Page 9 of The Deathless One (The Gravesinger #1)

She wandered for a long time.

Jessamine wasn’t sure how many days passed as she slipped through the streets. She stole whatever food she could find, usually from trash bins outside people’s homes. The food wasn’t good. It made her sick a few times. But it was better than starvation.

She stole clothes out of one of those bins as well.

A pair of black pants that hung off her hips, baggy and smelling like fish.

But everyone in the Water District smelled like fish, and people gave her fewer looks than they had when she’d been wearing the wedding dress.

She’d torn the skirt off and left it in a limp pile on the ground, the fine fabric a lingering specter of who she had once been.

But now, the ripped pieces of her bodice were falling apart, and the smell of the pants added to her nausea.

Her hair had knotted beyond anything she could fix, and she felt…

like a monster. Stripped of her humanity.

She skittered through the shadows, avoiding those who might recognize her.

But she couldn’t stay anywhere for too long.

Hands reached out of the darkness, thick-fingered hands along with whispers that asked her to burn down her kingdom and didn’t she remember that he’d given her life?

The Deathless One wasn’t real. The gods were all dead. They’d been murdered a long time ago, and none of them were coming back. They weren’t.

He wasn’t real. She was just losing her mind.

Arms wrapped around her waist, she moved through the Water District like a wraith. Sodden, dirty, she was not the person she had once been.

Until she heard a group of people talking, laughing. “Been a month since the queen died, did you hear the news? Someone else already took her place. Long live the king and all that.”

“He gonna give us a raise?”

“Probably not. They all forget we live down here in the Water District. Just filtering seawater into drinkable liquid for ’em, not like we’re necessary or nothin’.

” The speaker was a big man, whose beer belly shook as he laughed.

“Such a shame, though. Rumor is he killed the princess, too, and she was a lovely little thing. Always smiling when she came to visit with her mother. Remember the last time we saw her? The princess and her mother brought all that produce from the kingdom they’d visited.

She didn’t marry that one, but she should have. The strawberries were so sweet.”

Lovely.

Always smiling.

She felt a whine pressing against the back of her throat as she fled from those men.

She’d apparently been dead a month. She had no idea what Leon had done since he’d stolen her kingdom.

And her people remembered her as the pretty one.

The smiling one. The princess who was supposed to give them hope. It was all too much.

Her feet took her to the sea long before her mind realized what she was doing.

There she stood, the sunlight blinding as it danced upon the rippling waves that clung to her feet.

No one was here. It was too early, and this was the last place anyone would bathe.

The runoff from the fish market tinged the water red just a few steps to her right.

But this water was clean. It was blue and shining, like her mother’s eyes. And suddenly, she couldn’t stand this anymore. She couldn’t stand herself.

Jessamine stripped, yanking her clothing off and tossing it into the waves ahead of herself as she waded into the water.

She submerged herself, not caring that the icy chill stole her breath, that the waves slapped at her face, or that the salt stung all the scrapes and cuts that marred her once-pretty flesh.

It was all hers . The pain, the ice, the desperation to breathe. All of it.

When she came out of the waves, she was more herself. Everything was clearer in her mind. Clean, even if the salt was already hardening on her skin.

This was her kingdom, and no man would push her off her throne without a fight. She’d been a shadow of herself for too long. But first, she had to figure out who she could trust to help. Her mother would have wanted that. Her mother would have been brave and resilient.

She set her clothes on a nearby rock to dry and kept only a few strips of fabric on as she sat down in the sand. The band around her breasts that she’d ripped from her wedding dress, and her thin briefs that had been worn too many days in a row, but they’d have to do for a little while longer.

A stick. She needed a stick.

Muttering to herself, she found something that would help her draw in the sand and started on a diagram before her.

First she put herself and her mother, drawing a line through the symbols she’d drawn for the two of them to mark their deaths.

She drew a set of horns to represent Leon, and the rest she’d figure out more symbols for.

The last thing she needed was anyone to look over her shoulder and realize she was drawing rather confidential names in the sand.

