14. The Empty Throne
Ihad survived a Rift, a labyrinth, a wasteland of stone, and a war. And yet, standing in front of a mirror in a borrowed gown while a girl half my size fussed with the laces at my back, I was fairly certain a banquet was going to be the thing that finally killed me.
“Stop holding your breath,” Thalia murmured, giving the laces one last gentle tug. “You’ll faint before you reach the doors, and then I shall have done all this for nothing.”
“That might genuinely be the kindest thing that happens to me all night… hey, do you think if I did faint that I could get out of being there?” I asked, and she laughed.
It made me smile that she no longer looked like she wanted to bolt for the door when the laugh escaped her.
Now she only shot me a sheepish grin in the mirror and carried on smoothing the skirts.
Then I caught sight of myself properly, and all the air left my lungs.
The gown was deep emerald green, so dark it shifted toward black where the fabric folded and was threaded all over with fine silver.
It fit like it had been poured onto me. My hair had been swept up and pinned with tiny silver leaves.
A few loose, curled strands framed my face and were left to soften the whole thing.
Which meant the woman staring back at me looked like she belonged in a fairytale instead of a foxhole.
“I don’t recognize myself,” I admitted, the shock on my face evident.
“Good.” Thalia stepped back, hazel eyes bright with pride. “Because you look like a queen you are destined to be.”
“Oh god, not you too,” I groaned, pressing a hand to my stomach. “Don’t say that word. That word is exactly the problem.” She opened her mouth, no doubt to make it worse, but a knock came at the door before she could and saved us both.
When she pulled it open, Lazaros stood waiting in the corridor, and I almost laughed at how thoroughly he’d transformed.
Gone was the rumpled, pastry-thieving menace from breakfast. He was now dressed in deep sapphire velvet that seemed to glow against the candlelight. His formal coat was tailored to perfection and trimmed with silver at the collar and cuffs, the crest of his house embroidered over his heart.
It still unsettled me how alike Atlas he looked.
The same dark hair, the same proud line of his jaw, the same maddening twinkle they’d both inherited from gods knew where.
And yet where his brother was all breadth and brutal, immovable power, Lazaros was leaner, lither.
One built for speed and, apparently, sarcasm, rather than the open battlefield. The silent blade to Atlas’s war cry.
He’d pushed his hair back from his face, and the bruised shadows that had clung beneath his eyes since the throne room had finally begun to fade. He looked, for the first time since I’d met him, entirely himself.
His gaze landed on me, and he stopped dead in the doorway.
“My Queen, you look…” His eyes went wide as they swept over me, and heat climbed straight up my chest and into my face.
“Lazaros, get up,” I said the second he folded over into a deep bow, making me flap a hand at him as I shot Thalia a desperate look. “I am not your queen yet.”
Lazaros’s grin detonated across his entire face.
“Ah-ha!” he actually shouted aloud. “So, you have thought about it.”
I blinked. “Thought about what?”
“Being queen.” When my face apparently gave me away entirely, he pressed on, delighted. “You said ‘yet’.”
“I did not… I mean, that’s not what I… shut up,” I grumbled, and I rolled my eyes hard enough to hurt, and turned to Thalia for backup.
But the traitor had pressed her lips together and was staring very hard at the floor, her shoulders shaking with the effort not to laugh.
“Hey, you’re supposed to be on my side,” I whined, making her grin.
“I’m on whichever side gets you to the banquet, my… Alex,” she managed, eyes dancing.
“Hopeless. Both of you. Utterly hopeless.” I groaned without any heat, and they both knew it.
Lazaros only swept into a low, ridiculous bow again and offered me his arm, no doubt doing it on purpose.
“Shall we, before you talk yourself out of it entirely?” His eyes narrowed with mischief as I took it, and he tugged me a step closer. “You are, for the record, the very picture of beauty.”
I blushed. “Thanks, oh and of course, you too look very handsome, but you also look like a man who knows this.”
He grinned and ran a hand through his hair again in a slow, exaggerated way. “Do you really think so?”
I swatted his arm and rolled my eyes. “Come on, Mr. Ego, let’s go before your brother declares me a runaway and goes hunting again,” I said, and I didn’t think his grin could get any bigger.
He nodded to Thalia as we stepped out, and I threw her one last pleading grimace over my shoulder.
She pursed her lips at me, pretending to be stern.
But just before she turned away, I caught it break into the warmest, most genuine smile.
Then came a quiet little wave of encouragement that did more for my nerves than anything Lazaros could have said.
Friend, I thought again fiercely. I had decided, and she didn’t get a vote.
The corridor swallowed us, and somewhere ahead, the distant hum of music and a hundred murmuring voices drifted toward us, and my stomach turned itself inside out.
“You might as well get used to this,” Lazaros said, his voice pitched low for my ears alone, though there wasn’t another soul around to hear it.
I shot him a sideways look. “Used to what?”
He tightened his hand around mine which rested on his forearm. “All in good time.”
My heart skipped. “You’re very sure I’m not going anywhere, aren’t you?”
“Let’s just say,” he murmured, that knowing smile playing at his mouth, “I think you’d fit in rather well around here.”
I rolled my eyes, but the warmth in his voice made it impossible not to smile back, and for a few blessed steps, the dread loosened its grip on my throat.
Then the great doors rose up before us, the noise of the banquet swelling behind them, and Lazaros stopped, giving my hand another gentle squeeze.
“Ready?”
I dragged in a breath, nerves and something dangerously close to full on panic tangling together in my chest.
