Bound to the Shadow Prince

Chapter 70

Chapter

Seventy

T he mood is strange as we wait for the medication—Nemeth’s blood—to take effect.

He holds me for hours. It’s like he’s afraid that if he lets me go, the worst will happen. Even though it’s damp and humid in the old library, I remain locked in his arms, tucked against his chest. We’re both quiet, as if speaking will somehow set things in motion. I don’t tell Nemeth that when his blood enters my veins, it feels hot and a little itchy, and very different from the potion itself.

We wait. And wait.

At some point, I fall asleep in his arms. When I wake up, I can see sunlight streaming through one of the doors into the palace, and the air smells crisp and dewy.

And I feel…good. Surprisingly good.

I sit up in Nemeth’s arms. He immediately straightens, coming out of a deep slumber of his own, and panic is etched across his face. “Are you all right? How do you feel?”

“I think I’m fine?”

“Get up,” he says. “Move around. Let us see if you are dizzy.” There’s a note of tension in his voice. “I do not think we should celebrate too soon.”

Even before I get to my feet, though, I know. After years of living with my blood curse, I know what it feels like when my potion isn’t strong enough. I know the waves of nausea that hit when I miss a dose. I know how it feels when things are off . And it doesn’t feel off right now. I feel good. Amazing.

It feels as if some strange puzzle piece inside me has suddenly locked into place.

I push off of him and bounce to my feet. Gathering up the skirts of my chemise, I laugh and race across the library, kicking books out of the way as I do. Who cares about books at a time like this anyhow? I feel good . I’m not tired. Not drained. Not dizzy. Not feeling as if I’m going to vomit at any moment. Is this how healthy people feel every day? Like they could just run straight to the horizon and keep running?

Lucky bastards.

“Careful, Candra,” Nemeth warns, following after me. “Don’t hurt yourself?—”

I surge back toward him, running as fast as I can, and fling my arms around him. The momentum of my jump knocks us both to the ground, and I laugh and laugh and laugh.

I laugh so hard I want to fling myself on the floor and kick my legs like a child. “I’m free,” I whisper, and my voice breaks on a sob. “I’m free.”

“Are you well, love?” He rolls us over, his hands skimming over my body. “Does anything hurt?”

“Mmm,” I say, my arms raised up behind my head in a sensual stretch. I feel as if I can take on the world now. I want to both laugh hysterically and sob like a child for all that this means. “I do have one particular nagging ache.”

“Gods,” he murmurs, running his hands over one of my calves. “Where? Your arm? Your leg? How bad is the ache?”

“Higher,” I tell him, helpfully pulling my skirts up a bit. When he reaches my knee, I sigh. “Keep going higher.”

“Candra,” he growls, and he looks utterly furious. “Do not make light of this.”

“You don’t understand, Nemeth,” I say giddily. I squeeze my folded arms against my chest and shiver all over like a happy puppy. “I feel good! I feel good without the medicine! Do you know how much I’ve hated every dose? How much the scent turns my stomach sometimes? Do you know what this means? It means I’m free !” I choke on the word this time. “I’m bloody free .”

Nemeth grunts, and I can’t tell if he’s pleased along with me or still mad over my joke. “If by free you mean bound to me, because now you must have my blood.”

“Oh, pish-tosh. Being bound to you isn’t a chore. I love you. I want to spend every day with you. Now I have an excuse.” I beam at him. “It’s the best of all worlds.”

He doesn’t beam back. His wings flick and then settle against his back. “You say that now, but what if you grow sick of me like Ravendor did her mate?”

Sick of him? When he’s been the only thing keeping me going for so long? I shake my head and get to my knees, crawling over to him. I put a hand on his chest, pushing him back to the floor again. “I will never, ever be sick of you for as long as I live,” I tell him. “You and I are in this together. There is nothing that will separate us.”

“Nothing?” He arches a brow at me.

“Not even the gods.” I grab the belt of his kilt and tug it off. “Now come and kiss your wife.”

“Is it kissing that’s on your mind, then?” he jokes, even as my hands steal under his kilt and cup his shaft. I tease the knot at the base of his cock, loving the hiss of breath between his teeth. “That’s not my mouth, Candra.”

“I can kiss you in other places,” I tell him, words coy. “But only if you ask me nicely.”

Nemeth sinks a hand into my hair, his fingers curling in my mane. He holds my head pinned, and I gaze down at him, curious at the pause. But he only gazes up at me with stormy green eyes, his expression full of emotion. “This might be the best moment of my life,” he tells me. “Seeing you healthy and happy.”

“You’re not saying that just because we’re surrounded by books?”

