Chapter 1
Chapter
One
In his dream, Augustus Labienus Triarius stood on the deck of the Soris.
The ship was an empty ghost on a silent, stagnant sea. Hanging overhead like a tortured breath, the starless sky threatened to collapse. A crescent shadow slithered across the planks, a malignant stain, swallowing light. The ship wholly disappeared into the open-mouthed penumbra and didn’t return.
He should have cared about losing his ship to this ravenous void, but ships were replaceable.
His mother was not.
Scarred, treacherous, and glorious, Cassia stood near the main mast, her eyes black, chin tilted toward the gods.
A twin to the version he’d seen in her final moments of life.
And just as she’d been to the sellsword who’d murdered her, she was oblivious now to the approaching danger that was an insatiable shadow.
She was only a few feet away.
This time, he could save her.
Augustus lurched—
His upper body went where his feet refused. Rooted, he jerked and yanked, and when he still couldn’t pull free, he reached for her, straining. “Mom! You have to move!”
She couldn’t hear him. Or didn’t want to. “A return of the rightful king marks the end of the brother and the rise of daughters. When the time comes that the world becomes shrouded in shadows, a line of demarcation will be drawn.”
Augustus remembered this. Had spent more than six months trying to forget every word. He couldn’t stand here and watch this again.
Mettius’s desperate yell came from within the void, as if to yank Augustus into the past itself. “Cassia!”
Augustus winced. “No. Stop. Please.” He couldn’t go through this again.
The arc of black inched ever closer to Cassia, and the ship’s boards slipped into the nothing.
Cassia’s chin lowered, and her eyes sought his, pupils black and burning.
She glanced down at the darkness, then to Augustus.
Her eyes flared as her prophecy continued, the words hurried.
“The separation of lovers by oceans and seas isolates a vulnerable king and will awaken the accused. They return home to wage a vicious war, find the lost who wished not to be found, and reclaim a connection to love that will strip the power of a mended crown.”
“Mom, it’s okay. I know. You already said all of this. You have to move.”
He didn’t give a fuck about the prophecy or how it ended. He never had. Nothing mattered more than her life.
Cassia’s knees jerked up, but her boots sank into the planks, into the mud-like void that had finally reached her.
She met his eyes. “When the lands of snow and fields of thunder collide—”
“Cassia!” Mettius called.
“Move!” Augustus screamed.
The shadow surged—and then, a voice like seafoam breaking on a rocky shore. “Augustus.”
A siren. His safe harbor.
“It’s a dream.” The voice didn’t chase the shadows—it pulled him through. “Wake up.”
Augustus bolted upright and nearly knocked heads with Selene. She gripped his face, anchoring him to the real world, and her eyes—one like freshly tilled earth, one like sapphire—darted around his face. Budding sunlight cast her reddish-blond hair in a halo.
It was morning. Thank the gods.
He clutched her head and drew her so close that their breaths mingled. “Thank you.”
Selene’s hands roamed and caressed, unknowingly pulling him to safety. “I wish you’d tell me—”
“I can’t.”
“You called out for Cassia this time. Is that who—”
Augustus twisted out of her arms and perched on the side of their massive bed. It was so high, his feet barely reached the tiled floor. Across the room, a cool breeze blew gauzy curtains toward them from open floor-to-ceiling windows.
He inhaled deeply the brine scent off Castona Bay. Gulls dipped in and out of the water from a clear sky. The sea glittered in the morning light. So close, and yet impossibly far. Just like everything else in his life that used to make sense.
The vast spread of water was nothing but a reminder of how different things were.
These days, he made choices for someone else, rarely for himself.
After all, he’d already lived an active and full life.
Selene hadn’t, so he would keep quiet and let her navigate for a while.
What was a few months compared to the decades they had ahead?
And anyway, didn’t this classify as a new experience?
He’d been all over the world and stayed in plenty of nice rooms, but he’d never lived in one.
And never with another person. Little pieces of himself and Selene were all over the place.
From jewelry to vases to intricate little paintings of the sea on gold stands.
Weapons were strung about, lazily discarded like everything else.
Things one or the other had spotted in passing and purchased on a whim.
This was an especially big deal for Selene; she’d been a slave her entire life and had never owned anything of her own.
Selene wrapped around him from behind, her body still warm from sleep. Her fingertips skimmed across his bare chest. “It’s time.”
