I nod, and point a finger at her, then touch my hand to my heart.
Mayor Elland shakes her head at me, indicating she can’t understand, and I swallow my frustration, wishing she could read my hands. I take a pen from the table and start to draw on one of the papers before us. A rough sketch of Constantine’s crown, then a woman’s figure beside it. I point at her questioningly again, then touch my hand to my heart.
This time, she seems to understand. “You want to know my past connections with the Premier,” she says. “With his mother.”
I nod.
She sighs and looks away. There’s a distant memory in her eyes. Finally, she says, “I remember Constantine as a little boy. I used to walk with his mother, Darea, in the greenhouse on summer afternoons, and Constantine would sprint ahead as fast as his little legs would allow. That was before the whole scandal of Caitoman’s birth, you know. Darea was happier back then.”
I listen carefully to the way the lilt in her voice changes at the mention of Constantine’s mother.
“I loved her,” the mayor says quietly after a while. She looks sidelong at me. “Darea. She was a young bride that the old Premier had chosen from Carreal, then the latest conquest. Her entire family perished during that siege.” She lets out a humorless laugh. “And what did the Premier do? Decide she was beautiful enough to make her his official queen.” She shook her head. “At the time, I was just a young noblewoman waiting around for a wealthy young husband. Darea made a good companion. We’d walk the grounds of my manor, make up imaginary future lives together.” She looks down at the table and furrows her brows, and in that gesture, I sense a grief borne from a lover’s broken heart.
Mayor Elland had loved Constantine’s mother. Had beeninlove. And then she had seen Queen Darea die in childbirth.
“She loved Constantine, as any mother would,” she went on. “But there was a deep sadness in her. She knew that Constantine would become his father, take his place.” She took a deep breath. “On her deathbed, as I sat by her side, she asked me to promise her that I would find a way to take this all down. All the things that had destroyed her world. Her past. Her family. Her childhood.”
Promise me.I can almost hear the whisper suspended in the air. I think of the flash of memory I’d seen from Constantine in the greenhouse, of him as a child, peeking into the chamber at his dying mother holding the hand of a richly dressed woman. That had been the young Mayor Elland.
This is why the mayor spares a bit of pity for Constantine. For the boy that is no longer.
I suppose even monsters were children once.
“That’s why I’m here,” she says to me now. “Because I have a heart. Because action without heart is meaningless.” She leans toward me.“Protect your heart, Talin. It is good to grieve, to hurt for others, to care. If we don’t, then all is lost anyway.”
The third bit of news that arrives today comes shortly after I return to the palace. When a guard peeks in to escort me to the Premier, I can already sense that something has gone wrong. The guard murmurs the update to me.
Two Strikers have escaped from the arena and a lone soldier has been found dead, curiously separated from the rest of his patrol when he shouldn’t have been. Today’s game has been canceled.
So Red and Jeran made their move. And Adena and Aramin are free.
The four of them are now somewhere in the city. Unshackled and poised to strike.
The mix of emotions this brings threatens to shatter my defenses—relief, fear, disbelief. I want to reach out to Red, to make sure they’re all okay, but the worry that Constantine will know keeps me in check. At least I can still feel the distant rhythm of Red’s heartbeat. He’s alive. Maybe that means the others are too.
I clamp down my emotions as best as I can as I head to the main atrium to meet Constantine, but today my protective walls are shaky. My fear is channeling through our link, strengthening the bond between us with its ruthless and insidious tendrils, forcing me to open my heart to him.
He might have been in a bad state last night, but today his mood is calm again. However, it’s the kind of mood that I fear the most from him—the still surface over a deep anger. Dark circles rim the bottom of his eyes. He must not have slept at all after our confrontation, andeven behind the security of his vicious black band of paint, exhaustion highlights the sickly paleness of his face this morning.
Patrols of guards swarm the palace’s courtyards, sealing the gates and inspecting every inch of the grounds. More soldiers line the halls and the building’s rooftops. Beside me, Constantine says nothing. His jaw is tight, set. He doesn’t mention a word about what happened last night. He doesn’t talk about the Strikers’ escape.
Does he think I’m involved in it? He knows I was in my chamber during the time when they supposedly escaped. His guards can attest to it.
But it doesn’t mean he believes it.
As we make it down to the main atrium, I hear a female voice that I recognize. Then we see them. There, at the bottom of the stairs with a team of her personal guard, is Mayor Elland. The weight on her is as heavy as it was during our last meeting, but she stands straighter now, her eyes hard and her chin high. There’s no sign of the affection I’d seen in her earlier in the day.
Kneeling in a row before them, bands across their eyes and hands tied behind their backs, are three prisoners the mayor had ordered arrested from her estate.
Curiously, General Caitoman is nowhere to be seen.
One is elderly, while another is young. Too young. I think of the first time I’d ever seen Red, that scrawny, young boy soldier standing poised over me with his gun, reluctant to shoot. This child can’t be much older than he was, but the defiance in his eyes is still bright.
I think of Raina and her dismissal of the consequence of the unplanned assassination.
They pause at the sight of us. As we reach the bottom of the stairs and approach them, the mayor casts me a sidelong glance before addressing the Premier.
“Premier,” she says. “These are the workers I mentioned to you. After questioning, we discovered their ties with the girl who attacked you yesterday.”
