Chapter 20
DIEM
The walk to my old room was a sobering journey.
Vance and his men had ransacked the palace, slashing their blades through tapestries and art, shattering mirrors and windows.
Bodies of dead guards littered the halls, as did the corpses of palace staff.
The higher-ranked royals had hidden away in their rooms behind fortified doors, leaving the less fortunate to take the mortals’ wrath.
The sight of it made me ill. The poor fighting the poor, the oppressed taking their vengeance on other oppressed, while the privileged few escaped unscathed.
By the time I reached the royal suite—spotless and untouched, of course, thanks to the bloodlocks—I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to retch or tear the place to the ground.
The room was dark, lit only by the fading glow from my skin, and it was empty, save for a figure seated by the dormant fireplace, shoulders hunched.
I closed the door behind me and took a seat across from him, slamming back against my chair. “Well,” I muttered, “we’re home.”
My brother’s eyes lifted to me, the festering misery in them equaling mine. “This isn’t home.”
I glanced around the room, my gaze lingering as old memories arose. I couldn’t deny I’d been happy here for a while. I’d fallen in love with Luther in this palace, found new friends and new strength in who I was. As Queen, these rooms had been my refuge.
But it had never been that way for Teller. He had been dragged here unwilling, an innocent bystander to my fate. This palace meant the death of our father, the destruction of home. Without Lily, his memories here only brought pain.
And after all that I’d changed, I had to admit, it didn’t feel much like home for me, either.
I dragged my hands over my face, trying to quell my still-blistering temper. “We can find you a place of your own after the war, but I’d rather you stay here until all this is over.”
He didn’t answer.
“Happy eighteenth birthday, by the way,” I said. “Sorry I missed it. I threw you a party on the island. Perthe and I gorged on cake and wine, then read a few textbooks in your honor until we passed out from boredom.”
He sat straight up. “Perthe survived?”
My heart dropped into my stomach. “No,” I rushed out. “I only meant—” I cringed at my stupid, careless joke. “I visited his grave every day. Talked to him about . . . everything. He kept me company.”
Teller’s expression shuttered. He drooped back over his knees, hands balling into fists. The room went quiet until fluttering wings and the click of talons on stone marked Sorae’s return to her perch. She peered inside an open arch at me, then at my brother, and let out a sympathetic whirr.
“I saw the Ignios King stab you,” Teller murmured. “I thought he killed you.”
“He tried to.” The mating mark burned. “I wasn’t ready to go yet.”
He was silent for a long time, then he sighed, his eyes returning to me. “Cake and wine, huh?”
I forced a small smile. “Mud cake and rain wine. Just like we made when we were little.”
His lip twitched up, and it felt like the sweetest victory. “What was it like out there?”
“Awful. Every last second. What was it like with Mother and the Guardians?”
“Awful. Every last second.” He looked away. “I had no idea how much she’d kept from me. How much you . . .”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. I knew.
How much you both had kept from me.
Keeping secrets from my brother was among my greatest regrets. He was the one person in my life who had always been honest with me, and the shame I carried for not doing the same was immense.
“The Kindred spoke to me on the island,” I said. “Ophiucae is one of them. He’s Omnos—the tenth Kindred they never told anyone about. He tried to kill all the mortals, so they locked him up, and I accidentally set him free. Now I have to convince him not to kill all the Descended, too.”
Teller blinked. “How are you going to do that?”
I touched my chest with a mock look of outrage. “Are you saying you doubt my powers of persuasion?”
His blank look was not a vote of confidence.
“What if you can’t?” he asked.
“Then I have to kill him.”
Teller frowned. “How do you kill a Kindred?”
I set aside the blade I’d taken from Doriel and reached into the shadows of my cloak to pull out Sorrow’s Edge. “With this.”
He leaned forward to study it. “I thought Mother said she stabbed him with a godstone blade, and it didn’t kill him.” He looked up at me, brows knitting lower. “The Ignios King stabbed you with godstone. That didn’t work, either.”
My fingers traced the golden filigree that spanned the sword’s glittering black blade. As I did, a voice filled my head, whispering ancient words I could not understand.
“This sword is different. Their mother made it with magic from their home world. She was going to use it to kill him, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.”
“And you think you can?” He was trying hard to look like he wasn’t planning his own funeral already.
“Honestly?” I pushed out a heavy exhale. “I don’t know.” I buried my face in my hand. “Maybe not.”
There was something freeing about admitting the truth. Terrifying, too.