First, what were their ties? Most of the nobility knew Leon, of course, but Baron Edgerton had family in Orenda.

He visited them every year, and Leon had been rather chummy with the baron the last time she’d seen them together.

Of course, then there was her cousin Lady Fortuna.

A noblewoman by day and a theater owner by night, she regularly welcomed the realm’s most wealthy—Leon included—to her shows.

Not to mention Lord and Lady Prescott, both of whom must have taken significant bribes from Leon for the wedding.

They’d provided the food, though neither of them had ever catered in their life.

She snorted. Any food they’d made was probably poisoned. In case the infected hadn’t distracted everyone at the wedding, Leon likely had another plan. Too bad no one stayed alive long enough to eat it.

When she finished sketching, it all looked rather…

dismal. So she turned to other names of people she might be able to trust. Her mother’s head of the guard, Callum Quen.

The head gardener at the castle, although she’d forgotten the woman’s name.

Two maids who had been with her since childhood, and a single pageboy, Benji, who had always brought her mother a sweet treat in the afternoon.

Slim pickings, really.

The gardener was likely dead. So was Callum, if she was being honest. If she had any inkling at all that he might be alive, she’d run right to him. Unless he was still at the castle. She’d get her head cut off for that kind of recklessness.

The head of the military had done nothing during the coup, so she could only assume he, too, had been working against her family.

Any of the royal advisors would be a risk.

She had no one who was even remotely higher up in the entire kingdom who would help her.

After what had happened to any who stood against Leon at her wedding? No one would take the risk.

Jessamine swatted a fly that landed on her arm, likely licking at the salt that had already stiffened there. Her pale skin looked even worse, flaking sand and salt and whatever mud she hadn’t scrubbed off. It was… hopeless.

This felt impossible. She’d never wanted to marry Leon, and even if she had, she would still have been queen eventually.

The throne was supposed to be hers after her mother’s death, which shouldn’t have happened for years to come.

She shouldn’t be sitting here, with nothing to her name, wondering if everyone thought she was dead.

What was the right answer? Something had to be the correct choice, but instead, all she could feel was… lost.

Staring at the waves helped. It made the rolling ache of hunger in her stomach subside, but her near-constant thirst whispered that the sea hadn’t tasted that bad. Maybe just a few mouthfuls. If she got sick, then everything would end just a little quicker. Wouldn’t that be nice?

She saw the shadows moving in the waves long before she saw him. He stood there, below the surface, watching her. As if he didn’t need to breathe. As if his soulless gaze saw right through her, into the darkest parts of herself that she didn’t want anyone to see.

“Jessamine,” his voice whispered, floating through the darkness. “Ask me for more.”

Ask him for more? He had already given her life. He’d saved her when she should have rotted in the waters he now stood in. A wave crested and broke over his face, the white foam obscuring him from her vision once again.

A part of her soul whispered that she knew who he was, that they were tied together, woven into a tapestry of blood and sacrifice.

He’d saved her, but he was still dead. She hadn’t summoned him, nor had she left a sacrifice at a carefully laid altar.

Black magic had a price, of course, and his help had more of a price than most.

But she hadn’t asked for this.

He’d given her a second chance, and now he hoped she’d pay for it of her own accord. He wanted a price that he wasn’t owed.

Strengthened by the thought, she rose, dusting sand from the backs of her thighs. “I am not indebted to you. I don’t have to do anything you tell me to do.”

A wave rolled higher than the others, licking at her toes with foam that hardened into shards of ice. “I saved you.” His voice rippled through her mind. “I took your cold, lifeless body from the depths and I delivered you here. To your kingdom that was stolen from you.”

“I did not ask for your help,” she replied, her voice maybe a little triumphant. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“But you did.” And ah, that velvet voice smoothed over her ears like the finest of symphonies. “Don’t you remember?”

“No,” she started, but then she did. In a flash, she remembered all the moments in that terrifying realm made of ink and darkness. She remembered that deep, velvety voice telling her that she wouldn’t remember what he had to say.