Augustus stiffened. After weeks of nightmares, patiently sitting by without explanation, she was finally going to force him to talk.
He wasn’t ready.
He couldn’t.
The details of that day, the prophecy, Cassia’s death, how could he share those things with her? The prophecy didn’t make sense, and if she suggested picking it apart…
Not now. Maybe not ever. It would be like staring into his mother’s last breath.
Augustus peered over his shoulder as her fingers played in his long strands of hair. “Selene—”
“I promised Dimitrios three months. It’s been four.”
His breath shot out, and he almost laughed. “Five, actually.”
Where had the time gone? How had his entire world turned so upside down in just a few months?
Who he had been when he first boarded the Soris nine months ago was not the man he was today.
Sleeping beside the same woman every night.
Led instead of leading. Living in a world where his mother no longer existed, something he once thought impossible.
He’d chosen this life with Selene, and the gods knew there would be no living without her, but the rest? What was he doing?
Selene hugged him tight, and her lips pressed into his shoulder. “Let’s go. Anywhere you want. You still have the Entia—”
“I don’t have a crew.”
Nearly all of his mother’s old crew left months ago, having experienced all the fun to be had and itching to return to sea.
Most had returned to the Triarius fleet, which, last he’d heard, was docked outside Warian Bay.
No sign of Tristan Thorne or his promise to wipe his family out.
Augustus never thought Thorne was the type to bluster false declarations of war, but here they all were. Alive and untouched.
Maybe Thorne had heard about Cassia and decided they’d suffered enough. It’d been her he’d truly hated, anyway.
Selene tugged a lock of his hair. “Hire a crew, Augustus.”
Augustus twisted around and took her hand. Gods, he loved these delicate fingers. “I’m in no rush. If you’re ready, then I’ll take care of everything. If you’re not, that’s all right, too.”
Selene smiled, and her eyes lit up like a sky full of stars. “You promised to show me the world, Triarius.” She leaned in until their lips whispered against each other. “Show me everything.”
That sounded like an invitation if he ever heard one. “You know…” He crawled farther onto the bed and got her onto her back. “I can show you a few things right now… If you’re interested.”
“I’m suddenly very intrigued, Captain.”
He grinned, and she took his mouth with hers. Her lips parted, and their tongues brushed—
A coarse tongue slurped across his shoulder. Wet. Loud.
Gross.
Augustus unsheathed a knife from its home under his pillow.
The creature, only millimeters from the pointy end, blinked its big, brown eyes. Despite nearly dying, it smiled, its tongue flopping around outside its scaled face. Its blue and brown iridescent, leathery wings fluttered against its side.
This fucking thing.
Pent-up air shot from Augustus’s lungs. “You are the bane of my entire existence, dragon.”
Selene scooped the cat-sized creature into her arms and nuzzled their noses. “Good morning to you, too.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Augustus asked. “We were about to…you know.” He couldn’t even say the words in front of it.
Now he was treating it like a child.
“Augustus.”
“Can you ask it to…I don’t know. Go drown itself or something?”
“Stop that.” Selene scooted to the edge of the bed and rose, cradling the dragon. “We have our entire lives to…you know,” she said in a mocking tone. “He’s hungry.”
She opened one of two wardrobes and searched through the many, many dresses hanging there.
The dragon climbed onto her shoulder and blinked at him, tail wagging.
“Don’t you find it strange,” Augustus began, reaching into his own wardrobe, “that it doesn’t hunt for itself? Dragons do that, you know.”
“One, he’s not a dragon. He’s a…cousin. Two, he doesn’t like hunting. Or killing. It’s cruel.”
“How can you know that for sure? It’s gone for hours at a time. Sometimes days. How does it eat when you’re not around?”
“He visits the kitchens. Cook gives him fresh bread, carrots, things like that. Cake on special occasions. He likes cake.” They nuzzled their noses again. “I can feel you scowling over there, and stop calling him ‘it.’ He’s a he.”
“If you insist on entertaining it, it needs a name.”
“He hasn’t decided on one yet.” With a canary yellow dress draped over an arm, Selene spun toward their private bathing chamber, wearing a nightdress just gauzy enough to tease. “He’s open to suggestions, though.”
Augustus followed her with a change of clothes in hand. “When it first showed up, I thought it was cute how you spoke for it. Now, well, I’m beginning to question your sanity.”
“You should. I fell in love with you, didn’t I?” Her voice echoed inside the tiled chamber.