But I ignore him, the skull, even the enchanted clouds spilling soft rainwater onto our skin now. We’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been weakened. I am powerless. “I can’t use my magic when we’re bound by this rope.”
My strength is gone.
“Which is entirely the point,” a woman says. Her accent darkens the room first, a rasp to her voice I can’t quite place, before she swaggers out from behind a supernatural fog. I leap to my feet, hands bound and wings all but useless in this tight room—except for in a fight. And I will fight.
The woman picks her nails with a silver dagger, a belt slung across her waist stuffed with more blades than I can quickly count. Small ones, curved ones, dual-sided ones. She tilts her head, studying me like a cat as she prowls forward. Her eyes flash cloud gray, auburn tendrils of hair dancing around her tanned, narrow face. “Do you think you’ll send an elbow into my ribs? Or perhaps you’ll bash my nose into my skull and shove me off-balance,” she says plainly, bluntly, as if discussing the weather. She shrugs then. “No matter. Whatever you do, I will anticipate it. I will hurt you first.” She releases her dagger with an expert flick of her wrist, and it impales the bed. Right between Gavriall’s legs. Less than an inch away from his dick.
Gavriall looks down in abject horror. “I shouldn’t have come,” he declares after a few seconds. “I should have stayed in Tower Historia.”
“The criminal waltzed into a ball, and he took a little fall. His head hit the ground; his brains splattered out. The criminal chooses a white, white pall.”
The woman laughs at the skull’s latest rhyme, but Gavriall seethes. “This place is barbaric. And thatthingshould be pitched into the nearest fire.”
“Oh, she can’t be,” the woman says, pushing treasure off a chair and sending gems and coins clattering to the wooden floorboards. She plops down and throws her feet onto the nearest table. “Queen Emilia’s soul has been preserved for eternity. You can try to crush it, stab it, or set it on fire—but she never breaks.”
“You’ve tried, then?” Gavriall asks with an arched, skeptical brow.
“Of course. What woman wants to live with their great-great-great-grandmother for eternity?” The woman nudges the skull away from her with her blade, but the skull—QueenEmilia—bites down on the tip. She rends the blade in two. “You see? She’s the worst,and she can’t be defeated. Unlike you two.” The woman gestures between us with her broken dagger before flicking the broken tip away. “I assume you’re panicking now. The holes in your memory, the aches in your spines… you can’t be doing well.”
My hands clench into fists, and Gavriall grumbles as she pulls an empty syringe from her belt and tosses it onto the bed. “If injected into the base of the spine, viper toxin and a dash of liquid mercury can knock anyone out and render them unconscious for two full days. The dosage depends on the size and build of the person, of course, and we really needed to be sure you wouldn’t wake. We used a little extra. It’ll affect your memory of the capture, but it shouldn’t have too many lasting consequences.” She shrugs. “If we used any more, you would have died.”
“Inspiring,” Gavriall spits. “I suppose you expect us to thank you?”
“Of course not.” She grins wickedly. “I still haven’t decided if you’re going to survive this.”
I glare at her, not giving a shit about her cursed grandmother, her toxins, or her threats. She doesn’t hold all the cards here, and I’m not a fool. I know exactly who she is. “Princess Amaya Frost,” I say, “Stormborn seventeenth daughter of Tempestas.”
“Please”—the princess waves the title away—“no one calls me that here. I’m Amaya.OrCaptain. And it is an honor to meet you, Warlock Arion Stone. We wouldn’t have known about mercury if not for your attack.” She turns to Gavriall. “It was years ago now, but he conjured a mercurial gas, and it melted the flesh right off Tempest’s vanguard. Can you believe that?”
Gavriall stares a hole into the side of my head. “You know? I really can.”
Amaya continues as if he hasn’t spoken, her gaze flicking back to my face. “We started experimenting after that. Managed to excavate the stuff from deep, deep within the earth. Gruesome, truly. You really are as ruthless as they say.”
I step closer, and my wings cast a haunting shadow across the room. Rain pelts us all, cold and dreadful, but I don’t shiver. “Your mother tried to take Mortia’s coast.”
“No,” she argues. “She tried to take Mortia’s old shore-palace.Who can blame her? It sits atop a veritable trove of quartz that your king has never once tried to mine.”
“It was a siege,” I say flatly. “You had to expect a battle.”
I glance down at the silvered cord—it’s given up on trying to free me, instead shooting out from my chest into another mirage of fog that disguises the rest of the room. The door must be behind it. And beyond that—Zephyra. I don’t feel anything through the bond. Not anger, fear, or pain. But I’m alive, so she must be too. However, we won’t be for long.
I need to get these fucking binds off.
Gavriall glances around, undoubtedly memorizing the rest of the room. Star charts, oceanic maps, and a porthole to our left, peering out into a rain-soaked sky. We must be on one of their sky-bound ships.
She doesn’t spare Gavriall another glance. “What is a warlock doing traversing Stormborn waters? One of our newest vanguards spotted a beast flying close to our wall, and you’ll understand if we’re a little… protective of our border. Especially where Mortia scum is concerned. But we never expected to investigate and findyou.” Lightning hisses from her fingertips, but unlike my magic, it feels pure. Chaotic. It roils, expands, and crackles along her palms, as if waiting to shatter the ship into a hundred jagged edges. “Mortia’s strongest warlock near our territory withmermaids.”
Gavriall glances at me uneasily. Tension thickens with the royal’s powers. No one else in Tempest has magic, just the single line of succession descended straight from Tempestas himself. Able to wield storms like knives. Princess Amaya is something of a demigoddess, and we’ve fallen straight into her clutches. She’s young, probably a few years before her thirtieth birthday, with a mother of seventy-six sitting firmly on the throne. The princess will want to prove herself. She’ll want revenge for the deaths I wrought. She’ll want to bring my head to the queen.
“Oh, you know,” Gavriall says with a casual wave of his bound hands, “we were just out for a leisurely swim. The current swept us far, far away.”
Amaya narrows her eyes at the historian. Without warning,lightning strikes Gavriall. A single bolt hits his shoulder, and his body convulses. His eyes roll back in his head. “I hate liars,” Amaya says as Gavriall seizes with a pained moan. “Try again.”
My fingers twitch. Magic hums beneath my skin. If only I could access it. The Stormborn may be able to conjure weather, but I can conjure everything. I could exsanguinate the princess in seconds. She would drop dead on the spot.
She grins, seeming to read my mind, and shrugs again. “Your turn, Warlock Stone. Perhaps if your reasoning is decent, I’ll spare you from death.”
Gavriall tucks his knees into his chest, recovering breath by breath. The skull on the table cackles with unbidden glee. The clouds above darken considerably. And the silvered cord—it vanishes within the enchanted fog.
