Page 5

The Cursed Lovers

A guard appears at the bottom of the stairs that lead out of the temple, so quiet and out of nowhere he reminds me of the ghost who sent me here. “Follow me,” he says.

His serious gaze sweeps over the lot of us but pauses on Tabra before moving on to me, which is when his eyes narrow slightly.

“Stay with Tabra,” I tell Bene, not looking away from the guard.

Tabra goes taut beside me. “Meren, no—”

“I’m not debating this.” The Devourer is my best way to keep her safe when I’m not with her, even if it makes my own task much harder.

“Who are you talking to?” the guard asks.

“The raven.”

His frown clearly calls into question my power of thought.

Bene, meanwhile, doesn’t argue, and Tabra closes her mouth around any more protests.

“Careful,” I tell the guard. “He bites.”

The guy eyes Bene, both curious and wary. Good. No need to have them complacent.

Our goodbyes are brief after that, and we follow the guard away from the temple. As soon as we are out of Hakan’s hearing range, Pella pushes me aside to pull up by Horus, who is ahead of me. “Did you know?” she demands.

“Know what?”

I can’t see Horus’s face, but I can hear the amusement tinting his voice, eyes no doubt crinkling around the corners. He’s fully aware what she’s asking.

Pella tosses a glare first at him, then over her shoulder at me. “Did you know,” she all but growls, “that Hakan is royal ?” Her voice spikes as she flings her arm out. “Did anyone know that?”

She’s asking the others more than me. Horus, Vos, and Tziah are all part of the Vanished, the people Reven saved and who lived together in the Shadowood he created before Eidolon’s soldiers destroyed it. Hakan was also one of them.

I frown. “Didn’t he go with you to Savanah when you spoke with Queen Wynega before?”

“No. And now we know why he didn’t,” Pella mutters darkly.

Vos pats her shoulder. “He didn’t tell us either, if it makes you feel better.”

Pella’s scowl deepens as she shrugs off his hand. “I don’t feel any which way.”

The guard ignores all this and starts us up a steep path that scales the sides of the pit walls. Horus and Cain, ahead of and behind me, are no doubt positioned to keep me from running away screaming. Heights and I don’t get along, but I have it locked down this time.

A fall to my death, I’ve learned, is not the worst thing that can happen to me.

Their leader—a captain I see by the markings on his uniform—meets us near the top. The tattoos marking the dark skin of his shaved scalp differ from Hakan’s. One side is a bull, which is known to be a stubborn creature. Is that a warning of who we’re dealing with? Maybe, given the way he’s regarding us with distrustful curiosity.

“There’s a bounty on your heads issued by the King of Tropikis,” is the first thing he says to us.

All five of us reach for our weapons, but he holds up a hand. “Queen Wynega has given orders not to honor it.” His gaze slowly roams me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. “So there are two,” he murmurs to himself. “I see why you inspire such…violence.”

My mouth drops open. “What is that supposed to mean?”

His eyebrows shoot up almost to his hairline. “Just that you’re beautiful, domina.”

If I wasn’t wrapped in a cocoon of numbness, his words would probably have thrown me into a swirl of confusion. People don’t just…say stuff like that. I pull myself up to my most regal stance, giving him my best imitation of Grandmother’s haughty disdain. “I’m well aware but watch it. I’m still royalty.”

A spark of respect ignites in hazel eyes. “Now I see why you’re the decoy.”

I guess word of the hidden princess in Aryd has spread.

“This is getting us nowhere fast,” Cain grumbles.

The guard’s gaze shifts between me and Cain, a light of speculative amusement glinting in his eyes before he returns to the serious soldier he’s supposed to be. “No one goes to the Snarl for a good reason.”

Cain glares at him. “We already know.”

The captain’s gaze doesn’t so much as flicker away from me. “I doubt that.”

I sigh. Having to stand here and prove myself is a delay. I hate delays. “Hakan told us the legend.”

While we waited for nightfall in Mariana, Hakan briefed us on who—and what—we’d be up against.

A long time ago, a man named Aesthetus saw his reflection in a still pond and couldn’t look away from his own beauty to the point he began wasting away, dying of starvation. Finally, a woman named Mimick came along, a Hylorae who could shapeshift. She entered the water on the other side, then swam up under his reflection and took on his features in female form so that he’d fall in love with her and come out of his trance. During their bonding ritual, Aesthetus claimed that, together, they were the most beautiful creations alive, even more beautiful than the goddesses.

Savanah punished their vanity by turning Aesthetus into a beast who can only see his reflection from underwater and turned Mimick into a monster of unknown form who can only repeat other’s words.

The Snarl is the maze the cursed lovers built to keep out prying eyes.

The captain glances behind me, off to the east, then slings his bow over his shoulder. “They kill anyone who tries to enter. Why in the name of the goddesses would you want to go there?”

I could tell him the truth—that the only thing that matters to us is getting Savanah’s amulet—but that would mean telling him that a ghost in the Land of Eternal Death told me it was here and how to get it.

I’m sure that would go over well.

This is the last amulet containing the six missing goddesses, and our biggest bargaining chip in our fight against Eidolon. Thanks to my foolish ass, the king holds two—Tyndra’s and Aryd’s. We have three—Mariana’s, Tropikis’s, and Wildernyss’s—sort of. They’re hidden away in a secret shadowy pocket Reven made that only he can access. I haven’t figured out how to get into it yet or if I even can.

If Eidolon gets this one before us, that gives both of us three, and we need the upper hand before we confront him again.

