by K. A. Tucker
Annika grabs the king’s arm, jostling him for attention. “She saved me, Zander,” she repeats, emphasizing her words. “She freed me from the merth. Raw merth. With her bare hands.”
He blinks, her words seeming to bring with them understanding that I can’t comprehend. His eyes drift from my hands to the bloodstains on my dress. Finally, he lowers the dagger, and I allow myself the softest sigh of relief.
“Shall we hunt for the sapling, Your Highness?” a soldier calls from the bridge.
When this king—Zander—speaks again, it’s quietly. “No. Atticus and his men are already hunting for those who escaped. I will not risk more of you tonight. We shall return and regroup.” His eyes lift to mine, and his jaw—hard and angular—tenses.
“The water, Your Highness,” the man he called Boaz says, his voice low and laced with warning.
Zander moves impossibly fast, swiping the tip of his blade across my palm.
I cry out as it bites into my skin, more from the surprise than pain—I’m too shocked to feel much of anything. In the moonlight, I watch my blood seep out in a trickle.
“Bring her,” he orders, and then, gathering his sister under his arm, he guides her up the steep embankment.
My trip is nowhere near as gentle. I struggle to keep up with Boaz half dragging me through the mud past mounted, armed soldiers. There must be at least fifty of them, fanned out, their weapons drawn and their eyes on the surroundings as if preparing for an ambush. Any hope of escape is gone.
Boaz locks his arm around my waist and hauls me onto his horse’s back along with him. “Attempt to flee, and I will gladly cut you down,” he warns, adding quietly, “again.” Whoever they think I am, they believe they killed me once. They won’t balk at doing it twice.
He barks an order, and the soldiers form a perimeter around the horse that carries Zander and Annika. Another barked order sets them in motion. We move forward in unison, racing along the dirt road, Boaz’s metal-clad arms serving as an effective cage, the hooves pounding against the ground. My bones rattle but I barely notice, too focused on what might happen next.
We round a bend and head toward a vast gate that opens upon our approach. Dark figures stand sentry along the top of the wall, their arrows nocked.
We pass through, and I get my first glimpse of what’s beyond the labyrinth of cedar hedge.
Fire and chaos.
My eyes widen as I try to process the strange spectacle. I’ve stepped back in time. The open space past the gate tapers off toward a narrow cobblestone street ahead, lined with two- and three-story brick-and-stone buildings, their roofs pitched at various angles, their windows small and mismatched. Lanterns cling to posts and walls, the flames shimmering within providing the only light beyond that from the moons above. There isn’t a car in sight, or even a street sign.
In the air, the stench of smoke hangs thick, and the wails of despair ring frequent.
I gape in horror as we begin the steady march forward in single file, the horses’ hooves clacking, past armed soldiers whose faces are smeared with ash, dirt, and blood. To my right, slain bodies lie heaped on a wagon, the draft horses chomping on a bale of hay while they await orders to pull. More bodies are added to the pile.
I’ve seen dead people before—frozen in bus shelters, overdosed behind a dumpster, stabbed inside a cardboard box—but never so many at once.
Up ahead, a group of people huddle together, some with soot-covered cheeks, others with terror in their eyes as they watch a nearby building smolder, the flames dancing in defiance as people toss buckets of water at them.
A child crouches next to the body of a man, sobbing as she grips his hand. My chest constricts at the sight.
“What happened here?” I hear myself ask out loud.
Boaz snorts. “The Ybarisans happened. You happened.” He releases the reins and a moment later, a heavy blanket drops over my head, blocking my view. “It’s best they don’t see that we’ve brought you back into the city walls. Emotions are running high tonight. We wouldn’t want anyone taking away the satisfaction of exacting retribution from His Highness. I wonder what punishment will befit the woman who poisoned a king and queen and plotted to murder an entire royal bloodline? Sending you back to Ybaris in pieces for your treacherous father to ponder would certainly deliver a message. Though, I imagine the king would wish to keep your head. We wouldn’t want you somehow returning from the dead again.”
