Justus smiles, but it’s an ugly smile. “Simple. I proposed marriage or death. She preferred marriage.”
No shit, you psychopath.“How romantic. Is that how you got Nonna to marry your crazy ass?” My eyes widen as I realize I’ve just called one of my jailers an ass, and a crazy one at that. Granted, he is, butmerda. . . What if he, too, takes out his bruised ego on Antoni?
I scramble to think of something that could placate his temper before it can erupt, but I come up short.
“Blood of my blood, fruit of my daughter’s womb . . .” The eerie dulcet pitch shears through the stifling tension, snapping my eyes back to the vault. “Come forth so I may finally lay eyes upon you.”
Meriam is real. She’s really real.
“What did the witch say, Justus?” Dante’s rough timbre smacks the rounded shell of my ear.
I frown, because not only did shenotwhisper her unnerving summons, but also, Justus is standing just as far away as we are. Is the Nebban compound affecting more than Dante’s stomach juices?
“I’ve yet to master Shabbin, Maezza, but I believe she said something about blood.”
Fucking . . .what?! Goosebumps scatter over every millimeter of my body, surely giving my skin the aspect of serpent scales.
“Speak in Lucin, strega!” Dante inflects the word witch with great disgust.
A heartbeat later, the voice rises again from the pit of darkness. “Very well. Child of Shabbe and of the Sky Kingdom, grandson of Costa Regio, come forth so I may bind your bloods and break Fallon’s curse.”
When I don’t move, Dante shoves me, sending me stumbling forward. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve snarled at him, but the present circumstances are not normal.
I fucking speak Shabbin!
Well, I understand it, at least. I don’t think I speak it. Unless I do? Sybille and Phoebus have told me I mutter many unintelligible things in slumber. What if I sleep-talk Shabbin? What if I dream in Shabbin?
Understanding a foreign tongue feels like a supernatural prowess. To think Meriam has yet to unleash the true magic in my blood.
“Fallon, darling, come to me.”
I should probably be irked that the imprisoned sorceress has called me darling, but what arrests me is her phonation of my first name. The double ‘L’s roll off her tongue like a bolt of silk, overshadowing the last syllable, which she pronouncesaninstead ofon.
“Is Abi the royal family’s surname, Rossi?” Dante’s gruff murmur slaps my thrumming eardrums.
Abi? When did she— Oh, is that one of the words she uttered? Oddly enough, it doesn’t automatically translate into my mind when Dante says it. Perhaps because of his accent? Unless I only understand Shabbin when Meriam speaks it?
I suppose that would be peculiar, but any more peculiar than people who can transform into birds? That’s a resounding no.
“In Shabbe, children wear the names of their mothers after their own, so Fallon would be Fallon amZendaya.” The rope of Justus’s burnt-orange hair sticks to the navy velvet that espouses the strong lines of his four-century-old body. “Abi means darling.”
My heartbeats coil around my ribs and lash my skin like a serpent caught in a fisherman’s net.
“Are you not eager to taste your true potential, Little Queen?” Meriam whispers from the darkness.
I’m about to tell her that I will not be going through with the marriage Dante has planned for us, but I’m thankfully stopped from planting my foot in my gullet by Justus’s grumbled, “What did Dante say about speaking in Shabbin, Meriam?”
He sounds like ancient Headmistress Alice when Sybille and I would return from playtime, clothes splashed with grass stains in the spring and mud in the winter.
I lick my lips. “What did she say?” I pray the rising color in my cheeks doesn’t give away the fact that I understood her just fine.
Is she aware? She must be if she insists on using the foreign tongue. Will she tell the others or will she keep it our secret? What am I going on about? Why in the world would this woman want to share a secret with me?
Silence laps at the room. “Forgive me, Maezza. I forget Costa had all the Shabbin books burned the day he tossed me inside his dungeon instead of his bed.”
Meriam’s admission makes me loathe the first Lucin king a whole lot more, and not because of the dungeon part—that was entirely deserved—but because he destroyed a foreign culture to rewrite history the way he saw fit.
“We should proceed to the wedding and unbinding ceremonies while the moon is at its brightest.” Justus flicks his ponytail over his shoulder.
