Something flickered in Tisaanah’s face, a wince that she hid so well that most wouldn’t have noticed it. But over the last six months I had learned to read the invisible movements in Tisaanah’s expressions, no matter how good her performances were.
She leaned back against the wall, and I stepped closer. Again. And then her scent of citrus surrounded me, and my face was inches from hers, my arms against the wall behind her.
“You deserve everything,” I murmured. I bowed my head, breathing in the scent of her hair, her skin, and swept my lips over her cheek, right where tan skin met white.
She gave a weak laugh. “Everything?”
“Everything.” My lips traveled to her jaw, and I felt her let out a little breath.
“Such big promises,” she murmured.
My mouth moved to her throat… her earlobe…
Her exhale became a little less silent, and with one barely-audible sound, the rest of the world fell away.
“Well, aren’t you two just so… cute.”
Not all the world, apparently.
Tisaanah and I abruptly pulled away from each other. Nura stood at the corner of the hall, arms crossed, looking unamused. She wore a body-hugging white gown with long sleeves and a high neck, sleek and unadorned.
“Zeryth wants to see us,” she said. “Though no time to wait for you to take a cold bath, I’m afraid.”
None needed, after that sentence. Nothing killed a mood like Zeryth’s beckoning hand.
Tisaanah’s brow furrowed.
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know. He’s in his personal wing, apparently.”
I paused. “He’s in his rooms and not swanning around his own victory party?”
Nura’s lips thinned in a way that told me she, too, found this odd.
“He is indeed.”
I did not have a good feeling about this.
The three of us exchanged a look, all clearly thinking the same thing. Without another word, we went to the stairs.
I had been to the king’s wing in the Palace several times during the Ryvenai War. It was a beautiful place, in the same stuffy sort of way that everything in the Palace was beautiful. The wing was large enough that it was more than the size of a house all on its own, and certainly much larger than Zeryth’s apartment in the Towers. The central room had a hammered glass ceiling that cast fragmented sunlight across the black marble tile of the floor. It was sparsely decorated, and what furniture was here was haphazardly placed around the room, as if Zeryth had ordered Sesri’s things taken away and still had not replaced them.
He did not acknowledge us when we arrived. He stood at the window, looking out over his party guests scattered across the patio, his back to us.
The door closed, and the three of us stood there awkwardly, while Zeryth did not turn.
Nura cleared her throat.
“What was so important?”
“I’ve never thought of myself as naive.”
Zeryth’s voice was oddly quiet — his typical charming drawl replaced with a raw rasp that made the hairs stand on the back of my neck.
“Seems like it would be impossible, to be naive, coming from the world that made me,” he went on. “How could you ever be naive when you watched people starve to death at six years old? But at least survival was transactional. That was my mistake. I thought all of this was transactional. I thought it would be fucking simple. If I made the right moves. If I fucked the right people. If I wore the right clothing, the right title, the right woman on my arm. That would make me powerful.”
And then, at last, he turned to us.
I almost cursed.
He looked like a walking corpse. Dark shadows smeared his eyes, little black veins expanding like spiderwebs clinging to pallid Valtain skin. He was gaunt, like somehow he’d managed to lose another ten pounds since I’d last seen him. His hair hung in limp, white tendrils around his face, unbrushed and untamed, looking as if it hadn’t been washed in a little too long.
Zeryth had never seemed to carry the crown well, as if he didn’t quite like the way it felt on his head. But now it looked comically out of place, like an image sliced from a grand painting and slapped onto a death portrait.
His eyes landed on Tisaanah.
“But it isn’t transactional, is it, Tisaanah? It doesn’t matter what you trade away. And I did trade it all away. All of it, just to get that prized apple with the world carved into its flesh.” His smile soured, and he glanced over his shoulder, at the partygoers. “Only to find that it’s fucking rotten inside.”
“Zeryth,” Tisaanah said, quietly, “perhaps you aren’t feeling well.”
He let out a sound that barely qualified as a laugh. “Of course I’m not. I’m surrounded by traitors.”
He looked to Nura. Then me. Then to the partygoers outside. And then, at last, back to Tisaanah.
“I have a gift for you, Tisaanah.”
I had a terrible, terrible feeling about this.
Zeryth motioned to the guard at one of the doors. The doors opened, and two figures were dragged into the room and pushed to their knees before us.
One was a finely dressed woman, golden hair escaping a once-neat binding and spilling over her face.
The other was a wiry young man with copper hair. When he lifted his head, I saw that he was disfigured — a split across his lip, and two triangular holes where his nose should be.
Tisaanah drew in a sharp breath.
“Vos,” she whispered.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Tisaanah
My hands clenched at my sides, my heart racing. Vos looked up at me through tendrils of his messy red hair, a sneer at his lip.
Zeryth dismissed the guards, sending them out of the apartment. Then he smiled at me. Every time I met his eyes, something noxious slithered beneath my skin. Reshaye recoiled in distaste.
{He is poisoned,} it whispered.
Poisoned?
{For too long, he has been toying with magics beyond him. He is dangerous.}
“Tisaanah,” Zeryth said, “why did you lie about how you were taken?”