After a beat of silence, I heard the soft pat of footsteps, then wood creaking as Teller perched on the arm of my chair. He squeezed my shoulder in that firm yet gentle way our Father had always done. The memory of it had hot tears burning at my eyes when Teller let out an abrupt, unexpected snort.
“I can’t believe our mother fucked a Kindred.”
“Teller!” I gaped up at him, shocked. And a little impressed.
His mouth slid into a smile. There it was—buried underneath the anger and pain, a gleam of the brother I knew. The knowledge that he was still him gave me hope that somewhere inside, I was still me, too.
“You think Father would be jealous?” he asked.
“Jealous? Tel, he’d never stop bragging that he stole a pretty woman from a Kindred.” He laughed, and I shook my head. “Remember when our lives used to be boring?”
“You were never boring. I was boring.” His attention lifted to my Crown. “You were always meant to do something big.”
His words rumbled in my thoughts, a distant thunder.
“Don’t tell anyone, alright?” I asked. “You know how Kindred-obsessed the Descended are. I don’t know what they’ll do if they find out there’s still one alive.”
“I won’t,” he promised.
The click of a bloodlock heralded the opening of the door. The warm pulse of the mating mark on my chest told me who had arrived, and Teller’s respectful nod of greeting confirmed it.
“You know, I haven’t slept in a bed for weeks,” Teller said. “I’d really like to do it again.” He gave my shoulder a final squeeze as he rose, then shuffled across the parlor to his old room. He paused and looked back. “Happy birthday to you, too.”
He forced a small smile that I couldn’t seem to return.
“Night, Tel.”
“Night, D.”
I stared at his door long after he closed it, even as Luther came and crouched before me. “The poultice is gone,” he said. “I burned the bowl to make sure no one from Ignios could get even a trace.”
“Was there enough for the other survivors?”
He nodded. “Alixe took the final batch.”
I grimaced. I hadn’t even thought to ask her if she was wounded. I’d questioned her loyalty, then put her to work. And she had done so, knowing the poison was killing her inside.
“Mireille and Ailani left for Arboros and Faunos,” he went on. “Obaneryn won’t return to Meros until you decide Doriel’s fate, and the Ignios prick is too ill to travel. I put guards on the three of them for tonight.”
I stared up at the ceiling, surprised at how strange it felt to see wood and stone instead of the evening sky I’d grown used to on the island.
Luther’s hand shifted on top of mine. The balm of his touch was immediate, soothing my hissing godhood and coaxing the last of the shimmering, angry glow to leave my skin.
“Are you second-guessing your choice?” he asked.
“No. Does that make me a monster?”
“Ignios deserves his death. Some people are too dangerous to save.” His focus moved to the sword and dagger in my lap. He picked up Doriel’s blade first, casting a glowing orb to illuminate its design. “You’re right—this does look like the knife that killed your father.”
“Except for the handle,” I said.
“And the marquenom.”
I frowned. “What’s a marquenom?”
“Custom blades like these are engraved with a symbol for their owners.” He brushed his thumb across a small design etched just below the hilt: the sigil of Sophos—an open book below a glowing spark—topped with a single-peaked coronet. “This one is for the Crown of Sophos.”
My Sophos magic spun to life, plucking an image of the knife that killed my father from my memories in immaculate detail—right down to the warm, sticky blood coating its unmarked blade.
“The other one didn’t have a marquenom,” I said.
“Perhaps its owner chose to leave it off so they couldn’t be found.
” He hesitated. “Or perhaps it never made it to its owner.” Before I could push him on what he meant, his attention moved to Sorrow’s Edge.
“That’s the sword from our vision—the one you fought with in Sophos. Doriel brought it to the island?”
“No. The Kindred did. They appeared to me on Coeur?le.”
He waited for me to say more, and when I didn’t, he glanced up at my Crown. “The Kindred gave all of those to you, too?”
All I could do was nod. There were so many things I needed to tell him and show him and ask him, I wasn’t sure where to begin. I wanted to curl up in his arms and open my mind to let him see every dark, defeated moment through my eyes, make him understand how damaged I’d become.
His thumb grazed the line of my jaw, then he rose to stand. “You must be tired. Let me run you a bath.”
He strode toward my washroom like a man determined. I wearily rose and followed him, dragging Sorrow’s Edge at my side. I paused by my bed and cast a plume of Ignios magic to light the fireplace. As the warmth of the flames heated my skin, a calm settled over me.