Page 275 of Burn of the Everflame

Alixe might have had the same thought, as her pale blue shield glittered around me. “What would you like me to do if they refuse?” she asked.

I held my answer inside as I listened.

Waiting.

Old wood creaked beneath footsteps coming down the dock, softening as they crossed onto Lumnos soil. The guards tensed, but didn’t attack. A moment later, the Meros man’s arms opened, and Drusila crashed into them, burying her tear-stained face against his chest.

Her red-rimmed eyes turned to me. “Let them stay,” she pleaded.

I said nothing. Felt nothing.

The quiet was broken by the rustle of canvas sails pulling taut and the creak of a wooden ship lurching into wind-blown seas. Drusila and her mate extended their palms to the sky and murmured a prayer for safe passage to their respective Kindred.

“They’re leaving,” Alixe confirmed.

The guards relaxed. Shields began to fall.

Drusila wept.

My eyes turned to her Merosian mate. “Bring them back to the pier.”

He frowned, not understanding. “But you just made them leave.”

“I had to know I could trust them to obey my orders. They’ve proven that, so have your wind magic return them to the dock.” I looked at Drusila. “I expect you to make it clear that if even one Centenary breaches someone’s mind without consent, all of you will face the consequences.”

She gasped. “You’re letting us stay?”

“I’m the Queen of Emarion,” I said numbly. “It’s my duty to protect my people.”

My eyes cut to Alixe, wary of her earlier words about our people and theirs. She nodded. “I’ll find them tents.”

“Good. In the morning, do the same for everyone in the palace who hasn’t joined the army. The orphans and their caretakers may keep their beds, as well as palace staff. Everyone else can fight or sleep outside.” I thought for a moment. “Lumnos City, too. If the Twenty Houses want a safe home to live in, they can fight for it like everyone else.”

I glanced over my shoulder to the bewildered faces aboard the Umbros ship reemerging from the darkness. Though my heart felt hollow, my resolve was full.

It was time for the people of Emarion to make their choice.

All of them.

Including their Queen.

61

LUTHER

When Diem finally returned to the reception, something in her had changed, though I couldn’t tell what. That was hardly an unexpected feeling these days. She hadn’t been herself since before the island, and every time I thought I might finally understand what she was going through, some fresh new hell arrived to split us further apart.

It once felt like the universe was determined to put us together, no matter how hard we tried to fight it. These days, it felt more like her feet were rooted in the island’s soil, while I swam with all my might against a riptide pulling me further and further out to sea.

Though she briefly met my stare, she didn’t approach. She hovered on the edges of the revelry, hands clasped at her waist, her iron-grey eyes fixed on the south. I waited and watched, sensing that she needed a moment to herself. Each time someone stopped to greet her, her haunted features forced themselves into something beautiful yet false—the mask of someone hiding a part of themselves they feared letting anyone see. The same mask I’d worn for a lifetime, before she set me free.

Diem handled each interruption with grace, offering polite smiles to the sycophants who came to curry favor and granite resolve to the fools who brought complaints. The latter grew in frequency as word spread that the Centenaries had been invited to stay. It was especially disappointing to see the Ignios refugees join in the objections alongside the very same people who, not long ago, had insisted they be left in the deserts to die. How quickly warring prejudices could be overlooked by a shared one.

If Diem shared my disgust, I couldn’t sense it. I couldn’t read any emotion from her that wasn’t pretense. When Taran and Zalaric opened up their party to her army and the celebration moved into the camps, even the relief I knew she felt was invisible on her meticulously indifferent face.

She seemed . . . empty. Not sad, not distracted, just empty. The kind of empty I’d seen in her the morning after her magic first unleashed in the palace dungeon, when she’d made me promise to look after her family because she believed she wouldn’t be around to do it herself.

That memory did nothing to ease my concerns.