Page 21

XERXES

He’d made a scene. He couldn’t believe himself.

It had been months since he’d done something so irrational in public. For a few minutes, Xerxes had wanted the maidens to see him at his worst. The foolish, irresponsible part of him had won.

Immediately following the Initiation Ritual, Xerxes fled to the palace pools and dropped beside a cold one, scooping water and splashing it over his face.

He hardly knew what had happened in the courtyard.

The whole congregation of visitors saw him lose his mind.

The rumours would spiral out of control.

And what was worse—one of the maidens might be a sorceress who could hear his manic thoughts and voices…

He didn’t care about his coat of nobility; Xerxes leaned forward and plunged his face into the water, holding himself there, feeling the icy caress until he ran out of air.

He came up panting, his robe drenched at the collar, his hair dripping water back into the pool as he watched his warped reflection in the ripples.

Slow footsteps filled the bath house, footsteps Xerxes could have recognized in his sleep. Xerxes thought to greet the Chancellor first, but he’d lost his voice somewhere in the pool. It seemed to have sunk right to the bottom.

“What you did was dangerous.” Belorme spoke first, to Xerxes’s relief.

“Then you shouldn’t have provoked me,” Xerxes snapped back, finding his voice after all.

Belorme was quiet for several moments. Xerxes wiped the water from his face with his sleeve.

“Who is that maiden?” the Chancellor finally asked.

Xerxes stayed quiet this time. Not that he knew anything about Estheryn Electus to tell anyway. Except that she could kick with the strength of a disgruntled horse.

“The Intelligentsia hired investigators, but her home has been abandoned, and there wasn’t much in it to speak of. Even her neighbours knew little about her,” Belorme went on.

Xerxes swatted at his reflection in the pool, sending a shower of droplets across the water. He took fistfuls of his hair and squeezed out the moisture. It all ran down his neck.

“She’s dangerous, Xerxes,” Belorme said. “I think she might be using magic to persuade you.”

It could have been true. Xerxes had considered it. And perhaps he should have been more careful around her, but—

“She could get you dethroned,” Belorme reasoned. “She could even get you killed. Divinities, she looked like she wanted to kill you herself.”

Xerxes burst out laughing, and Belorme finally shut up.

The look on Estheryn Electus’s face in the courtyard had told tales; the anger, her piercing eyes, her pinched mouth, and even her tiny scrunching nose.

For a moment after he’d uttered those things about her father, she had wanted to kill him—he’d practically been able to taste it in the air.

And now he couldn’t stop feeling that kick colliding with his stomach.

It was as though the maiden had the same curse as Xerxes and inherited supernatural strength at the drop of a dime.

But her flesh hadn’t turned gray and cold, so how did she do it?

It didn’t matter. Even if she was briefly charming in the yard—holding that sword of hers like she’d been ready to use it—Belorme was correct. She should be killed off before she might try anything else. Danger was danger.

Xerxes sighed. Laughing still felt strange. He rubbed his throat.

“She should be executed,” Belorme stated, echoing Xerxes’s thoughts. But Xerxes found his grip tightening on the edge of the pool. “Before she becomes more dangerous. I can make it look like she fell—”

“If you touch her,” Xerxes said, sliding his grip off the ledge and sitting up, aware that his back and neck were fully exposed to the Chancellor, “I will kill you next.”

Belorme went deathly quiet. The coiling mist stilled in the room. Far across the chamber, a waterfall tumbled into one of the pools; the only sound remaining.

Xerxes heard Belorme’s sandals shift over the floor at his back. His skin pulled tight as he imagined the sage quietly drawing a blade. Xerxes glanced over at the rippling reflection of the Chancellor in the water.

“I warned you not to threaten me, Xerxes,” Belorme said calmly. Articulately.

Xerxes rose. He turned and took the last step toward the Chancellor, closing the gap and towering over the man by several inches. There was a time when Xerxes was just a boy at this man’s feet, but those days had passed long ago. It was time the Chancellor realized.

“Have you forgotten who I am?” Xerxes asked. “I’m the King. With just one word, I can have you executed for disobedience before this whole kingdom. I can have your reputation ruined for ten generations—I can have you written in the history books as a shameful traitor.”

