Chapter 12
twelve
Rune Kalygorn
My shadows had never before been more powerful—and more useless.
Losing control made it worse, so I had to keep my focus on the rage simmering just underneath the surface, too, to keep it from slipping.
It had. In the past seven days, it had slipped more than a few times, and the only thing it had managed to do was set me back hours—and I did not have hours.
Nilah might not have hours.
If only I could see her. If only I could feel her, feel the magic that burned so brightly inside her. If only I could find those shadows that the old Midnight King had marked her with and destroy them.
Instead, I was left in here once more, in this empty throne room, trying. Failing. Raging. Trying again.
The Midnight Palace still refused to let me go, even though I’d accepted the crown. Had worn it. Had accepted my duty as king.
I’d done it all and it still refused to allow me outside—or even away from this wing at all when I even considered trying to find a way out. It knew. It always knew.
To try to bend it to my will those first days had been foolish of me because all that had done was exhaust me and make the palace respond to me with less…enthusiasm in the following days. Not that I’d have minded had I been out there searching for Nilah.
But I was stuck here, whether I liked it or not. I was stuck here, and I still couldn’t find her.
When I let go of the shadows, seconds before I passed out, I sat there, defeated, and looked at what remained of that ritual drawing on the marble floor.
He’d drawn it right before our eyes, and I couldn’t stop him.
He’d drawn it and had taken her from me with his last breath because he was a fucking coward. Always had been.
Helem Teneris was a coward with two kingdoms under his thumb, and the more my memories unlocked, the more I despised everything he had been. Because he hadn’t just banished me when I killed the Ice Queen, but he’d killed seven of his male children on the very day they were born.
Seven of my brothers, five born from his queen, two others from the help—just like my mother.
It was why Queen Nata, his wife, had chosen the Iyandra shortly after Raja left. It was why his very people, advisors and those who’d had the good of this kingdom at heart had either staged their own deaths or had spoken out against him and had died at his hand.
A coward. A weak man with blood on his hands.
And this was what he’d left me with.
I raised my head and looked at the shadows that settled on the floor in front of the dais.
This was the only place where I could still feel like my shadows went farther, searched deeper in the realm and out for Nilah.
I’d tried in the bedroom, too—it had been worse.
The remains of the ritual drawing helped even if I wanted to burn the entire floor to ashes.
So, here I sat and here I tried when they weren’t at my door, demanding my attention as if they thought anything in the world mattered to me more than Nilah. They wouldn’t have it, not until she was by my side.
Then my eyes fell on the other end of the room, near the edge of the illusion window that stretched behind the dais, and to the silver white lynx sitting there, looking outside.
I stopped.
He hadn’t been there before. In fact, he hadn’t been there at all for the past two days, if I recalled correctly, yet here he was.
Even though I’d specifically asked the Midnight Palace to not let through anyone but Nilah and Raja without explicit permission from me—he was here, looking at the window as big as the wall that was infused with illusion magic, and would show the watcher anything it desired if they had a good dose of imagination and stood in front of it long enough.
Then he turned and his eyes locked on mine.
“Vair.” I said his name as if I expected him to answer me, but I knew he wouldn’t.
I said his name to remind myself that just because his eyes were almost the same as Nilah’s, it wasn’t her looking back at me.
It wasn’t Queen Veyra, either, though she’d looked almost identical—almost. To a foreign eye, they would easily be the same person, but I saw the differences. In the looks in their eyes. In the clarity of their colors. In their smiles. In their body language.
The Queen had been so…reserved.
Nilah was completely free in expressing herself whichever way she pleased. It was part of what I loved about her, the way she told you what she felt, not just with words but with all of her. All the passion in her heart.
She was fire. My fire that brought me to life.
And now that she was gone, I felt like I was fading underneath the very shadows that took her from me.
Then Vair turned and slowly started to walk toward me.
“You left,” I said, knowing very well that I would not get an answer. “Did you go to her? Did you find her?”
The lynx stopped a second before I heard the footsteps beyond the doors. Someone was coming.
