Venick’s hip felt hot and huge, but his head was worse. It pounded, agonizing. The angry voices battered. He wanted to say something to calm that anger.The pain, he would whisper.Please. Don’t fight.
He wondered if he had spoken aloud after all because there was sudden quiet. Then: a warm hand on his forehead. Callused. A hand he knew.
Sleep, she told him.
And he did.
THIRTY-SIX
Ellina stalked through the palace halls. Shadows rippled across the flagstone, soft and blue and grey. Dawn was coming. Outside the glassless windows the sky was clean and new. When the sun rose, the day would be brilliant.
The promise of its brilliance mocked her.
Ellina’s palm dug hard into her sword’s pommel. She was not brilliant or new. She was a looming storm. Rigid with fury. She had never known such anger.
An assassin with a poisoned dagger. Despite her bargain for Venick’s safety, despite the public stateroom agreement, someone had sent him. And Ellina feared she knew who.
“Where is my sister?” Ellina asked the first guard she could find. The elf turned, blinked once, then gave his answer. Ellina started to march away.
“If this is about the human,” the guard said to Ellina’s back, “he got what he deserved.”
Ellina recalled, as a young elf, admiring the skill with which elder elves could shut down their emotions. It was an art, she had always thought, a gift, the way they wiped their faces as smooth and still as glass. The queen was particularly gifted. Ellina used to spend hours studying her mother’s face, searching for even the slightest hint of feeling but finding only the queen’s composure, the queen’s control.
Ellina knew she looked nothing like that now. As she whipped around to face the guard, she could feel heat rising under her skin, the hot swell of it, the way it curled her lip in anger. In the tower, too, when she had found Venick dying on the stairs and ran to him and snarled at others to help, she knew how she must have looked: panicked, terrified…human.
Ellina understood the wrongness of this, yet she could not stop the rush of fury or the words that came next. “Speak ill of the human again,” she said, “and I will have you banished to the whitelands. Do you understand?”
There was no need for the guard to answer. Ellina had spoken in elvish; he knew her threat to be true.
???
Ellina found Farah where the guard said she would be: in the archives.
The room was cold and echoing, stacked with row upon row of books and scrolls. Torches and lanterns were not permitted near the parchment; instead, tall windows filtered in grey morning light. It streamed down in soft beams. The shadows were dense where the light did not touch.
Farah was there, tucked away between the stacks. She was speaking to another elf Ellina could not see—at least, not until Ellina came closer and that elf was revealed to her from behind the shelves.
“Ellina,” Raffan said when he spotted her. Surprise lifted his brows, smoothed his features. Gone in the next instant, settling back into the Raffan she knew best: flat eyes, flat lips, a hard stare. Haughty, around the edges. Maybe a little cynical, too, as he said, “To what do we owe this pleasure?”
The words dried on Ellina’s tongue. They dissolved bitterly and were swallowed.
Farah turned, and of courseherexpression did not change. “Sister,” she said, opening her palms in a gesture that might have been welcoming and was not.
And maybe it was that movement—the false warmth, the way the lie of it crawled over Ellina’s skin—that had her tongue working again. Had her sucking in a breath and splitting a smile—just as purposeful, just as false—as she replied. “I need to speak with you. Alone.”
“Alone?” Farah folded her arms. “I think whatever you have to say can be said in front of your bondmate.”
“Not this.”
“We are not children. What secrets must we keep among us?”
“You are heir to the throne,” Ellina replied. An acknowledgement. And a threat: “Are you saying you have no secrets?” Ellina’s smile was gone now. “None at all?”
Farah’s expression remained impassive, but her lighthearted tone—the false one she had been using—dipped into something colder. “Say what you have come to say.”
“You sent an assassin to kill Venick.”
“Many elves want the human dead. What makes you think it was me?”
