Chapter 36
Chapter
Thirty-Six
Alexandra spun and danced through a mosaic of sunlight and shadow, her bare feet whispering across the cold marble. The black mist followed, always watching, always shifting. Waiting. Around fluted columns and into the small alcoves that housed the statues of every Soterran king who ever lived.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
Her body ached, but her mind raced—so much to see, so much to know. And here, in this room made for dancing, she had all the space she needed to spin, spin, spin through the world.
“Someone stop her.”
Kassandra. She ruined everything.
Alexandra turned and turned and turned. Soldiers closed around her like a shrinking cage, stepping on those she must see, must tell, must warn, must know. Powerful men go too far, blind, greedy, dead, dead, dead. He’s gone, but his words live on, and now—
Blood on the snow.
Mother didn’t know, see, warn enough, and now they’re paying the price.
“Be our voice,” they said.
“You’re all dead, dead, dead,” Alexandra sang, spinning away from the black mist.
The stalking soldiers paused and stared at each other. They thought she was broken, cracked, shattered, but she wasn’t. She was better, smarter, powerful—the most powerful. She saw everything, everything, everything.
Blood on the walls.
Blood on the stone.
The man bleed, bleed, bleeds.
She saw so much now—why had she fought it so long? This was a great power, and she would use it to destroy them.
A voice thundered through the chamber. “What is this?!”
Kings, weak kings, blind kings, greedy kings.
Dead kings?
“I must see how it ends,” she said to the shadow.
“I’m handling it, brother,” Kassandra said to the man who would be king of kings.
Xavlin laughed, a rasping, guttural mockery, and she clawed the air to dismantle their shape.
“Patience,” they said.
“You show me nothing but blood,” she hissed at them. “I want to see my crown.”
A hand cracked across Alexandra’s cheek. The shock, white-hot, scattered the voices and gave way to…
She’s home. She knows this room. Two boys, sleepy, heads full of dark blond curls, sit up in their beds and smile. “Auntie Alexandra, are we going to play in the tunnels again?” But those boys are gone, ashes, and another sleeps in their place.
A handsome man smiles over the sleeping child, a happy king, a delusional king.
He bleeds like all the rest.
She speaks to him…so faint, a thread of silk between worlds. But she’s delighted. She’s won. She’s tricked them all.
His blood runs gold, and she laughs and laughs and laughs. “You’re nothing but a man now,” she says, and she’s holding a knife and she’s ready, so ready, the time is now now now. “Your crown is mine.”
A hand fisted Alexandra’s throat and shook. Titos’s eyes burned with rage as he pulled her to her tiptoes. “Get yourself together.”
Together? She was the only one who knew, who saw, who was finally beginning to understand. He was the one who remained blind.
“He smiled at you from his horse,” she told her uncle, a smile spreading her dry, cracked lips. “He called you Little Fox, and you turned your back on him with dreams of his blood spilling on that mountain.”
The room went silent. Even the mist held its breath.
Nearby, Kassandra’s hand flew up to cover a gasp.
Titos’s gaze flicked across Alexandra’s face, his skin turning pale. “Only one person ever called me that.”
“And now you wear his crown.” Her voice turned sing-song. “And he’s dead, dead, dead.”
The king’s eyes narrowed, his brown eyes, her mother’s eyes. “What else do you know?”
“It’s time for kings to fall. Weak kings, usurper kings, bastard kings.”
Titos’s lips widened into a smile, and he flashed his teeth. “A crownless king, perhaps?”
“His crown is within reach,” she said, and it was… She could almost feel it in her grasp.
“Tell me everything.”
She leaned close, lips cracked open like a wound. “I already did.”
Alexandra laughed and laughed and laughed.
Stupid, stupid, stupid kings.
The scent of burned flesh clung to the air.
Augustus gagged on it as he woke again—he’d lost count of the times he’d lost consciousness. His cheek scraped against the stone bench beneath him. Even that slight shift lit his spine on fire. His back was a swath of never-ending pain.
“Dad,” he groaned, squinting into the too-bright jail cell.
“Still here.” Mettius’s voice was frightfully weak. “How do you feel, son?”
“Like my back was flayed open. You?”
“Like I lost a leg.” A ragged laugh. Then a groan. “Half a leg.”
It wasn’t funny. Not when his father looked so…small.
At least they were together, screaming, crying, vomiting companions through the night as the healers put them back together with their poultices and wraps. In Mettius’s case, a cauterization to halt his bleeding.
