2. Emmerick
Chapter 2
Emmerick
S he’d lied to me.
She was leaving with a King of a land we knew so little about. My Queen, my lover, was now oath bound to an unknown evil.
I should be kneeling, thanking Krait Darvanda—it would’ve been the noble thing to do. He’d saved my city, after all.
But he intended to take Sybilla away, and regardless of whether his men fought alongside mine, regardless of the debt we owed him, I despised him. I’d never felt so raw and bitter down to my core. It was so unlike me.
Her betrayal seemed to have broken the good-natured man within me. I wanted to shake her—to force her to stay. But her fate was set in blood. She would leave, while I’d be left to love her and hate her for breaking the trust I’d put in us.
“Emmerick,” a warm, feminine voice soothed from the door. I hadn’t realized Amara, my birth mother, had been let into my chambers.
The guards had been keeping watch over me since my outburst toward their Queen. I hadn’t left my chambers since she’d agreed to go.
No part of me had wanted to be in the dining hall last night. I hadn’t cared to wear a crown or talk politics with a bunch of silver-spoon-fed royals around a table like I belonged there.
You do belong there. You’re a King. That is what Sybilla would have said to me, had I not been avoiding her like the plague since realizing how long she’d withheld the truth of my identity from me. She’d known for a decade; she’d known what fate lay before me and said nothing.
I sat on the foot of my bed, elbows on my knees, hands cradling my head.
“If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take deep breaths and count backward from ten, my love.”
A mother’s love knew no bounds—it was something that the mother I’d grown up knowing, Angeline, had taught me. Amara might be my mother by blood, but I barely knew her, and I’d never met my birth father, King Corric Mattock, before he died. The revelation of my lineage was still so fresh.
“I don’t want to fucking count,” I snapped back. I winced at how unfamiliar my surly tone sounded.
Amara sighed and said, “Sybilla is not in danger with Darvanda, Emmerick.”
“How do you know?”
When I looked up at her, her posture slackened. The shape of her nose and her almond-shaped eyes were so familiar to me. I’d taken the warm tones of her dark skin, and our curls were the very same pattern. Nature had molded me as her duplicate but in a heaping male form. It surprised me that it had taken Asterie, my friend and Amara’s former ward, so long to notice our similarities. It surprised me more that I hadn’t immediately seen them myself.
“Because I know Krait. We were friends—once, maybe more than that—before Corric. Krait is not the monster he puts forth to the world, and he will keep his word not to harm her. I don’t know what he came here for, but I am confident in that much.”
Something between a strangled gurgle and a growl left my throat upon hearing her speak kindly about Darvanda.
Sybilla’s agreement had replayed in my head a million times. I agree to your demands. I will go willingly to the Sahlms so long as no harm shall befall me or my Corridor until the trials end.
“How could she do this?” I pulled at the hair at my temples.
Was I the only one who could hear the risk in the blood oath she’d made? The trials could take centuries—Henosis was built on the foundation of fearing magic’s rise. She was trying to fast-track a flimsy plan in a land that wouldn’t welcome Source-wielders without a long legal negotiation.
A warm hand landed on my shoulder, and I felt the weight of Amara sitting beside me. “She sees an opportunity, I presume.”
I rubbed my eyes with the pads of my fingers. My head had been throbbing since that night Firose had poisoned me and Asterie. The details were still so blurry around the edges.
I shivered, thinking about my time in the Central Tower. The events that had unfolded there were becoming less foggy—events I wanted to bury deep in the depths of my subconscious because they no longer mattered.
Firose was dead.
You could not remain bound to a dead woman.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Sybilla is a capable ruler. This realm is depleted of magic and sitting helpless. Like it or not, Krait holds the allegiance of Source-wielders far more powerful than the ones who attacked this city yesterday. He’s lived away from this realm in peace for four centuries.”
I sighed. “So you trust him?”
“I do,” she said without hesitation. “Rough around the edges, that one, and not one to be crossed. But if he’d wanted to turn on Henosis, he would have already. We would not stand a chance.”
Letting that sink in, I nodded. Amara rubbed my shoulder, and I relaxed at the sensation of her calming touch. I imagined what it would have been like to be raised by her. My friend Asterie knew her as more of a mother than I did. The Sisterhood, Amara chiefly, had raised Asterie in the High Enchantresses’ towers. I trusted Asterie, but could I trust my mother?
Amara cut through my thoughts. “Why didn’t you attend the meeting last night?”
I groaned and craned my neck back to look at the birch-planked ceiling. “I don’t want it,” I answered.
“Don’t want what, dear?”
“A crown, a Corridor, my life to change...any of it,” I answered.
Amara squeezed my shoulder again. “I know. But sometimes, we rise to fill a need. I see a great King in you. A King like your father used to be—before Firose sank her claws into him, before his downfall. I want you to know he was a very good man. Consider attending the next meeting, please? He would want you there.”
My jaw tightened at her words, but I nodded.
Like it or not, I was going to take my birth father’s crown. I would try to be worthy of wearing it, however incapable I felt for that duty.