Page 33 of Fractured (Royal Sins #3)

twenty-one

Rune Kalygorn

Sorcerers stayed away from me. I hadn’t once had to show them why they should, which was a bit confusing if I cared to even consider it for longer than a moment, but I was thankful, nonetheless.

Nilah was nowhere to be found.

I could feel my sanity slipping through my fingers, and I was all out of patience, too.

I would not hesitate to kill anyone who stepped in front of me—and the sorcerers knew.

They must have known, and that was the reason why not one of them had come close to me in the days I’d been in Mysthaven, searching.

None of the mermaids had come near me, either, when I searched every inch of the Mercove as well. They watched me, hundreds of them close to the shores, yet none spoke a single word.

It had been five days, and Nilah was still gone. Not in the Mercove, and she wasn’t in Mysthaven, either, and I had no fucking clue how she’d managed to disappear without a trace, so quickly, but she had.

The horse underneath me neighed when I pulled the reins.

We were in the middle of one of the livelier Mysthaven towns, the bigger ones close to the border with Blackwater.

So many shadows, so deep, even though the sun had just begun to set.

This town might have been born into them.

Or maybe the night just refused to be erased during the day here.

The streets were narrow and twisted for no reason, even though they had plenty of space.

The towers and houses were crooked, built too close together, and I hadn’t been to a Mysthaven town before.

Of course not—I hadn’t had enough magic to protect myself against sorcerers.

They were dangerous, vile, twisted minds, and one needed a good amount of power to keep them back.

But I never considered that I was afraid before. I was terrified of them, yet I hadn’t realized it, sure that I was simply being reasonable. Now that the only thing to terrify me was the fact that Nilah was still missing, I saw clearly. I saw how truly afraid sorcerers had made me my whole life.

Smoke curled from chimneys, and the smell was heavy, too heavy.

I doubted they were burning wood here. Runes were drawn on the doors, symbols and sigils I had no clue how to read.

Magic hung in the air like fog—very different from what you felt in fae courts.

This was…corrupt. Sweet and metallic— overly sweet.

I smelled a thousand different kinds of poisonous plants as I passed by buildings and shops and towers.

Mysthaven had no guards, no bells, no central square, no place for people to gather and spend time as a group. The heavy silence was only disrupted by the footsteps and the wheels turning and the sorcerers muttering under their breath as they watched me.

These towns had been carved from the bones of old sorcerer magic—this Raja had told me about. I knew exactly what she’d meant now—as I had in the past three days while searching every inch of Mysthaven. Even Hessa had grown tired of it, and she’d left. Had gone back to wait for my return, she said.

I would never hold it against her, just like I would never admit to her face that I preferred solitude.

Faces vanished behind curtains when I looked.

I passed a wide well in the center of these tall buildings, the most space between a group I’d come across so far.

It wasn’t filled with water as I’d thought, though, but instead with something black and thick that could have been tar if not for the heavy smell of magic clinging to it.

It had been a full day since the last time I’d had water. Both bottles I’d taken with from the Mercove were empty, but I was not about to stop and try to buy some from a sorcerer. Not in Mysthaven.

This was not a place that tolerated visitors unless there was nothing any of them could do about it.

For that, I thanked the power of my magic, but even I knew that I couldn’t come back the same way.

There was only so much taunting the sorcerers would allow—and my presence here, not hiding in any way but riding slowly among them?

They would undoubtedly believe that I was asking for it .

It didn’t matter, though. I didn’t plan to stay.

Nilah was not in Mysthaven, and to admit that without unleashing every bit of madness that I was barely containing inside me was difficult, but I focused on the horse whenever I could. The Seelie stallion I’d taken from the soldiers who’d come to raid the fucking mountain where we’d been hiding.

Someone told.

That made me want to rage even more. I had checked the magic, had tested it with my shadows, and the cave underneath that mountain we’d been in had indeed been impossible to find with any kind of tracking magic.

Which meant someone from the Broken Crown had told Lyall exactly where we were while we’d been asleep. Possibly in hopes of getting a pardon, being allowed back into the Seelie Court?