I focus on my breathing, inhaling the mixture of leather, pine shavings, and hay in the blanket’s wool as my stomach threatens to expel its contents. The asshole’s trying to scare me. That’s all this is.
“Make way for the king!” a soldier shouts.
The horses move forward at a steady trot, and I listen to the cries of anguish as we pass, my own hot tears streaking down my cheeks.
Chapter Seven
I stumble blindly up the endless set of stairs, Boaz’s viselike grip on my arm the only thing keeping me on my bare feet. Only when we reach a landing does he remove the blanket from my head. He shoves me forward.
I falter several steps before tripping over the hem of my dress and falling, smashing my knee against the stone floor. I bite back my howl.
“You will explain yourself.” He tosses the blanket onto the ground beside me.
Gritting my teeth through the pain, I drag myself to the farthest corner from him like the wounded animal I am, and quickly survey my new surroundings. He’s brought me to a semicircular room with nothing but a small pile of furs over hay on one side and a bucket on the other. A small opening in the wall reveals the night sky.
Boaz fills the doorway, his helm removed and tucked under his arm. He’s older than I expected for a man with such strength, a dusting of light gray touching his cropped, mouse-brown hair and frown lines zagging across his forehead. A streak of blood paints his golden cheek. More streaks coat his breastplate. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Do not toy with me,” he growls. “I put that arrow through your heart. I saw you fall in the rose garden. You were dead.”
An arrow in the rose garden …
I recall the blood-soaked weapon I picked up. Is he saying that was my blood? That he shot me with that? I peer down at the dark stain in the bodice where the material appears torn. The throb in my chest is not nearly as sharp as it was when I awoke, but it still hurts. But I came to in the cedar maze. How did I get there? I must have crawled. But he didn’t shoot me …
“How are you alive!” Boaz’s deep voice ricochets off the stone, severing my wandering thoughts. He charges forward, his armor clanging with each step.
“I don’t know, but I’m not who you think I am!” I curl into a ball, wrapping my arms around my head, bracing for an assault. When it doesn’t come, I hazard a glance upward.
He studies me through narrowed eyes. “I do not know what new deception you are concocting. Perhaps you think you can buy time until you are rescued by your accomplices? It will not work. Muirn is dead. The insurgents have either been killed, caught, or have fled the city. No one is coming to free you.” He spins on his heels and marches out, slamming the barred door behind him.
I listen to his footfalls fade down the steps, waiting until they’re beyond earshot before I allow myself a sigh of relief. Though there is nothing to be relieved about. I’m in a predicament that I can’t begin to figure a way out of. I should have run like that man said. I’d be living with Annika’s death, but I’d be alive and not in this cell. Boaz’s threats of dismemberment did what he intended. I’m terrified.
And my hand throbs. I cringe as I inspect the sizable, deep gash across my palm. That will take at least ten stitches to close, maybe more, and something tells me they aren’t in a rush to fetch a doctor for me. I need to staunch the blood.
The hem of my dress is ripped. Using my teeth and my good hand, I tear off a strip and wind it around my injury as best I can, trying to ignore the dirt that’s begging to climb into my w
ound. People have lost limbs from basic infections. Sometimes more. A homeless woman who lived down by the Hudson—we called her Sally Rivers—cut her thumb on a tin can and later died of sepsis.
I pull myself off the hard stone floor and head to the tiny window to get a better grasp on my surroundings. Boaz has locked me in a tower, I realize with dismay. The top of a tall tower, the ground at least a fifty-foot drop. Even if I could fit through the opening, I’d break every bone in my body jumping. Fitting my head into the small space, I spot a helmet. A soldier guards the entrance.
Boaz marches across an enormous courtyard with purpose, pausing to speak to two men who are busy hauling logs and dumping them in a pile, directing them with a pointed finger and words I can’t decipher. Aside from them, I don’t see anyone else. It’s quiet here—far more so than along the city streets we passed through.
