There it was again, that uncertainty that writhed like a shadow across her face.
Ramson pushed deeper. “What do you think he would do to you if he found out you’d interfered in his great plans to gain a stronghold over the Cyrilian Empire?”
“You’re lying,” said Sorsha, but her breathing came too quickly, and her eyes were too wide.
You have much more to learn, little sister,Ramson thought. Out loud, he only said, “Do you really want to find out?”
Their gazes clashed, hers the bitter black of their father’s, and Ramson’s the sharp hazel of his mother’s.
Sorsha’s eyes narrowed in cunning, and Ramson found an exact mirror of himself reflected in his half sister’s face. “Guards!” she shouted. “Surround them! We’ll take them to the Blue Fort.” And then, in a lower voice so that only Ramson could hear, she hissed: “Ifound you. If I take you and your whore empress to Daddy Dearest, I get the credit.”
The soldiers hidden on rooftops and behind houses and alleyways now came into view. They stepped out of the coiling mist, wrapped in leathers and decked in metals. Ramson caught the flashes of the Bregonian insignia—a roaring seadragon—on their chests.
Sorsha whipped her cloak around her, metal boots and swords clinking as she stalked past them. “Follow me,” she said brusquely, and the Royal Guards turned on their heels and swept after her like a wave.
In the silence, the reality of his situation sank in. He’d just bartered his way back to the place to which he’d sworn never to return. To see the man he’d left behind in another life.
The sound of boots drew farther from him, and it occurred to Ramson that this was his last chance to run. He’d come to Bregon to see an end to Alaric Kerlan and to take Goldwater Port and the rest of what Ramson had built over the years.
This wasn’t part of the deal.
Ramson turned and met Ana’s gaze as she strode over and pressed a hand to his bleeding wound. Her touch both unmoored him and anchored him.
“Farrald,” she said quietly, looking up at him. Her hands, still bare, became ribbed with black veins as she applied her Affinity to his wound. “Admiral Roran Farrald.” Her gaze snapped to his, crimson, a question burning in them.
He looked away, his breathing going shallow with her so close, her fingers curling against his skin.
He could tell she was gathering her thoughts, trying to parse her emotions into logic. “I read in the books the Bregonian Admiral had a daughter. I didn’t know…You didn’t tell me…” She trailed off, and he would have preferred her anger to the mixed sympathy on her face.
“They wouldn’t have written me into history books,” Ramson said shortly. “I’m his bastard son.”
She fell silent for several moments, her forehead creased. Her hand was still warm on his wound, his blood crusted all over her skin. The bleeding had stopped. “And you were going to keep this from me forever?” Her words were as sharp as blades.
His laugh was bitter. Ramson flung her hand from him and turned to follow the Royal Guard. “Ana, you’re the heiress to the world’s most powerful empire,” he said. “There was never going to be a forever.”
Ramson followed close on Sorsha’s heels. Even when she walked, his half sister had an erratic sort of stagger that made her appear almost drunk. She wove in front of him like a phantom, mist clinging to her.
Behind, Ana, Linn, and Kais followed quietly.
As they passed through the narrow alleyways and curving streets, the city came alive in the shadows of Ramson’s memories, and it was as though he had been plunged back in time. The rough-hewn stone gilded with touches of brass and bronze, the multistoried buildings stacked high, the smell of ale and steel in humid air.
Another thought came to him then, one that sharpened his gaze and honed his senses.
Kerlan was somewhere in this kingdom.
He had never planned, so long as he lived, to ever return to the Blue Fort, or to see the monster that was his father again. But it seemed the gods had thrown them on a collision course. There was no escaping the reckoning that had been due seven years ago.
The thought—the inevitability of it all—steadied him like steel. He would play along for now, return to the Blue Fort and help Ana with her plan. As soon as he had a chance, he would leave to do what he’d come here for in the first place.
They turned, and the alleyway ended sharply, cobblestones giving way to the lap of waves from another branch of the canal.
Sorsha stopped, and her procession of guards halted behind her. Ramson watched them carefully. This wasn’t the way to the Blue Fort as he knew it.
A foghorn sounded, and a boat cut through the veiled gray mist. Not a gondola, but a steel-plated barge, masts reaching to the sky like daggers. The sails billowed midnight blue, a gold Bregonian seadragon roaring proudly like a phantom from the mists.
Sorsha barked rapid-fire orders and a small gangplank was lowered. She threw them a glance. “You stay in the back with that beggar empress of yours,” she sneered, and boarded with her escorts.
The barge was small enough to navigate the winding canals of Sapphire Port, yet large enough to fit over two dozen people. Ramson swept his gaze over the Royal Guards as he boarded, noting the dark blue uniforms and the bronze seadragon badges glinting on their chests, indicating their affiliation to the Navy. There were three, however, dressed in livery of a blue so pale that it appeared white. Their pins bore a seadragon, a stallion, and an eagle, all enclosed in a circle.
