9 Imogen
Imogen
The oil in the lamp was running low, but I’d turned it up regardless.
I wanted to see every dart of Halla’s eyes. Her every tell and twitch would point me toward the truth, but in the short time we’d been huddled together in the small cabin, she’d not said a word.
“I’ll ask you again,” I said, forcing as gentle a voice as I could.
Despite how I’d tried to quiet it, I could not unhear the conversation she’d just had with Theodore.
Like an echo in a cave, the words rolled over themselves again and again until they became an overwhelming ache in my chest. “Did you know that your mother took my friend?”
She only stared at me for a long moment, her face ashen even in the warm light of the lantern. Finally, after the ship dipped and swayed over a violent patch of sea, she spoke in a weary voice. “I thought you might be here.”
“Why would you think that?”
Halla pressed a hand to her mouth, looking pained. I’d not expected to feel so… disarmed by her. The intensity of her sickness, the mass of scars on her body, the serene way in which she held herself despite everything, had me off-kilter.
She cleared her throat. “The sea went still… earlier.” She sat upon the narrow cot of my purloined cabin with her back straight and her white, fur-lined cloak wrapped around her. The ship dipped steeply again, and she groaned. “I’ll need a chamber pot.”
I moved carefully, not wanting to reveal my pain, and slid the chamber pot from beneath the cot. She reached for it, but I barred her from taking it with my leg. “Answer my question.”
Her eyes flared with antipathy. “No,” she blurted. “I did not know what my mother did.”
I would have called her a liar had I not caught the barest hint of resentment in her tone. I pulled my leg back and she dove for the pot, heaving it up into her lap and retching.
“Then tell me about your scars. About the spells you’ve performed.”
Her face pinched with distaste. “I have never performed a spell.”
“Every time you gave your blood and spoke Eusia’s prayer, you performed a spell, Halla.
” My temper was shortening, my pain building.
I remembered her praying to Eusia, ankle-deep in the sea, the day I’d taken the severing draught.
“That is why you grew ill that day you asked for a blessing on the beach.”
Halla’s blue eyes locked with mine. Feverish hunger flashed through them before she opened her mouth, then snapped it closed again.
“What? Speak.”
She tipped up her chin. “I’d like to be returned to my husband now.”
I’d once thought her to be nothing more than a lump of clay shaped and directed by her mother’s hand, but she was more than capable of inflicting her own hurt when she chose to. The way she’d said my husband was meant to sting me and it had.
But I had become well acquainted with pain by now. I could handle what she dealt.
The ship dipped and moaned. “If you will not tell of your scars,” I said, sternly, over the creaking wood, “then I will tell you of mine.” I held my open palm between us, steadily, so she could see.
I did not want to give her commiseration or a gentle coaxing.
I wanted to see her afraid. Wanted to lock her in this cabin and leave.
But seeing those scars carved into her body—a lifetime’s worth of them—had sent a sort of sympathetic desperation through me that I could not banish.
She was the only other person who knew the awful, heady taste of spell work.
She was the only person who could help me.
And despite everything, I was surprised to find I did not want to force her to it.
I fixed my eyes on the twist of gnarled skin on my palm. “The first offerings I remember were not performed by me. King Nemea, my… my father—”
Halla gave a soft gasp.
“He would cut my palm for me. I remember the cuts being deep, and he would squeeze the blood from them into a very small bowl. He would always make the cut in the same spot, which made it heal poorly. All hard.” I drew a finger over the ropy flesh.
“It still aches sometimes. In the mountains, I never felt the full force of a spell’s effects.
Just a gentle illness, fatigue, a rough throat.
And then when I was older, I grew bold and desperate enough to ask if I’d be permitted to make my own cuts.
I made them shallower, and in a different place each time, so they could heal.
But even that didn’t prevent them from leaving a mark. ”
With an unreadable look upon her face, Halla’s gaze darted between my hand and my eyes.
She said nothing. She did not move. The nepenthe’s effects were nearly gone, and what crept through me now was a thumping anger, a stifling frustration.
Inexplicably, I wanted to hear Halla say It was the same for me too if only so I could feel a moment of furious solidarity.
My loneliness was a traitor, prodding my control, when I heard a muffled voice yell out over the main deck above us. Boot fall and sailors’ calls preceded a low, deep creak. I held my breath, hoping… The ship began to tilt as it turned.
West. We were heading west.
Lachlan had gotten them to reroute the ship. As the vessel straightened out on its new course, my crumbling sense of control began to grow sturdy. We were on our way to Agatha.
Halla’s gaze darted across the ceiling. “They’ve changed course,” she said with trepidation. “Why?”
“Because your mother took Agatha to Anthemoessa—to Eusia.” A new rush of fury and fear filled me. “And when I’ve seen that Agatha is safe, I’ll relish watching Eusia die.”
She’d been so impressively stoic, but for the briefest moment, she slipped.
The jerk she gave, the way her eyes went wide and her mouth broke open, gave the impression that a long, thin dagger had been driven through her gut.