Augustus gripped the bench, bracing to push. He had to move, if for no other reason than to get his blood flowing into his frozen limbs. Even using only arm strength, pain lanced across his back. Bile burned the back of his throat, and his head spun. Sweat slicked his brow.
He blinked through the haze of pain. Blood streaked the grout lines in rust-brown trails.
The damp, pitted walls closed around him like a fist. Very different from the last time he’d been here, when his biggest mistake was a bottle and someone’s spouse.
He’d been damn near nostalgic that night over when he’d successfully picked his first lock in one of these cells.
Not that he’d escaped… The stone building backed up against a cliffside, complete with jagged rocks and a crashing surf.
Across the narrow corridor, Mettius, pale and sweaty, lay on an identical stone bench with his bandaged leg propped on a blanket roll. Thorne’s blade had been clean and true—just below the knee. But someone had hacked the pant leg to mid-thigh, exposing bone-thin skin.
Augustus’s stomach hollowed out. His father used to carry weight, whether in confidence or simple muscle mass. Shirts, jackets, tunics…no matter what he wore, he looked crisp and clean. His beard was always trimmed and full.
Now, his shirt clung to his chest in sweat-stained patches, the fabric yellowed and torn. His beard was a tangled, bloody nest. He looked thinner. Older. His time with Thorne had aged him ten years or more.
He hated seeing his father like this. But, gods help him, he was grateful he’d found him alive.
Thorne hadn’t been as kind with the rest.
“What happened?” Augustus asked, his voice gritty. “What he did aboard the Akias… Had I known it was that bad, I— You should have told me.”
He’d just been sitting around twiddling his thumbs for weeks, living it up in a palace like some high-born lord. All the while, his family was dying slow, painful deaths.
Mettius glared toward the ceiling, and a moment later, he swiped his damp eyes. “You saw them?”
Augustus swallowed the sudden lump in his throat. “Aye. Did you?”
He didn’t answer right away. “He made me watch. Loto… He made him go last. Took five men to hold him down.” Mettius’s voice began to quake and thicken. “I couldn’t—”
“It’s okay, Dad. I know.”
“Where’s the ship now?”
“I… I burned it. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking—”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s what I would have done.”
Augustus released a breath. “How did it come to this? The fleet… You took an entire capital only a few months ago. I don’t understand.”
Mettius scrubbed his face and pushed upright, wincing and grunting, until he was half-supported by the stone wall at his back.
“Phya’s been slowly pulling the threads of our purse strings for too long.
The crews began dwindling. We couldn’t replenish food, let alone weapons.
Thorne had the manpower and strength, and by the time we crossed his path outside Okos…
” He shrugged one frail shoulder. “We didn’t make it easy, but we lost in the end. ”
“Why were you there? Where’s the rest of the fleet?”
“We were regrouping after we lost Ramón and Quin, then word reached me that he’d taken Selene. I knew you’d follow on the Entia, and I thought…” Mettius met Augustus’s eyes. “I couldn’t let you do this on your own.”
Augustus’s throat tightened. “All this because I lost that steel? I should have listened to you and Mom.”
“Don’t put that on yourself. Phya was a fucking prick, but he was a coward, too. He would have caved eventually. This is all Tristan Thorne.”
“But why? This seems a little extreme, doesn’t it? The fleet’s never been loved, but this feels personal.”
Mettius lay back down and draped an arm across his belly. “I don’t know. He just keeps saying I’ll understand when the time comes.” A chilly silence passed between them, and after a while, his father whispered, “I’m glad your mother isn’t here for this.”
“You can’t mean that.”
Silence thickened the already humid air.
Augustus couldn’t help but wonder if Cassia would have made a difference. She’d had gods in her head. She’d had an uncanny way of knowing exactly what to do. She hadn’t been impenetrable, but there was a reason why Phya and Thorne didn’t hesitate after she was gone.
Finally, Mettius asked, “Where’s Selene? I heard she escaped Thorne’s ship near Okos.”
A chill crossed over Augustus’s skin.
He hadn’t said goodbye. Not really. Not to any of them.
Augustus cleared the blockage in his throat. “Thorne contracted the Bladesworn for her head. She was in the city the last time I saw her, with Oskar Dahlin and some of the Blades.”
“Good. Then I’m sure she’s all right.”
