Page 273 of Burn of the Everflame

“What my daughter needs is her mother.”

“Go,” I said again.

His pained expression hardened into a glare that rivaled Symond’s. He shifted the blanket aside to give Drusila one last look at her daughter’s face. Drusila’s shoulders shook, her hand covering her mouth to stifle her sob. She pressed her mating mark to her heart, and he did the same, flashing me one final, bitter look before slowly, excruciatingly, leaving them behind to walk to shore.

Drusila swiped away her tears. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I know you’ll keep them safe.” She motioned to the rope. “If you’ll untie our line, we’ll be on our way. We won’t bother you again.”

My eyebrows rose. “I didn’t tell you to leave.”

Hope flared like a fresh-lit match across her face. She looked to her mate, then back to me. “We can stay?”

“You were willing to give up everything you love to save your child from those who wish to harm her,” I said. “I trust that means you understand what I’m willing to do if I believe, even for a second, that you will harm the people here.”

Despite my stiff-lipped threat, the hypocrisy of my words ate away at me. I’d stood in front of Ophiucae, a man who very much intended to do harm to the people here, and I’d been unable to do the one thing I knew would protect them.

Drusila nodded vigorously. “Yes, of course, Your Majesty. We understand. We⁠—”

“You,” I said. “Not them.”

She looked back at the other Centenaries, who had gathered along the ship’s edge to watch. Their expressions said little, but the way they traded stares in matching rhythm told me there was a great deal being said in voices I could no longer hear.

“We could make her take us,” Symond said aloud. He leaned forward, fingers curling around the wooden railing, and gave a sinister smirk. “We could do anything we want. She has no magic to stop us.”

“Breaching my mind is an unwise choice when you need my help,” I warned.

“I didn’t have to. That secret was obvious—you don’t have an aura.” His cruel smile grew. “And if you had heard what I just said about you to the rest of them, you would have come aboard and stuck that pretty sword through my neck.”

“Symond,” Drusila hissed.

He chuckled, looking me over like a savory meal he wanted to devour, but not like a gourmet dish—like a lion appraising a wounded gazelle. “We could take this whole realm for ourselves. Make the Queen of Emarion ours to control. Just like he did to them.”

“Silence,” Drusila said. “Haven’t you cost us enough?”

Darkness spilled across his face, a monster emerging from the icy deep. The black of his eyes seemed to consume him as he dropped his head and gave me his back.

“What happened in Umbros?” I asked.

“You didn’t get our hawk?” She exchanged serious glances with the other Centenaries—more shifting expressions, more mental conversations I couldn’t hear. I cleared my throat, and Drusila looked back to me. “We stopped receiving messenger hawks the day before the attack. We found it strange—Umbros never goes a day without a hawk arriving. It seems you didn’t receive ours, either.”

I glanced at Alixe, whose uneasy frown reflected mine. We hadn’t received a single messenger hawk since my return from Sophos, nor any responses from those we’d sent.

“Tell me what happened,” I said again.

“After you left Umbros, we formed a militia from the survivors of the first attack. When the rebels came back, we managed to hold them off at the city entrance, but a gryvern came to help them—black with red wings. It attacked the canyon walls, and we feared the rock would cave in and crush the city. Then your gryvern arrived.”

“We would not have needed her if Cyranei had been there,” Symond muttered.

“Who is Cyranei?” I asked.

The Centenaries responded with a wave of disgusted scowls. Even Drusila’s brow stitched into a disapproving frown. “Cyranei was our gryvern,” she said.

The memory of the Umbros gryvern’s death ruined me all over again. Watching her body crash to the soil, drawn to her demise like a fyre-breathing moth to a broken, pitiful, rain-soaked flame, had been my darkest moment on the island.

Knowing her name made her death real in a different way, more painful for how little I’d known of her. Had she loved nibbling on crisp apples like Sorae? Did she have a usual spot to snooze on a sunny afternoon? What life would she have chosen if she’d survived long enough to see freedom?

That question haunted me most.

“Your gryvern was fighting the other when the red-winged gryvern suddenly turned and flew away,” Drusila went on. “The rebels retreated. We thought we were saved.”