The shock of what I’d said, the odd pain, was clear on her face.
She tried to master herself, but when she reached up to smooth her hair with her hand, it shook.
“Do you have no objections to our altered course?” I asked.
Her eyes had gone cool once more, but she locked them with mine. “No,” she said. “I have no objections.”
“Did you know that your mother—”
“This is a waste of your time and mine.” Anger flared her eyes and flushed her cheeks.
“My mother tells me nothing. All I know about her is that she aims to secure her power. She is motivated by that and that alone.” She pulled mindlessly at a loose stitch in the blanket she sat upon, her long fingers twisting the thread.
“She would only take your friend if it served her in some way.” When she met my gaze, her countenance turned from frantic, albeit tired, to steady.
“Or perhaps my mother is using her to lure you into a trap.”
I’d had that thought myself and still my stomach swooped.
I cataloged what threats I could make, what pain I could inflict, but I did nothing because I found that I believed her.
Halla’s surprise at learning that Eusia was on Anthemoessa was genuine.
She hadn’t known. If her mother had never revealed where their own beloved saint resided, then why would she have revealed her schemes?
After a long moment, Halla finally spoke again, her voice soft and sweet once more. “You look ill.”
I leaned against the chair back and regarded her. “I am. Does that please you?”
She shook her head. Confused interest lit her eyes, and an air of disbelief, or perhaps awe, hung around her. “It surprises me.”
“Why?”
“You are the daughter of a Great Goddess.” Resentment ran through the words. “Infallible. Untouchable.”
“Great Gods can be injured and ill,” I ground out. “They are simply long-lived.”
“Simply long-lived.” She gave an angry titter. “You take it for granted. Your power. Gods and Mages and saints,” she said with disdainful longing. “So much tension between you all, yet to me—a pawn, a person with nothing—you are all the same. Mighty and dangerous.”
A person with nothing. I’d spent my entire life feeling precisely as Halla did. Powerless, inconsequential, an instrument to be played. Yet I was a Goddess, and now a queen, and in many ways, I still felt as she did.
A soft knock sounded at the door. I unlatched it and Lachlan rushed in. “We should reach Anthemoessa in a couple days’ time.” He pointed to Halla with relief. “Still alive. Good.”
Halla sat straighter. “Has the king demanded my return?”
“No,” Lachlan said. “But he’s been assured that you will be treated well and since I am a man of my word, you get to sleep on the cot.”
Halla’s scowl changed her whole face. “Do you mean we will all be sleeping in here together? There is no way.” She rose. “Return me to my cabin this instant.”
Lachlan’s face remained amusingly blank. “No. I believe Imogen has further use for you.”
Halla plopped back down on the cot like a child who’d been denied a treat as Lachlan pulled me by the arm to the farthest corner of the cabin—which wasn’t far at all.
The tight space was already warming with the heat of our bodies, the air going heavy and hot.
No doubt Halla would spend the whole night being sick in the chamber pot.
I didn’t want to share the space with her any more than she wanted to share it with me, but I needed to keep her close.
She was my leverage. She was my key to Eusia’s demise.
The lantern gave a flicker, dimmed. Lachlan leaned in close to whisper. “Theo ordered the captain to reroute the ship, but I worry about the council’s opinion over it.”
“It’s no surprise that they’d be unhappy.”
“Unhappy is manageable,” he said. “I expected unhappy. This is worse. Everything that’s happened…
with you and the Serafi attack… has made Eftan question Theo’s ability to rule and I think he’s finally gone too far…
there was a look in his eye.” Lachlan shook his head.
“He’s been trying to get the council to invoke a law that would let him essentially rule in Theo’s stead. ”
My stomach sank low. Like a taunt, I remembered the Mage Seer’s prophecy. You will bring chaos, ruin, death. And here I was, despite my determination to keep far from him, still compromising Theodore’s crown.
I leaned against the rough wood of the cabin wall. Now that the nepenthe had dwindled, the ache that standing caused me was a deep, brutal current. “They’re all fools to question his care for the realm.”
Lachlan nodded, thoughtful. “Eftan wanted proof. They know Eusia is on Anthemoessa, but they don’t know how we’ll access the island, or how we would defeat her. Revealing to them that you will allow us to accomplish those things might not be wise either—just yet.”
Nerves burned my stomach. “Did you… Does Theodore know? That I’m here.”
Lachlan gave me a brief nod, then pinched his mouth shut, like he would say nothing more on the matter.
I glanced over my shoulder at Halla, who’d laid herself across the cot and pulled the pathetic blanket up to her chin. The lantern wick fought for its dying life, shooting little bursts of light over her supine body.
“They want proof?” The gears in my mind began to whir.
“Proof that the empress is where we say she is, that we can get onto Anthemoessa’s main island when we get there.” Lachlan rubbed at his drooping eyes. “Which is, of course, something we cannot give them.”
A trill of anticipation filled my belly. My heartbeat kicked up in my chest. “Actually,” I said, not bothering to keep my voice between the two of us, “I think we can.”