Chapter 24
Is This Another Breakdown?
Eiko found out about the date of her wedding just as everyone else did—through a stack of flyers delivered to the barracks, declaring that she and Rion would be married in a double ceremony in two weeks’ time.
Two weeks’ time.
It felt like such a sudden escalation from the King of All—just like the engagement—but she wasn’t sure what could have possibly prompted him.
The paper of the flyer was thick and expensive.
Embossed, so that she could read it by tracing the words with her fingers …
though she was a little self-conscious as she did it, knowing what she had learned from the Abnormal Silencings book two nights before.
Was it normal that she could read with her fingers, just because these little words were embossed?
She wasn’t sure, and in truth, the announcement was so unbelievable that she had read it through four times now in the hopes that she had misread parts of it entirely.
By sovereign decree of the King of All, King Grigori of Goldmoor,
Let it be known to the realm that, in accordance with the interests of unity, stability, and the preservation of peace, and in recognition of loyal service rendered to Goldmoor, the following marriages have been duly sanctioned and set:
Rion Shulin of Stonesigh and the noble Godsguard of Goldmoor shall be wed to Prince Corvan of Goldmoor, Commander of the Sovereign Kingsguard, and Crown Prince of Lyra.
And Eiko Menai of Stonesigh and the noble Godsguard of Goldmoor shall be wed to Prince Ceran of Goldmoor, First Soldier of the Sovereign Kingsguard.
These esteemed matches will be honoured in a single, formal ceremony to be held at the Crown Spire of Brightfort, fourteen days hence, beneath the blessed light of the sun at the height of midday, that the realm may bear witness to the strengthening of its bonds and the promise of continued peace.
The Crown extends its blessing upon these unions and invites all loyal subjects to share in this moment of joy and celebration.
By the hand and seal of the King of All.
She stopped reading. Her fingers had gone numb. She hadn’t even seen Ceran since the Copperlight Thingy. Once again, she had allowed herself to become lulled by the entirely delusional belief that they had somehow forgotten about her.
Rion’s voice cut through the murmur of voices in the hallway, her footsteps snapping quickly against the stone. “Eiko. We need to talk.”
“Yes.” Eiko was still in shock.
“Privately,” Rion insisted.
“Yes.”
“Like … now.”
Eiko shook her head, releasing her body from its frozen state. “Right, sorry.”
They retreated down the corridor together, past the noise and speculation and the rustle of paper and muttering. Eiko’s boots traced the familiar breaks in the stone. She counted steps to keep herself grounded.
At some point, she heard the sound of booted feet running after them. Ky, Ren, and Kaito had hunted them down. Rion hushed them before they could speak, leading them to a bedroom on the Crescent level—whichever of theirs had been closest, Eiko guessed.
Rion shut the door with more force than strictly necessary.
“Two weeks,” Rion seethed. “What happened?”
“Isn’t it romantic?” Eiko asked mildly. She was still in shock.
“What happened to ‘engagements can be broken?’” Kaito demanded.
Ren didn’t speak at first. Eiko could hear him stalking around the room, each scrape of his boots edged in tension. A chair scraped softly as he pulled it out. He sat, then jumped up again and resumed pacing.
Kaito was also loping about the room. “Has that dickhead of a prince even visited you since the engagement? Have you even spoken? Even once? Has he written? Is he even smart enough to figure out your monster can read letters for you?”
“It’s not his fault,” Eiko defended with a wince. “This isn’t his choice either.”
“So that’s a no?” Kaito demanded.
“It’s a no.”
Kaito fell to the bed, sitting on the edge with a huff and a heavy thump.
Rion made a humming sound. “Something changed,” she said. “This was too fast.”
Eiko hesitated. The room seemed to narrow around her, the air pressing in. Hymn stirred at the base of her throat, restless.
She swallowed. “Ren came to my room two nights ago.”
Kaito sprang off the bed so fast he seemed to stumble before he could properly gain his feet. “What?”
Ren stiffened. “I didn’t—”
Eiko quickly interrupted. “That’s not what I mean. He brought a book.”
“What kind of book?” Ky asked. He had been quiet, probably watching her as she nervously shifted on her feet.
“About abnormal Silencings,” Eiko whispered. “I’ve been waiting for a spare moment for us to talk about it.”
The silence that fell was thick and immediate, but Ky recovered fast.
