43. Konstantin
43
KONSTANTIN
I sla’s stare trips off the new Serpent and lands on Vance. They carry out their chat in Serpent, making me wish I’d taken the time to learn this foreign tongue.
“Do any of you have news from my general?” I bark at my soldiers over the galloping blusters of wind.
“He left for Voshna on a Crow,” one of them replies unhelpfully.
“That was hours ago!” I exclaim as my fiancée steps out of my clutch to become shadows and then feathers. I widen my flare of magic to keep the hail from harming her outstretched wings.
“Probably took refuge from the weather, Vizosh,” the same man replies, while his colleague cranes his neck to track Isla’s hovering body and gleaming talons.
Dread glows in his gray eyes and rumples the bridge of his stubby nose. Since I don’t care for bigots in my ranks, especially in such proximity to my home, I make a note of having Salom relieve him of his duties…whenever my general fucking returns.
Isla lands, passing a hand through her snarled locks. I don’t miss the tremors agitating her fingers. I hope the Serpent misses them, though, considering how distended the tendons in his neck already are.
In Crow, she says, “Imogen’s inspecting cargo with Salom and Bohdan. He confessed to being the one peddling illegal weapons. Dádhi believes there must be too much obsidian around them. You know how that scrambles mind links?” Her voice judders like my pulse.
I now know my fiancée well enough to sense a lie, and she’s lying to the Serpent.
A wet cough rattles Mestyla’s slight body, barely audible over the howling wind.
With a deep swallow, Vance tows his worried gaze off Isla and onto the new Serpent. “We need to get her into the ocean.”
“I’ll take you there,” she offers, “and then I’ll drop you off at the train station to see Imogen.”
“Which station?” I ask, even though what I want to say is: tell me the truth .
Isla’s stare locks with mine. “The capital’s. The main one.”
I try to read the rest of what she doesn’t say off her glittering irises. “I’ll go by sleigh.”
“No.” The wind amplifies the ripple in her pitch. “Go back to the castle. Please.”
And then she’s spearing her fingers through my locks and drawing my head low. I think she means to kiss me, but her target isn’t my mouth; it’s my ear.
“The teeth Ksenia spat out were stained at the roots,” she murmurs, making me recall how she’d observed them back at the castle. “I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard, but in Luce there’s this tribe of mountain Fae that have black teeth from ingesting iron. It doesn’t make them immune to it, but it does it make them resistant to the effect of salt.”
I draw in a brusque breath, not because it’s the first I’ve heard of them— it’s not —but because, if my sister has been dosing herself, then all her answers might have been lies.
“Be careful. And keep Aodhan close.” This time, she kisses me. Hard.
Before I can volunteer that he fly Vance, she’s back in feathers. Still, I want to shout for her to stay with me, but isn’t she safer up there with Vance?
As he scoops up the girl, I tell him, “Once my niece is lucid, ask her whether she came to steal my necklace and kill me, will you?”
The Serpent nods and climbs up my fiancée’s outstretched wing. So that Isla doesn’t risk brushing against me and shifting back to skin, I step back, then throw my magic as far as I can, but as far as I can isn’t far enough. I know the hail touches them because she dips and spasms more than once.
I hate my body’s limitations.
Hate that I cannot protect Isla from everything.
Nevertheless I’m reluctant to trade my sovereignty for additional power and truer immortality. Becoming a Serpent wouldn’t only tie me to my maker but also to their queen. Perhaps, in a few centuries from now— if the Cauldron grants me Isla as a mate—I’d consider handing my land of ice and woodlands to a sibling or an heir and asking Zendaya for immortality. But not yet.
As I stride back toward the sleigh, I squint at the white-capped swells over which Isla hovers. When she splashes into the chaotic surf and fails to resurface, I shout at Aodhan, “Go help Isla!”
He tears his gaze off the foot soldier, whose palm is still fused to his sword. “She’s a Shabbin Crow, Kostya.”
She hasn’t reappeared.
Why hasn’t she reappeared?
My lungs shrivel as though I were the one floundering in the icy sea. “Go bloody help her!”
My desperation must be etched into every line of my being, because Aodhan benches any further protest and launches himself into the air. I watch for a moment, the cold air gliding beneath my fur-lined collar painting my sweat-slicked skin with frost. And then I finally climb into the sleigh and take a seat across from Ksenia, who tracks Aodhan’s flight through slitted eyes.
