29. Max #2
Aelindor set his glass down. “No more secrets between the five of us.”
“Roll the dice, sweetheart,” Caspian said. “Fleece us.”
I fleeced them.
All four of them could hear my heart. It never once told them what my hand held, because in the mine your heart hammered all day and meant nothing at all. That was the trick of Deadman’s Lantern.
Caspian went down first, blustering into a cave-in he had no air to survive, and paid up laughing.
“Line one.” He recited it to the fire. “Where Serpent kisses Ram, the lost one wakes. Serpent is House Scorpio. Ram, in the old readings, is House Capricorn, right? Never made sense to me.” He ran a hand through his tousled wine-red hair.
“You’re the heir of both houses, and you woke here, inside the Covenant. ”
“Didn’t you tell us that line meant a snake kissing a goat, and the kiss was foreplay for swallowing it whole? Wolf?”
“And now you remember all my jokes, vamp?”
I rolled a nine on the next hand. A cruel depth.
Drakken folded early and clean. Aelindor folded on his second card.
Nikolai raised, and I built him a bluff over three raises and let him climb the whole way up into it.
His eyebrow acknowledged the craftsmanship even as he pushed his pebbles across the blanket.
“Line three is mine by rights,” he said.
“By Coldiron’s shroud, no blood may sing.
Blood is my business. Blood always sings to me.
Every living thing announces itself to hunters like me.
” He turned his glass slowly by the stem.
“You grew up buried in Coldiron, and the metal hid you. For twenty years the most hunted bloodline on this continent made no sound at all. Aelindor nearly went mad looking for you.”
The fire cracked between us.
“Then you walked out of that mine.” His crimson eyes held mine. “And you sing. There’s no better sound, Eirath.”
I swallowed. My grip went loose on the cards, and I fixed it.
Drakken lost the third hand, and he lost it on purpose. Drakken didn’t bluff badly. He bluffed badly that night.
“He walks in shadow, she in flame.” He said it into the bonfire instead of at me.
“That line broke scholars. He and she, one heir. They argued it meant twins. Two children. A translation lost in time.” He turned the log with his boot.
“But it meant you. Years walking in shadow as a boy. And revealed in flame.”
He looked up, gray eyes with the fire moving in them.
“My flame. I built the Sorting to burn out a spy, and instead my fire answered a prophecy older than my house and showed the whole Covenant what you were.”
The dice came up four and two for the last hand, a shallow seam, an easy win for anyone paying attention. Aelindor pushed his pebbles in without looking at them.
“The final line,” he said softly. “And four crowns must kneel.”
The fire popped. Nobody breathed.
“It was preserved once in the archives of House Scorpio, until the ink faded from the pages. I’ve hunted its meaning for nearly a century, since the Shimmer fell.
” He looked at me across the fire. “Max. The Covenant itself was formed because of the Fourfold prophecy. The houses banded together, built the fortress, held the line, all of it waiting for the lost one’s waking.
Three lines have come true in you. The fourth stands open. ”
I drew a breath. One question climbed up my throat and wouldn’t go back down. I’d asked Aelindor once, alone. Now I needed it from all of them.
“Do you want me because of the prophecy?”
Aelindor sat back and let his brothers answer.
“The prophecy told us you existed,” Caspian said.
“It didn’t say you’d stand on a bridge and refuse to leave your team behind.
It didn’t say what you’d be like when the worst of it came.
” The shifter prince wore his whole heart in those green eyes.
“We found that part out on our own. That’s the part I’d always fight for. ”
“If we didn’t want you, Eirath, no prophecy and no god could make us.” Nikolai set his glass down. “I know the difference between being told to want a thing and wanting it. So do you.”
“We’ve spent our whole lives being told what our crowns require.” Caspian’s voice was thick with emotion. “You’re the one thing the four of us ever picked for ourselves, sweetheart.”
Drakken stood abruptly and fed the bonfire a log it did not need.
“You are ours,” Aelindor finished, “as we are yours. The prophecy is only the oldest witness.”
The lifelong knot behind my ribs eased.
Everything in me wanted to cross that blanket.
I’d been hungry. The kind where your body started eating itself and your hands shook and you caught yourself doing math about how many days you could go.
I wanted to be held. Just held. Somebody’s arm across me. My face somewhere warm. The weight of another person deciding to stay exactly where they were.
I swallowed. There was one more thing I’d heard that they hadn’t.
A second prophecy, counter to this one. My demon had warned me once. The Oracle’s parting words had said the same.
I turned it over, and I set it down. Not tonight. Tonight was for the Twelve Fires.
Tonight was for the thing the fires said. We’re still here. The lights hold.
I’d bring them the second one soon, in daylight, with maps on the table. Besides, I still believed what I’d believed in that tunnel at eight years old: we dig our own way out.
“So.” Caspian scooped up the dice and rattled them in his fist, grinning. “Same game. New stakes. Whoever loses, strips.”
Heat went up my face to the tips of my ears.
“You’re an idiot,” Drakken said.
“I’m a man of ideas.”
“You’re a man who’s about to get thrown off a mountain.”
“By who? I’m going to lose my mind anyway.”
All four of them were barely holding it together with me sitting apart from them, buttoned to the chin.
Then the memory came up on its own, uninvited and in full color. Nikolai’s mouth on my cunt, licking me until I couldn’t hold a thought in my head. Aelindor’s hands pinning my hips down while he fucked into me, over and over. Caspian’s breath on my cheek.
My lips parted. I pressed my thighs together hard, and it didn’t help. It made it worse.
Four sets of nostrils flared. Shifter, vampire, dragon, Fae. Not one of them missed it. I was wet through on a mountaintop in front of all four of them, and every one of them could smell exactly that.
Shit.
No one moved. Four men who could have crossed that blanket in under a second, and every one of them sat dead still and let it go through him, because the alternative was burning.
Caspian’s knuckles went white. Nikolai kept his fangs from coming out. A thin trail of smoke curled out of Drakken’s nostrils.
Aelindor closed his eyes for a second, his breath ragged. “We should—”
The radio at his belt buzzed, and every one of us jumped.
It buzzed again. The Stormglass core flared with each pulse. The emergency cadence, over and over.
Aelindor keyed it.
“Report.”
Frost’s voice came through, and Frost’s voice was never anything but level.
“Your Highness. Missy is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Drakken got there before Aelindor could draw breath.
“We believe she’s been taken. We’re searching every quarter of the base. Her guard and Josette were found stabbed, both in critical condition.” A half-second pause, the length of a blade going in. “And Desta is missing.”
A roar pounded inside my skull.