The guard finally looks up, and his face twists with horror at the sight of the spreading blackness. “What are you doing? Stop it!” he cries as he leaps to his feet.
I keep singing, faster and louder, urging the noxious mold to overtake the floors and walls beyond my cell. Inching ever closer to the guard. It emits a musty, fetid smell that usually takes months to accumulate, but with the aid of my singing, it’s already unbearable. My throat burns and my eyes water. The guard coughs painfully as he stomps over to my cell.
“Enough!” he roars, banging a fist against the bars to scare me. Ironically, he’s the one who ends up screaming and frantically brushing at his arm as mold climbs the sleeve of his coat. He peels off the jacket and shucks it into the corner, but it’s too late. The mold has already found his skin. Black dots spread across his chest and arms like freckles, slowly covering him in what looks like a thick layer of hair.
“Please!” He claws at his skin, leaving long bloody nail marks.
“You know what I want!” I bellow—or try to. The air is so thick with spores, I’m wheezing almost as much as the guard.
“Fine!Fine!I’ll take you to him!” he cries, fumbling for the key at his belt.
I drop the original patch of mold, grab the handful of pebbles containing my carefully chosen memories, and allow the guard to chain my wrists and drag me down the hall.
As he shoves me up a flight of stairs, the mold grows sparser, the airclearer. By the time we reach the landing, it’s all but gone, contained behind us in what looks like a pulsing black pit. A monstrous entity I find oddly beautiful.
When we reach the doors of the king’s council chamber, the guard shoves through without announcing himself. The heavy doors crash against the walls, and at least two dozen blue-robed councilors fall silent and turn to gape at us. Their expressions morph from confusion to hostility when they see me and the guard, who’s still frantically muttering and pawing at himself.
“What is the meaning of this? How dare you bring a dangerous prisoner into the king’s council chambers?” says a councilor with long white hair and equally white teeth. He takes a bold step toward us, and the other councilors follow his lead, arranging themselves into a human wall.
I crane my neck, trying to see past them, curious to know if Alaric’s pleased they’re protecting him. If he finally feels he’s earned their respect and support. But I can’t see through the barricade of bodies.
“You heard Councilor Ignacious!” a brawny guard bellows as he steps away from the wall. He eyes the guard responsible for me with open revulsion. “Be gone, or I’ll be forced to remove you.”
“I can’t go back down there,” the guard holding me howls. “She tried to poison me with her noxious plants! I would have perished if I hadn’t given in to her demands.”
“Then you should have perished!” the higher-ranking guard snaps. “It’s yourjobto defend our king or die trying—not to bring a known assassin into his presence!”
“I’m not an assassin,” I interject. “All I want is a quick word—”
But none of them acknowledge that I’ve spoken.
Councilor Ignacious stabs his crooked finger back the way we came. Behind him, the other councilors nod, and several more guards come forward. But I won’t go back to that dungeon. I’d rather they kill me here, fighting for the bright and glorious future Alaric and I imagined,rather than withering away in the cold, stony shadows.
“I promise I’ll leave after I’ve spoken with Alaric!” I cry out. “I just need a moment of his time.”
“You must be mad to think we’d let you anywhere near His Majesty after the wounds you inflicted!” Von Nevus’s voice rises from somewhere in the group, breathy with exaggerated horror.
My nostrils flare, and I blow out a breath, fighting the urge to throw myself at the hypocrite. It’s precisely what he wants—what he’s banking on, so he can claim I’m unhinged and hysterical, and discredit me, should I ever mention his alliance with Rowenna. So I curl my fingers into fists and say with deadly calm, “If you refuse to give me an audience with the king, I’ll use every morsel of plant life in Vanzador to overrun the Fortress and bring it crashing down.”
I would never actually do such a thing and endanger so many innocent Vanzadorians, but something in my heaving shoulders and flinty eyes must unnerve the councilors. Or maybe it’s the state of the guard who brought me here, still scratching and muttering helplessly. Councilor Ignacious sputters. Even Von Nevus is momentarily at a loss.
In that breath of quiet, an achingly familiar voice rises from behind the line of councilors. “Gods of the Mountain, let her pass so we can be done with this already.”
Alaric’s words are cold, and his tone borders on venomous, but my stomach still dips at the low, velvety timbre of his voice.
“But Your Majesty!” Von Nevus is the first to recover. “Think of your safety.”
“Are you suggesting I’m incapable of defending myself?” Alaric shoves past the councilors, and there he is, bathed in a shaft of sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. He looks as cold and terrifying as he ever has yet, somehow, even more beautiful than I remembered. Even better than the memories I’ve obsessively revisited while languishing in my cell.
“Well?Here I am.” Alaric spreads his arms wide. “What do you haveto say,dearest wife?” He spits the term of endearment like a curse, and even though I knew to expect this and tried to prepare myself for it, the reality further splits my already broken heart.
I lick my trembling lips and search his face for a trace of softness, for the slightest pulse of recognition. Some indication that seeing me sends shivers through his core the way it does mine. But Alaric continues scowling, wearing the same resentful expression he wore the day we left Tashir in ashes.
A lifetime ago.
I didn’t realize how much I was hoping that Von Nevus was lying about Alaric’s memory loss, or that Alaric was bluffing in the presence of the council, until this moment. When I’m bludgeoned by the full force of his contempt.
“Hurry up and speak your peace,” he barks. “Then run along and tell that relentless Tomasko girl I’ve seen you, so she finally stops pestering me. If I have to listen to her insist I’m in love with you one more time, there’s a good chance an ‘accidental’ rockslide will bury her.”
