Darren had finally convinced Blayne to take down Derrick and the other rebels’ bodies. They’d been burned the previous night. Then… then I felt something.
“Pythus has promised us forty warships. They set sail in two months.” Blayne’s words echoed across the crowd, inciting screams and cheers and frenzied cries for justice. The clamor of fools. Don’t they know we’re calling for blood?
“Our Caltothian enemies will feel what it is to suffer. They will feel Jerar’s wrath.” The king’s eyes sparkled as he raised his fist in the air, his Black Mage at his side. “As your king, I promised you peace. And peace you shall have. Emperor Liang has renewed his treaty as well. A fortnight from today, my dearest brother will marry his betrothed. The two most formidable warrior mages our kingdom has ever seen, prince and princess of our realm, united. The Crown has never been more powerful.”
Darren’s eyes fell to mine, and I looked away. I didn’t wait for his face to fall. A tempest of emotions threatened to burst. I needed to keep them inside.
When the proclamations were done, I was first to exit the square.
HE FOUND ME. Three knocks at the door, during which I feigned silence. I wanted him to go away. I wanted to be alone, but Paige let him in anyway.
I heard her turn the key in its lock, an odd gravely sound that scratched at my ears.
My room was a den of shadow. I didn’t want any light. And he didn’t try.
Darren pulled up beside me on the bed.
“I wish it didn’t have to be like this,” he said.
I didn’t speak. I was too afraid if I did the words would fall away. Too afraid in the darkness I’d confess my sins, and I couldn’t speak a word. I couldn’t stand the blood.
“You haven’t spoken a word to me since it happened.” I could hear his pain. It hurt me worse. “When Eve and Caine… when my father died…” He swallowed. “It was never like this. Derrick was your brother, and you loved him. He was the youngest, the one you were sworn to protect…” Darren shifted on the bed. “I know you, Ryiah. You’re blaming yourself. It’s what I would’ve done.”
Silence was my only response.
“You think you could’ve stopped it, but you can’t stop a person from his mistakes. When you returned to Demsh’aa, they blamed you, didn’t they?” Silence. “Alex always hated me. I’m sure he made me the villain… But we did nothing wrong.”
I did. I made myself blink away the tears.
“We never talked after…” Darren’s words fell to a whisper. “I would’ve let him go, Ryiah. I know it would’ve been a mistake. Gods, after all the rebels have done…” He was quiet for a minute, and then he made himself continue. “I swear to you, Ryiah, if I’d known Mira was there, I would’ve stopped her. For you.” His voice broke. “No one should ever have to watch a brother die.”
My whole face was wet, and my hands trembled in my lap. I shoved them under the cover and held my breath, waiting for him to leave.
“I wish I could take it all away.” Darren’s hand pressed against my wrist as he stood to go.
There was the shift of shadows, and then he started toward the door.
“Stay,” I whispered.
The outline of his shoulders froze, and I heard the soft pad of his boots. They grew louder until he was at the edge of my bed.
I curled up, sitting against the frame. The tears were drowning me. I didn’t want to be alone.
Not tonight.
Darren’s arms wrapped around my waist, and he pulled me against him, my back pressing against his front.
He held me.
The rise and fall of his chest carried me to sleep. His chin rested on my shoulder, pine and cloves enveloping me whole.
Darren’s whisper was the last thing I heard.
“I love you, Ryiah.”
OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, it got easier to breathe. In and out. Darren’s arms surrounded me as I slept. He came to my room each night, and each morning a pressed flower was next to my head. Without fail.
The prince was going to cure me of everything Derrick had taken that night and everything Alex had stolen the day he joined the rebel cause.
All Darren ever did was hold me. But that act alone was... everything.
It was a drop of sunlight in a prison of ice. It warmed the part of me I was afraid I’d lost. It took the fear, the doubt, the terror, and it pushed it all away.
And that final morning I awoke, I was happy. My ladies-in-waiting came to the door, and I smiled. It was small, barely a tug of the lips, but it was real.
Today I was marrying my best friend.
Because that’s what Darren was after all these years. Ella was one—she’d held my hand and carried me through the trial year and our apprenticeship—but this last year was Darren. The two of us had held each other through the darkest parts of our lives and never once let go.
Madame Pollina and Celine and Gemma helped me bathe. Soft-scented rose water and oils made my skin glisten. They brushed my hair, pinning just a couple strands behind my head with copper pins. The rest remained down, loose waves framing my face.
The powders they applied were bare and set to highlight my narrow cheeks, the softest gloss to my mouth, and the lightest shadows to darken the corners of my eyes.
Then they brought out my gown. It was a cream yellow with light ruffles running diagonally down its silken skirts, and a fitted bodice of gold and orange beads. It was nothing like I’d ever imagined, and everything that I’d never known I wanted. With its matching satin slippers, it was fit for a princess.
The loveliest thing I would ever wear.
I stood on a small raised stand as they helped me into the dress in front of a gilded mirror studded with pearls.
They laced the bodice, and I held my breath, my arms free from the weight of traditional sleeves.
