” she added as an afterthought. Self-consciously, she ran a hand over her shorn head, the tufts of pale hair uneven, a few darker lines marking scabbed-over cuts. I didn’t know how she’d come to lose her beautiful hair.
I couldn’t remember much at all, except the pain, and that dreadful, nauseating weakness as my blood and very life drained away. And then I died. Remembering that nothingness, the sense of my self dissipating, had me spinning down and away, the clammy claws of death reaching for me …
“Stay with me, Lia.” Con’s hand still on my jaw, he turned my face toward his. “We need you to get us home.”
Home. To Calanthe. I should never have left.
“What’s going on?” I asked, my thoughts clearing as I levered myself up. I had a duty, a responsibility. There should not be a storm like this. Not restraining now, Con helped, steadying and supporting me. I tried to see past the pitching deck that filled most of the scene, but couldn’t. “I need to stand.”
I pushed to my feet, but my legs gave way like wilted flower stems, and I collapsed back against Con. How humiliating. I hated being weak in any way and now I was only that.
“Let me,” Con said, sweeping one arm under my knees and lifting me in the cradle of his arms as if I weighed nothing. Probably I did, after all that I’d been through. He tucked me against his chest—a comforting place to be—and braced against a pole that held up the awning that had sheltered us from the storm. I scanned the night-dark sea. Our torches made a pitifully small circle of flame in the swirl of wind and water. Rain drove sideways outside our flimsy shelter on the deck.
In the distance, Calanthe shone with drenched light, crowned by the glittering jewel of my palace high on the cliffs. The home I thought I’d never see again.
Lightning forked through the sky with an immediate crack! of pulse-jumping sound, illuminating everything in a harsh, ruthless glare, thunder rolling after as Calanthe groaned of her pain and hunger. Not far away—entirely too close—sea spray fountained dramatically from the waves churned into fury by the massive coral reef that protected Calanthe.
“That is our problem,” Kara shouted over the wind, pointing, in case I’d failed to notice.
“Why are we so close? Your boat will damage My coral reef.” Con snorted out a sound suspiciously like a laugh.
Kara looked pained, but inclined his head. “My apologies, Your Highness, but it’s true. Unfortunately, we may not survive the encounter either.”
“I thought you said you knew the trick of navigating My reef and harbor.” I could remember at least that much.
He grimaced, wiping rain from his face. “It seems to have … shifted, Your Highness. And the wind is driving us straight for it.”
Oh. Of course. Calanthe had changed the conformation of the barrier reef. Not only was the coral a living entity, but so was the entire island, though in a different way. And where I’d thought of my connection to Calanthe before as trying to coax a sleeping cat to do my bidding, now She was awake, a raging lion savaging all in her quest for more blood.
The storm was like a living thing, too, ravening and full of inchoate rage. Even when I understood little else of my abilities, I’d always been able to steer the worst storms around my island kingdom. Allowing the gentle, nourishing rains and sending the rending winds and waves out to sea had been as natural as breathing.
This, however, was no normal storm. Birthed by the thrashing of Calanthe’s abrupt awakening, the ferocious surf and driving winds ignored my call. And … something else contributed here. A magic not my own. But one I recognized.
“I need to see the other direction,” I told Con.
He turned, stepping out from our dubious shelter, his body flexing, briefly shifting me in his arms as he looped an arm around the post and braced against the pitching of the ship. I peered into the gloom, seeking through the violent chatter of Calanthe’s ravings for information on what disturbed Her waters.
“Lia, I don’t know what—” A flash of lightning cracked, illuminating the night. “Great green Ejarat,” he breathed in horror.
Rearing against the horizon, an enormous wave chased us. Kara and Sondra shouted orders and—absurdly—Ambrose laughed. “Now, that took some doing!” he exclaimed.
Anure’s wizards, chasing us. No. Chasing me.
“We have to get below,” Con shouted in my ear.
“No.” I loaded my voice with all the authority I could, ridiculous as it might be from a bald, barely clothed, and sodden heap who couldn’t stand on her own. “I can stop it.” I hoped.
“Then do it fast,” he answered without further argument, then shouted something back to Kara and Sondra.
I concentrated, feeling my way. These were my waters, mine by right of birth, responsibility, and through long familiarity. This sea belonged to me as much as my own blood did. Not a great analogy, as those wizards had tried to steal that, too. But it had done them no good. They’d ultimately failed to take the orchid ring, and they’d fail in this, too.
The waters were mine, but the wave came from elsewhere. As wizards, they couldn’t bend my elemental magic to their will; they could only try to disturb it. Like dropping a rock in a still pond. The rock wouldn’t change the w
ater, only displace it. The wizards no longer powered this wave. They’d started it—dropped the rock to swamp us—but it traveled on its own now.
The yacht plummeted down a slope, following the irresistible current made as the powerful wave sucked the sea toward it. A roar of the tumbling water filled my ears. Con’s arms tightened on me and he shouted some kind of prayer or exhortation.
Be still, I told my sea. Shh. Lie down.
The wave stalled, shifted and simmered, blacker than the sky as it reared above us. Then, like a dropped bowl of water, it splooshed down and outward. The swell caught us, lifting us high and tossing the yacht down again. Con bent over me, holding us against the post as the ship hurled up one wave and down another—and shuddered to a screeching stop.
We’d hit the coral reef.
Another swell—smaller, but still huge—hit and the boat leaned to one side, grinding against the rocks ominously. The Last Resort shuddered, as did my bones, the living coral beneath us screaming of their small deaths as the yacht crushed them.
The boat lurched again. Something broke beneath us with a loud bang, The Last Resort tilting precipitously. Agatha and Ibolya had joined us, clutching each other for support, their faces pale, but calmly turned to me, trusting in me to save them.
“We need to get off this boat, now,” Con barked in his rough voice. Not so much trust there. “Can you swim?”
I needed to be firm and I couldn’t do that while cradled like an injured babe in arms.
“No, but I don’t need to. Take Me to the prow.”
“What? No. We’ll be swept over onto those rocks.”
“Take Me now or put Me down so I can walk,” I commanded coolly.
Con muttered something but began forging uphill toward the leaning prow, powerful muscles working against the incline. Sondra came up beside him, using an odd-looking walking stick to dig into the wooden planking of the deck, steadying herself and then Con with a grip on his arm.
“Close enough, Your Highness, or would You prefer I dangle you overboard?”
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