Page 35

T ime stuttered. Perhaps it stopped. My vision rippled and went black. When I came to, I lay upon the floor, the gleam of orb light above me. Beside me, Theodore was still unconscious. The tinkling of glass, the hiss of smoke, the sound of all those slithering vines, filled my ears.

Sluggishly, I lifted my arm and pressed my hand to Theodore’s chest. Even, shallow breaths. I rose onto my elbow and watched Rohana working over her bowl, her bald head reflecting the sickly, yellow glow.

“Speak, Imogen,” she said, sounding once more like a young woman. “I know you wish to.”

“I want my severing draughts,” I croaked.

“I am making it.”

“I paid for two.”

“You will get one.”

I rushed to stand but her vines tightened around my calves and wrists, keeping me down. I focused, tried to find Theodore’s power through my smoke-addled haze, but I was too sick, and she was so strong.

“I can sever the bond between you and your king, and that is all.” Her awful, cloudy eyes locked with mine. “And what a shame too. You are so much better together.”

I reeled, head hammering. “What do you mean?” I yelled. “What about my bond with Eusia? The bond that you just told me drains me of my divinity.” I thrashed against the vine’s hold. “You told me that I will ruin Theodore, that we will bring death and chaos. How can we be better together?”

Rohana gave an eerie, skittering laugh and loosened the vines. “How young you are, how new and bright. You see things with clear, crisp eyes. But let your vision blur and break. Let yourself see deeper.”

I pushed myself up with a hiss. “If that’s your way of telling me to look for more meaning in your prophecy, then fuck you.”

She was too still, her little body sagging against the cage of vines that held her up. She set a small glass bottle into the loop of a vine and sent it toward me. “It’s time for you to leave. This will remove the God-king from your blood—”

I nearly screamed. “What of my bond with Eusia?”

“You made that bond with a despicable spell, and it is always the Mage who makes the spell that must break it.”

Hopelessness pummeled me. My voice grew small. “What should I do? How?”

A vine curled around her chin, cocking her head for her. Her unblinking eyes were locked with mine. “Go home.”

My brow creased. “Go home?”

The room erupted with the scraping of moving vines. Like a bed of verdant snakes, they began to creep around Theodore’s supine body and ferried him over the bones and wood, toward the hut’s crooked door.

Go home.

The blood bond pulsed like a racing heart, filling me with worry, and I rushed to his side. I touched him, needy for the assurance of his warmth. Gently, I traced the edge of his cheekbone. I ran a fingertip over the slanting line of his nose, down to the contour of his lips.

Home.

The word was a changeling, twisting its meaning from one breath to the next. My mind was still sluggish from the lingering taint of the ritual smoke, and that word— home —spun it and filled it.

Then I was transported. I stood in my old home. In King Nemea’s icy-white throne room, cold penetrating to my bones. I looked to the wall. To the splayed black wing that hung upon it.

It was just like mine.

The king sits wrecked and ravaged beneath her wing. My heart began to squeeze. What they have made will decimate the order of all things.

“What they have made… What the queen and the king have made…” I whispered, clinging to Theodore’s sturdy shoulder. My stomach dropped. “Is Nemea…”

Rohana began to giggle, and with sickening assuredness, I knew.

“He’s my father.”

“Good girl.” She sounded approving of my revelation, but I was undone.

The features of Nemea’s face, the notes of his voice, even the remembered touch of his hand, swarmed me. “I’m not…”

Then Rohana was in front of me. Her skeletal fingers clamped onto my jaw, and she jerked it toward her face. “You are what will bring chaos and ruin and death. You are the fount of desolation and change.”

My throat tightened with tears. “And Theodore…” I was the daughter of the man he hated most. “Will I ruin Theodore too?”

She blinked slowly. “His power and duty are as incorruptible as ever. And yet he would give up his throne for you.”

“No.” I shook my head. “He’s a good, loyal king—”

“Chaos. Ruin. Death,” she whispered through a flash of bluish teeth.

Her wrinkled mouth pulled back in a smile.

“I’ll tell you what I would do if I were still young and beautiful like you.

” Her white eyes shone. “I would keep him. I’d use his power and body to keep myself safe.

Your journey to sever your bond with Eusia will be dangerous.

You’d be a fool to go it alone.” Her vines brought her even closer to me, but I was too stunned to recoil.

“Damn the war I feel brewing in the water. You are a Goddess-queen. Take what you want while you can.” Her voice dropped low. “For someday you will be like me. ”

I batted her hand from my face. Her laughter was coquettish, completely at odds with the monster before me, but her guidance struck me square in my chest with intoxicating force.

Keep him. I wanted to. Desperately.

Despite all the destruction Rohana saw following in my wake, despite there being no clear path toward remaining together, I yearned for it. My stomach turned with sick, my eyes burned with tears, but I refused to fall apart in this hellish place.

Unanimated vines still draped Theodore’s body, and I tried to focus on his power within me.

I set my fingers to them, fighting to command them to drag Theodore the rest of the way to the door.

They were slow at work, sputtering under my weak control, but I managed to get him near enough that I could drag him the rest of the way myself, out into the daylight and sea air.

The waves churned against the rocks. I tried to let the sound soothe me, but each word of Rohana’s prophecy was a needle-thin blade, slipped through my skin. There they sat now, aching, refusing to be ignored. I pulled Theodore farther into the clearing and slammed the door.

“Goodbye, Rohana. I hope you rot.”

