Page 36 of Blood King, Part I (Crowns #4)

Chapter twenty-nine

The capital looked as if the gods had tried to destroy it.

Cyrus and Essandra walked the city, surveying the aftermath of their fight with the nobles.

He knew she’d wrecked quite a bit with the power of the geomancer, but now, seeing it in the daylight, he realized just how much.

This would set them back in their rebuilding efforts.

Of course it wasn’t her fault—he’d let her do it.

More than let her, he’d wanted her to. They’d done what was necessary to protect the coven and to keep the city.

All right, maybe a little more than what was necessary, but they’d both been fueled by their anger and loss.

Now they’d have to work doubly hard to get the rebuilding efforts back on track.

Fortunately, only a few buildings had been toppled, mainly the ones the nobles and their men had been hiding in or using as cover. The damage to the streets was significant, though, given that Essandra had split the earth and catapulted the cobblestone.

People were still clearing the dead. One of Cyrus’s dogs trotted by with a mangled hand in its mouth.

Essandra grimaced. “That’s disgusting.”

“Two, drop it,” Cyrus called. When he’d named the dogs, he’d expected to still call them as a unit, or at the most, use the names interchangeably.

But each dog gravitated toward a specific call, and Cyrus found himself noticing the subtle nuances about them.

One was the largest, Two had a slightly longer bob of a tail, and while their coats were all a black brindle, Three bore a small white mark on his chest.

Two reluctantly let the hand fall from his mouth.

Cyrus couldn’t help a smile.

As they rounded a bend in the street, he slowed.

There was a set of buildings, all very similar—small, like mausoleums, but not ornate or marked.

They had no windows, and heavy locks bound each of the doors.

A stone wall stood tall around them, obviously to keep them from the public, but an inadvertent trench of destruction had collapsed both part of the wall and a corner of the building closest to the street.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing, just… those are strange buildings.”

She frowned. “King Orrid probably used them to lock people away to die in darkness, or for some other terrible reason.”

That was likely. Something nefarious.

Still, he found himself wondering. If he climbed the corner rubble of the one closest to them, he could look down inside it, although exploring wasn’t what he should be doing right now.

His curiosity got the better of him. Cyrus jumped up and over the buckled wall.

“What are you doing?” Essandra asked.

“Just taking a look inside.”

Carefully, he climbed the fallen stone, gripping the corner of the building to keep from falling.

Not so carefully, he reached up to the broken roof and pulled himself up higher.

As he peered over the open edge, his eyes widened, and he let out a chuckle.

Inside were shelves of coin—a lot of shelves, and a lot of coin.

“What is it?” Essandra called.

“Money. Loads of it.” He worked his way back down. “These must be additional treasury storehouses.”

“Why would Orrid keep money here?” she asked as she climbed over the crumbled section of the wall.

“I wouldn’t keep all the money in the palace either.

There are probably a few of these, spread throughout the kingdom.

” He glanced around. “It would have been heavily guarded—I’m sure they were killed when we took the city, though.

Obviously, no one’s discovered this yet, otherwise everything would be gone. ”

A heavy lock secured the door. He pulled his sword.

“Really?” Essandra asked, crossing her arms.

Oh. Right. He smiled sheepishly and took a step back to let her forward.

Reaching out, she put her hand on the lock. Her lips moved—words he couldn’t understand.

The metal gave a brittle crack and then crumbled, a slow cascade of ash and dust falling like charred snow to the ground.

He’d seen her do that before, more than once, but it was no less impressive. Not just the magic, but the control of it. The quiet command of destruction.

“What?” she asked him.

He hadn’t realized he’d been staring. “Nothing,” he said quickly. Then he pushed open the doors. The hole in the roof let in the light, otherwise he would have needed a torch. He stepped inside, and Essandra followed.

They stood for a moment, letting their eyes adjust. He watched Essandra in the half-light.

His mind wasn’t on the coin anymore. It was on her power—power so easily lost—and what she’d told him the night before.

She might wield the power of all the witches, but none of it was hers.

If she ever lost her coven, she’d have nothing to fight with. Nothing to protect herself with.

“You know,” he said as he slowly started down the center between the racks of gold, “I was thinking, you should learn to use a sword.”

“I don’t need a sword.”

Rows of shelves stacked to the ceiling spanned the whole storehouse.

