While the goblin with the shock-white hair stared slack-faced at me, as if I were an apparition likely to vanish without warning, Cosette argued with the judges.She puffed out her chest and claimed that Alonso had no authority over this tribunal.According to the vicious parvnit, the magistrate should sentence me to death right there and then, and order my sentence carried out immediately to boot.Execution, she insisted, becauseof course she did.
If Death weren’t so openly prejudiced against small, squeaky creatures, I would have guessed Cosette was working for him, striving to meet a quota through the unfriendly end of a guillotine.
Our audience bubbled with excitement.Zaragans had an instinct for drama.As if they heard a silent call to bear witness, the crowd multiplied, nearly filling the small courtyard and spreading onto another raised platform with a gallows and guillotine, its blade glinting beneath smears of old blood.
I ignored their attention and the curiosity of the prisoners at my sides, and kept my eyes on the goblin’s.I’d never seen this particular goblin before.Yet I felt as if I could drown in the big, dark, pupil-less eyes that reminded me so much of my servant Marina’s.
If she were here, she wouldn’t hesitate to give Cosette a smackdown.It wouldn’t matter that violence from a goblin was forbidden under the strictest terms.
For me and only me, Marina always broke the rules.Even Teo was a far second.
The fae-judge banged her gavel.Cosette rose her voice to be heard over the crisp clanging as of a bell.
Perilous emotion swelled then crashed inside me, over and over like the waves of the ocean I’d so barely survived.
Too much had happened in a shockingly short amount of time.Too much was drastically different from what it should be.The stakes were too high, Teo too far away, if he lived at all.
Since my shattering heart had first jerked me back, the answers I so desperately needed were almost,almostwithin reach.Alonso would certainly know where Teo was.If he told me Teo was alive despite our broken connection to each other, I’d believe him.
It would be true.
But Alonso was no drake and had never been one.His path wasn’t to rise through the rungs of the aristos but to be born already a prince heir of the D’Arco dynasty.
There was no one in the entire Opalese World with greater authority than Alonso.Even his queen, Rafaela, ultimately had to submit to him since it was his blood and not hers that sang the melody attuned to this land.
And yet, while Cosette argued, and the goblin stared, and the judges and crowd and other prisoners darted looks my way, none of them suggested that the goblin had gotten his title wrong.No one explained how Alonso might be adrakewhen he’d been destined to be aking.
When the goblin’s eyes welled, tears pricked my own.Shocked to discover myself about to cry in front of an audience, I sucked in fortitude and blinked savagely.
Rafaela might be second in rank to her husband, but her unyielding expectations and unforgiving ruthlessness knew no equal.If she heard I’d been crying, she’d march me up the steps to the guillotine herself and tuck my head close to the catching pail.
Weakness was a mortal sin.
Excuses were more weakness.
After an irritating amount of gavel clanging and calls to order, a sullen Cosette led me to the palace with an entourage comprised of half a dozen guards—all careful to keep their weapons beyond my reach—and the goblin with the emotional eyes.
My hands were cuffed behind my back and bound with shadole faithum, and my power was still dampened.
I was a splinter of my usual self.
No blood power.
No Teo.
Weakened by my captivity.
Even so, the white-haired goblin kept casting expectant looks at me, as if he knew I was no meremurderess, as if I were going to break myself free at any moment.At one point, he arched a bare brow at me that seemed to demand,Well?
“Do I know you?”I half-mouthed, half-whispered over the sure-footed steps of the soldiers climbing the cobbled path to the palace and the annoying buzz of Cosette’s wings.
“Shut up,” snapped the guard closest me, a brawny human who was too thickly muscled to be as agile as I was.
Behind him, the goblin smiled, and recognition sparked in that gesture.Where did I know him from?
“You seem famil?—”
The guard backhanded me on the mouth.