I froze, my eyes flicking to Vos. “Why is he here?”
Zeryth’s smile did not waver. “He is here because he offered you up to Atrick Aviness. With the help, of course, of Lady Erksan here — ever-loyal friend of Aviness.”
My jaw clenched.
Vos. Gods. Of course.
Every time I thought of my kidnapping, I had to fight back my anger. Now, with Vos on his knees in front of me, it was nearly impossible to choke down.
{How you insisted it could be different. And yet, I have watched hundreds of years pass, and I know it is the same story, so many times. So many betrayals.} Reshaye coiled around my hurt. Dangerous. I carefully kept control away from its grasp.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Do not lie to me, Tisaanah.”
“I did not know that either of these people were involved.”
The truth, technically.
Zeryth’s lip twitched.
“Then it must be quite a shock,” he said. He leaned closer, and I was so distracted by the unnerving gracelessness of his movements and the veins around his eyes that I nearly jumped when something cold pressed to my hands.
I looked down.
It was a dagger.
“How lucky for you, then,” he said, wandering back to the window, “that you’ll get to have your justice.”
Lady Erksan fell against the floor, weeping. “No, please, no, no, no…”
But Vos met my gaze directly, lifting his chin as if to present me his throat. His face was still, his image defiant, but I wasn’t fooled by the way he looked. Neither of them shielded their minds. Their terror consumed the air. Erksan’s fear was like that of a startled animal, brittle and fragile, befitting of someone who had never known suffering. But Vos’s was heavy with dark knowledge. He was afraid of death, yes. But he knew what pain was. He knew what it was to suff
er.
{It would be a mercy to give him death after all he has endured. To give him the fate that he deserves, for what he did to us. He bends beneath the weight of it.}
It would be a lie to say that a part of me didn’t crave vengeance. Reshaye found it in me, a little shard of white-hot anger. That part of me hated Vos for what he did to me.
Perhaps just as much as Vos hated me for that one lie. That one lie that destroyed his life.
I did not look away from him as I said, “Let him live.”
Reshaye’s surprise rippled, at the same moment that Zeryth’s face snapped to me.
“You begged me for his life. You sold away half your soul to ensure he was provided for. Then he turns you over to Aviness to be killed. Or tortured, or dissected. And you tell me ‘Let him live?’” He whirled to Max. “What about you, then? I take it you would just love to do it.”
Max was visibly tense, his jaw tight. “You’re acting insane, Zeryth.”
Zeryth barked a rough laugh. “Insane?! I’m saner than I’ve ever been! It’s amazing, actually, how sane getting everything you’ve ever wanted makes you.”
“Exactly,” I said. “You have everything that you want. You are the king.” I went to the window and lifted my chin, nodding to the partygoers below. “Now give them what they want. Perhaps now, they will be reluctant to love you. But show them you can be the king they need. Show them you know mercy.”
Zeryth stilled, almost thoughtful, letting out a faint scoff. “Mercy, hm? Is that what they want?”
“Your war is over, and you won,” Max said. “Take your victory, and let it be.”
Those words seemed to snap some thread of restraint in Zeryth, because every angle of his body went hard, eyes flashing, mouth twisted into a sneer.
“My war is not over. Not when I’m surrounded by Ascended-damned traitors. My war has barely begun.”
My stomach dropped.
Nura stepped forward, her eyes darting between us.
“We discussed this, Zeryth—”
“We?” he snarled. “There is no ‘we.’ Don’t think that I don’t know what you have been up to, my dear, loyal Second. Don’t think I don’t know exactly what your help has done to me.”
Nura’s eyes widened.
But Zeryth was back to me again before she could react. He moved in fits and starts, like a collection of limbs held together by fraying strings. “Execute them,” he commanded.
And with those words, the bind of my pact tightened around me like a noose. My fingers were forced closed around the hilt of the knife.
{He deserves this,} Reshaye whispered, and it would be so easy, but—
No, I didn’t want to do this. No matter what Vos had done to me.
“No,” I choked out.
Still, every muscle in my body pulled to obey Zeryth’s command. I held it off for seconds.
Then Zeryth rolled his eyes, let out a scoff, and the next thing I knew, the dagger was no longer in my grasp.
“Fine. Then stay there.”
Two smooth strides, and he was behind Lady Erksan, yanking her up by her hair, and her scream was splitting the air, and then there was blood everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, spattering across my face, the floor, the window. Her scream became a gargle. Zeryth’s beautiful white suit was awash in crimson.
The body fell in a heap. Vos scrambled away from it, slipping on blood.
Do something.
But Zeryth’s command froze me: Stay. Stay. Stay.
Zeryth reached for Vos, the blade lifting—
And then Max was between them, his hand catching Zeryth’s wrist.
“Is this really how you want to start your reign?” he said. “Hiding from the people you rule and drowning in paranoia?”
“That’s a rich statement, coming from you. After you lied to me as you have.” His gaze darkened with feral hatred. “You told me the stories from Threll were exaggerations. And you tell me that I’m not surrounded by traitors, when you are one of them?”
