Chapter 54
Chapter Fifty-Four
Emmeline
When Emmeline woke on the morning of the Remembrance Revels, the bed was cold.
Not just the sheets, empty and chilled, but a loneliness that spread through her heart.
If she remembered correctly, she’d fallen asleep with her cheek against Roremar’s chest, his arms wrapped around her and his heady sandalwood scent writing dreams to tell the stars about.
The windows were still open, the crashes and shouts from the preparations for tonight’s ceremony bouncing off the cobblestones and filling the apartment.
Hummingbirds fluttered in the flowers growing up the side of the building, and a few Starsearchers hummed a folksong as they strung mystlights between the rooftops.
But even with the noise, something was wrong.
A tug pulled at her chest, the icy emptiness flooding outward along her veins. Emmeline sat up, blinking blearily around the room.
“Roremar?” she asked.
It tugged three more times, insistent and desperate, an ache so deep she couldn’t identify it as anything other than devastation. She quickly pulled on a simple cotton dress and lightweight cloak, the clasp buttoning between trembling fingers, and slipped her feet into her worn boots.
Why was she shaking?
And what was that Fatesdamned wrenching sensation in her chest?
It pulled bile straight up her throat, distress she didn’t understand flooding her gut.
It dragged her down the stairs and along the Promenade of Revels quicker than she could make sense of the streamers and colorful glass lanterns being hung.
She walked as if in a haze, not nodding hello to any of the shop owners or acknowledging the platform they were constructing to reenact the Fate of Chaos and Revelry’s death at the end of the festival.
The entire thing soured in her stomach, and still she walked, following that ever constant pull behind her ribs.
It dragged her into the Trade House, nausea and misery a swirling cocktail in her stomach, deepening with every step.
She nodded to the clerk at the front desk, still here from the night shift. But she didn’t stop to answer the questions he called after her. Words wouldn’t form.
The halls were empty, most guards stationed outside, but to Emmeline every step that echoed on marble felt haunted, fear lingering around every corner.
The pristine white floors reflected her distorted image beneath her boots as she wound through the building and to a door at the very back of the maze of halls. She’d passed it before on her nights breaking in here, sometimes with a guard before it, others abandoned.
Today, it was propped open.
As her fingers pushed it wide, the wood foreign beneath her touch, the sensation in her chest thickened into something akin to denial, smothering the rest of it.
Then, heartbreak splintered through her, impossible to ignore.
And for some reason, as her feet floated down stone stairs and into the cells, she had the great ruinous thought of wanting to take a blade to her own heart.
The stone corridors and iron bars she passed echoed with the same cold she’d woken to, the torches between the cells doing nothing to warm the air. It wasn’t until her boot toed a splatter of crimson that she froze. And the despair became her own.
Not until wracking sobs reached her that the fog she’d been floating through cleared, and she realized she was still trembling.
“No, no, no,” the voice repeated, words a broken wreck. A voice she’d know in her dreams or nightmares. “Not again. Not again. I didn’t—”
Agony slicing her open, Emmeline rounded the corner at the end of the hall, into the open cell.
A mix of incense she couldn’t place clung to the wall, candles flickering ghastly shadows against the stone. Ashes and shreds of wildflower petals littered the floor, leading to an altar carved with feathered wings, and—
Roremar.
He was hunched over, his form shaking and every muttered word ripping Emmeline’s chest wide open. Spilling her own sorrow and heartache and ravaging pain, leaving nothing but utter terror in its wake.
“Roremar?” she tried to get his attention, but he didn’t hear her. His body trembled, his being shattering.
“No, not again. Please, Angels, no.”
She stepped closer, boots shuffling over the ashes and blood painting the floor, and dread turned her numb. Because Roremar wasn’t only hunched over the altar.
He clutched a lifeless Nico to his chest.