“As I’ll ever be, I guess.”
He winked. “That’s the spirit! And did I tell you how beautiful you look?”
I smirked, tapping him on the arm. “You did thank you. But I’ll warn you now, if you say it one more time, I might have to marry you instead of your brother.”
He blew out a low whistle. “You seem lovely, but not worth my head if you know what I mean, and he already came close once.” He said, rubbing at his neck and making me feel guilty, that was until he saw my face, and his laughter rolled like warmth over the music.
Then he nodded to the guards flanking the doors, and in perfect unison, they swung them open.
And the whole world spilled out in front of me.
Every dignitary in the kingdom seemed to be crammed into that hall.
The long tables crowded with chatting, laughing, jewel-bright faces.
It was almost obscene how completely the room had been scrubbed of the war that I had seen hints of earlier.
Although most had been cleaned away, even then, I could very much imagine how it would have looked in the aftermath.
There was no smoke staining the soaring ceiling.
No blood ground into the marble. Nothing waiting in the shadows.
Just the gleam of polished silver and the warm gold of a thousand candles burning in chandeliers strung high overhead.
A soft glow and music playing over the easy roar of people who had survived.
And at the far end of it all, raised above the rest on a wide stone dais, was a long table.
Behind it sat a throne.
Not the same as the one in the throne room. This one was carved and gilded, warmer somehow, and the man seated upon it made every other soul in that hall look small.
Atlas.
I had thought I knew what he looked like. I had seen him in armor, in battle, black tunics… in nothing at all. But I had never once seen him crowned, and the sight of it stole the air straight from my lungs.
He wore a high-collared coat of deepest midnight blue. Its surface embroidered with shimmering silver thread that traced whole constellations across his chest and shoulders, so that he seemed to be wearing a piece of the night sky itself.
A heavy velvet cloak fell from his shoulders, fastened at the throat with a great silver clasp bearing the crest of his house.
And there, resting against his dark hair, was his crown.
Dark silver spires curving upward, threaded metal twisted into impossible patterns, and at its very center a single brilliant emerald ringed in silver, with smaller stones scattered like seeds across its base.
He looked like something out of one of Thalia’s stories she had told me about the world when doing my hair.
Distant. Magnificent. Untouchably and terrifyingly, a king.
And beside his throne sat a second one. An identical seat to his right. Utterly, pointedly empty.
Waiting.
I knew, with a horrible certainty, exactly who it was waiting for.
That was the moment the hall noticed me.
In one breath, the room was a wall of warm noise, and the next it came to a stop, all at once.
It was as though some unseen hand had reached out and pinched the flame of every conversation between two fingers.
Heads turned. Chairs scraped. And then, in a great rustling wave that started near the doors and rolled all the way to the dais, every single person in that hall rose to their feet.
For me.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered.
My feet stopped working. Just like that, somewhere between one step and the next, my body refused to carry me another inch into that sea of staring faces.
My heart slammed so hard against my ribs, I genuinely thought it might tear straight through the silver and emerald and out into the open for everyone to see.
The doors were right behind me. I could still feel them. One turn, one breath, and I could be gone. Gone like the wind, back down that quiet corridor where no one was looking at me like I was something out of a prophecy.
I felt my hand begin to slide from Lazaros’s arm.
And right there across the entire length of that hall, on his dais, was Atlas, who, the second he saw this, went very still.
His eyes found mine and held them, and even from there, even across all those heads and all that distance, I felt the exact moment he understood.
He saw it.
The way my nerve was failing. The way my weight had already shifted, half-turned toward the doors and the escape I desperately sought.
He rose from his throne.
“I can’t do this,” I breathed, the words tumbling out before I could stop them, my hand dropping fully from Lazaros’s arm. “Laz, I can’t. Look at them all. My heart’s about to come out of my chest, I can’t…”
“He will chase you, you know.” Lazaros’s voice was quiet, steady, threaded with something that wasn’t teasing at all. “If you run.”
I dragged my panicked gaze to his.
“Trust me. I know my brother.” His mouth curved, gentle now.
“He will not care one bit who is watching. He will come down off that dais and carry you to that seat himself, in front of every lord and lady in the kingdom, and he will not so much as blink an eye while he does it.” His eyes flicked to the empty throne.
“Because, as far as he is concerned, that seat is already yours. It was always going to be yours.”
I opened my mouth.
I never got the chance to answer.
Because Atlas did something then that no king of The?kós had ever done before him. I knew that from the reaction of the crowd as they all gasped as one.
He didn’t wait for his queen to come to him.
He moved to claim her.
A second gasp went up across the hall, soft and astonished, spreading outward in the same rolling wave the silence had, as Atlas stepped down from the dais.
One step, then the next, his cloak pouring down the steps behind him, his eyes never once leaving my face.
And the crowd, that great glittering crush of nobles who had all risen to honor him, parted before him without a word.
Each now falling back on either side to clear a path straight through the center of the hall.
A path to me.
He moved through it like a tide coming in, unhurried and utterly certain. Every step closed the distance between us while the entire kingdom watched their king walk down to fetch a terrified mortal girl frozen in his doorway.
There was nowhere left to run.
There was only him, crossing the last of the floor, the candlelight catching on his crown and his constellations. That dark, steady gaze pinning me where I stood as surely as any hand.
And the realization crashed over me, cold and sudden, somewhere in the half-second before he reached me.
Oh, shit.
He really is a king.
And he really, truly, and deeply…
Thinks I’m his queen.