“I never—”
“You lied to me.” The two of them were locked like that, each pushing against the grip of the other. Magic began to crackle at Zeryth’s skin — strange, sickened magic unlike any I had ever seen. Pain flickered across Max’s face.
“I thought I needed you,” Zeryth sneered. “Needed your name, your nobility. So pathetic.”
Nura began to approach and Zeryth barked, without looking away from Max, “Don’t you fucking move.”
She lurched to a stop. She couldn’t fight his commands, either, whether it be due to his magic or her own pact, or both. His magic was toxic in the air, so thick my vision blurred with it.
Stay. Stay. Stay.
As a last resort, my magic reached for Zeryth’s mind, and I nearly gasped.
He was so, so far gone.
His mind was a maggot-infested, rotting thing. He didn’t even bother to shield his thoughts, if they could even be called that. There was nothing left but pain and rage. He didn’t care that he had won. Whatever he had hoped to claim still eluded him. Whatever hole within him he had hoped to patch with the stitches of power still gaped.
A horrible realization fell over me: he would never stop. This was a man capable of anything.
I tensed, bracing for the worst.
But Zeryth drew in a long breath. Then let it out. He dropped the knife. Stepped back.
I almost let myself feel relief.
“The truth is,” Zeryth said, calmly, “it’s a relief not to need you anymore.”
I wouldn’t have had time to react, even if I could.
The strike was like a crack of lightning, splitting the room in two. Pain cleaved through my head, my vision going white. When I could see again, Max was on the ground, blood soaking his shirt. Zeryth stood over him, noxious magic peeling from his skin, as thick as his hatred.
And I still could not move.
Max countered fast, pushing himself to his feet, fire at his fingertips. The flames crawled up Zeryth’s clothing.
But Zeryth just smiled.
He lunged again.
His magic was even stronger, this time, knocking the breath from my lungs. Max fought back, fire swelling. He was a good fighter. Zeryth’s magic was strong but his body was a shadow of what it once had been.
But that magic —
Another burst of it had Max on the ground again. This time he was slower to rally.
Zeryth would kill him.
I needed to do something.
But the pact hobbled me. Everything in me roared to comply — to serve Zeryth’s commands. To protect him.
My blood pact. Mine… but…perhaps…
An idea bloomed out of nothing but desperation.
Reshaye. Help me. The pact that binds me is mine, not yours. Together, we can stop this.
Reshaye examined my panic. And then it said, coldly, {Why?}
Max was on the ground. Fire thickened the air, and it was thickened more by Zeryth’s magic. And Zeryth just kept coming.
{Perhaps he deserves this. He abandoned me.}
My hatred bubbled over.
You are a monster. Is that all you think about? The people who have wronged you?
Reshaye snarled. {You know nothing about what I have suffered.}
You are with me because I know EVERYTHING about what you have suffered!
My memories assaulted us. Esmaris’s hands on my skin. His whip at my back. The betrayal, in my heart and in his. My blood on Zeryth’s contract.
{I loved him and he left me. Even after I gave him everything that I had to offer. Just as they always do. Just as you will.}
This anger is not love. Love is selfless. And I think you knew that, once. I think the part of you that I saw that day at the Mikov estate understood.
Another strike. Max was on his knees, swaying. Everything was fire and shadow. How many blows did Max have left in him?
I wouldn’t let this happen. Every muscle in my body strained. Reshaye examined my des
peration, confused.
{Your life is bound to Zeryth’s. And you still would act against him? Even if it meant sacrificing your life?}
Max’s eyes flicked to me. He would not kill Zeryth, not if there was even a chance it would result in my death. But Zeryth would kill Max. He would kill thousands more. He would never stop.
I did not need to answer.
{I see,} Reshaye said, with an odd calm.
Something clicked into place.
It happened fast. I lifted my hand. Magic sparked at my skin. Zeryth was yanked across the room, his body colliding with mine. Together, we fell to the ground.
At first, Zeryth’s gaunt face was dark with fury. He collapsed on top of me, a snarl on his lips, so close he could have kissed me. Reshaye’s smile seeped across my face slowly.
“You are right, foolish king,” my voice whispered, my accent gone.
Zeryth’s rage gave way to confusion, gave way to pain, gave way to fear.
Fear, as he realized that my blade was buried between his ribs.
Reshaye caressed his face like a lover. Decay trailed my fingertips, consuming skin, muscle, bone.
“You were naive,” I purred.
I felt one beautiful moment of satisfaction as I watched Zeryth die. And I thought that maybe, he really had been bluffing about the extent of his power — maybe the curse that bound my life to his was a lie, all along.
My eyes found Max’s as he struggled to his feet. He looked terrified.
It’s alright, I wanted to tell him. I’m fine. See?
But then something grabbed me, like a monster reaching up from beneath the sea to drag me down.
Less than a second, and I was gone.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Aefe
“They will not help us,” Siobhan said, pacing the length of the room. “We should move on immediately. The less time we remain here, the better.”
We gathered in the sitting room of the guest suite that Ezra and Athalena had given us. The windows spanned the length of the room, its frame covered in winding ivy, overlooking the city of Niraja and a star-scattered sky. A beautiful view, though none of us took the time to appreciate it.
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