Page 31 of The Shattered King

I did insist Renn rest the next day, despite his protests that he’d been resting his entire life. He read, carefully played danerin with Sten, snoozed—anything to occupy himself and let me work.

After some experimentation, I learned I could use the dust and tiniest bits of his lumis to reconstruct whole baubles, as I had when he last relapsed without entirely draining myself in the process; I just had to do it slowly.

So slowly even I became bored with it. I was as still in Renn’s lumis as I was physically in his room. My neck and back ached.

“Read something to me.” My voice sounded distant, like I’d spoken underwater.

I felt Renn shift against my physical fingers, but he didn’t break contact. He spoke softly, too soft to breach the barrier between reality and lumis, asking one of the guards to hand him a book, perhaps, for a moment later he said, “Do you want poetry or the ecology of marshlands?”

I paused, watching the infant orb in my hands slowly take shape. “Those are my only choices?”

“We can move to the library.”

I shook my head. My ethereal, in-lumis head; my physical one stayed put. “I’ll have to start all over if we move.”

“I could try carrying you.”

I laughed. “You’re not serious.” I thought, perhaps, physically he could, but the idea of being paraded through the hall in the prince’s arms, blank-faced with magic, made my ears burn.

A pause. “I could attempt to merge the two and read you poetry about marshlands.”

“Yes, that. That is what I want.” I rolled my eyes and leaked a little more magic into the orb, watching it grow like a sponge beneath a sprinkling of rain.

A minute passed before he said, “Art thou the ... common bullfrog ... of mine heart? Dost not the ... cattails ... bridge yet the ... directly into the water, not a nest?”

I nearly broke our contact laughing. “That is utterly ridiculous.”

“I’m reading out of two books at once. Ard seems amused.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” I chided, refocusing on my work. “If I break contact, I’ll have to do all of this again, and it’s tedious.”

So he read from the book on marshlands until I finished, leaving me knowing far more about the bullfrog life cycle than I ever cared to learn.

I finished the new globe before lunch and was thankful when I blinked back to reality. I must have looked tired, for Renn offered me his bed to sleep. Instead, I took the sofa. The last thing I needed was the queen making another unexpected visit and finding me curled up in her son’s bedsheets.

After an hour’s nap, I shifted back into Renn’s lumis and gathered another pile of glassy sand, sighing inwardly at the spine-aching work ahead of me.

Even taking the process slowly, it would exhaust me beyond function.

I looked out over the strewn pile of broken globes.

The weight of the work settled on my shoulders.

As I scooped up a handful of dust, however, an idea came to me. It was the magic that melted this down and re-formed it. The magic that let me do anything in this ethereal space. Magic that let me shift weights from scales or move blocks or hang orbs.

If so much of the lumis was magic, then could I form the orbs from magic?

I sat with the idea for a moment. Wanted to run it by Ursa, but I’d have to excuse myself to speak with her privately. Considering, I watched the sparkling sand sift through my fingers, until it left my hands empty.

I imagined the bauble I intended to form and drew pure magic into my hands, as I would if I were summoning a tool or mending a break.

I felt it shuddering through my limbs, warm and quick, like an infant’s heartbeat.

I willed it into a sphere. Watched as it swirled, a translucent white, like frosty glass, between my palms. Pulling my hands apart, I carefully shaped the magic into a sphere, pulse quickening as it took shape.

Yes, this looked just like one of Renn’s orbs! Just like—

The magic rippled and popped, vanishing from my hands.

I gaped at the empty space, wondering. That had felt ... that had felt right, or so I thought.

I tried again, cupping my hands tightly together. Starting smaller. Pulled on the magic a little more, steadying it with that extra oomph Ursa had given me. Again, the magic swirled into a perfect sphere, but right when I thought I’d finished, it fizzled into nothing, as though it never were.

There was something here, I was sure of it.

Not wanting to exhaust myself on theories, I scooped up sand and finished one more bauble before Renn excused me for the night. I treated myself to a bath and turned in early.

The following day, my one-hundredth since entering Rove Castle, we were to set off past its gates.

I rose early, as always, and went down to the kitchens, happy to be greeted by Lonnie.

She asked me about the birthday celebration and told me how hectic it had been in the kitchen for two days, and she’d stayed up nearly all night cleaning up.

