32 Theodore
Theodore
The ballroom was overfull with guests when I finally reached it.
The music and chatter were deafening, dissonant. I stopped just upon the threshold to look over my shoulder. Across the center hall, Imogen’s guards, and my lone armored one, still stood at the entrance to the altar’s chamber.
“Oh, there you are.” Halla’s usually soft voice was bolder now that she was off the ship and in her own home.
She took my arm firmly and tugged me into the ballroom. The smell of wine clung to her, mingling with the densely sweet perfume she usually wore. I tried to breathe the scent back out, but it was as pervasive as the noise, as stifling as the crowd.
She slid her chilled hand into mine and led me around the edge of the room with as wide a smile upon her face as I’d ever seen her wear.
It was distinct and victorious, like a battle sword raised after striking a winning blow.
At the head table, she waited for me to pull out her chair before she sat.
“Where were you?” She smiled above her goblet, eyes sparkling as they darted over the room, but there was an accusation in her question.
I took a slow sip from my own goblet before answering. “At Eusia’s altar.”
Her lips twitched, but she managed to keep her smile wide. “Ahh. I thought you might have disappeared with—”
“Is that where you would make your offerings?”
She cut me a fast glare. “I have no desire to talk about all that. Not tonight.”
I turned my goblet slowly, idly. I smiled easily at a handful of guests as they came to the table to bow and offer their congratulations. “I will leave this ridiculous charade of a feast right now if you do not answer my questions.”
Her smile grew wider, giving her an almost deranged air.
“Yes,” she hissed through her teeth. She spoke quickly, as if her control had finally snapped.
“That is where I gave my offerings. Mother does not let me near the sanctum, and she wouldn’t take me to Anthemoessa, so I make my prayers the way everyone else does. ”
She took a deep gulp of wine, and a bead dribbled from the corner of her painted lips, looking uncannily like dark blood.
I sat in the wake of the bitterness she’d just revealed.
I knew her plans, I suspected that her relationship with the empress was irreparably damaged, but the depth of hurt in her words, the mad longing that suffused them, sent worry hurtling through me.
Desperation made the most frightening monsters.
I let the moment settle, watching the dancing, tasting the food, before I finally asked, “Does that mean, then, that Eusia’s sanctum is not near her altar?”
Halla’s jolt was infinitesimal, a small stutter in the rise of her goblet as she brought it to her lips. Without answering, she took a small sip. Before she was able to set it back on the table, I rose to stand. “Answer, or I go.”
She reached out with a tight smile and took my hand.
Her touch was not soft. Not sensual, or coaxing.
It was strained the way I’d imagine the grip of a woman clinging to the edge of cliff would be.
Her wide eyes bored into mine. “I tell you in all honesty…” She pulled in a deep, shaking breath.
“I have never been in the sanctum—where she used to reside while in Obelia and where she would reside now. I have never known where it was. I have spent my life trying to find it.”
I lowered myself to my chair and leaned back with resignation. I believed her.
A loud cry echoed from somewhere near the ballroom doors and I sat up quickly, but Halla’s former glee had returned at the sound. She sat forward and clasped her hands to her chest.
“What is it?”
She craned in her seat, trying better to see. “The bride robbing.”
“The what?”
Anticipation filled her to the brim. “Did they not tell you? It’s an Obelian custom. The ladies-in-waiting steal away the bride, and the bridegroom must search the palace to get her back.”
I huffed, exasperated. “And if he doesn’t want her back?” I asked. “What then?”
The music and laughter only seemed to swell. Every face in the glittering place was alight with mirth. Her own smile remained, but her voice darkened when she leaned toward me and said, “All-out war.”
She rose like a cloud, light and wafting, and whisked herself around the table, into the crush of partygoers.
I drank deeply from my goblet, scanning the room for the gold shine of Imogen’s gown, even knowing I wouldn’t find her.
Markis, who sat to my left, watched Halla keenly as the crowd enfolded her. He spoke half to himself. “I cannot figure her out.”
“How do you mean?”
He speared a piece of meat with his knife and pulled it off with his teeth. “Your wife is cagey.” He stroked his beard, shoulder half shrugging. “The Siren is clear as day. I know her aim.”
“You’d be wise to not think of—or touch—the Siren ever again. And I think Halla’s aim is rather obvious.” My patience was already dust. “She wants favor.”
