Vaasa stood at the edge of the left hallway, eyes fixed on the wooden door she knew led into her father’s study.
This side of the quarters was far less panic inducing. When her father had died in his own bed, it had looked like illness. A fever, strange nightmares, thrashing at night. Then his body had simply… stopped.
But Vaasa knew that wasn’t the truth. That Ozik had done it.
Vaasa thought of the Settara, of the cool water and the way magic had felt in her abdomen. She took one step. Then another. Dread filled her chest. Still, she pretended that she walked along that shoreline. Thought only of that and the door.
Urgency—this desperate instinct torun—assaulted her. It felt as if someone stood behind her, knife in hand, ready to plunge it through her back. Like at any moment, her life would be claimed. She broke into a sprint down the long hallway, heaving down breath. It was irrational—there was no one chasing her, there was no real danger. But her body did not believe her mind. She gripped the handle and threw herself into the office.
Vaasa pressed her back to the door, taking deep breaths in and out. When she opened her eyes, her hands fell from the door behind her.
Bookshelves lined three of the four walls in the ample-sized office, a sliding ladder able to travel across them all. Black archways carved the center shelves and drew her eye, rows and rows of books studding the scene. A large russet leather chair sat next to the fireplace. The firebox had been well tended—with a flint and steel, Vaasa stoked a fire. She stood from her crouch and gazed around again, eventually staring at the dark wooden desk in the center of the room.
Her late brother hadn’t changed a thing. Vaasa wondered if Dominik had silently wanted to be more like their father than he’d let on. He’d had the opportunity to make this study anything he wanted it to be, yet her father’s golden hourglass still sat in the very left corner of the desk like a beacon to a life that no longer drew breath.
Vaasa ran her fingers over the cool surface, remembering a time when she had sat on the other side of this desk and spent hours translating correspondence her father’s soldiers had recovered from the once-unconquered center of Asterya. The correspondence had been written in code, making the dialect even more difficult for Vaasa to recognize, but the root language had been enough to uncover at least the purpose of the letters.
That same civilization had been reduced to ruins, and now the Karev family oversaw the territory from the castle her fatherhad built for them upon those grasslands. Lord Karev was one of many contenders who would be on his way, the smell of blood in the water bringing every shark to their shore.
Her hand grazed the bookshelf on the far-left side of the room, hand landing on an iron-hewn statue of an owl. She gripped its head and pulled, and like a lever, it cranked forward.
Vaasa pushed the shelf. It opened into a sinister tunnel, pitch-black. Her heart started to race again. Just as quickly as she’d opened it, Vaasa closed the entrance to one of the fortress’s escape routes. When her father had built this new wing and abandoned the old emperor’s quarters on the far side of the fortress, he’d demanded this exit be built. Should they ever be attacked and unable to hold the fortress, the passageway would grant their family a way out and eventually into a secret apartment they kept in the main city. As a teenager, Vaasa had abused the presence of the tunnel, knowing when her father wasn’t here and sneaking through it to meet Roman and his friends, disguised as anyone but herself. Her heart lurched into her throat.
They were all dead now.
Sitting in the oversized black leather chair just behind the oak desk, Vaasa began to thumb through each of the drawers. They contained various papers and notes on the happenings in each of Asterya’s provinces, including financial logs and the reports of their supplies. Despite herself, the gathering of information was a grounding of sorts. Her foolishness sank its teeth into her—she would need to commit this all to memory by the time the lords arrived if she had any hope of navigating the new political landscape. Most of it was boring, but she was already at a disadvantage. Given she couldn’t take the throne without marrying one of them, she would have to cling to any ounce of power she could wield. She didn’t know what would become of Asterya, but she couldn’t let it swallow her whole.
She took her own diligent notes, resorting to a notebook that felt foreign in her hands. She briefly thought of her own notebook, the one Melisina had helped her find that still wove her and Reid together, but the memory was too sharp. Too jagged.
She forced down a deep breath, then another, then another. She could do this.
Vaasa tucked each piece of information about Asterya away as if it would save her. She had always found solace in knowledge. Knowledge was where power lay.
Tiptoeing out of the office, Vaasa peered into the hallway to check for any remaining attendants. There were none. They must have retired for the evening. She slipped back into the office and sat in the chair, taking in a calming breath.
Quiet as a mouse, she used her fingers to delicately trace over the lines on the bottom of the desk. They caught upon the faintest groove. Vaasa dug her nail into the slit opening, and with a little prying, the false bottom of the desk unlatched.
There was nothing except a dark-brown leather journal tied together with a golden string. Her father had kept his most valuable notes here—another secret between her and him. He had never shared this much with Dominik, paranoid that his own son would come to claim the throne before he was ready to release it. Andrej Kozár had not seen Vaasa as a threat, so he didn’t realize when he’d turned her into one.
Seemingly, Dominik had found this drawer. He had replaced the contents with something of his own. Unsuspecting and unlabeled—if the journal hadn’t been hidden in this secret compartment, she would easily have passed over it. Softness pressed to her fingertips, and she knew the notebook had been well-worn, its leather soft and supple. Tentatively, she opened the first page, eyes scanning over the worn parchment.
She knew the bold lines of her brother’s handwriting, had looked upon it more times than she cared to count during their shared tutelage. But his notes were accompanied by detailed charcoal sketches, somewhat of a signature of his. Art. It began with flora and fauna found around the fortress, proof of a young boy’s hand and imagination. Notes turned to fantasy—the pages were littered with things Vaasa had never seen but had read in the folklore she’d acquired from the territories her father eventually conquered. Rabbits with horns, deer with the tails of a fish, even a wolf with wings jutting from its shoulders like a mighty god.
Keep your head in the clouds, her father once hissed at a twelve-year-old Dominik,and you’ll lose it.
Their mother had glared at Vaasa then, at the place she’d perched on the edge of her father’s desk, Dominik narrowing his eyes along with her. Pride had coursed through Vaasa at being the one who made their father proud. Now it just made her feel ashamed.
With the journal in her hands, every memory Vaasa had of Dominik became tinged with something else. He’d been much like their great-grandmother Freya, hadn’t he? The paintings on the second floor of the Veragi witch’s tower flashed behind Vaasa’s eyes. The white willow tree Freya had illustrated in every season, a mark of Vaasa’s heritage in Icruria. In Mireh. The place Vaasa had traced her maternal bloodline to.
Vaasa lowered her eyes.
This entire time, Vaasa had seen her mother’s discovered lineage as her own, as belonging to only her. But Dominik shared her blood. What was hers was his, too, down to the bloody legacy of their father and the death of their mother. And in all that darkness, he’d once been a boy who loved to draw.
And she had murdered him. Severed his head and thrown it into a crowd.
Vaasa’s hands shook, and she debated closing the notebook. She wasn’t certain she had any right to look upon it. What she had done had been the only way to save her life, she reminded herself. He’d intended to kill her.
Hero or villain, hero or villain, her mind whispered. It was a two-faced coin, and she didn’t know which side she had landed on.
