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“Or just curious, I suppose. I haven’t seen this tree since the day we planted the seed. How long ago was that?” Belorme asked, looking up the tree’s height.

Xerxes drew in another step closer while the sage’s back was turned. A deep, overwhelming appetite burned through his abdomen, his head clouding with a horrid desire to do something terrible. “Ten years,” he said.

“No one is allowed down here. He should die.”

“You made the rules.”

“He didn’t follow the rules.”

“He doesn’t respect you. It would be better if he was dead.”

Belorme turned, and Xerxes stopped walking.

“I came to inform you what the Intelligentsia has decided,” the sage stated in a clear voice.

“Why did you come down here ?” Xerxes asked again, carefully.

“I figured this was where you’d be hiding.

” Belorme didn’t address that he broke Xerxes’s one strict rule.

That he’d tossed Xerxes’s authority out the window.

“I know you despise that we invoked the Heartstealer trials and disrupted the palace’s routine.

So, the Intelligentsia has decided to shorten the trial period. For your sake.”

Xerxes glared.

For his sake.

He could have thrown Belorme across the room by his lips for uttering such a lie. This man was the reason Xerxes hated liars. He was the reason Xerxes hated waking up in the morning.

“Tomorrow night, Lady Calliope will be performing a bandari dance at the senses trial,” Belorme said. “She’s chosen the sense of touch .”

Anger rippled over Xerxes’s body. “Don’t you dare let her touch me,” he warned.

“It’s too late, Xerxes. She’s been practicing how to keep a hand on you at all times during her routine.

I’ve ensured none of the other maidens have chosen touch .

I’ve even warned them not to lay a single finger on you, no matter what, or there will be consequences.

It will be easy and obvious for you to know when it’s Calliope’s turn. ”

“You want me to take off my blindfold?!” Xerxes growled. “You might as well tell me not to come. I have no intention of rewarding a maiden at this ridiculous trial.”

“This is your punishment!” Belorme shouted, his voice echoing through the room, and Xerxes jumped. The sound rang in his ears.

It had been years since Belorme raised his voice to scold Xerxes for doing something wrong.

Belorme always had a way of putting Xerxes in his place, but the last time he’d truly shouted like a disappointed father was long before the death of the late King.

Back when Xerxes had a father. And an uncle.

“You didn’t meet with Calliope in your chambers like I told you to,” Belorme said from his hood. “You weren’t even at your room when she got there. She waited all night!”

Xerxes released a heavy breath.

“You’re angry.”

“You will feel better if you kill him.”

“There are no witnesses down here.”

Xerxes grabbed a pear from the tree. He squeezed it so hard, the flesh crushed in his fingers. But he took a bite, furious at the shame that washed over him at having to succumb to his illness, to devour his medicine, right in front of Belorme.

Belorme watched him eat it in silence for several moments. “We’ve chosen her,” he stated before Xerxes was finished.

Xerxes’s lips paused on the fruit. He took his last bite slowly, sucking in the juice. He turned and hurled the core up into the skylight tunnel. It smacked the wall and bits of pear showered down over the tree.

“It’s going to be Calliope,” Belorme stated again. “The Queen.”

Xerxes did not acknowledge the claim. He refused to reply as he tugged a leaf from the tree, dropped it, and watched it flip through the air until it met the cobbled ground.

He crushed it with the toe of his boot, strangling the leaf to death beneath the pressure. A green smear was left on the rock.

“If you reward Calliope at the first trial, and if you offer to meet with her in the evening as her prize, we will cancel the rest of the trials, send the other maidens home with riches, and you will no longer have to suffer through this. Once you’re married, Calliope will leave you alone, just like your last wife did. ”

Xerxes’s glare rose. His blood boiled at the mention of the woman who was never to be spoken of. But that wasn’t all.

Ryn. He’d promised her three months. He could not let her leave—He could not stay trapped by his voices forever. He would rather die.

Xerxes fought the urge to blurt the truth to this man who had been playing puppet master for too long. The truth that Xerxes would never marry Calliope and that if the Celestial Divinities threatened to strike him down if he did not choose a wife…

It would be Ryn. He would pick her.

His heart tugged him toward the spiral staircase at his back as he realized. He felt the overwhelming need to find her immediately. He didn’t know why.

Or maybe he did. Ryn had been the sole recipient of Xerxes’s sincere laughter since the day he caught her escaping through the garden.

She’d been the sole recipient of his heart flutters, the one to prove that beneath all his monstrosity, he did have a heart after all.

She’d been the focus of his interest, the obsession of his thoughts every time she was within view, and all the more when she wasn’t.

Ryn even made him believe, briefly, that he wasn’t a monster.

Divinities, he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything. With or without his voices, he could not let her leave the palace or be sent away. Because if she was gone, he was sure he would never smile again.

“Answer me, Xerxes. Do we have a deal? I can make these trials go away.” Belorme tilted his head, waiting.

Xerxes stood taller, the beastly parts of him on edge.

“I will not get married,” he articulated.

“Not to Calliope, not to anyone. Fake my death and choose a new King if you must. I will not be a husband again.” He grabbed Belorme’s collar, and the sage’s hood fell back.