Belorme’s black eyes flickered back and forth between Xerxes’s. A slow, terrible smile spread across his face. “Can you?” he wondered, and Xerxes frowned. “I don’t think you have it in you after what you did.”

Xerxes’s hands balled to fists at his sides, his toes curling.

How dare he? How dare this foolish man bring up the one thing Xerxes dreaded talking about the most?

“I have helped you at every turn, Xerxes. You would be a raging beast in the garden without me. What do you think would happen to you if I was gone? What would happen to your tree? To your only source of medicine? Don’t you think I would have a plan in place to have it burned, should any harm come my way? ”

Xerxes staggered back, his stomach dropping as he imagined his tree up in flames. Suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to race down to the basement and make sure it was still there, to stand guard, to keep it safe.

“Destroy him!”

“Keep our tree safe!”

Belorme had the nerve to raise a hand and shake a finger in Xerxes’s face. “Careful,” Belorme warned, like he was scolding a child. “Don’t forget how much you need me.”

Xerxes clenched his jaw as the Chancellor turned and glided from the pool room in slow, easy steps.

“Belorme,” Xerxes called, and Belorme stopped at the arch.

“We were friends, once.” It pained Xerxes to say it aloud, to have to beg for the Chancellor to remember the time before he became Chancellor.

Back when Xerxes’s father was still alive and the King.

Back when Xerxes got along well with the Intelligentsia.

Back when the Intelligentsia taught him many important things—things that had raised the only great parts of him.

Belorme used to sneak Xerxes sugar-coated peanuts after council meetings, and he’d bring double if Xerxes memorized a whole chapter of the Divinities record books.

Belorme’s face had looked different back then. His eyes had been a little brighter, his smile more genuine—not the dull, forced thing it was now.

The Chancellor cast a look over his shoulder. Xerxes studied the man’s unblinking eyes that were looking his way but still didn’t appear to see Xerxes standing there. And Xerxes’s shoulders dropped. By the expression on Belorme’s face, Xerxes knew once and for all that what he feared was true.

The man he once considered an uncle was gone. Belorme saw Xerxes as nothing but a tool to be used now.

After Belorme left, Xerxes stood in that very spot, staring at nothing for a long time.

“We want her dead.”

“She is our enemy.”

“She is dangerous! Hurry, before it’s too late!”

“Kill her!”

“She must be stopped—”

“WHAT IS THAT NOISE?!”

Xerxes’s eyes peeled open.

Somewhere in the darkness of his bedroom, a clock was ticking.

The sounds were evenly spaced apart: tick, tick, tick …

He’d lived in this bedroom for almost four years now, and he never knew there was a clock.

He lifted his head from his pillow to look around, finally spotting it far across the room—a small oval of gold high upon his wall, blending into the gilded framework of diamond paintings gifted to him over time.

Xerxes studied it, realizing it was the middle of the night.

The quiet buzz of a bug lifted by his window. His gaze darted to it. The tiny insect landed on the closed drapes.

Xerxes climbed from his bed and wandered over. He took hold of the drapes, but he didn’t draw them. Instead, his hands hung there, fingertips grazing the velvet. He waited for someone to tell him something. Anything. He waited for dark instructions and cruel messages.

A faint, distant humming he hadn’t noticed until now tickled his ears. It sounded like…

Xerxes glanced toward his bedroom door instead.

Music .

He didn’t bother getting dressed. He grabbed a silk robe and pulled it around himself as he headed from his room, grateful he’d sent his guards away earlier.

He felt like a part of himself had fallen out of his head while he was asleep, leaving an empty space in his mind.

He rubbed his temples and scratched behind his ear.

What was that noise? It was like the plucking of strings, a sweet melody that spilled into the hallways. And with the sound came… utter quiet.

How could music bring quietness? It didn’t make sense. Also—where were his voices, and why didn’t they care about what he was doing at this moment?

Xerxes padded over the cold stone, following the music around a bend. His heart picked up speed as he drew closer. He jogged the last few steps to the Celestial Divinities temple to catch the musician before he or she could disappear.

He swung around the temple entrance, grabbing the arch frame to keep himself from barging in and startling whoever was inside.

He pressed a hand against his chest where his heart drummed along to the music’s rhythm, his gaze settling on a young woman with long, dark hair.

She faced the city, strumming a harp beneath the silver moon.