In the light of day Theodore looked so much worse. His golden-brown skin had been drained of its glow and was beaded with cold sweat. The rise and fall of his strong chest had lessened, now nearly too shallow to see.

“ Shit, shit, shit. ” I cupped his clammy face, dragged my hands down to his neck. His pulse had grown sluggish.

I squeezed my eyes shut and saw Nemea’s face once more.

I remembered bouncing on his knee as a girl.

The terror his nasal voice would send ricocheting through my body.

The gifts he’d lavished upon me after he’d been particularly cruel—gowns and jewels and books.

His thumb digging into my flesh to take my blood.

The unsettling, empty way he would lose himself to some remote place while looking at me.

I wondered if it was my mother he thought of then.

My mother—whose wing hung upon his wall.

I lurched to the side and vomited onto the rocks.

Coughing, I swiped at my mouth and crawled halfway over Theodore’s inert body. “Theodore. Please.” I hit his chest with a fist. “Theo. Get up.”

He gave a hoarse groan.

“Theo.” I grabbed his face again, begging. “You need to get up. We need to get back to the shore.”

The water in the channel was high. The storm gusts turned its surface into a frenzy of toothy white peaks. I rose to my knees, tugged on his heavy hand. His head lolled to the side.

Panic rammed me so powerfully that I was certain something cracked.

I was alone. Utterly alone save for a confluence of fear and fury, crashing through me like the sea.

I stood and walked over the jagged rocks, down toward the edge of the water.

I stared and stared at the waves. “Listen to me,” I said through my teeth. “Listen.”

The power in my stomach rose, and I focused, focused on twining it and the sea together until they could not be rent apart. Until they were indistinguishable.

Finally, when I pulled in a deep breath, the surface swelled.

When I blew it out, it ebbed. I told it to steady, and the frothy peaks smoothed.

A narrow path of water between Rohana’s island and Varya’s shore went flat.

Calm. I could feel the waves at the tips of my fingers, and with the curl of my hand, the sea rose up the rocks, toward me.

Higher and higher the gentle flood climbed, until it rolled around Theodore’s body. The dark fan of his lashes fluttered at the contact, but he didn’t rouse.

“Theodore?” My voice cracked at the sight of him.

“Shit. Wake up, please wake up.” I urged the water to move quicker.

It cradled him, carried him down over the rocks and into the now-glassy channel.

With a hand clamped around the severing draught in my pocket, I followed.

Cold water met my hips, my navel. When it reached my chest, I swam.

He looked like a dead man. Motionless, empty.

I swam faster, commanding a current to aid me, and when my boots hit the other shore, I ran up the sand and urged the water to carry Theodore up the beach, toward the vine shelter and our tethered horses.

He sprawled over the black sand, white shirt clinging to his skin.

He made an aching sound, cracked his eyes.

I fell to my knees. “Theo.” I forced a smile, swiped the wet hair from his brow. “I’m going to take care of you. Tell me how to get to Hector and Antonia’s. Can you tell me?”

His eyes shut. I tapped his cheek too hard, and this time he opened them wide enough for me to see the faceted green of his irises.

“Road,” he croaked, before he dropped away again. A bead of dark muck dribbled from one of his nostrils. Like oil. Like black blood. I frantically swiped it clean and bent to place kiss after kiss on his cold lips, his chin. He didn’t flinch.

In my single-mindedness, I lost all sense.

I cursed and focused to near exhaustion and somehow commanded the vines of the shelter that Theodore had built us to help me bundle him up and over his horse.

I sat behind him, straining to keep him steady, and started us down the road with my horse’s lead in my hand.

Rain started and stopped as we traveled through the mud, though I hardly felt it. For over an hour I kept silent, a hand firmly over Theodore’s back, counting his breaths and feeling his heart.

If I stopped counting, stopped pushing, I feared what would become of me.

We took a bend in the road and a well-built wooden house, tucked behind a lush, fenced garden, revealed itself. It was painted a creamy white, with those ever-present blooming vines climbing up its walls.

The day was dying. I stroked Theodore’s shoulder.

“I wish you could tell me if this is the right place.” Quickly, I dismounted at the garden gate.

With some force, the rusted latch gave, and I led the horses into the clearing beyond.

On the large, covered porch dozed an older man.

The tight coils of his white hair were stark against his black skin. A small pipe dangled in his loose grip.

I glanced back at Theodore, slumped over the horse’s back. The sight alone sent a shot of worry through me. I cleared my throat. “Excuse me.”

The man sucked in a startled breath. Sat up on the edge of his chair. “Yes?”

“Are you Hector?”

The man’s jade-colored eyes were kind, edged in a soft crosshatch of wrinkles. They narrowed on me. “I am.”

He took in my appearance. The soaked, dirty clothes. My knotted tumble of dark, wet hair. Those kind eyes turned hard when they landed on Theodore’s unconscious body.

“Who do you have there?”

“Theodore, king of Varya,” I answered, softly. “He’s sick.”

Hector’s eyes bulged. He moved quicker than I expected him to, stepping off the porch and coming to Theodore’s side with long strides. He set a knobby hand to Theodore’s wet cheek. “Let’s get you warm and dry, my boy.”

Together, we lowered him from the horse, set one arm over each of our shoulders. We started slowly toward the cottage through the mud. “And who are you?” Hector asked in a strained voice.

“I’m Imogen.” I ignored the weight of the severing draught in my pocket. I ignored the shame that made me want to admit all the things I truly was. “I’m Theodore’s wife.”