Page 127 of The Darkening (The Darkening)

He drags me through the palace into a dim place lit by only a few ikonlights. As Dalca sweeps through, they flare up and reveal a large room of dusky gold, with tiny mirrors studded into every surface. On a platform stand the gilded bones of some ancient beast, molded into a throne. The Regia’s throne.

He pulls me onto the ikon in the middle of the floor. I flinch, but nothing happens.

“No,” he whispers, dragging his free hand through his hair. “I forgot. I forgot the Regia needs to power this ikon.” He laughs a laugh tinged with madness.

“I’ll tell you everything,” I say. “But please, stop this. You’re frightening me.”

He swings me around to face him, his voice uneven with either fear or rage. “Why did you grab me?”

I start, flummoxed. Does he mean up on the balcony? “I—I didn’t want you to fall.”

“I could have saved her.” He gazes into someplace within, his fists clenching at his sides.

“Dalca, you didn’t have your cloak.”

He pushes me away and paces like a caged beast. “I could have saved her,” he says again, his voice low and dangerous. “You did something to me. I felt it. You made her fall.”

“No—”

“What deal did you make with the Storm?”

“I didn’t—”

“Enough! No more lying, no more playing me for a fool. What did you do to me?”

I flinch at the acid in his voice, at the thing within me. Even now, the Queen’s gift—the Queen’s curse—simmers in my veins, changing me, giving me a sixth sense of the agony inside him.

His eyes turn knowing, the blackness of his pupils eating away at his irises. “Yes. Tell me the truth.”

My voice comes out small. “The Storm gave me something. A curse.”

“Go on.”

“When I was holding you, I—it saw your curse. And undid it.”

He comes close again, like we’re two stars locked in orbit. “I wasn’t cursed. I’m cursed now.”

I take a step back. “You were. Your fear was locked—”

He takes my face in his trembling hands. “Undo it. Please.”

His thumbs brush my lower lashes, and I fear him more than I’ve ever feared a stormbeast. One quick move and he could pluck out my eyes. I squeeze them shut and seek the Queen’s gift within me, reaching with phantom hands for Dalca. The gift paints a picture of him for me, one painted in shadows like the inside of the Storm. A black starburst in his heart and his hands is his fury and it’s slowly poisoning his head, his eyes, his tongue. His fear is a cold, many-splintered thing in his gut, the shards of which pierce him in the heart, in the lungs, in the throat. It’s a portrait of his pain.

There’s nothing for me to pull, nothing for me to undo, nothing for me to fix.

I open my eyes, and teardrops crawl down my cheeks. “I can’t.”

His thumbs dig into my face until my tears drop onto them. Dalca pushes me away as if I’ve burned him, his face a twist of wrath as he stokes his fury, letting it burn hotter and hotter within him, all the better to melt away his fear, his sorrow, his guilt.

I wipe my tears and stand tall. “I’m with you. I walked into the Storm with you. For you.”

His voice is flat, dead. “It wasn’t for me, was it? It was for your father.”

“For my father, for you, for the city.”

Dalca’s eyes hold no love, no hope, nothing of the boy who kissed me. There’s only something infernal. “What should I have expected from the daughter of traitors? Treachery and murder are in your blood.”

He steps toward me.