The man’s eyes weren’t big and startled like Xerxes had expected; they were dark.

Menacing. At the sight of them, Xerxes had no doubt Belorme could devise a plan to have Xerxes murdered in his sleep and choose a new, more obedient King.

“If Calliope touches me on that stage,” Xerxes went on, “I will kill her before everyone.”

It was a bluff, but it worked. Belorme’s face changed, his cheeks falling white. Xerxes kept his gaze on the sage as he reached to the tree beside him and plucked a pear from its branch. He grabbed Belorme’s hand and placed the pear into it.

“For your hunger,” Xerxes said.

He turned his back to the sage, and he marched up the stairs, thinking only of the girl he could not let go.

The moon found its place above the palace. Ryn wasn’t in her chambers, and the organizers were being obnoxious about not letting him see her anyway, stating how important it was that he not get a hint of what sense she chose for the trial. As if he cared a dime about the trials anymore.

“Tell her I’m looking for her when she comes back,” he told the organizers hovering outside her door, but he knew they probably wouldn’t. Belorme had likely gotten around to everyone already. The whole palace had probably been instructed to cause interference so he’d never run into Ryn again.

Xerxes rubbed his temples as he walked, his skin growing tighter, his headache becoming more irritating by the second. Voices he’d pushed aside for a little while began slipping back in. Tempting him to do ugly things. Making him notice how vulnerable every person he passed was.

How easy it would be to break something large and cause a great ruckus that would turn heads and strike fear into his subjects throughout the palace.

Xerxes eyed the statue of Eos in the atrium, imagining hurling the goddess across the room and watching her smash to a thousand pieces.

The Intelligentsia would be enraged he’d dared to insult one of their precious goddesses.

Xerxes stopped before the statue, thinking about doing it.

“Your Majesty?” A soft voice brought him to glance over his shoulder. The blond fellow stood there. Xerxes had already forgotten his name, but he eyed him until it returned.

Matthias .

Xerxes raised a brow as he waited for the guard to spit out his request.

“I’m wondering if you know what happened to Ryn?” the Folke asked.

Xerxes turned to face him. “Explain what you mean.” He didn’t intend for it to sound demanding, but it did.

“I can’t find her anywhere,” Matthias apologized. “I was told she was with a man, and I assumed it was you…”

Xerxes did a sweep of the atrium, taking in every servant and statue and painting and councilman.

He’d already visited the Abandoned Temple, and Ryn wasn’t there.

He hadn’t seen her guardswoman all day either.

“Does…” Xerxes pursed his lips as he thought about how to ask.

“Does she have other friends here who are… men? That are like brothers? Apart from you, I mean?”

Matthias’s brows furrowed. “No,” he said.

The clouds in Xerxes’s mind swallowed him for a moment as he recalled how he’d stood across from Ryn in the tower last evening.

How he’d stumbled over his thick throat and had shared things with her he’d never shared with anyone.

And how, in the end, she asked for permission to leave as soon as she’d dealt with his voices.

“So, you’ll let me go? Once you’re cured?”

She was a prisoner here, Xerxes knew that. It had been obvious since the day they met at the palace wall. She’d always been trying to run away.

But he’d been convinced something had changed. It was the way she’d looked down at him in the Abandoned Temple. The way she’d mouthed those words.

“I like you.”

He couldn’t stop hearing them, putting a voice to them, even though he’d only seen it with his eyes.

No one liked him. Xerxes was incapable of being liked in any of his forms—or so he’d believed until that moment. He’d lost count of how many people despised him, were disappointed in him, wished he’d move out of their way. No one in the kingdom of Per-Siana liked him.

Just Ryn.

But the Intelligentsia would execute Ryn on the spot if she was caught alone with another man while she was a Heartstealer. Xerxes swallowed, hoping she wouldn’t be that foolish. Trying not to imagine it if she was.

“Your Majesty.”

Three Intelligentsia glided across the atrium toward him. “We can’t seem to find Damon. I don’t suppose you know where he is?” The way Yelenos asked made Xerxes worried the sage knew exactly where Damon was.

Xerxes’s fingertips grew ice cold. He wondered if his skin was glistening.

“I do,” he lied. “Go back to your mediations. I’ll go get him for you.”

A moment passed where no one spoke, and there was a lot of staring. Maids and guards exchanged pleasantries at the far end of the atrium. Carts were pushed past by attendants serving tea. Though it was all exactly as it should be, nothing about it felt normal.

Finally, Yelenos smiled and dipped his head. “Your kindness knows no bounds, Your Majesty.” The Intelligentsia trio turned and drifted back across the atrium.

The Folke guard at Xerxes’s side moved to leave, but Xerxes grabbed his arm.

“Folke—I mean— Matthias ,” he said in a hushed voice.

The red-cheeked fellow looked at Xerxes in question.

“We must find Ryn before anyone else does. Do you understand? Move through the palace as fast as you’re able—check every room. ”

“Why, Your Majesty?” Matthias whispered back. “What’s the urgency?”

Xerxes watched the Intelligentsia disappear through the arch in the direction of their Room of Knowledge. The sun was setting outside, pushing shadows into the atrium.

“She’s in danger right now,” Xerxes said.