Chapter 19
nineteen
Rune Kalygorn
I sat on the floor, played with the shadows etched onto the marble, considered leaving them there as a reminder, but then decided against it. There were plenty of reminders. I didn’t need the remains of a banishment ritual in my throne room. Especially since I would no longer need it.
My eyes closed. I breathed and the air went down easy.
It had worked. Nilah was no longer banished. She was free.
And the small white figurine in my fist was proof of it.
I opened my fingers, looked down at it, hoped against my better judgment that I’d somehow imagined it. I hadn’t, though. The silvery-white snow lynx was but a cube made of white marble in my hand.
He’d taken the hit of the banishment spell Helem had put on Nilah. I felt it when he did it, when I pulled and when he stepped forward to absorb the shadows, to make sure that they couldn’t reattach themselves to Nilah again.
I felt it when the shadows slipped inside him, when they broke whatever magic had made him.
I felt it when he wasn’t a lynx anymore, only an object smaller than my fist, discarded on the floor. The pet had sacrificed himself for Nilah even though I hadn’t asked him to. I’d been prepared to take the hit. I’d have been wounded, but I’d hoped that I would survive it.
But he hadn’t let me, and now he was gone.
Footsteps outside the throne room door. I thought it was Raja, as she was the only one who came to see me when the sun rose in the sky in the rest of Verenthia. Dawn used to be beautiful in the Seelie Court. A forever changing sky with so much color, so much light.
Here, it was…the same. Always. Every moment of every day.
But it wasn’t Raja who stopped outside the doors of the throne room, though.
I kept no soldiers in the hallway outside, and the royal escort was only allowed near the stairway, so there was no announcement.
I didn’t quite recognize the energy I could barely feel, as distracted as I had been since midnight.
Then, she said, “It’s Jasewine.”
My half-sister. A woman I had never even known existed, who looked too similar to me for comfort, and who smiled when I pissed off the rest of my half-sisters. Her own siblings.
Open, I thought, and that’s all it took. The throne room was so in tune with my thoughts it alarmed me most times. There was comfort in knowing I was alone in my head, and now that I knew I wasn’t, it felt almost like a violation. Or maybe it would have had I heard the palace whispering back.
I didn’t, though. It was perfectly silent at all times. There to serve, not offer an opinion.
To serve, and to not allow me to walk out no matter how much magic I threw at it.
Then my half-sister walked in, the sound of her high heeled shoes against the marble strangely soothing.
I was sitting on the floor still, leaning against the first stair of the dais, barefoot, wearing only a pair of pants.
My hair was a mess. I probably looked awful sitting there playing with the cube, trying to gather enough will to stand up.
Go to sleep. Do something other than sit here.
Still trying.
Then Jasewine squatted down a couple of feet to my side, folded her hands over her knees, and smiled.
“You look horrible.” She batted her long lashes at me. “How very un-royal of you to receive your sister half naked. Have the sunnies not taught you decency and manners?”
I knew she was joking—or maybe just being sarcastic. But I don’t know why I smiled.
Maybe because the weight over my shoulders had lessened now that I knew Nilah was free to come back…if she chose?
Because I considered it still that she might not want to come back to Verenthia at all. That she might just stay home where she felt she belonged with her family. With her people. Even if my heart insisted she wouldn’t, I did consider it.
And how was I going to follow?
“They tried,” I said to Jasewine, and just when I thought I would stand up and go put my jacket on, I didn’t. I just…remained sitting there, playing with the cube.
Jasmine grinned and sat on the floor with me. “Then tell me this—did you make their lives a living hell at least?”
I met her eyes. A deep blue, so much like my own it took me by surprise all over again. “I tried.”
Laughter erupted out of her and she brought a hand to her mouth to stop it. Not sure why her laughing was suddenly so curious to me.
But when she put her hands on the floor behind her and leaned back comfortably, I was struck by the fact that she was…different. The same as my other half-sisters, but different, too. Even my instincts weren’t on high alert with her. Even my shadows were…calm.
“That’s an ugly throne right there,” she said, looking up at the throne chair made of shadows.
She was right. “It is. I keep meaning to change it.” And maybe now I actually would while I waited.
What else was there to do, anyway?
