“Come with me. Please. We need you as queen, Coralys. It was your loss that started this madness.” He’s suddenly angry. His furious words gust hard into my face with his stinking breath. “Tradition be damned. Look what it got us. Look what madness has descended upon us.”
I can see what he means. He is no longer sane himself.
“I’ll take you to the boat,” I say calmly. “Why don’t I carry those maps?”
But he’s not willing to give them up. Instead, he leads me crab-like across one hall and then across to another, never taking a straight line but darting from doorway to doorway until we reach the gardener’s entrance. Then he grabs my arm and clings to me as we spill out onto the cobble courtyard.
I freeze.
Bodies litter the mosaic cobbles. Men and women lie where they fell in tangled garments and pools of fly-crusted blood. They look as though they were corralled here first.This explains the empty palace. To one side a guard tower is charred black and still smokes, and the smell of burning flesh hangs in the air. I gag and scramble to pull the tunic over my nose and mouth.
Gods have mercy. I see a face I recognize—a chambermaid—and look hastily away, blinking back tears. But they won’t be pushed away. They streak my cheeks and I’m forced to scrub at them with my palm.
“Here,” Turbote says. “This way. Hurry. They left the palace when there was resistance in the city, but they’ll be back to finish looting it, you can be certain.”
“Who is ‘they’? We had no enemies threatening us. We had no reason to fear.”
I can’t grasp that all this has happened while I have been in my new husband’s home. It makes no sense at all.
“What does it matter who they are?” Turbote’s voice is almost a wail. “Don’t be like Gherise.”
I shoot him a quick glance. Gherise is… was… another of my advisors. Usually a rival to Turbote.
“He thought he could ask those questions. He thought he could demand answers of the raiders. Last I heard, they killed him on the docks.”
He pulls me from the entry courtyard to the gardens. There are more bodies here and there is no avoiding them.
“Where is everyone?” I breathe. “Surely there are some others alive here?”
“Fled, or dead. They drove them to the city square,” Turbote says.
Now I am trembling just like him, my hands shaking badly, but it’s not until we come to the center of the garden overlooking the turbulent sea that I find my legs won’t carry me anymore.
We keep the anchor from the first ship of our people here in the center of the garden, where it is backdropped by the roar of the sea on the rocks. It held our people fast when first they came to this island and by tradition it will hold us fast until the end.
It is here still. Holding fast.
But lashed to its crusted frame is Delarte. He’s wearing my pearl belt and crown, though they are badly askew. His dead eyes are sightless. Crusted blood traces down his chin and soaks the front of his tunic.
“They didn’t even ask him any questions,” Turbote says, hands fluttering again. “Just took the tongue and left him to die. I hid. I hid and I can’t ever forgive myself for it.”
I wasn’t here.
And I can’t ever forgivemyselffor that.
I wipe my sudden tears away harshly. I don’t deserve the right to them.
There’s a sound in the bushes and I look around for a weapon. The bodies have been stripped of anything like one.
I fumble for the belt pouch with the knife in it. A poor weapon, to be sure, but better than nothing. Both the knife and something else fall to the cobbles and I lunge after them, catching the black pearl in the tear-slick fingers of one hand and the knife in the other. My fingers on the pearl feel hot. Ilook down at it and see a wisp of smoke curling out from its glossy surface.
I’m just finding my feet when an unfamiliar voice slices through the air.
“Decorative, to be sure, but it won’t last long in this heat. I prefer my monstrosities cast in bronze so that they last.”
Fear runs cold and sudden down my spine, down the backs of my legs, dragging my courage with it as I find myself face-to-face with a… creature. A thing of nightmares. It stands with a finger to its chin as it regards Delarte.
Turbote tugs at my sleeve, clearly blind to the monster, but I can’t seem to look away.