“We have no choice,” I say simply. The fewer people who know, the better. For them and for us.

A frown flickers over his features, and he glances down into the temple as if deciding if he should just send us back the way we came or let us go off to die.

He doesn’t have to voice his thoughts aloud. I’ve already thought them myself.

A smarter queen would have found another way to do this. A braver one would have come here on her own. An honest queen would admit that Eidolon’s ghost said only Tziah and one other person needed to come. He said nothing about me.

The captain finally gives a single nod. “Then I hope you are successful. Goddess speed to you.”

“Thank you.” I pause. “Any tips?”

“Yeah. Don’t go.”

Everyone’s a jester. “Except that.”

“I voted for the not going,” Vos tells him. “But I was overruled.”

The captain looks off to the east again. “When we hear something that sounds like a flute, the grasses past the Sacred Tree move, and screaming usually follows. Even though we’re leagues from there, we can see it and hear it.”

Eidolon’s ghost told me about the flute, but not that it may be what triggers the monster. And what’s this about the grasses moving?

Maybe we don’t know everything.

I look at Cain and he shrugs. He’s the only one who’s supported this idea from the beginning. As long as he’s still with me, we’re doing this.

“Thank you,” I say to the captain.

He nods again, then executes a sharp about-face and leads us the rest of the way up. Before I follow, I glance back down into the temple where the others are standing, peering up at me.

Looking down at Tabra now, in a hole in the ground, is like looking down into a grave.

Not that a queen would ever be buried. Tabra has a tomb waiting for her, adorned and glittering. So maybe I’m seeing my own death as the copy of myself—down to every freckle and scar, except for the more recent ones—staring back at me. I should shiver with fear while worry vaguely gnaws at my stomach.

But I’ve got a handle on the Shadows, the numb spreads through me and over me like I’ve been buried under a sand dune. The marks of my bond with Reven are silent and so is he.

So is my heart.

“She’ll be okay,” Horus murmurs from behind me. My sworn bodyguard lost a sister himself.

“I know.” The words come out cold. As cold as I feel inside.

Please let Reven be okay.

Tziah gives my arm a squeeze, and I force my legs to work, walking away from the people I love. Not the first time I’ve had to, and I’m sure not the last.

I pause when we reach the top of the pit as I get my first real look at the grasslands of Savanah. I can see leagues and leagues across the fields—all brown if what’s closest to us is any indication, not spring green the way they should be this time of year. Tyndra’s winter has her hooks in this dominion even more than in Mariana. Each blade is individually sheathed in a layer of thin ice. A tinkling crackle of sound follows the wind as it plays gently across the fields.

A slow-moving river flows nearby, its usually fertile, black banks covered in drifts of snow.

The temple pit is out in the open and solitary, no structures anywhere in sight. Savanah is the only dominion with the temple not located directly in or close to the capital city. In fact, it’s at the opposite end of the long, narrow dominion, as far from civilization as it can get. I turn slowly, taking in the vastness of it, and spot our destination in the distance.

“What do you think?” the guard asks.

Is he expecting me to wax poetic or something? Ooh and ahh in wonder? The me before all this would have. “It’s beautiful.”

I hear Cain sigh behind me. Tziah, standing at the guard’s back now, gives me a pointed look. I guess that wasn’t gushing enough. She then makes a sign with her hands that the captain can see, and Vos translates. “Peaceful.”

The Savanahan soldier looks out over the fields, and I study his expression, which is somewhere between sad and angry. “You should see it when there’s no ice and snow. Lush and green, bountiful. But Tyndra’s freeze…”

He trails off.

Many of the dominions, Savanah included, won’t survive Tyndra’s winter. It’s too cold here, while the glass walls, made by the goddess Aryd herself along our borders to protect her people from the Devourers, are making it too hot, drying up our oases and shortening the periods of rain we get. Wildernyss rises higher into the skies every day, and the void it’s leaving on the ocean floor is sucking Tyndra deeper into the waters. Mariana has been taken over by winter, decimating the temperate dominion. Even Tropikis’s southern borders have been breached by the cold.

The dominions are breaking because the goddesses aren’t here to fix them.

I want to set them right, but that means releasing the goddesses. We still don’t know why my ancestress trapped them in those amulets in the first place. Instead of helping, I could very well unleash the hells on all of Nova.

That’s assuming I can do what Eidolon failed to and figure out how to release them at all.

The captain points off to the east. “Two leagues that way to the Sacred Tree, then turn south and go another league.”

At least three hours of walking, in other words.

I turn to where he’s pointing, and a pinprick of wonder penetrates my blanket of numbness.

The Sacred Tree.

It’s fully visible on the horizon. Impossible to miss. A massive watchtower standing tall against the slowly pinking skies, covered in glittering bluish-white ice, different from the frozen land around us. Their tree has always been frozen, never melting. Savanah and Tyndra are twin goddesses, and each gifted their tree to the other.

Do they miss each other? Separated in their different amulets and scattered to the dominions’ rulers, Savanah’s even lost to memory. I know what not seeing my twin for extended periods of time feels like, and that was only weeks and months, not centuries.

Cain bumps me with his shoulder. “At least we can see this one together.”

I elbow Cain back to hide my smile. As kids, before either of us had ever left our dominion, we always said that someday we’d see every Sacred Tree for the first time together. It was a promise we both ended up breaking.

“How long do we wait for you?” the captain asks.

I don’t pretend to misunderstand. People don’t come back from the Snarl. He’s assuming we won’t, either. “Let my sister decide.”