Page 7

When my blood stopped flowing, Evander stroked my wrist, a gentle back-and-forth, then took a bandage from the pile and wrapped it around my palm.

How effortless it was for him to cut me, then mend me.

To mix his barbarous duty with his endearment.

I slid my gaze away from him, as if compelled, straight to King Theodore.

He’d stepped so close that his polished boots toed the black velvet we knelt upon, spear-tip eyes on me and me alone. Anger flushed his cheeks, and when he spoke, like a deep roll of thunder, the pressure in the room seemed to shift. “How much blood have you taken from her, Nemea?”

Not a single courtier pulled in a breath as they waited for King Nemea to answer. Even Evander had frozen, his hand hovering over the hilt of his sword.

“I have taken blood from my entire court and gifted it to Eusia for over two decades, boy.” A smile colored his voice.

King Theodore finally unlocked our gazes to glare at Nemea. “I asked about hers. ”

Why?

Something dangerous hung between the two men, something unspoken that I could not decipher, but I felt myself—my blood—sitting at the rotting heart of it.

Nemea laughed, the sound rattling and bleak. “Look at the cogs of your mind trying so hard to spin. I have taken her blood since her infancy.” Nemea sat back in his seat. “Since the day she became mine.”

There was no time for me to parse Nemea’s words before King Theodore reared back his long leg and swung it into the offering bowls that sat between Evander and me.

They flipped and spun, spraying the blood within across my face.

It spattered over his own cream-colored coat.

I fell back, swiping the sticky, hot liquid from my cheeks, my eyes, when the room surged into motion.

Guards’ swords rang as they were pulled from their scabbards.

Women gasped; men shouted. I tried to untangle my legs from my gown, scrambled to stand, but all the while I could not look away from the fearlessness that King Theodore possessed amid all the swords and muscle and sound.

Nemea’s guards encircled him, and Evander pushed me back, clearing me from the center of the room.

King Theodore was quickly enfolded by his own guards too, but there came no clash of metal.

Nemea bellowed over the huddle of grunting men, “You cannot undo what has been done, you fool. But I hope you die trying.”

“Imogen, get to your chamber,” Evander yelled from where he stood between the two kings. “ Now. ”

The courtiers cawed and clutched one another at the sight of the two rulers coming to blows, and I shouldered through them, toward the steep, uneven stairwell.

The stone wall was cold beneath my bandaged hand, but I used it as my guide, forcing myself up and out of the belly of the mountain and into the slicing light of Fort Linum’s entry hall.

The front doors sat wide open to the courtyard, just as they did every day when the weather was fair.

I started toward my chamber and stopped.

The sky outside was shrouded in clouds that rippled like gray waves.

The mountains below sat in a bluish-white haze.

How vast, how endless it all seemed, and I did not want to be locked behind a door.

Trapped and amenable. I wanted out. A pitiful thrill of excitement raced through me as I disobeyed my order and crossed the fort’s threshold.

The courtyard was a wide, barren circle, ringed in towering white pillars.

At the very center sat an oblong stone, soaked with layer after layer of old blood.

I strode past the stain, black gown dragging behind me, toward the cliff’s edge.

Beyond the peaks, through the haze, I could just see the fluttering stretch of sea.

I pulled in a long, slow breath and imagined I could smell it.

Imagined I was filled with it once more, like I had been last night.

I had been fearsome. I had made Evander’s eyes stretch wide. I had made him beg. Made him bleed.

“Imogen.”

King Nemea’s voice was harsh and scraping as he strode through the fort’s doors.

Behind him, his guards were an implacable wall of armor and blades.

Evander stood at the center of them. He’d removed his dress coat in the tussle and his shirt was now rumpled and undone at the neck.

In one hand he cupped his ritual bowl, in the other his sword.

The disappointment in his gaze staked me to the spot.

Nemea’s cheeks were mottled red and beaded with sweat. Those colorless eyes of his locked with mine.

“Your Majesty.” I gave a stiff curtsy. “Is everything all right?”

His grunt sounded like scuffing stones. “That fucking boy-king can rot on the seafloor.” He lifted a ritual bowl, still coated with thick, wet blood, from his side.

He grabbed my hand like an eel striking prey and ripped the bandage from it.

“He fancies himself a benevolent king.” He took his thumb and dug it into the angry flesh around my cut.

His touch was heavy, painful, forcing my stanched wound back to bleeding.

“But it is not benevolence that makes a ruler mighty, is it, Imogen?” His eyes had grown bright with malice.

Spittle collected on his lip like sharp white teeth as he forced each word out.

I gasped as he squeezed and pressed, grinding the bones in my hand against each other.

My mind slipped outside my body from the pain. It floated above me. Heard my whimpering and saw my tears. “Stop. Please. ”

Finally, he stopped, but he kept my hand in his.

“It does not matter how powerful the ruler’s blood is.

It does not matter that a ruler is good, or just, or fair.

What matters is that they can keep hold of what is theirs, by whatever means necessary.

” He turned my hand and placed a kiss on the back of it.

“It is easy to be good when you’re blessed by the bloody fucking Gods.

It’s when you are lowly, when you are nothing—like I was—that you learn to make your own power.

And with it, you take what you’ve been denied. ”

He stared at me for a long moment, holding the bowl of my blood, before he turned and made for the stairs that led down to the mountain road. His guards followed him, and I knew precisely where he would go.

To the sea. To offer my blood to his deity. To make his own power.

Evander slowed before descending. “I ordered you to go to your chamber.”

“I needed air—”

His eyes flashed as he shoved his sword into its sheath. “I don’t care. I’ll not risk you getting hurt.”

I skipped over the irony that was my aching hand, carved open by him. “There was no danger—”

He was before me in a breath, fingers biting into my jaw. “That’s enough.” He lowered his lips to mine, but it felt nothing like a kiss. It felt like a cracking whip, slashing through my flesh. “Get”—another kiss that felt like a leash, notching tightly around my throat—“to your chamber.”

He walked away like he knew I would listen, never once looking back.

A blood bond between us would compel his true protection, but his protection was locked doors, and smothered needs, and obedience of my body and mind.

A bond would bolster him and wear me down to nothing—I would become the headwater and he the river that I fed until I ran dry.

I needed to leave. I needed to get down this mountain, off this island, or every vital part of me would perish.

Inside, the courtiers were abuzz. I stopped at the top of the entry stairs, my wounded hand cradled against my chest, and watched them over the banister.

They rose up from the ritual room stairwell, pooling in the center of the hall.

They recounted the kings’ fight with glassy eyes and cheeks full of ruddy color, like they’d just gorged themselves on a fatty meal.

It was easy for them to be entertained by these men—they weren’t at risk of being crushed between them.

The blood on my cheeks had dried and felt tight. I needed to wash quickly, bandage my hand, and then find Agatha. I’d tell her everything. Admit she was right about my engagement from the start, beg her to help me find a way out.

There came gasps and murmurs. The clank of armored men.

I looked out over the banister once more.

The king of Varya had ascended from the ritual room.

He stood in the stairwell door, my blood flecked over his pale coat, looking severe as a graven image.

The whole hall fell reverently, dreadfully still.

Envy ripped through me.

He could silence a room by simply entering it, could command awe, fear, without making a sound.

He did not buckle under Nemea’s barbarity the way I did.

How clear it was that he was something different, something greater than Nemea and Evander, who grasped and gnashed for dregs.

No, the king of Varya’s greatness welled up from within, fed from a source that was entirely his own.

Clarity struck me, bright as a bolt. It pulled my spine straight and tilted my chin high.

It was not Agatha whose help I needed to get out of Fort Linum.

It was the king of Varya’s.