So dramatic, I write.Consider me intrigued. You going to elaborate?
I can nearly feel his hand cradling over mine as he yanks the pen back.Brat.
We made a vow, out with it,I remind him and yet the pen is slow, hesitant.
It’s something your mother said. About my father’s blood.It could be a trick of the zenith light on my deck, but I swear the pen trembles. Draven continues,I started thinking back and my father was from an ancient royal line. He was also the first mortal leader to be able to get a small group of immortals to joinhim. But how could they have broken their oaths? How could a sympathetic druid have wiped your memories?
You think he had the Cup?
It may have been passed down to him. I need you to go into my room and check a book. It’s emerald, with gold foil along its spine. It’s titled The Rise and Fall of Mortal Kings. There’s a bookmark.
I cross the hall to his room. It lacks all warmth without him here. But it smells like him, and I eye a waffle-knit blanket on his bed, making a note to steal it later. I set down the pen and paper and grab the rolling ladder, looking for the tome. Finally, I find it and take it to the table by his fireplace.
The book is worn, and the page in question has a drawing of a tomb, a statue of a man on his knees with arrows in his back, leaning against a marble sword. Beneath him is a small bowl, for candles or coins. It’s titledThe Last Resting Place of Kieran Ceres, the Traitor King.
Traitor. The immortals would see him as such, but with what I know now about the Curse … he and my mother betrayed mortals, too.
I hesitantly take up my pen and a spare piece of paper.
I have the book.
Can you … draw at all?
My brows come together.Surprisingly, they didn’t teach it in Wraith school.
All right, smartass, just try to draw the collection bowl.
Hesitantly I sketch it. It’s oddly shaped, narrower than most bowls, with ancient carvings on the side.
Oh dear gods.There’s a pause, then he picks up the pen, and I sit impatiently as he draws a clean-lined, finessed sketch, his movements easy, as opposed to my scribbling.
Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?I ask.
It’s the same, right?
I look at the drawing of Oathbreaker, comparing it to the bowl at his father’s grave site. Not a bowl, but a cup, half buried. The images … are very similar.
I think so. Draven … if you’re wrong …
I’m not.The ink bleeds against the page, like he forgot to pick up the pen.I’ll be out of touch a few days looking into this. But … Rune. I need you to know. It’s been fucking misery being stuck here without you.
I don’t know what to say, so I write the only true words I know.I’ve missed you too.
IT TAKES A FEWworrisome nights to hear back.
I got it.His letters aren’t as neatly written as usual. They’re shaky. He just had to defile his father’s grave, to pull the Arcadian Artifact from marble and concrete. I can’t imagine his headspace.
Are you all right?
There’s a pause.I will be. I don’t want to think about it.
My thumb runs the length of the pen, wishing it was his hand instead. That I could have been there with him.
With this, we can make things right. Unshackle our bonds.Maybe it’s a small comfort. But we won’t be forced to keep our loyalties to his father.With the wand we can summon an army.
He replies with,You don’t know how sexy you are when you think like a queen.
A heat pulsates between my legs and my mind flashes to our time in that apartment, as it so often does.