Markis dipped his chin and considered this with raised brows. A new song swelled and he leaned closer to be heard. “Yes, Your Majesty, but whose? Yours? Her mother’s? Gods, half the time I expect it’s Queen Imogen’s favor that she wants.”
A piercing scream rose up from the middle of the ballroom. Peals of delight followed, and the crowd shifted as another scream came. I saw the flash of a white skirt, a wisp of pale hair. Then the entire ballroom broke into a cheer.
Markis’s question had set me on edge, and the screams nearly pushed me over.
I’d always thought Halla desperate for Nivala’s favor.
I’d thought she’d been eager to leave home and marry and have children with a man she didn’t know or love because it would appease her mother.
Because it would fix whatever had fractured between them.
She’d capitulated to me as well, quickly, when I’d stripped her of every promise I’d originally made.
Imogen had told me of the bargain that Nivala had struck with Eusia, and I’d thought that Nivala’s whole aim was to get Halla to pay her debt.
To give Eusia the divine child that Nivala was meant to.
I’d thought the empress was the mastermind, the one who would stop at nothing, who was determined to use Halla—and everyone around her—but a well of sickness opened in me at a new thought: What if Halla had her own goals?
What if she was striving for something else altogether? Something we hadn’t accounted for.
I pushed back my chair with a loud scrape, just as calls for the bridegroom began ringing through the notes of the pacy music. I was not fit for magic, I did not have white-eyed visions, but the way my skin pricked, the way my spine went terribly cold, was most certainly an ill omen.
I glowered down at Markis. “Has Lachlan arrived?”
He sat up quickly, ran a hand down the front of his brown waistcoat. “I saw him and his wife not long ago. In the main hall.”
A throng of partygoers was coming toward me, hands waving, urging me to start the hunt for the bride.
“Find him.” I wavered suddenly, uncertain of Markis’s trustworthiness.
“Tell him and Agatha to come to me, and if you don’t, you’ll be joining Eftan in the dungeon.
” I started around the table and out into the crush.
“And if you see Imogen, tell me at once.”
The beating, staccato music had turned grating, as had the huddle of drunk revelers who followed me out of the ballroom and into the main hall.
To appease them, I limply searched an antechamber near the stairs.
I ducked my head quickly into a neighboring room.
But I fought my way through the wall of people with determination until I could make out the doors to the altar room where I’d left Imogen.
Our guards still stood before it. Which meant that Imogen had yet to come out.
The sudden urge to see her, to know that she was all right, was overwhelming.
I shoved the man before me with such force that he nearly fell. “Out of my way.” A fresh wave of laughter and cheers came from behind me, but my ribs felt like fracture. I stormed toward the altar room. “Where is she?”
All of the guards looked dumbfounded. “She’s within, Your Majesty.”
I shouldered my way inside. The light of the candles on the far end of the room flickered. I stopped in the aisle, eyes locked on a blood-strewn statue of Eusia. The chamber was empty.
My knees threatened to give. I gripped the bench at my side.
“Theo?” Lachlan said.
I spun. Agatha stood beside him, her face as gray as the gown she wore.
Her mouth gaped as she stared at the bloodied altar.
Partygoers filed into the hall beyond the open doors, but I could only take them in in pieces, as if the whole world had shattered into sharp, blinding shards.
The glint of a jewel, the flash of white teeth.
“She’s in a gold gown,” I managed to say, unsure why I was describing her. “Her hair is down.”
Agatha locked eyes with me. “She’s gone?”
I nodded. “Yes.” Reflexively, Lachlan pulled his sword. “The empress must have taken her—”
Agatha reached for Lachlan, bracing herself on his arm. “The empress isn’t here. I caught a glimpse of her through the door of her throne room in the keep as we were leaving. A servant was tending to her. She was pacing in front of her throne.”
“She could have sent anyone.” I touched the dagger at my hip. “Take a carriage back. I’ll set my guards searching here for her first, and then I’ll meet you.”
“But what if she’s here?” Lachlan asked. “What if Eusia is down here and the empress is keeping her hands clean? She might have given the task to someone—”
“No,” I said, adamant. “The empress never let her own daughter into Eusia’s sanctum. She’s hoarded Eusia for all these years. She will be the one to gift Imogen to Eusia.” The short moment they took to let that absorb felt like a lifetime. “Go.”