“Iknow.”
“It should’ve been checked first thing this morning.”
“Then you shouldn’t have planned it for the day after the ball,” he snaps. “I only woke up three hours ago.”
“I didn’t think you’d attend.”
“Yeah… well…” He writes down another number, his pen scratching hard into his pad. His shoulders are tight, and I wonder what happened after Arienna and I left.
Knowing he won’t want to have that conversation here though, I simply say, “I’m glad you were there.”
He nods.
“Fabia was happy too,” Arienna says brightly.
His pen stills. Then my brothers rounds on me. “Tell me what you want so I can get back to work”
“Show me the floor plan for the market.”
He flips through his notebook, opens it on a sketch, then passes it to me. “Any concerns?” I ask as I study it, clocking where each Vylian table is. If the Court is going to hit me today, they will do it around one of them. Our enemies will make easy patsies.
“Not now. Echo’s been to see me, and she had me remove one of the stalls.”
“Vylian?”
“Razian.”
Better her than me. If I did it, my own people would hate me for taking care of foreigners rather than our own. The market, after all, is being paid for by the royal treasury. But no one’s dumb enough to question Echo. I doubt my brother even asked her what the issue was. She’s too damn scary to talk to.
Hundreds of years old, she hasn’t merely lived through centuries of fighting on Raza’s front lines. She was sent deep into enemy territory with a squad of women, who are now seen as mythical heroes of legend.
Before each mission, they killed themselves, then were resurrected by a necromancer. The influx of magic in their veins made them near immortal for the next few hours, allowing them to massacre entire cities on their own. But being brought back that many times fractured their souls – leaving them broken in ways no healer could fix. Most of them eventually went mad. When two of her squadmates, women she’d fought alongside for decades, attacked their own… Echo was the sole survivor.
After that, the practice was abolished. Unfortunately for us, Echo didn’t retire though. She became the head of the Royal Guard, finding “joy” in training the next generation:ourgeneration.
My body aching with phantom pain just thinking about her, I nod. “Did she say anything?” I ask, happy that I no longer haveto seek her out. Either she told Nicholas about any issues to pass on to me or she didn’t have anything to report.
“Nope,” he says.
“Which stall did she remove?”
She will have already put a guard on the family if she deems them a danger, but I want to know about everyone who might be a danger to my queen.
You’ll never learn all those names. There are too many.
Raza will take her from you eventually.
Ignoring that voice and the fear in the pit of my stomach, I finish my discussion with Nicholas, then head out to find King Dravr.
But fuck, he doesn’t give me any reasons to leave my queen here either.
A large part of me wants to do it anyway, keep her safe within the walls of the castle. But I can’t shelter her forever. She will not survive in a gilded cage; she has too much love for the world. So I will bring her with me.
And pray that the feeling of crows circling overhead is just my paranoia.
Six
If we want to protect our freedom, we must go to war.
