“He isn’t here anymore,” the prince says. “It was a brief meeting. But he mentioned a part of your gift I suppose I’d forgotten. You don’t just open portals and will the thing where to take you. You use farsight. A magickal mechanism that can pinpoint a locale, sure and true. And yet,” he shrugs, “we mysteriously keep portaling to places within Quezira. Funny that.”
“You are his puppet,” I say, all but spitting the words, surprised that they are somehow allowed to fall from my lips.
“No, I am his servant.”
“Or his slave.”
He sighs. “A slave requires unwillingness. I am quite willing to abide your father’s wishes for resurrection. He will ensure that I reign over Tiressia when the time comes. We will be a force.”
“He told you that? And you believed him?” I laugh, but only to hide my sadness. I can hardly believe those words just came from his mouth, a man who would’ve forsaken a throne at all costs many moons ago.
His face darkens. “I’m going to give you one warning, Fleurie, and only one. You have seven days to portal us into the City of Ruin, to Mount Ulra, but that is all. We made a deal, and your deception breaks it. All I need to do is refuse any further efforts to fulfill the bargain, and you’ll end up back in Yura’s pits, where I’ll leave you to rot for a very miserable eternity. So I suggest you prepare.”
Defiance fills me, but my ruse has come to a crossroads. I either give in and help the prince resurrect the vilest creature I have ever known, or I suffer a life of agony, alone in darkness, for an infinity.
I can’t see a way out of this. And the truth is, I already know he wins. I know that I will take him to Mount Ulra, and that I will portal Thamaos’s bones back to this very room. I know that more will be asked of me too. Soon, I’m sure. I’d just hoped that somehow, the future once revealed to me might’ve been wrong.
But it wasn’t. And now the pain truly begins.
56
RAINA
Fleurie abandons the prince’s shadows and steps into the night with Bronwyn Shawcross and a guard at her sides.
Having never met her—only having seen her through Colden’s eyes—I wasn’t certain I would be able to see her. But she appeared plainly enough.
All I could make of the conversation was the dread and bitterness she felt, the sadness and anger, the worry and loathing. But it was still a conversation at midnight, one she was clearly summoned to and didn’t want to attend. I cannot help but wonder what was said.
I leave her and bleed into the waters to see Colden. He’s asleep in his new bed in the dungeon, his pretty face cast in the golden torchlight.
“He looks so innocent,” I sign, and my sister busts into laughter.
Alexus smiles, and I remember him using that very descriptor when he first told me Colden and Fia’s story in the cave. But I don’t need their reaction to know better. I’ve met him, and I’ve seen him fight.
Though I can’t believe I’m thinking it, I sign, “I wish I had seen him wield his power before Neri stole it.”
My sister, trying to contain her laughter, goes stock-still. “His power,” she says, as if she didn’t read my hands correctly.
I give her a strange look. “Yes. His power. Over ice and frost and snow.”
She blinks, as though a revelation just dropped into the depths of her mind, and glances at the shadowy alcoves of the temple ruins, where Joran vanished earlier.
“Gods, Nephele,” Alexus says, being facetious, “have you forgotten the man already? Is Joran getting to you that badly?”
She tosses a handful of sand at him, and he jerks to the side to miss it, laughing at her. The way she glares at him, her head tilted, her brow flat, makes me smile. They’re like brother and sister sometimes, the way Hel and Finn used to be.
Nephele waves her hand at my scrying dish. “Go on. Ignore me, I’m only… thinking.”
Alexus laughs again and gets up to stoke the fire as I bleed to see General Hammerin Vexx.
Not to my surprise, Gavril is with him, that fucking bastard. But I can’t even think about that sorcerer as they talk because there’s something about Vexx. Something that makes me view him from the outside.
His expression is colder than I’ve ever seen, his grin even more delightedly cruel than in the ravine. He laughs, tossing his head back with malevolent glee I feel in my soul.
Suddenly, he looks out over the dark sea, toward the bowsprit. His grin spreads into an evil smile, and a cold wave comes over me, chills so brutal they make my skin hurt.
I dip back inside Vexx’s viewpoint, expecting to see the sharp spar at the front of the boat pointing toward the open ocean and an eastern, midnight sky.
