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Eamon eyes the parchment as though it’s a keyhole into the mind of the lord himself.

Then he decides, “It’s a scare tactic. Braxis predicts I’ll come forward with information about Taroh’s disappearance in exchange for a cease.”

“But we don’t know anything about his disappearance,” I snap and hit my hand down on the table. My plate rattles, empty, but I ignore it.

“It doesn’t matter. It matters that he believes I know what happened.”

Aleana throws a bewildered look between us. “I didn’t know he was still missing. What has it to do with any of us?”

“He’s using you,” I say with a whooshing breath, “to shake information out of me. He thinks I know where Taroh is.”

“Or Daxeel.” Eamon’s face is grim. “Either way, he’ll use me to rattle you… or kill me to hurt you.”

19

the night of ordinary dreams

††† TEN YEARS EARLIER †††

Serenity envelopes me in its loving embrace, as it always does in these secret moments when I like to pretend I can fly.

Arms spread like the wings of a white eagle, the breeze of night cascades over me. The breeze is strong enough up here on the tower to fool me—just for those brief, fleeting moments—that there’s enough lift under my arms to carry me.

It never does.

I stare at the clouded gleam of the moon, but my mind is far away, on Taroh, on father, on the dark one who stole my heart.

Is there a word for this? More than troubled, less than mind-loss. To be submerged in the woes of life, threaded together from all angles like spiders working together to create the most complex web ever weaved—and I am stuck in the centre of it.

Perhaps I will stumble across that word one day in scripture, just as I stumbled out of the High Court’s celebrations some moments ago.

My kicked-off sandals lay somewhere behind me on the tower roof. The skirt of my slip is torn and muddied, a red spill stains down my front, blood or wine, I don’t know.

I escaped the festivities with nothing but fatigue.

The music became too loud, the flutes speared me with their wretched pitches, the cellos thrummed in my bones, the calls and songs and shouts of the party rattled my brain in my head.

And I had to flee.

I snuck away from father on the dais, left him to his sliming of Lord Braxis, and came where few will follow.

The place I might like to fall.

The moon powers the winds higher off the ground. My lashes flutter in the brush of it over my prickled flesh. Strands of chestnut hair flow in the breeze, they frizz and fall from my braids, but I keep my arms splayed like wings.

That’s when he comes for me.

I expected he might.

But to hear him, his soft, gravelled voice from the archway some distance behind me, is to deflate me.

“Wishing you could fly?”

The gleam of the moon glares at me as it creeps out from behind wispy clouds.

I shut my eyes on the light; now, I am submerged in dark.

In the dark, my troubles find me.