She assisted me in making lunches for the trip, eight in total.

To appease the queen, Renn had to bring all four of his personal guards, as well as have two more trailing behind in civilian clothes.

We sliced beautifully baked hard rolls and laid slices of bacon and a fried egg in each.

Wrapped each of them up with a stem of grapes and packed them into a wicker basket I could carry.

I complimented the cook. Lonnie came into the keep with me, carrying canteens to go with lunch, giggling quietly about how we could put anything we wanted in there and no one would know, which got us on the topic of the hardest liquor we’d ever tasted.

Were it a contest, Lonnie would have won.

We had just reached the floor the Noblewight family roomed on when I noticed a flash of a broad white cincture.

Prince Adrinn was coming from the opposite direction, sandwiched between two of his own guards, striding with a confidence even Dan would never truly be able to mimic.

He met my eyes and smirked; I pointedly looked away and continued my conversation with Lonnie, pressing into her shoulder to make space for the men to pass.

When the prince’s hand reached out and grabbed my womanhood, I jolted as though lightning had entered my crown and zapped out my heels. The castle clicked into shades of gray. For a breath, my spirit left my body.

He released me, never breaking his stride, never looking back, and neither did his rearguard.

I stood frozen in the corridor. Dark memories licked at the corners of my mind like death would a lumis.

“Zia help me,” Lonnie murmured, blanching. She’d seen, then. “Nym, let it go. Let it go. Come on.” She grabbed my wrist, desperate to move me, to distance us from the elder prince. My feet responded before my brain did, and I let her pull me forward as the keep slowly regained its color.

It was not the first time I’d been touched so against my will.

And yet I could not ignore it. I still felt his hand there, like it had attached to me, and no matter how quickly I walked or how much I brushed at my skirt, I could not dislodge the sensation.

My throat began to squeeze shut. I forbade it, for Lonnie was right—there was nothing I could do but let it go.

I was a servant, and he was a prince. I was a peasant, and he the heir to the kingdom.

I started shaking, like it was Ford all over again.

“Nym.” Lonnie guided me into a recess, a little stone inlet meant to showcase a vase or portrait but standing empty. She pulled the wicker basket off my shoulder and grabbed my shoulders, standing so her young face filled my vision. “Nym, are you all right?”

“Hardly,” I whispered, then cleared my throat. Shook myself. “I mean ... yes, yes, I’m fine. It was nothing.” You’ve survived worse. This is nothing. You’ve survived worse—

“It happens. I told you ... he’s best avoided by everyone, even us. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t think from ...” She shook her head. “It’s over now, all right? He’s gone. See? Empty hallway. It’s just a stupid thing men do. Don’t let it get to you. It doesn’t mean anything.”

I swallowed hard, trying to find my voice. “It doesn’t mean anything,” I repeated.

“What doesn’t mean anything?”

My heart leapt from its cage, the voice unexpected, the fact that it was male feeding the panic and muting the colors around me a moment, but the grayness split for a head of golden hair, and my heart settled a little lower, though not quite in my chest.

Lonnie whipped around. “Y-Your Highness!” She curtsied so low I wasn’t sure she’d be able to get back up. “We didn’t mean to make a spectacle, just delivering the food for your outing today.”

But Renn looked over Lonnie to me, his brows drawing together. I had not schooled myself in time. “What ‘doesn’t mean anything’? What are you not letting ‘get to you’?”

I shook my head. “It’s nothing, Your Highness. A ... miscommunication.”

But that damn quiver was in my voice, and he knew I was lying, and the tension in the air felt like it had in the Great Hall when Whitestone attempted to discredit me.

“You’re dismissed,” he said to Lonnie, followed by, “Thank you for your assistance.”

She passed one nervous glance to me before rising and scurrying down the hallway.

Renn took a step forward. “What, Nym?”

I tried to smile. “It’s nothing, just between Lonnie and I—”

“Is this the line, then?” he asked, his body heat making me feel like I was standing next to a furnace. “Where we stop being honest with one another?”

I pressed my lips together.

“Nym—”

“That’s not fair.”

“Just tell me—”

“Your brother ... touched me, all right?” I whispered, feeling as though the accusation rang through the little alcove. “It was nothing. Over clothes, just in passing. I’ve already forgotten— Renn! ”

He was marching down the corridor, back the way I’d come.