Page 210 of Burn of the Everflame

I clamped a hand on top of it. “Please don’t tell anyone you saw this. I’m not mated—I’m a stranded mate.”

She looked horrified and, oddly, a little relieved. “How terrible. I’m so sorry.”

My jaw tightened at the reminder that what I so deeply valued was seen as an awful burden to everyone else. “I should get back,” I said, a little curtly. “Enjoy your bath.”

She moved to stop me. “Actually, there’s something I was hoping you might help me with.”

I glanced toward camp. Now that I knew where Ophiucae was, we needed to gather soldiers, arrange ships, warn everyone in Meros . . . gods, it might already be too late to save them.

I tried to edge around her. “I’m sorry, I really must go.”

“My niece is missing,” she blurted out.

I stopped.

“After I was arrested for helping the mortals, my brother was driven out of Faunos,” she went on. “I spent sixty-five years in that prison, and he died in the Umbros attack two days before you freed us.” She laughed—a choked, heartbroken sound. “If I’d been a little earlier, I would have seen him one last time and met his mate . . . but then I probably would have died with them, too.”

I took her hand. “I’m sorry. The gods can be so cruel.”

“I found a survivor in Umbros who knew him. She told me his little girl was one of the children they took. He named her Kéani—after me.” Her amber eyes gleamed with brimming tears. “He never forgot me.”

I squeezed her hand and held it to my chest. “I promise, I’ll do everything I can to bring Kéani home.”

“I asked Blessed Father Faunos to give me a chance to save her. When Enness asked me to come here, I thought it was an answer to my prayers. I was sure that if anyone could find her, it was you.”

A heavy pit lodged in my chest. I’d been stretched so thin between so many other problems, I’d done nothing to find the missing children.

Her hand pulled from mine and fidgeted at her waist. “I sent letters by hawk to every realm. I used my magic to make the hawks keep looking until they found her. I wasn’t sure where she was or what she looked like, or even if she was still alive, but I had to try.”

A twig snapped behind me. I glanced over my shoulder, eyes narrowing on the wooded shadows.

“This morning, I finally got a response.”

I looked back to the woman. “Your niece wrote to you? Did she tell you where the children are?”

She swallowed. “The letter wasn’t from my niece.”

Her fingers twitched. Grass rustled by my feet, and something sharp pinched my calf. I looked down to see a green-scaled snake with reddish rings and a black diamond on its head, its long fangs embedded in my flesh.

I yanked it from my leg and hurled it into the brush, but another snake slithered from the grass and launched for my ankle.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman whispered.

A snake dropped from the tree above and landed on my shoulders, sinking its fangs into my neck. I gasped at the scorching heat of its venom entering my blood. Within seconds, my eyelids felt impossible to lift. I reached into my pocket and closed a hand around the compass.

Then my body hit the soil, and everything went dark.

47

LUTHER

Istared at the paper clutched in my hand, my mind as ever on my Queen. I’d deluded myself into believing that once she stopped pushing me away, things between us would be as perfect as they’d been in Sophos. Though Diem had let me back in, I felt no closer to her than when she’d first returned.

My mind agonized over what I’d denied her last night. If all she’d wanted was rough, I would have been eager to comply. My tastes had always tended toward the dark, and so did Diem’s. But the thought of harming her—inflicting pain not to arouse but to truly make her suffer—repulsed me to my core.

I’d sworn I would do anything to help Diem if she asked, but last night left me wondering if there were some lines I wouldn’t cross, not even for her.

If I had, perhaps she wouldn’t be hiding from me today. When I left this morning for an errand in Mortal City, she still hadn’t returned to camp, and the message she’d sent by stealing the compass was clear: she wanted to be alone.