Despite the warm summer air, this cell is cool, and my dress is sopping wet from the river. My teeth chatter as I attempt to ring water from the countless layers of skirts using my uninjured hand. I can’t help but chastise myself for it. But death by hypothermia or pneumonia might be preferential to whatever they have planned for me.
When I can’t squeeze another drop of water, I gather up the blanket Boaz left, finding an odd comfort in the earthy smell. The pile of hay layered with sheepskin is my bed, I guess? I’ll admit, I’ve slept on worse, but it’s still unappealing.
There is nothing to do now but stare at my muddy feet and wait.
A faint scraping sound carries from somewhere within the tower nearby, prickling the hair on the back of my neck. I move cautiously toward the cell door, searching the darkness beyond the bars. Across the landing is another cell.
“Hello?” I hold my breath, listening intently. Might there be someone hiding within the shadows who can fill me in on where the hell I am? “Hello?” I call again, louder.
A rat scurries out between the bars, startling me. It halts abruptly when it sees me standing there and then veers down the stairs. Otherwise, no one answers.
I test my cell door with a push and a shake. It rattles noisily but does not budge, confirming that it is locked.
I’m trapped and utterly alone, save for the rodents.
How did it come to this?
Moonlight reaches in through the window to bathe the makeshift bed in its silver glow. How many others have waited for punishment beneath that light? Wrapping the blanket tighter around myself, I pick through everything Sofie told me in her frantic march to the vault, and the insanity since I woke up in a maze.
Sofie was adamant that these people couldn’t find out who I am. What I am. If they do, I won’t survive. But this version of Romeria they think I am? Apparently, she killed a king and queen and started a war in their city. I’m pretty sure they’re going to kill me anyway.
I study the ring she slipped onto my finger. I thought the gem dull, but beneath the moonlight, it shimmers. She said this would protect me, and maybe it will. I still don’t understand how it lit up like that in the river, but I guess I’ll have to add that question to a long list of events that doesn’t make sense.
Maybe I’m losing my mind like my father did. Is this what he feels like? To this day, he is adamant that he sees the truth unfolding before him, and yet everyone around him insists on a different version. I mean, soldiers with swords and a medieval city no one knows of? Two moons? I’m seeing it with my eyes, but have I created all of this in my mind? Is this what it feels like to suffer from delusions that are so vivid, you can’t possibly accept them as false?
I remember Sofie driving that jagged black horn through my chest, and yet Boaz insists he shot me with an arrow. We both remember two versions of a truth that would explain why my chest aches and my gown is stained in blood, and yet neither of those explanations seems plausible.
Is any of it true?
With shaky fingers, I shift the blanket away. As absurd as this dress may be with all its layers and pomp and cleavage-baring style, it must have been stunning before it was ruined. Whoever made it spent countless hours stitching swirls and flowers in golden thread.
The bodice is stiff and formfitting, and it takes effort and the removal of a sleeve to peel the material past the swell of my breast so I can better examine the tender spot in the dusky light. I grimace at the mottled, deep-purplish red mark. I was expecting to find a gash, and yet my skin isn’t broken. It looks like nothing more than a nasty bruise.
But I remember that horn piercing—
“You heal fast for someone who was dead.”
I startle at the voice, yanking the blanket up to cover myself, my cheeks flushing. I recognize that chilly, calm tone. It’s the king. Zander. How did he sneak in without making a sound? And how long has he been standing in the shadows, watching me?
A key rattles the lock.
My panic swells as the door swings open with a yawning creak. He ducks as he steps through. Gone is the armor, exchanged for a sleek black ensemble, including a jacket that meets the boots at his knees. Without a helm covering most of his face, I see that he’s young—older than me, but younger than I’d picture a king to be. Not that I’ve ever given the age of a king much thought. The rest of his olive-skinned features are as hard and angular as his jaw, framed by a mane of golden-brown hair that sweeps backward off his face in waves, reaching his nape.
