“How can you be certain they’re the same?” Marco asks.
“By their size, color . . . The length of their tusk. I work atBottom of the Jug, so I’m often strolling the wharf.”
Marco’s thick black eyebrows lift. “You work at the brothel?”
Tavern, not brothel. I avoid correcting the king. “I serve food and drinks there.”
A slow smile forms on the king’s lips as his gaze slides between Silvius and me. It takes me a moment to realize he may be connecting dots that don’t even exist on the same sheet of parchment.
I step closer to my grandfather, who’s been exceptionally quiet during this exchange, to the point where I check over my shoulder that he hasn’t been called away from the throne room.
The ponytailed general stands beside me, blunt nails tracing the facets of his rubies. If only he’d intervene on my behalf, but the man would probably offer to push me into Mareluce himself.
Since no metal crow adorns the throne room, I imagine I haven’t been brought to Isolacuori because of Bronwen’s prophecy.
Unless the crow is nailed to the island’s submerged foundations . . .
Oh, Gods, I’m losing the plot. Completely losing it. Like the king, I’m forming connections that don’t exist.
I’m not here because of Bronwen; I’m here because of me. Because I jumped into the canal to protect my beast.
“Come, Fallon Rossi.” The king’s order, followed by his brusque footfalls, makes me jump.
Oh, Gods, he’s decided to toss me in. A plea scales my throat but stays lodged behind my tongue, which has swollen with dread and sits atop my chattering teeth like a slug, unmoving and useless.
“The king has less patience than I, Fallon.” My grandfather’s voice stabs my ringing ears. “So you’d best follow him. And promptly, at that.”
I jerk forward on numbed feet and numbed legs, my knees barely bending. The king strides opposite the entrance, toward another set of golden doors, smaller than the ones that lead outside.
“Where . . .?” I swallow, start again. “Where . . .?” I cannot get the end of my question out, the same way I cannot calm the clatter of my heart.
Am I being led into a dungeon?
Toward a blue hole that leads straight into Mareluce?
I clear my throat, part my mouth, try again to ask where I’m going, but my words turn to air when the doors are pitched open by the air-Fae bracketing them like gargoyles. The room beyond is windowless, black as a moonless, starless sky.
I stop moving forward and dig my feet into the floor. Through my leather soles, I can feel the shape of each tile, the burn of each blister.
The king sweeps his hand in an arc, shooting fire from his palm that sparks the wicks of a giant candelabra made of . . .
Stomach bottoming out, I take in the superimposed wheels of ivory cones banded together by rigid strips of gold and topped with black candles. It rises ten wheels high, the bottom one as wide as the varnished wooden table beneath it. Although the wheels grow smaller, it isn’t because fewer serpent horns were used to make them, but because the horns are progressively shorter, torn from the skulls of juveniles.
The gruesome light fixture makes bile rise at the back of my throat, and although it isn’t serpent blood that drips from wheel to wheel, blunting the ivory, it may as well be.
“Welcome to Isolacuori’s trophy room.”
Trophy?How dare he call bones trophies!
I knot my arms in front of my chest and cast my stinging gaze to the ground.
How fucking dare he . . .
“You don’t seem a fan of my candelabra, Signorina Rossi.” Marco’s voice traipses through the air that reeks of must and copper. “My grandfather designed it. He was such a perfectionist that if the horns weren’t perfect in length and shape to the ones already in place, he’d discard them and hunt down a new animal. For every piece of ivory up there, I have a chest filled with rejects. I’ve sold many, mostly to the Kingdom of Glace. The Northerners so delight in bangles and home furnishings crafted from ivory.”
“No wonder the serpents fear our kind.” Although I’ve steeled my spine, my voice quivers as it springs across the bolt of crimson fabric that stretches across the oval room’s wall.
Marco plods over the golden mosaic sun, whose rays extend to the rounded walls. When his boots darken the tiles in front of me, I finally look up. “They’ve been our enemies since the dawn of Luce. They steal our fish. Eat our people. They ruin our boats and our embankments. The only thing they haven’t caused damage to, is you.”
