Bound to the Shadow Prince

Chapter 58

Chapter

Fifty-Eight

I ’m holding my breath.

Holding my breath, my eyes tightly closed, and I wait for something to happen. Time feels as if it’s slowed, my pulse pounding in my ears. My slippers—made for walking on the even stone floors of the tower—sink into the sands of the beach. A breeze ruffles my hair, pulling a few strands loose from my braid. Somewhere in the distance, a sea bird cries out.

I wait for the goddess’s wrath to fall upon us. I wait for lightning to strike us down. For the skies to rumble with thunder and the wind to wail, letting us know she’s displeased that we’ve broken our vow to remain in the tower. I wait for anything, any sign at all.

Nothing happens.

I exhale and open my eyes.

It’s…a nice day. The sun shines down from above without a cloud in the sky. The breeze is cool for the otherwise warm day. The sandy beach surrounding the tower looks pristine and untouched, and if the waves seem to be a little high and white-capped, it makes for a pretty scene.

Shouldn’t it be…awful? Out here? As punishment? “I don’t understand,” I say to Nemeth, my clammy hand still clutched in his. “I thought we’d feel something.”

“I did, too,” he confesses. His gaze moves over the bright blue skies and he squints, raising a hand to shield his eyes. “Perhaps the goddess has not noticed yet. Or perhaps she understands our problem and forgives us.”

Out of nowhere, thunder rumbles overhead, loud and crackling.

“Or not,” I say tightly, clutching at his hand as I stare up at the still-blue sky. “Dragon shite.”

Nemeth extends a wing over my head as fat drops of rain begin to fall from above. It seems impossible for it to rain on us without clouds overhead, but I guess the gods can do whatever they want. I peer out from under Nemeth’s wing, thinking of the small pack I have on my back with my cloak and a change of clothing. Nemeth insists upon carrying everything heavy but I don’t mind carrying my fair share. I glance up at my lover, and the rain is sluicing down his dark gray skin in rivulets. “Do we…go back inside and wait out the rain or do we just soldier on through?”

He shakes his head slowly. “It seems insulting to retreat back to the tower after taking two steps out. We’ll continue onward. Let us give the rain a moment.”

Sure enough, the patter of rain stops as quickly as it started, and Nemeth shakes off his wings before folding them up again. “Shall we have a look around?”

I nod, not trusting my voice when a knot rises in my throat. We really are leaving. We’ve done it now. There’s no turning back. It doesn’t matter that we had no choice. The goddess would probably argue that our choice could have been to starve. The Golden Moon Goddess has never been a goddess of kindness and understanding, after all.

I cling to Nemeth’s hand for a moment longer, and when I take a step forward, my shoe scrapes on something hard. I glance down and realize it’s one of the bricks that used to cover the door. It’s nearly covered in sand, and a quick look around shows that more of them are scattered against the wall of the tower and off to the side, most of them covered in grit or half-buried.

It reminds me of the dead men who should still be on this beach.

Instead of investigating our surroundings, I scan the sands for dead bodies. They would have rotted, I think, though I have no idea how much or how little would remain. I doubt they would have coin, but they might have weapons. More knives. We can always use more knives.

So while Nemeth looks around on the beach, his mood as apprehensive as mine, I go hunting. A short distance from the door, I find what looks like a ribcage half-buried in the sands. I use my shoe to kick some of the sand away, and the moment I do, I see a dirty piece of cloth…and then a faded symbol embroidered on the cuff of a sleeve.

It’s the cuff of one of Castle Lios’s guardsmen. Surely he couldn’t have been one of the men that broke in? I remember them as skinny and disheveled, with ragged beards and a terrible need for a bath.

“Candra?” Nemeth calls. “What are you doing?”

I kick the sand back over the bit of rotten fabric. “I thought I saw a pretty shell,” I call out. “It’s nothing.” Gathering my skirts, I return to his side, slogging through the sand. It fills my slippers and makes walking difficult, but I manage a bright smile for Nemeth. “I don’t suppose you see a raft anywhere?”

“A raft?” Nemeth echoes.

Nodding, I glance around the lonely stretch of beach. There’s nothing here but a few waving grasses and a distant seagull on the far end of the beach. I vaguely remember the old, weathered dock on the far side of the shore, and how there wasn’t one on this side. “Something we can use to get across the water? I can’t swim.” I want to point out that the men who arrived to attack us would have needed a raft or a boat of some kind, but I don’t want to bring Nemeth’s attention to the dead. For some reason, I don’t want him to know that they were from Lios. They were human, so it stands to reason that they were my people, but…still. “Any ideas?”

Nemeth chuckles. “I cannot believe you even have to ask.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask what he means when he picks me up into his arms, grinning. My shoes stream sand and I cling to his neck as he spreads his wings and moves into the shadows of the tower?—

—the world flips upside down and my stomach heaves. Everything spins and it feels as if all gravity has disappeared.

A moment later, everything is heavy once more. The tumbling world sets itself right again, and when I blink away the confusion, I see we’re still on the sandy shore, but now we’re in the shadow of a cliff, and across the long stretch of water in front of us is the distant tower.

He’s shifted us into shadows.

“See?” Nemeth murmurs against my ear.

I smack his arm, furious (and a little queasy). “You said you wouldn’t do that! You’re not supposed to risk your life.”

“There was no risk. I could see the beach from here.” He ignores my anger, setting me down. “And with how weak you’ve been, I don’t want you swimming.”

I don’t point out that he has wings. We both know he does. The fact that he wouldn’t fly us over the water means he doesn’t trust them, which makes me ache inside. How horrible must it be to have wings and not be able to use them? To be stuck with nothing but your two feet to travel? I want to ask him how he’s feeling, but I also don’t want to prod an open wound. So I give him a huffy look, straightening my rain-dampened clothes. “Next time you do that, please warn me.”