“We’re surrounded by death,” he corrects. “On all sides. And yet somehow, as long as it doesn’t touch you, I find I can manage it. I can manage anything as long as I have you, Candra.”

The look on his face is intense, vulnerable. I want to shower him with kisses and make him laugh so he’ll stop looking so concerned. “Then it’s lucky for you that you’re stuck with me, hmm?”

“I am lucky,” he agrees.

“So lucky.”

He lowers me toward his face and his lips brush against mine, just barely. “You can kiss me,” he murmurs. “Or you can ride me. Your choice.”

As if that’s much of a choice at all? “Why can’t I do both?”

“You can, if you’re feeling greedy.” His other hand steals up underneath my chemise, skimming up my thigh. “I won’t judge you.”

“You just want me on your knot,” I tease. “Lucky for you, I’m feeling good enough to ride you for hours.”

“Hours, you say?” He arches a brow at me, even as his fingers slide between my thighs. “You truly think you can last that long?”

“Is that a challenge, my mate?”

“It is.”

I do so love a challenge.

I confess that we’re shamelessly wasteful with the day. I know we should be focused on finding a boat to take us to the Alabaster Citadel. I know I should be hunting for my sister and the survivors of the sacked city. But we’ve got a bit of horse meat left and our stomachs are full. We’ve got medicine for me, and for the first time in a long time, the pressing need for survival is not quite so pressing as it usually is.

Instead of focusing on survival, we spend the day in bed.

Well…the floor counts as a bed. Most of the bedding that’s left in the palace is soaked and moldy, but when I wake up from a delicious nap, Nemeth has found blankets for us. I don’t ask what room they’ve come from—I don’t want to know. We curl up in them, eat our horse jerky, and we spend the day together, touching and kissing and loving.

I adore every moment of it, and I refuse to feel guilt. That will return soon enough. For one day, it’s nothing but pleasure.

The next morning, we wake up early and head out to the deserted stable, where the sad, lone horse waits. He’s skinny, searching the stalls for grass or hay, even though there’s nothing to be found. The constant, incessant rain means that everything is muck, and any plants drowned out long ago.

Even so, I rub the poor horse’s nose and hug his neck. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I’m sorry that it has to be you or us, friend.” To think that I’m feeling guilty over the slaughter of a horse. It’s just that…he’s carried me when I was too tired to walk. He’s seen the destruction of Lios and carried me this far. He’s survived until now. It feels wrong to kill him.

“Remember that this is a mercy, Candra,” Nemeth reminds me when I hug the horse’s neck again. “We can’t take him on the ship. Turning him loose here would just kill him slowly instead of quickly. There’s nothing for him to eat. Better to let his death nourish us.”

“I know.” I do. It’s just hard to watch. I bite my lip, hating that I’m so weak, but I’ve never been around death. It’s always been hidden from me, and I don’t think I can watch Nemeth slaughter the horse as it gazes on me. “Is it all right with you if I come back later? Once it’s done?”

Nemeth moves to my side. He presses a kiss to my damp forehead. “Why don’t you go search for mementos in the palace? Perhaps there will be something you can bring to your sister.”

He’s sending me away, but I’m so grateful I don’t even care. I give him a quick hug and then grab my skirts, hauling them clear of the calf-high muck at the entrance to the stable, and head back for the palace itself.

I spend most of the morning digging around in empty rooms, trying very hard to ignore all the destruction. I pointedly look away from tears in the tapestries, from dark stains on the rugs. I don’t find anything my sister would want, I think. Whatever treasures Lios had have been taken by the conquerors, and all that are left are scraps and memories. I head down to the library instead, determined to tuck away a few books for Nemeth. After all, if we’re going to be taking a boat, we can surely take a trunk full of books. I’m sure he’ll fight me on this, but I’m good at winning fights. I pick a few of the rarer-seeming books, the ones at the top of his pile that he can’t resist pawing every now and then. We don’t have the luxury of staying here long enough so he can read them all, and I’m desperately glad for that.

It feels as if I’m roosting in the graveyard of my people, and that if I remain here long enough, I’m going to be swallowed up by the dead.

Not that there have been a lot of dead. Other than a few scattered bodies, there’s been nothing. I’m relieved, of course, but I’m also confused. There was a battle clearly fought here. Someone would have been killed, and the dead would have had to go somewhere. Nemeth explained to me that the Fellians burn their dead so they can be returned to the skies as ash and smoke, but that doesn’t explain where the Liosian dead are.

Maybe they’ve all been taken captive and are currently at Darkfell. Maybe I’ll see a sea of familiar faces when we get there.