“I guess we won’t know anything until someone shows up to rescue us.”
Mettius frowned. “Augustus, son, I’m sorry to say we may never know. Thorne will kill us before he lets that happen. I hope you said your goodbyes.”
“We’re not leaving them!” Selene shouted.
The Entia’s crew was staring—she didn’t care.
Lili, sporting a black eye and an arm in a sling, couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, she let Omar relay the bad news.
“We’re sitting ducks,” the quartermaster said. The two women behind him nodded in agreement. “The mercenary ships vanished in the night—”
“With our payment, I might add,” Blaze muttered. He looked as wrecked as she felt.
Good.
“Thorne’s fleet is moving back in,” Omar finished. “They’ll be here within hours.”
Selene turned and gripped the starboard railing until her knuckles burned and fingers went numb. The salt-laden wind burned her eyes, and it was becoming increasingly difficult not to scream her frustration into it.
Poor Little Gus had taken the brunt of it that morning. He’d appeared out of nowhere, plopped onto her bed, babbling in bursts about his delightful foray across the mainland.
Streams, stolen fruit, luron pups.
As if none of them had been bleeding.
As if Petrina wasn’t dead, and Augustus jailed, and Mettius…
Her stomach rolled. Augustus’s public whipping. Mettius’s amputation. The details had come last night, quiet, unbearable.
Selene sensed the group behind her strolling away, all but one. Oskar leaned onto the railing beside her. Usually, Oskar’s calm steadied her. Today, it scraped raw.
“Unless you have some idea how to get me into that jail,” she ground out, “I don’t want to hear it.”
Oskar stared into the pirate city and sighed. “We stay, we die.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I saw what Thorne did to that crew, Selene, and your imagination holds no candle to the reality.”
And none of them were there to see Petrina’s look of shock. Or remember the way she reached for help, while already beyond it.
Hot tears pricked the backs of her eyes, and she turned her burning gaze toward her mentor. “We left him. We left him, and Petrina died. If we’d just stayed together—”
“You can’t honestly believe that would have gone any better.”
“We won’t know that, will we? The answer certainly doesn’t matter to Petrina anymore.”
Oskar nodded, then straightened. “You’re letting your worry cloud your judgment.”
He didn’t understand. None of them did. “Fuck you, Oskar.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “You can’t know what it’s like to have someone ask you to walk away from—”
“I don’t know?” he shouted.
Selene flinched.
Oskar’s entire body vibrated with restraint, and his fists curled into the air between them. “Emanouella put herself between me and her husband and bartered for my life. She begged me to walk away…and I left her there to die. I live with that every fucking day.
“I know exactly what we’re asking you to do. And so did Augustus. He doesn’t think his life is worth more than yours—or this whole godsdamned crew.”
She knuckled a tear from her cheek and nodded. “All right.”
Oskar heaved out a breath, and his shoulders relaxed. “All right.”
A sob broke through her tight chest. “I can’t lose him.”
He pulled her in, one hand cradling the back of her skull, as if holding her pieces together. “I know. We’ll figure this out.”
She didn’t know how, but she’d work night and day coming up with a plan. She’d burn the world down around her if that’s what it took.
In the near distance, Omar shouted orders over the wind and surf. “Weigh that anchor—move it!”
Selene and Oskar parted to watch the quartermaster work.
“Wave Rider,” he shouted to the helmsman named Victoria, “hold her steady to starboard. Let’s catch that wind.” He scanned the deck until he found the riggers climbing the shrouds. “Loosen the topsails and furl that mainsail! We need full canvas!”
Omar turned to Felix. “Hammer, check the rudderlines. If anything jams, we’re dead in the water.”
“Aye, aye,” Felix said.
Lastly, Omar turned to his wife, sister-in-law, and Lili. “Storm, North Star, the ship’s yours.” Lili started to argue, but he added a final order overtop her arguments. “Graveborn, get your arse to Patch and see to that fucking arm. I’ll hear no more of your excuses.”
Roman approached Selene and Oskar on silent feet, gaze sweeping the efficient crew. If Augustus were there, he’d appreciate the fact that the Drynopian had finally donned a shirt.
Roman’s gaze paused on her tear-streaked face.
She wiped them away, fast and furious.
He frowned. “Where are we going?”
Oskar squeezed Selene into his side as if to hold her together. “To find the rest of the Triarius Fleet.”
“And then,” Selene said, “we finish this war.”