“You’ve been busy,” Jasewine said, eyeing the shadows on the marble floor as I slowly coaxed them off, and pushed them toward the walls so that the room could swallow them. Or keep them—I didn’t mind. “I’m glad it finally worked.”
I looked up at Jasewine again. “It did,” I said, just to test what she actually meant.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Your Highness.” A mischievous little grin, like she knew exactly how much I hated those words. “I’ve been spying on you. And don’t beat yourself up over it—I’m just better than you at this place. Better than Aunt Raja. Not that she would ever admit it.”
Straightening up against the stair, I turned to face her better. “You’ve been spying on me.”
“Well, you make it easy. Father made it easy, too. Keeping all these shadows here”—she waved a hand around the room—“how are you going to know which is yours and which is mine?”
“You have shadows in the throne room?” I said because that was…kind of smart.
“I do. It takes up energy, but you don’t allow soldiers in here I could have pleasing me in bed—and giving me information. So, I have to make do with what I have.” She shrugged.
There was something about her.
She dragged herself a little closer. “The point is that you broke the banishment of the mortal you’ve been obsessing over. And I’m here to offer you a helping hand.”
“Hold on,” I said, raising a finger. “How could you have your shadows here when I specifically asked the throne room to keep away any magic that tries to harm me?”
“But I never did,” Jasewine said. “I never planned to harm you—on the contrary. And me and this palace have history.” She sat up straighter and brought her hands in front of her feet, patted the floor as if it were her pet. “It knows me.”
The palace knew her. Allowed her to hide shadows in the room with me.
I didn’t know whether to be impressed or pissed off. I didn’t know whether that meant I couldn’t trust this very palace that was supposed to be under my rule at all.
“You’ve broken the banishment, and you seem okay,” Jasewine said. “I know you can’t leave the palace just yet, and that is why I’m here.”
Hope was such an incredible thing, able to materialize out of nowhere, all at once. I watched her lips, expected her to tell me that she knew of a way to get me out of here, since she and the palace had history, apparently, but…
“I’m going to go out there myself, find the Aetherway, and bring that woman back to you.”
My heart skipped a beat.
I wanted to say yes so badly.
“No.” And I finally stood up.
Jasewine followed me to the dining table where my jacket hung on the back of a chair.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t trust you.” And she couldn’t have known much about Nilah if all she heard was the conversations Raja and I had in the throne room.
But then those times when I invited the seer, as well…I flinched.
“Why do you think I’m here, asking you to let me sacrifice myself for a stranger? A mortal?”
If she only knew…
I put the jacket on and turned to her. She was shorter than me by half a head, and the look in her eyes was fierce. The magic radiating from her body was not weak, either.
In fact, it was much stronger than I expected.
“Because you want to earn my trust?”
I knew she got the sarcasm in my voice. She just chose to ignore it.
“Exactly. Is that a bad thing?” With her hands on her hips, she looked up at me and raised her thin brows as if she were daring me to answer.
I stepped back—she was quite intense. “It’s a suspicious thing.”
“Not really. You’re my half-brother. My king.”
“And you expect me to believe that that means something to you.” Being her half-brother, I meant. Not her king. I wasn’t delusional.
Again, Jasewine followed me all the way to the throne. I stopped in front of it, and I figured now was as good a time as any to make that change I’d been meaning to make. So, I raised my hands toward it, released my shadows to merge with those of the palace.
“What I expect you to believe, Rune, is that I have been raised by a father, a king who did everything in his power to make sure I remained dumb, uneducated, a fragile little thing with no real magic skill or combat skills or any skills at all, so I didn’t pose a threat to that.
” Her finger pointed up at the chair atop the dais, and then the stairs began to collapse one after the other.
Way too high. The dais was unnecessarily far from the floor, and that’s why I didn’t stop until only two stairs remained. I left those only because I felt the pressure of the throne room. I’d have brought it level with the floor, but two stairs were better than seven.
And then the marble, the completely black marble brightened up everywhere with small white lights I lit up from within. Those stairs had looked like nothing before. Nilah would like the little change, I thought.
“Rune.”
I stopped. Turned to Jasewine. Felt like my own self for a second.
“He was a bad man.” These words she whispered. Her eyes were wide and dark, glistening with unshed tears. It was impossible not to stop. “I don’t think you are.”
There went my mind, turning completely blank again.