But they didn’t know who Lyall truly was. Whoever betrayed Merenith, they died. All her friends died that morning in the forest when Nilah’s magic erupted—not from it , but from the soldiers. Only Hessa, Merenith, Ergen and the dogs survived, though all of them wounded.

And me.

I woke up from what I initially thought was frost but wasn’t, to find Nilah gone. Just…disappeared.

I thought it was the soldiers who got her, who took her back to the Seelie Court, to Lyall—but they didn’t. I saw them. I saw him.

My magic had wrapped around the necks of each and every soldier who’d come for us all the way to the other side of the mountain. I went all the way to where Lyall lay near his horse, covered in white magic, motionless, eyes half open, staring at the sky.

It was him, I knew it was. And even though part of me had insisted that I kill every single one of them right that second, crush their throats while they were still unconscious, I hadn’t. Because Lyall was unable to defend himself, and I would not take a life in a way that would make me a coward.

That, and the idea of his death was something that made my own body turn against me still, even if I didn’t understand it.

Once again, I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply, tried to smell Nilah’s scent or feel the special brand of her magic. I kept my focus on my senses, on my magic, even knowing it wouldn’t get me anywhere. And it didn’t.

So, I drove my heel against the horse’s side to tell him to keep moving.

The sorcerers watched from a distance still and the sky turned darker with each moment.

Something about Lyall’s death.

It wasn’t something I’d ever cared to try to explain before, or even understand, but it was there all the same. This gnawing ache in the middle of my chest that seemed to come alive when I imagined him dead.

It had happened first when he was poisoned, had held me captive every single day since.

Deep down, it was the reason why I’d gone after Helid and the royal guard when they went to search for the human in Nerith—not just my sense of debt toward Lyall.

Not half of it was that, if we wanted to be honest. Just the ache that came with the thought of Lyall being no more.

I’d never cared to understand it simply because it made no sense, but now that nothing did—now I wanted to understand everything.

Now I wanted to know how that part tied to the rest of my reality in which Nilah had burst into all that magic—so much, so intense, so fucking powerful.

I wanted to know how she could have disappeared into thin air, leaving no trace behind—only me to search for her while I fought not to lose my mind.

Yes, now I wanted to know everything. The whole truth exactly as it was. As it had been kept from me since I was a boy with the very ink that still marked my skin.

I wanted to know if Nilah was right, if I was a fool to have started to believe it myself—that I hadn’t killed the Ice Queen. I would have never. I did not like death, even when I served it.

That was still not going to stop me from killing anything that stood in my way of Nilah, but I did not like it. I wouldn’t have killed a woman, queen or no queen, just because.

I wouldn’t have—this much I knew. Only, before Nilah, I hadn’t had the desire to want to go against the whole world when it insisted on something. I’d felt too weak, too powerless.

But the anger had swallowed all of that down now.

Blackwater. She could be in Blackwater, I thought, maybe on her way to Raja’s home. Whatever had happened, she knew how to get there, had been there twice, and maybe that was her destination. That was where I would find her, if I only made it there in time.

You’re a fool, Hessa had told me—nothing new. She’d been calling us fools since she was a girl, and back then I had been. I might even be one now, bigger than before, but it didn’t mean I was going to stop.

I’d left without strangling Lyall and his soldiers that morning. The dogs and horses had been the first ones to wake up after me from whatever Nilah’s magic had done. I’d taken two horses to carry Hessa, Merenith and Ergen—the only people who were still alive.

I’d taken them away, hidden us in another cave, this one on the ground and dangerously close to the water, but I’d had no other choice.

The mermaids had only watched. Whether it was because they could sense my magic—I wasn’t sure. I didn’t really know how much of it outsiders could feel because I hadn’t had it my entire life to understand the effect it would have on the people around me, but I took it.

Hessa and the others had woken up a while later, and Lyall and his soldiers hadn’t followed. I knew because I was there, hiding in the trees, watching and waiting—just in case someone had somehow hidden Nilah while I was out. Just in case.

She wasn’t there.

The soldiers and Lyall had been completely disoriented, and they’d searched the mountain and the forest three times before they went back toward the Seelie Court. Nilah was most definitely not with them.