It had been mere days since Evander left Silvanlight. How was Haldir already here?
Lysander raised his chin, defiant, and the conscripts nodded and shouted, encouraging him.
“Stand down, Lysander!” Evander cried, gripping Hera as she startled at his voice.
But Lysander did not heed him. “I demand to see your commanding officer!”
Evander’s heart pounded in his chest; his voice was urgent. “Lysander, do what he says!”
“You will take me to your commanding officer,” Lysander continued, “or my mother will …”
Without a word, Haldir pulled his shotfire. A crack, a flash, and Lysander sprawled on the stones, dead.
Evander let out a strangled cry.
The conscripts gasped as one, then erupted.
Haldir spun toward them, a second shotfire in his hands. “Quiet, or I’ll shoot again!”
Samara surged forward with the conscripts at her back like a rising tide, their faces livid. They spat curses, threw stones.
Hera’s right head looked sheepishly at the other two, then nudged the big center head. The center head tugged out of Evander’s hands and reared, steam pouring from her nostrils, ready to send boiling water on the crowd. The riot settled in an instant, everyone ducking for cover, screaming.
“HEEL!” Evander shouted.
Magic poured from his hands in a ripple of watery light. It struck against Hera, and she huffed, lowered her heads, and settled onto her belly, all doggish love and regret. She lay all three heads at Evander’s feet, the big one nuzzling his boot. Her left head watched Haldir.
Shotfires drawn, Haldir’s men pushed the Cobblepinions into submission again, binding them and loading them onto a waiting dreadnought. A few exceptionally brave soldiers crept up to Evander with manacles for his hands, but he just cocked an eyebrow at them and said, “Are you mad?”
A slight snarl from Hera sent them scurrying away.
Evander mounted Hera, and Haldir climbed up behind him, his shotfire cold on the nape of Evander’s neck.
“Hello again, old friend,” Haldir snarled.
As they trudged away from the smoldering sanctuary, Evander risked a look over his shoulder. Ariadne knelt on the beach, wailing, cradling Lysander’s body and shattered head in her arms. The remainder of the village crowded behind her, watching as their children vanished into the mountains.
Chapter thirty-nine
Valenna
Morning dawned damp and gray, with bird calls echoing over the sea. Outside the window, a vast, blue marsh glimmered, broken by patches of cordgrass.
Sennalaith was exactly as Valenna remembered it—soggy, quiet, smelling of salt. A pod of aquatic dragons curled through the shallows, their spiny dorsal fins splitting the water and leaving V-shaped eddies in their wake. Their keeper paddled behind them in a narrow boat. He tapped the surface with his oar as he guided the pod to new fishing grounds. A peaceful scene, but there had always been a veneer of peace at her father’s summer home.
Everything was the same. The oil paintings of birds and dragons hanging on the papered walls, the ornate rugs imported from Talwaith before it withered into the Scathmore Barrens, the maids humming folk tunes as they carried laundry down the stairs.
As she waited in the bright sitting room outside her father’s office, Valenna tried not to let her eyes drift to the chair in the corner and the basket at its feet. Her mother was the last living soul to rest in that chair. Her sewing kit and embroidery hoop sat where she left them on the morning of her death, the needles stabbed through the fabric, waiting for twenty years for their artist to return.
Why her father had never allowed the servants to pack the kit away eluded Valenna. It was as if he, too, was waiting for some impossible resurrection.
Valenna glanced in a mirror mounted on the wall and frowned. She was muddy, her hair tangled. She didn’t look like an avenging agent of justice; she looked like a bewildered young woman who missed her husband very much.
The door swung open, and Valenna’s father stood in the doorway.
Like everything else, he had not changed in five years. The touch of gray at his temples had not yet frosted his golden hair. He was still strongly built. His face bore deep lines, but not from mirth. They were smirking lines. Scheming lines.
He wore white pants tucked into shiny leather boots, a powder-blue jacket with golden epaulettes on the shoulders, and a cobalt cloak on one shoulder, fastened by a gold braided rope looped under his left arm.