It was then I read his letter: “This dress reminds me of the midwinter solstice, our second year in the apprenticeship. Your arms were bare and Priscilla told you it made you look common… Ella asked me what I thought, and I remember your face when I didn’t reply. Ryiah, I want you to know that you looked beautiful. So beautiful that I couldn’t stop staring even if I tried. And then I asked you to dance, and even though I knew it would only bring the both of us heartache, it was the best night of my life. And now I want you to wear a dress just like it today, as you become my wife.”
“Don’t cry!” Celine snatched the card out of my hand before I could read it again. “We just finished with your face.”
“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered. But I wasn’t. Not after reading Darren’s letter.
My eyes were a bit blurry, and ever mindful of Celine’s warning, I lifted a cautious finger to swipe away the water that had started to form at the rims.
I blinked twice, and then regarded myself in the mirror.
And that’s when I saw it.
What I’d been missing all along. What I’d failed to see until the moment that yellow silk caught the light.
“Might I have a couple minutes,” I rasped, “alone?”
“My lady, you don’t have much time before the ceremony!”
“Please?” I gasped for air, my fingers trembling as I pressed them together in hopes no one would notice.
Madame Pollina sighed and then motioned for my ladies to go, trailing after them to the door. She ducked her head in one last time. “Ten minutes, my lady.”
I waited until their mindless chatter trailed off down the corridor.
I took one last look at my dress. My yellow silk dress.
Then I shut my eyes and let the memory flood back.
A scared girl, no more than six, tugging at a yellow silk ribbon at the end of her curly black braid.
A man who looked nothing like his daughter, dragging her along to meet with a crown prince in the stands of the Candidacy.
The black-haired Caltothian ambassador looking on, no longer indifferent, cold fury written across his face, fists clenched at his sides, eyes locked on the s
ame pair as me.
And then Blayne’s voice: “Come now, Father, everyone knows the noblemen take a lover or two during their travels, even their wives. Why, it’s a common enough saying: the longer at sea, the more lovers she keeps.”
The woman we kidnapped during the apprenticeship in Dastan’s Cove.
Lady Sybil was awaiting her husband’s return.
I left the dais to press my palms against the side of the wall. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not like this.
But now that the gates had been thrown open, the memories wouldn’t stop. Three years ago, the lady had had a three-year-old daughter with black curls.
The mother adjusting the pale silk ribbon on the waist of her daughter’s dress.
Little Tamora, who looked just like that girl in the stands. The same blue eyes, the same age, the same fondness for silk. The black hair of the mother. The curls that mirrored Lord Tyrus. The blue eyes that matched both.
The cold fury on his face…
He couldn’t have been Baron Cyr. The other dignitaries would have recognized…
Was Lord Tyrus a lover?
Was Tamora his daughter?
Cold steel cut at my chest, and my whole body seized. Had Blayne known?
But how? How would he—
And then I remembered.
The Caltothian traitor. Flint. He’d been a sentry who served among Lady Sybil’s men. He’d mapped out the terrain for Dastan Cove and knew the in’s and out’s of Baron Cyr’s castle. Her husband was away at sea for many months at a time.
Master Byron’s words returned: “Lucky for you Commander Chen has recently received orders from the Crown.”
And then, Mira’s threat as she informed us that our mission was “never to be discussed with anyone unless you have permission from the king.”
The Crown had ordered a kidnapping, but on whose orders? King Lucius?
“I asked my father that year we returned to the palace,” Darren had replied. “He told me he couldn’t recall.”
What if the reason the king couldn’t recall was because the orders were never his?
Blayne and Darren had hated their father. But Blayne… Blayne had suffered much longer at his hand.
The crown prince just gave me a sardonic smile. “It takes much more to impress when you are his heir. Darren wasn’t always around. In any case, I’m better for it now.”
Had Blayne planned all of this? Had he been planning this for years?
Crown orders for a secret mission nobody knew about. Kidnapping the lover and child of the head Caltothian ambassador? Blackmailing Lord Tyrus with his child’s life?
Had the girl been brought to the Candidacy, within the lord’s sight, as a reminder? A promise to keep her alive in exchange for a crime? Murdering a king in front of a room full of soldiers and knights and the world’s greatest mages. The man had never expected escape.
“For Caltoth!” It’d been a cry to remind the audience it was an attack and to show the other country’s ambassadors the ultimate breach of a treaty.
No one would be able to tie Lord Tyrus to Baron Cyr’s missing wife and child. No one would’ve known she had a lover.
No one but a traitorous sentry, one who’d managed to explore every inch of Baron Cyr’s castle unnoticed. One who had perhaps seen Lord Tyrus visit Lady Sybil while her baron husband was away.
Perhaps Flint had been one of the traitors hired by King Lucius to stage the attacks on the Jerar-Caltothian border.
Maybe Commander Nyx and King Horrace never lied. Maybe Derrick was telling the truth.
And maybe Blayne, tired of being in his tyrant father’s shadow, had decided to bribe his father’s man to learn Caltothian secrets to find something to use to his advantage. Because perhaps his father had told him about all of the staged attacks. After all, Blayne had been groomed as King Lucius’s successor for years. Why wouldn’t the king share his secret with his heir?