“Remind me never to help you again,” she mutters.
“Planning on endangering our family once more?” My tone is as glacial as the hail trouncing the land. “Take us down to the shore!”
I squint hard. Why the fuck hasn’t Isla reemerged? Did an orca snatch her? Did Mestyla?
“So, what’s the plan now, Kostya?” Ksenia’s conversational tone cleaves through my runaway train of thought.
“Depends on what…” I moisten my scratchy throat. “On what Mestyla has to say.”
“Because you think she’ll admit to wanting you dead?”
“If she’s anything like you and Alyona, then yes, I do believe she will.”
“She’s slier.”
“Then it’s a good thing her maker will be able to see into her mind.”
Suddenly, Isla soars from the ocean, and my heart…my poor, trodden heart picks itself off my ribs and launches skyward on wings of its own. I shut my eyes for a second. Knead my temples.
And then I affix my gaze to my sister. “Tell me, Ksen, for how long have you been ingesting iron?”
Her irises seem to swell even though it’s really her pupils that retract. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I blaze right through her pretense of innocence. “Cut the bullshit. For how fucking long?” I growl. “For as long as you’ve been planning your little coup?”
She regards me without flinching…without blinking. But then her features rearrange into a grotesque leer. I’m guessing her pride has finally bested her intent to play victim.
“It’s not a little coup; it’s a grand revolution.” Ksenia’s smile slips to her eyes, inflames them. “We don’t want a new king; we want a whole new governing system.”
I start to shake my head, marginally astounded that she’s confessed, when the sleigh pitches forward as though we’d tipped over a cliff. A glance over my sister’s airborne locks reveals we’ve merely deviated from the cleared path. We gain such speed that I have to clutch the nearest armrest and the underside of the seat to avoid flying off.
Ksenia grips her own armrests.
When did my soldiers unbind her wrists?
Where are my fucking soldiers and sprites?
I whirl in my seat to find two standing on the platform behind me. Our velocity has blown off their furred caps, revealing ears that aren’t pointed. I’d asked Salom to start employing half-bloods, but he’d been reticent to bestow the protection of Glace to soldiers with lesser magic. Especially, that of the capital. When did he change his mind?
“Slow d—” A chunk of hail clips my jaw, stealing my breath.
I whip my hand off the seat frame and nurture fistfuls of air to keep the ice pellets at bay, then try to enlarge my force field in order to brake our speed before we plunge right through the open vestibule and down the stairs.
“Isn’t it poetic when nature and fate align…?” Ksenia muses, creating a liquid eddy over her head that not only blocks the soaring hail but also absorbs it.
The ice sphere is soon larger than the base of the snowman I helped her build when she was six.
“You should call to Isla for help through your mind link.” Ksenia’s taunt impales my humming eardrums like an icepick. “Oh, wait…you don’t have one, now, do you? A real shame, huh?”
Understanding that our treacherous skid isn’t the fault of inept drivers, I jerk to my feet. Ksenia flicks her fingers, bludgeoning me with her ball of ice. My vision goes black, then glaringly white.
When I blink next, I’m flat on my back between the two sleigh benches, and Ksenia is crouched over me, her flaxen locks swirling around her head like a crown of frost, her knuckles digging against my chest as she haplessly attempts to pry the chain from my skin.
“Why isn’t your necklace coming off?” she howls.
This time, even though my wrists are shackled behind my back—most probably in iron since magic doesn’t tickle my skin—and I’m surrounded by vindictive beings, I’m the one who smiles. “Because the Cauldron mustn’t deem you worthy, sister.”
With a frustrated chuff, Ksenia straightens. We must’ve eased to a stop, given that her hair has collapsed around her scowling face like flaccid reeds.
“Knock him out!” she hisses.
One of the soldiers—who mustn’t be a soldier, or at least, not one of mine—raises a shiny weapon and levels it at my forehead.
I stare down the barrel, then past it and him , at the flashing, leaden immensity beyond. Are Isla or Aodhan on their way? I suddenly pray they aren’t, for if Imogen has been unresponsive, then that means Ksenia and her accomplices have found a way to neutralize Crows.
The distinct sizzle of a bullet is the last sound I hear before pain detonates behind my eyes and sweeps me under.