“So you can panic?”

So arrogant and confident in himself. I love it, even if I want to wrap my hands around his neck and choke him right now. “So I can talk you out of it.”

Nemeth snorts with amusement. His gaze moves over the rocky shore, eyeing the Liosian land. On this side of the channel, it’s not nearly as mountainous. The Fellian landscape is nothing but mountains, his people living deep in the belly of the rocky giants instead of on their sloping surface. Meanwhile the Lios lands are far more temperate. There are some steep cliffs near the waters, sure, but Castle Lios itself is tucked into a rolling green valley surrounded by a thick forest on one side and hills upon the other, with an impressive dockyard to the south leading to deep waters and a harbor constantly full of ships. Here, though, days away from the castle and the city it protects, there’s nothing but desolate beaches that lead up to equally desolate plains. Here, there are no ships on the water, no farms for as far as the eye can see. It’s remote and deserted.

It worries me a little. When I was brought out here, there was a carriage with strong horses, and it still took two days to arrive. How long will we be traveling on foot across this land? How long will it take for us to return to Castle Lios?

And how are things going to go when I arrive five years early with a Fellian at my side?

Hot panic bubbles up inside me, but I push it down. I’ll worry about that when I have time. For now, I’m here with Nemeth, and we need to conquer one issue at a time.

“There’s no one here,” Nemeth says, gazing along the empty shore. “Is this normal?”

I shrug. “As normal as to be expected, I think. There’s nothing out here.”

He nods, then studies my face. “Are you tired? Do you need to rest? Your face is flushed.”

Is it? “I’m just anxious.” I gesture at the coast. “Castle Lios is a few days on horseback to the north. I suppose we can start in that direction.”

“Are you all right?”

“No,” I admit. “But neither are you. We’re out of choices.”

“Are you tired? It has been a long time since either one of us were outside. This is a lot.” His voice is gentle. “If you need a moment, I understand.”

I do need a moment. I also need five more years of food supplies and to have not left the tower. I need to not have a blood curse. I need to not be pregnant with a Fellian’s baby. But these are not choices I have, so I shake them off. “No, I can walk. Let’s go, shall we?”

I’m a terrible traveling companion. I know I am. Before we walk very far at all, my feet are hurting, my shoes useless. My legs ache with fatigue. I’m hot and sweaty and I dislike being hot and sweaty. Nemeth makes excuses for me because he loves me. I’m fatigued due to my illness. I’m fatigued due to years in the tower. I point out to him that I’m also a princess, and a princess never walks farther than across a ballroom. That, I think, startles him. As a Fellian prince, he has been trained in all kinds of combat, even from his days in the Alabaster Citadel. He has traveled to his homeland and back again.

But he is also a man, and not one with cursed blood. I have been sheltered all my life, and even in the tower, it was a sort of shelter once more.

So traveling? Not my favorite. It’s difficult and unpleasant and I want to scream when we finally find a rutted dirt road that’s more rock and mud than actual road and it stretches across the endless horizon without a single town or village in sight. I know I should be glad that we can travel without a Fellian being noticed, but when I pull the sixteenth rock out of my flimsy, useless shoe, I would give my smallest toe for a run-down inn with a free bed. Any kind of bed, no matter how filthy. Just a bed.

No, a chair, I decide. I would give two small toes for a chair.

I want to ask if Nemeth isn’t flying because I’m with him, or if he’s afraid of his injured wing. He hasn’t even attempted flight, despite spreading his wings a few times. Maybe we’re both on edge and doubting ourselves. Certainly our communication skills have been strained. Normally in the tower we can’t stop talking to one another, but ever since we’ve crossed the threshold, we’ve been more or less silent. It worries me.

Then again, all of this is worrying.

Like the shrines we passed as we looked for a road. Small roadside shrines to the gods are common, as travelers make offerings so they will be protected in their journeys. The shrines we’ve passed aren’t filling me with reassurance, though. They’re covered in leaves and detritus, the offerings left behind withered and ancient. The flowering bushes near each stone effigy that are tended to by travelers out of courtesy are overgrown and abandoned, and even the earthenware offering bowls on the altars themselves are cracked and look as if they’ve seen better days.

With how abandoned things are, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear we’d been in that tower for a hundred years and not just two.

“Not exactly a reassuring sight,” I tell Nemeth as we pause in front of the latest set of altars. Whatever has been left in the offering bowl of the Gray God rotted into a pile of goo long ago. I wrinkle my nose. “Surely the gods can’t be pleased with this.”

“I imagine whoever was here last did the best they could,” Nemeth says at my side. “Do you want to stop for a time and tend to it? Do our duty?”

I don’t. I really don’t. I’m tired and cranky and I just want to sit somewhere and rest. But we’re not exactly the favorites of the gods right now as it is, so I suppose it couldn’t hurt to kiss up a little. “Why not.”

We pause by the shrines for a time, tidying up. I brush the three altars—one for each of the gods—tidy of debris and clean the offering bowls, rinsing them out with water. Nemeth uses a knife to tend to the overgrown plants, trimming vines and cutting down overgrown branches from the flowering bushes. When we’re done, the altars look less forlorn. Even though we don’t have much food left, we offer a few withered vegetables from our depleted store. Part of me hates to leave those behind. We need them more than the gods—or whatever birds will pick them off because the gods won’t notice or care.

But Nemeth is more pious than me. He seems happy with our contribution, smiling at me. “If the gods have noticed us at all, perhaps they’ll notice our efforts, too.”

Noticed us? I don’t see how they couldn’t, given that we abandoned their tower. But I don’t say that aloud. You never say the bad things aloud.