Maybe.

I stack the books I want Nemeth to have into an unwieldy pile, and then grimace at the mud I’ve tracked in. My shoes don’t protect my feet inasmuch as they simply seem to gather mud, and I’ve trailed a lot of it into the library. If it gets on the books, Nemeth will fuss, and while I find his fussing adorable, it does make sense to protect the books somehow. I think of a trunk my sister had in her quarters that was yet untouched. The lid’s jewels were pried off but it seemed otherwise intact, and the perfect size to hold a variety of tomes for my Nemeth.

I head upstairs for my sister’s quarters, and as I do, the sun comes out from behind the clouds and shines in through one of the broken windows. It’s such a rare occurrence that I pause in front of the windows, sighing with pleasure at the sunbeams…

…and that’s when I see them.

The graves.

There’s not many of them, but it’s the size of each one that makes me clench the windowsill. Shards of glass embed themselves into my hands, but I don’t pull away. I can’t, because I have to take in the sight below.

The palace had gardens once. I never cared for them much, because my medicine made me sensitive to heat and it always felt too warm to spend much time outside, but I remember my sister loved Lios’s gardens. She loved the flowers that filled the beds, the vines that crept along the walls and the scents of the herbs that flooded Nurse’s herb gardens. I remember there was a maze, and a sundial, and a statue of the goddess herself, holding the moon above one shoulder like she was carrying a pot of water.

The statue of the goddess remains, but everything else is gone. The maze is gone. The hedges gone. The herb garden, gone. What remains are five sunken pits in the muck, each one headed with the eye symbol of the Absent One, hastily carved out of wood. Each sunken pit is nightmarishly big, bigger than my sister’s entire suite of rooms, and I wonder just how many people were buried in each large grave.

Each one is far, far too big for just one body. Or even ten bodies.

This is what has happened to Lios. Tears prick my eyes and I lean over the broken window, as if pushing my face out into the light will somehow enable me to see more. I stare with sick horror at the mass graves, praying that my sister and her children aren’t in any of them. That both Nurse and Riza are safe. That those I love somehow made it away from this place.

I want to leave. I need to leave.

Now.

Something flutters in the breeze. There’s a heap of rags at the feet of the goddess, with a pair of swords sticking upright, the ends shoved through the rags and into the ground below. I wonder why these particular rags…and then I see a leg bone. And the tiny bones that make up a hand, shattered and scattered in the mud. It takes me a moment longer to see the skull, and for me to realize one of the swords pierces it through the eye.

And resting upon that particular sword’s hilt is a tarnished crown.

I recognize that crown. Recognize the spot where a fat, garish ruby sat on Lionel’s brow like a giant red wart. It looked ridiculous against his pale skin and pale hair, and I’d spent many a night at court wishing the crown was upon any head but his.

That body…those remains must be his.

Gods. I cannot even celebrate this death. I hated Lionel, but his death fills me with fear for my sister and their children.

“Nemeth,” I cry out, turning away from the window and racing down the stairs. “Nemeth!” I fling myself down the hall, ignoring the skid of my feet on the perpetually damp floors. “ Nemeth !”

The shadows coalesce in front of me, and then my mate is there, grabbing my arms and shaking me. There’s a look of fright in his gaze. “Candra? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Graves,” I choke. “I found the graves.”

And then I fall into his arms, weeping.

We don’t bury Lionel. After the initial horror fades, I’m left with a deep, burning anger in my gut.

This is his fault. These deaths are upon him. Lios and Darkfell have co-existed in an uneasy truce for ages. He was the one that pushed for the war. He was the one that insisted I go to the tower, and quickly, so he could set off to conquer the mountains of the Fellians.

These deaths are on him.

While the meat from the horse smokes on racks in the kitchen (we burn the broken frame of a once-elegant poster bed), we head down to the shore and look for a ship. There are several wrecked vessels, but we manage to find a small craft with a broken mast. It’s terrifyingly small for an ocean journey, perhaps the size of two horse-lengths, but Nemeth assures me we don’t need more than that.

We spend the rest of the day working on making her seaworthy. Nemeth replaces the mast with wreckage from another ship and I sew a large piece of fabric that will act as a sail. As if the goddess likes the idea of us fleeing this place, the sun remains out, the rains temporarily banished. We erect a small tent-like shelter at one end of the ship that we can rest under when the sun is high, and Nemeth will cast a spell in the morning to enchant the sail itself. As long as it’s on the ship, it will steer us toward the Alabaster Citadel.

And from there, to Darkfell itself.

I’m ready. I want answers, and all signs point that Darkfell will have them.