“Well, I would hope not, but it would be good for you to learn the skill, just in case. Aaron and Amiel, the two guards I’ve given you, were exceptional bloodsport fighters. Gold-tier. They could teach—”

“I don’t need a sword,” she said more firmly.

He paused for a moment and looked back at her. Her eyes combed the storehouse.

The shelves held mainly bags of gold and silver coins, but several also held odds and ends—maybe family treasures, religious trinkets, gods knew what they were. His gaze stopped on a solid-gold sword. He picked it up.

“You could have a pretty one,” he teased, holding it up.

The daggered look she gave him could have cut him more easily.

He chuckled. A gold sword was useless anyway.

Gold was weak against armor and weapons of steel.

In fact, aside from the bags of coin, most of the items around them seemed useless or hardly worth taking up space in a private storage chamber.

He picked up a bowl—it was odd to find a bowl here.

It was gold, but nothing unlike what he’d already seen multiple times throughout the palace.

He almost tossed it but paused as he glanced up to find Essandra staring back at him.

Still.

So still.

“Give that to me,” she said, her voice barely a breath. Her eyes were fixed on the small bowl.

“Do you know what it is?” he asked.

She only stepped closer to him. Not casually, but like she was prepared to pounce.

He stepped back. “Tell me what it is.”

She lunged for it, but he jerked his hand and held it high, out of her reach. “Is this what you’ve been searching for?” he asked her.

“Give it to me!”

“What is it?”

Her eyes turned black. “Give it to me,” she demanded again with a demonic thunder.

He probably should have worn that armor she’d just given him, although something told him that even magically imbued armor wouldn’t protect him—not when he stood between her and this… bowl. “You don’t have to fight me for it,” he said quickly. “I’ll give it to you but tell me what it is.”

Her breaths came clipped and fast. She was desperate for it, and the look on her face told him she didn’t trust he’d give it to her after she told him what it was.

Trust.

He didn’t trust that she’d tell him what it was, but he did trust her with things that were much more important to him than a stupid bowl. He wanted her to do the same.

Slowly, he held it out for her, and she snatched it from his grasp.

She turned it in her hands, her eyes wild, checking it, breathless.

Then she clutched it to her chest and closed her eyes as a tear streamed down her cheek.

She obviously wasn’t going to tell him what it was, but he didn’t really care, especially now that he knew it was just a bowl.

But whatever it meant, it was important to her, and she’d gotten it.

Cyrus sighed and looked back at the coin. This would help continue to fund the capital’s rebuilding, and whatever else a kingdom needed money for—like buying… things.

“It’s the Amoran Cup,” she said, and he looked back at her in surprise.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. “The what?”

“The Amoran Cup,” she repeated, as if he simply hadn’t heard her.

“It”—he searched for words—“looks more like a bowl, but… it’s very nice.”

Her brows dipped, and her eyes narrowed. “Do you not know what the Amoran Cup is?”

He’d never heard of it.

“The Cup of Life?” she added.

He inhaled as he shook his head slowly.

“You don’t know what the Cup of Life is?”

He was pretty sure they’d already established this. “Maybe you could try telling me,” he shot back.

She crossed her arms, hugging the bowl to her. “It’s believed that if you drink from it, it will give you eternal life, or eternal youth.”

Cyrus recalled King Orrid, who was very much not alive, and who certainly hadn’t been youthful when Cyrus had killed him. “Well, I don’t think it works,” he said. “Or maybe it’s a fake.”

Essandra shook her head. “No, it’s real—I can feel its power—but that’s not what this cup does. People are wrong.”

The cup was a simple one, aside from being gold. It had no jewels affixed to it, no designs other than a foreign inscription that ran along the upper edge.

“So, what does it do?” he asked.

She raised it close to her face again, turning it in her hands as if she still couldn’t believe she was finally holding it. “It brings life back. After death.”

That sounded… not real at all. “How does it work—you just have the dead person drink from it… or… pour from it down their throat?”

“No. It’s part of a spell. Combined with the bloom of an everlife tree, the cup will bring the person back to you.” She drew her fingers again around the bowl’s rim. “The spell won’t work without the cup.”

“Who are you trying to bring back?”

She pulled the bowl back to her chest but said nothing.

Of course. He sighed again. Well, at least the council would be happy about the storehouses, especially Fatim, his master of coin. He turned to head back out.

“My family,” she said, stopping him. Her eyes met his, and they glistened. “I’m trying to bring back my family. My sister and my mother. This is why I came to Rael. This is what I’ve been looking for.”