“Good thing you’re no damsel, Starkeeper.” With a wink, he slings the weapon over his arm and flexes. “So you think I’m a beast?”
My grin is watery. “I thinkyouthink you’re beast.”
“Too late,” he says with an irreverent wink that reminds me of our first meeting here on these very grounds. “You already admitted that you like me. And we both know how you feel about my body. Especially when you commandeered it so well.”
Blushing at the innuendo, I shake my head. “You poor thing, you must have been so disoriented and confused that it scrambled your wits.” I break into a jog toward the citadel and the royal stables. “Try to keep up, will you? And use the muscle in your brain instead of the one between your—”
I cut off as the air around us is filled with blinding bright light. An enormous portal is opening in the courtyard... and I recognize the armed warriors pouring from it, including their leader. The telltale maroon stripe across her chest and the studs in her cheek slam into me like a boot to the gut. That’s the woman from the communications mirror—the one who reported to Vogon.
What the fuck are theScavsdoing here?
But I’m distracted by a group of Dahaka soldiers who are running our way from the opposite direction, shouting and waving their weapons. “Commander!”
Three of the men veer toward us, their arrows flying as they ward off the incoming wave of Scavs. I recognize Aran running next to a slight female soldier with her head down holding a brace of arrows on her back, both followed by the commander from Nyriell. He moves quickly for such a big man.
“We need to get you to cover, sir,” the commander rumbles.
I blink at Roshan. My gaze automatically drops to his clothing to see if he’s purloined another Dahaka uniform like he’d done in the Indraloka, but he’s dressed in plain brown trousers and a tunic tied with a yellow sash. He looks much like he did the first time I saw him on that courtyard wall... like a lowly gardener. But the commander knows he’s the Oryndhrian prince and not some foot soldier in their ranks so maybe it was a slip of the tongue in all the chaos.
A conflicted look crosses Roshan’s face just as the men reach him. “Sura, there’s something—”
The commander stops short of Roshan, grasping him by the shoulder. “This way,” he shouts. “We secured transport.”
“Scavs!” Aran shouts, holding on to a jadu crystal and sketching protection runes as we race down the start of the maze near the forge. I shake my head at our lack of foresight. The Scavs are controlled by Javed—he must have been using them as an extra layer of defense in case the Dahaka attacked. Of course they’d be here.
We reach a long wagon pulled by four horses and climb in. The female soldier offers me a seat, and I freeze as her face comes into view from beneath her hat. Happiness slams into me, and I grasp her forearm. “Clem,you’re alive! What are you doing here? How—?”
I break off as it takes my sluggish brain a second to understand that Clemshouldn’tbe here... in a warzone... wearing soldier’sgear. Unless it’s something to do with House Antares. But still... how is shehere?
“Clem?” I whisper, but her eyes fall away as she ducks to hide her face.
“Where are the rest of the men?” Roshan barks, making me jump and swing to him. “Report, Hamid.”
My brows rise at his curt tone, but the burly leader only nods. “Scattered. We took the victory in the courtyard, but we lost more than we bargained for. The Scavs caught us off guard in the open. We didn’t see them coming.” He stops, his face grave. “They’ve secured the king, Commander.”
A huge explosion detonates, this one much too close for comfort. Screams and shouts rend the air, but I hear nothing but that single devastating word falling from the man’s lips:commander.
My pulse pounds with the three-syllabled sound of it. The noises fade. The lights wink out. Everything goes still—dangerously still, like the eye of a sand cyclone when you think everything has passed, only the worst is yet to come.
Roshan reaches for me, and I jerk backward, breaking the sticky time lapse in my brain. He nods curtly to the commander—no,notthe commander—and my heart free falls in confusion and treachery.
“Get us to the hangar, Hamid.”
“Copy, sir.”
Stars on fire.They’re his men. All loyal to him. They’re fucking here forhim.
Including Clem. Ithadbeen her in the bunker, not some random hallucination. She’s one of them. One of the Dahaka. She finally meets my eyes, guilt and an odd defiance swimming in them, her mouth twisting down as she reads my embittered expression.
Had she ever been my friend, or had that been a lie, too? My mind rears back to the explosion in this very palace during the ball that had started this whole thing, and I spear Clem with a look ofbetrayal. Shame makes her flush as her gaze falls away. I’d been so worried about her safety and being ill, and I’ll bet everything she’d been the one on the inside who set off that blast.
Because the precious fucking prince couldn’t be implicated...
And then he had to pretend to save me.
As the wagon takes off, more truths slam into me all at once like sucker punches to the gut—the way Roshan was treated in Nyriell and the Dahaka fortress. The respect, thedeference. He even slipped up and said that the men in the tower were his. It had nothing to do with the uniform he’d been wearing, the medallion he’d carried, or being an undercover imperial prince, and everything to do withhimbeing the fucking leader of the Dahaka.
I’d been so blind to it. To all of it. No one else looks surprised, not even Aran, and that perhaps feels like the biggest betrayal of all.