And perhaps Blayne had needed a mage to help accomplish his mission. Not a commander, not the current Black Mage, but the jealous sister, Mage Mira. The one who would love a position of power more than anything. Something to distance herself from her prodigious brother. Something to rise.
She stepped in like a hero to kill the king’s murderer. It’d been so easy. So convenient. It had earned her a place as King’s Regiment lead mage. Blayne’s right hand in castle affairs.
Blackmailing Lord Tyrus with his lover and child would’ve accomplished two goals with one act:
First, kill the father. The man who’d tormented him for years. The king who’d taken a sweet boy and made him a monster.
“You see the boys as the men they are now,” Benny had said. “They were much different back then.”
Second, convince the other countries that Caltoth had broken the Great Compromise in one indisputable act. Killing off a Pythian heir was an added blow to the shrewd King Joren, who was so reluctant to pick a side between Caltoth and Jerar.
Blayne had been poisoned, of course. But what if it had been a farce? What if one of the healers had already had an antidote on hand?
It took a healer precious minutes to identify a strange poison’s symptoms, and even longer to cast the correct balance of magic mixed with the herbs and powders on hand. I’d seen the Restoration mages struggle during their Candidacy trials just to concoct the correct casting for their prisoner’s ailment in time. And those took close to an hour.
The crown prince had been healed within twenty minutes.
I slipped to the floor.
This past year, even with everything Blayne had done to win my trust, I hadn’t ever trusted him, not completely.
But I’d let down my guard after he’d shown me a bit of his past. Isn’t the best bit of truth always woven in with a lie?
But why hadn’t he tried to kill me, too? Why hadn’t he just rid the palace of the girl he hated and force his brother to marry Priscilla instead?
The crown prince had hated me from the moment we met. The second he saw the way Darren looked at me that second year at the ascension feast—
And then I paused. Darren. That was it.
“My dear,” Benny had said, “Darren is the only person that boy has ever cared for, besides himself.”
Blayne hadn’t been able to do it, not after he saw how hard Darren had worked to trick his father into accepting me as his betrothed. An infatuation he could ignore. But love? As much as Blayne hated me, he loved Darren more. The younger brother who continuously fought his father to protect him from the blows.
Blayne had probably felt indebted to Darren, and so he’d made me a part of his plans. He’d changed his game; he showed me vulnerability, earning sympathy in his father’s cruel acts to win me to his side.
It was all to further his ploy. Like Blayne had said: “The two most formidable warrior mages our kingdom has ever seen... The Crown has never been more powerful.”
He’d been building his indisputable reign all along.
MY HEAD PRESSED against the chamber wall. I kept my eyes clenched shut as the wave of nausea hit, breathing heavily through my nose.
Derrick.
I pressed my fist to my mouth. Teeth scraped against skin as the scream ripped me apart. It clawed up from my chest. It was so long and so hard I had to slap my other hand over it to muffle the cry. Blood coated my tongue. I choked on hot metal that was melting my lungs.
Derrick.
The screams rippled along my bones, one after the other, until all will left my limbs. My hands and arms went limp against the cold marble floor.
I let him die. I let him die, and I could’ve helped him escape. I was the second best Combat mage in the realm. I could’ve taken on a whole legion of guards. Why didn’t I do something?
That first night, after he was caught, I could’ve saved him. I would’ve been caught, of course, and tossed in a cell to rot. But Darren would’ve convinced Blayne to spare my life.
And I could’ve let my brother live.
But instead, I’d called my brother a traitor. I’d blamed him for not telling me everything about the rebels’ orders. And why would he? He’d known the Crown was tainted. He’d suspected the wrong brother, but he’d been close.
Why didn’t I listen? The answer had been staring me in the face the entire time.
Blayne was evil. What he’d tried to do to Ella, the way he had treated me when he thought I was just a distraction to his brother…
I’d known all along. I’d known, and then I’d looked the other way. Because the black wolf had dressed up like a white lamb. The fool that I was, I’d seen the wolf become the lamb and never bothered to wonder whether the one was still the other. Because a person couldn’t ever be good and evil at once.
Little girl, don’t you know? The world is made up of shades of gray.
I was one of the few people who’d served on that mission to Caltoth, and I was the only one who’d seen Tamora at the stands in Montfort. I’d even seen the way the Caltothian ambassador looked at her and the prince. No one else could’ve added up those two clues but me.
I’d condemned my little brother to death. My family was right to hate me. I hated me.
The pain I’d suffered after his death—the agony, the torment, the rage, and self-flagellation. The guilt—it was nothing compared to this moment now.
But it was also different. Because this time I couldn’t be a victim. I couldn’t be the little girl who shut out the world. I couldn’t break apart any longer. I had to do something. And I knew exactly what I had to do.
I had to keep Darren and Marius from finding out the rebels’ identity. Blayne had given them orders to investigate, and it would be my mission to sabotage.
I had to find the proof the rebels were looking for, anything I could use to prevent a war.
I had to gather as much information as I could. My position in the Crown granted me access to things that would raise questions were it anyone else. I’d proven my loyalty time and time again—even Blayne had agreed with Darren. I was not a rebel; I was not a threat. But I was now.
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