Cold eyes bore into me as he approaches, his hands hanging at his side, next to the scabbard that holds his sword. The jeweled dagger is also within reach, strapped to his thigh.
The thief in me wonders if I could relieve him of the smaller weapon without his notice. But the reason I succeed at depriving people of their belongings is because they don’t suspect me. Zander was a split second away from driving that dagger through my chest earlier because he suspects me of a great deal worse than theft. He thinks I murdered his parents.
That I’m still alive is a miracle.
“Stand,” he commands, stopping a mere foot away, his hands flexing.
I oblige, not wanting to give him an excuse to kill me on the spot.
He seemed a titan earlier in all that armor. Now, he looms over me, tall and broad-shouldered, but not inhumanly so. He’s no less daunting, though. And he is to be king. Even if this place and these people mean nothing to me, I sense the aura of power radiating from him. An arrogance.
His piercing gaze has settled on me. I struggle to maintain composure, focusing on the lapel of his jacket as I scramble to find the right words to convince him I’m not the Romeria he thinks I am.
He reaches for a corner of the woolen blanket, and his intentions quickly become clear.
On instinct, I curl my arms tighter against my body, and spear him with a glare of warning.
His eyebrow arches. “So now you’re modest around me?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know. Show me the wound. Now.”
I’m nowhere strong enough to fight him off if he forces himself on me, and I’d rather have some control of the situation. Reluctantly, I lower the edge of the blanket, just far enough that he can see my bruised skin and nothing more. Not that he didn’t already get a good look, lurking within the shadows.
I tense as he reaches out, grazing his fingertip across where something injured me, horn or arrow. Despite his obvious hatred for me, his touch is gentle.
And despite my terror, a shiver courses through my body.
After a long moment, he pulls away. He turns his back to me and begins pacing around my tiny cell.
I take the moment to adjust my dress, wincing from the trouble.
“You’ve been busy these past weeks, playing the benevolent charmer, seeking peace between our people, all while plotting to wipe out my entire family. Don’t bother trying to deny it. We’ve questioned your servants, the ones who survived. They all confessed. And quickly, I might add.”
I have servants?
“You succeeded at killing my parents. Atticus na
rrowly missed an arrow through his heart, and Annika was certainly dead until you rescued her. I can’t figure that one out, but I’m sure you have your reasons. Perhaps a goodwill gesture when you realized you were being pursued? Still, I’m surprised you didn’t put up a fight.”
Put up a fight—by myself—against fifty soldiers on horses?
His heel scrapes the stone as he pivots to face me. “How was I to go? Poison as well? Or perhaps a well-placed blade while I lay next to you, sated and oblivious?”
I want to deny everything and claim my innocence, but I bite my tongue. The more he talks, the more I’ll learn. So far, I know his parents are survived by three children, and it sounds like Zander and I might have been a couple. In that case, the snipe about my modesty around him makes sense.
But what exactly were we to each other?
My gaze drifts to his mouth, to a full set of lips. Have I kissed them before?
Have those piercing eyes already seen everything beneath this dress?
Have we woken up, jumbled in each other’s limbs?
It’s disorienting to stand before a man who I have no familiarity with when he seems overly familiar with me. A man who accuses me of murdering his loved ones, with ample evidence, apparently.
“Did your father know about this scheme when he bargained with mine? Because I see Neilina’s name written all over it. Not that it matters. Unfortunately for all of you, your carefully laid plans fell apart when my parents decided to have their repast before the ceremony instead of after.” His jaw tenses. “Who within these walls conspired with you? I know you had aid, beyond that of Lord Muirn’s. Someone who knew our schedules, knew how to get past the guards. I want to know who betrayed my family. Who betrayed Islor?”
I steady my voice. “I didn’t conspire to kill—”
“Who helped you!” he roars, his hand flexing toward his dagger.
I shrink back. There’s no use. He’s already convinced of my guilt, and he won’t listen to me if I keep offering him denials. I need to find some other way to give him the truth. “Sofie.”