The cut of Lord Vlacik’s blade.
Vaasa tried to stand. She searched for courage or strength or rationality, but could find none of them. The only thing left in her was the faint trickle of magic that seemed to wind around her abdomen. Ozik was there on the other side. It was a simmering power just below the surface, like a thin layer of gauze over a wound curdled with infection.
Vaasa shook. She rocked back and forth. Every time she thought she was ready to stand, her body simply… wouldn’t.
At some point, she rested her cheek upon the cold stone floor.
At some point, her body gave out completely.
At some point, she slept.
Vaasa had no taste for sunlight or crisp air or the way snow glistened when it fell. She had once known these as a reprieve, a moment of peace cut through the violence of her surroundings. But she did not long for peace anymore. She craved blood and steel cutting through skin and a cry so piercing it would bring the snow on the mountains plummeting down.
She stared at Ozik across the dinner table.
For a week now, he had forced her to hold court at the Sanctum like a pathetic stand-in for her father. She had met with the other members of her father’s advisory council and judicial body. For hours, she listened to their placating compliments and slimy reaches for power, all of them wondering if they would keep their positions when she took a husband. If there was a path to the salt. Half of them looked to Ozik for answers, the other half to her. This was uncharted territory—Vaasa wasn’t the emperor, but she was the closest thing to it, and they likely assumed she would have her eventual husband’s ear. Yet Ozik was a man. For many of them, that mattered more.
“Eat,” Ozik commanded, forcing Vaasa back into the present. His golden eyes didn’t budge from her, like a hawk’s focused on prey. “Take advantage of the quiet meals before the rest of the nobility arrives.”
Stained glass windows covered the perimeter of the room and soaked the table in a treacherous orange and red, the sunset bleeding through the patterns that overlooked the angry, churning ocean. A small feast was sprawled across the oaktable: a mild white fish drenched in a steaming broth made from golden leeks and bloodred beetroot, potatoes swimming alongside it, and a loaf of warm bread.
Vaasa picked up the fork. She speared a potato and brought it to her mouth, fighting against the urge to gag, but the taste of food made her want to vomit on the pretty plates and streaks of gold woven into the tablecloth. She did not deserve to eat so richly while her friend rotted in a dungeon.
“Have you reviewed the correspondence your brother left?” Ozik asked.
Vaasa kept her eyes on her food. She hadn’t set foot in her father’s office, and she wasn’t sure she intended to. She had no interest in this nation, no care for what became of it. Her only hope was that Reid would manage to get an army through the Loursevain Gap and obliterate any chance Asterya had of holding its territories.
And that she and Amalie would still be alive when he did.
A disbelievingtskrolled off Ozik’s tongue. “If you aren’t going to cooperate, perhaps I should give Lord Vlacik what he wants and marry you to him now.”
She narrowed her eyes, lifting her goblet to her mouth and taking a long drink as she considered her options. The simple truth was that she would slaughter Lord Vlacik and mark herself a traitor before she spent a single moment in his wedding bed. The act might condemn both Amalie and herself to death, but if their roles were reversed, Vaasa would willingly go to a burning stake before Amalie spent one night beholden to the lust of a man like that.
“If the lord is your choice, then so be it,” she muttered obstinately, standing from the table.
Without warning, her abdomen lit on fire, and magic was wrenched from wherever it hid within her. She choked on her wine and tried to move her hands, but they were caught,weighed down on the table by some invisible force. Slickness ran over her skin, the feel of Ozik’s raw magic slippery and wet. Breath pushed from her lips in harsh bursts, memories of her time in the prison sliding back into place and stealing her calm.
Her hands began to shake, and the absence of her power hit her like losing air. Something in her body clawed for it, nails sinking into the sides of her stomach and digging deeper and deeper to find that magic. But as she delved into herself, what she found wasn’t the hissing of a snake or the waves of the Settara or the wolf with bright white eyes.
It was just that single, shimmering cord that tied her to Ozik.
Everywhere she searched in her own body, she found the remnant of him there—attached to her, woven into the threads of her muscles and wrapped around her bones. One long string, tangled in so many places it had become a spiderweb. The deeper she pushed, the more of them there were. He had taken over the spaces where her magic used to reside and had replaced them with these…things. She found that she could run her own fingers upon them, pluck the threads like an instrument and create the wails of high and low notes, music in her mind and body. And as she did, she felt the ties between them tighten.
There was something there on the other side.
She reached for it. Something glowed crimson behind her eyes.
And then pain splintered down her spine. She was being ripped in two.
Vaasa choked, and her hands slammed against the table.
“Enough!” Ozik yelled.
Vaasa’s eyes flew open as she gasped in a breath. “What was that?” she demanded through the haze of her pain.
Ozik’s anger crawled across their connection, his emotions so clear to her, so easily perceptible. A large three-pronged serving fork that rested against the platter of meat in front of her slid offthe plate. Horror sliced into her. The fork turned itself over in midair, prongs pointing downward.
And then it dropped with terrifying speed and stabbed straight through Vaasa’s hand, exiting through her palm as muscles severed and bones cracked.