“Explain,” he said calmly.
“There’s a forbidden type of Silencing,” Ren said grimly. “And Eiko’s bond with Hymndrake fits … every single marker.”
Eiko felt suddenly exposed, as though her skin had gone transparent.
“Like what?” Kaito asked, though it sounded as if he already knew the answer.
Ren didn’t speak. He was waiting for her to decide how she would like to respond.
She stared unseeingly down at the floor, sucking in a breath before listing, “Fixation. Obsession. Accelerated cognitive abilities … like … how I was able to learn the commander’s language so fast. Increased tolerance for pain.
” A pause. “Greed. Possessiveness. Aggression.”
Ky made a soft, distressed sound.
She could hear the grind of Ren’s jaw clenching. “There’s more. Someone left out the book for me,” he said, “which means someone wanted me to read it.”
Kaito swore under his breath. “What else?” he demanded. “There’s more. I know you.”
She could feel his stare boring into her.
Hymn curled tighter, a small, trembling weight against her pulse.
“We can’t ever be separated,” she murmured. “If we are, we both die. If one of us is harmed or killed, so is the other. We’re … a single entity. We have been since we bonded.”
“What?” Rion squeaked.
Ky swallowed tightly, his voice barely audible. “Will it keep … changing you?”
Eiko opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “That’s the problem. But anyway—I think that’s why the wedding announcement suddenly happened. Someone saw Ren sneaking out of my room, and all the damn soldiers knew about it by breakfast time yesterday morning.”
Silence pressed in on them, filled with the very loud thoughts of everyone turning over the same realisation and not wanting to be the first to say it.
Rion broke first. “So,” she said, flat and tight, “this is actually happening.”
Eiko swallowed. Her throat felt scraped raw. “Yes.”
Ren turned on her. “You can’t just accept this.”
“I’m not accepting the wedding,” she snapped, the edge in her voice surprising even her. “I’m accepting that I have no power and no choice here.”
“That’s the same thing,” Kaito shot back, but there was a hint of regret in his tone. He was angry; he just didn’t know who to take it out on.
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “Accepting it would mean believing it’s right. I don’t. I just … I don’t see any version of our current reality where this doesn’t happen. I don’t know how to stop it.”
“All we have to do is smile,” Rion muttered, almost to herself. “Wave. Look pretty. Be grateful. We can do that. And then …” She trailed off, and even Eiko didn’t know how to picture the future.
They weren’t prepared to be wives. They certainly weren’t prepared to be princesses.
Eiko didn’t have time to be a wife or a princess.
She was too busy getting her ass kicked and concocting poison in her beautiful, peaceful little greenhouse.
Alone. Blessedly alone. She was only just finding her feet in the Godsguard barracks, and already, they were yanking the rug clean out from beneath her.
She forced a breath in through her nose so that she wouldn’t cry.
“Look,” she said. “We don’t know what’s coming.
We don’t know what this turns into. We just need to be aware that the King of All is watching—and willing to react to the slightest hint of something he doesn’t like.
We have to realise who we’re dealing with here. ”
King Grigori didn’t need to stomp around and threaten them. He could move the whole world with the stroke of a pen, and he had proven it swiftly and with very little effort.
He would react.
They had to be careful, and they had to ensure he didn’t see anything in their behaviour that hinted at noncompliance.
He had already made it clear he knew about Ren, and she had stupidly drawn even more attention to her friend.
It was time to realise that this was happening.
Her days of pretending, ignoring, and hoping were over.
Ever since she boarded the Kingsweep, things had been moving at a rapid pace, but she had been so distracted by everything that she hadn’t once looked at the destination, and now that train was hurtling towards a sudden drop and she had no choice but to brace for the fall, and hope that she would survive it.
When Eiko looked back on her life in Stonesigh, it felt like she was seeing only a collection of moments stretched thin over a twenty-year span. It was like recollecting a past in slow motion—everything was hazy and blurred, with a dreamlike quality that made it all seem less real.
She had arrived in Goldmoor as a woman of the mountain. A woman whose constitution demanded slowness, whose brain processed at a snail’s pace, hoping more than anything that a turned shoulder and a blind eye would solve most of her problems.
That attitude had not served her well.
She had acted without thinking so many times, and by the time she had been corralled into a corner with no way out, it was too late to think her way free. Things simply moved too fast for her in Goldmoor.