Niko shrugs listlessly, his gaze sliding from me to the lantern. He blinks at it slowly, like now that it’s caught his attention, he can’t figure out how to tear it away. “And we all know…death is the worst thing in the universe.”
It takes me a few moments of silence, and just as many sips from the bottle, to recognize the irritation pricking at the back of my neck as my own.
“By the star, Niko, are we really doing this right now?”
Now, he blinks at me instead of the lantern as if I’ve bewildered him just as greatly. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“That’s because you’re a bastard,” I huff. “A bastard who has been more than my captain and my king. You have been my brother. You have been my best friend. It was not the Aeternalis I followed through that orphanage window. It was you, Niko…a little runt of a boy who spoke of family like he knew what it should mean. And you always have. The greatest things in my life have come from my loyalty to you, and I won’t allow you to shame me for it, just because you cannot see past your own pain.”
My words appear to sober him, or at the very least, steal whatever self-aggrandizing sentiment he had at the ready. His mouth opens and then closes, before his head sags into his hands.
His shame is heavy like iron, but as viscous as the mud of a bog and the same shade of brown. It soothes the rankles of my irritation, a bitter reminder of everything Niko still shoulders.
I set the bottle down on the table. “Now…are you going to tell me what the hell happened, or should I begin the world’s most depressing guessing game?”
Niko considers this for far too long, before sniffing haughtily and leaning back into the couch. “You said you were going to brood too. So you first.”
I roll my eyes.
Niko waves his hand with a flourish. “Allow me a moment to ruminate in someone else’s misfortune please, Samuel.” And then, “If you’d do me the kindness.”
I let out a disbelieving laugh. “Whatever pleases His Most Royal Pain in the Ass.”
Niko scowls. “You’ve spent too much time with Willa. I’m sure she’s had the title etched on a placard somewhere.”
“If the title fits.”
He tilts his head in frank assessment, before letting out a beleaguered sigh. “This guessing game is rather one sided,” he pouts, winding a ribbon that’s slithered drunkenly to the floor back around his wrist. “As the sole cause of your misery has been the same for the last two centuries.”
I grin. “Well then, let’s move on to yours, shall we?”
Niko purses his lips and drags a hand through his hair. Silence stretches between us, and I simply sit in the cradle of it until he gives in, as he always does.
“Did you know I tried to warn her?” he asks finally, his voice quiet. “I tried to send her away from the island, even though it meant the death of Letum and the mainland.”
I didn’t know, but if Niko means to shock me, he fails. He loves with an intensity I’ve never witnessed in anyone else. It led me to follow him in his wildest of schemes, because I’ve watched the way he holds on to anything he deems as his.
“I warned her…what being their savior would cost.” He shakes his head with a rueful grimace, tugging thoughtlessly at anotherribbon. “But I hadn’t known the true price. I was reckless and desperate and arrogant, and now, there is no fixing it. There is no reversing it.”
He drops his head into his tattooed hands once more, grinding his palms roughly into his eyes.
“I should have fucking known better than to try to hold onto something beautiful when I’ve been fated to watch everything decay. My world, my body…and now Willa.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, my confusion palpable. “Willa isn’t decaying…she can’t die.”
I stare at his crumpled form, his defeat bitter on my tongue. In the three hundred years we’ve known each other, I’ve never tasted its like from Niko. When everyone else lost hope, the Carrion King has always been driven by something different: ruthless determination.
It was something not even the Aeternalis had ever been able to take from him, a steady flame that held strong against the currents of the universe. But it is extinguished now by his sorrow. Not for himself—but for our queen.
Our queen who has been plagued by her own shadow, strangled slowly by it each day as it feeds on her fear and shame.
“Do you mean—are you talking about her shadow?”
Niko nods miserably into the cradle of his hands.
“I thought it odd…it felt…” I search for the right word. “…I don’t know. Almost like a hole?”
He huffs a breath. “It is of the island, just like the Everlasting’s. We thought it a merry little magic trick as children, but it was a manifestation of Somnya. A way to draw him closer, to siphon his magic. Just as he did to so many others.”