I stood up and closed my eyes, breathed deeply to calm my racing thoughts, allowed this need for violence that came over me any time someone tried to get my attention to simmer down before the knock on the door came.
It was Raja—her energy I felt clearly. But I didn’t open the door until I had my jacket on and was at the top of the dais, sitting on that throne chair made of pure, raw power.
Then I thought, let them through, and the throne room pulled the door open without hesitation.
Raja came through wearing her modified dress with armor plaques on her chest, her chin up and her swords strapped around her hips.
Behind her were four women who walked like they owned—not just the throne room, but this entire realm. Heads full of dark hair, faces too similar to my own for comfort, but my half-sisters weren’t to blame for that. Merely for their behavior.
“There he is,” said one or the other.
“Our half-brother, the bastard son,” said the next.
“Our new king,” said the last, and I recognized her voice because she spoke the most. Kentara was her name, and on her side were Oda, Jasewine, and Saya.
The king had had five daughters, and I’d met the fifth one, too, that first day I was given this throne. Alemia, the youngest, the only one who hadn’t cared to call me names or tell me how disgusted she was that I, the bastard, had taken the throne from them and had announced myself king.
Of course, they all knew that that wasn’t how it worked, that the throne would have never accepted me if I wasn’t worthy of it.
But they said it anyway—except Alemia. All she’d asked for was a piece of land and a house to her name, one that had once belonged to her aunt, her mother’s sister.
She asked to go live there for the rest of her life alone and unbothered, and who was I to say no?
She left that very same night, but the other four remained.
Gave me their word that they would do their best to make me quit and leave and go back to the streets where I belonged.
All, except Jasewine. She always stood by the others when she spoke, but she never said the words herself, only watched.
Not going to lie, they had amused me that second time I’d seen them. With their sharp tongues and their contempt, they’d amused me for a minute. Then I’d told them to speak to Raja for anything they might have in mind, yet here they were. With Raja, in the throne room.
Calm, I reminded myself, eyes on the lynx who’d come to sit there on the first stair of the dais, and he was looking at the newcomers, too. Curiously.
The doors of the throne room closed. I allowed no soldiers in here with me, not when I was searching for Nilah, so it was just us.
Raja curtsied. “Your Highness, I apologize for the interruption. Your sisters wanted to hear it once more, from you, that there will not be a celebration following your coronation.”
The women barely bowed their heads, except—again—for Jasewine.
There was a smile on her face, always, and out of all of them, she never looked at me like she hated me.
I got the impression that she came with her sisters and stood by them when they made their comments and demands purely for her entertainment, nothing else.
“That is correct,” I said, and my voice echoed in the throne room the way no other voice did. It was part of the magic of the Midnight Palace, I was sure. “There will be no cele—”
“That is outrageous,” Ketara cut me off, then stepped forward.
Raja pulled her lips inside her mouth to stop her smile, then turned her head away, too.
“You not only steal the throne—”
“Mind your tongue when you speak to the king,” Raja then said, all traces of that smile now gone when she turned to the girl. “Princess,” she added with such venom it hung in the air.
For a second there I was tempted to smile, too. The way Ketara was looking at Raja deserved a good laugh.
This throne, this dais was too high up, too far from everyone else.
I understood why Helem had wanted it like this—because he didn’t trust the people who came in here to speak to him.
And the throne room would allow me to rearrange the dais any way I liked.
Maybe I would if I ever found the patience. Maybe I would, after I found Nilah.
“What Ketara means to say, Your Highness,” Oda jumped in.
“Is that we are owed a three-day celebration for your coronation, as is custom in the Midnight Court. We rarely get to be around people, and how will we find suitors if we’re never allowed to mingle with anyone but those who live in this wretched thing?
” She batted those long lashes coated with a bright blue color at me, with a smile that was so sharp it could cut through flesh and bone.
All my half-sisters were beautiful, and they all resembled Helem in one way or the other. I did, too, unfortunately. One could tell we were related just by looking at us and taking in the shape of our jaws and our eyebrows. Those were near identical between the five of us.