32 Theodore #2
We started toward the laughter and chatter and buzzing music beyond the doors.
Agatha and Lachlan disappeared into the crowd almost instantly, and as I hurriedly spoke to my guards, the guests cheered and hollered and began herding me back out into the center hall.
My guards had gotten their directions though, and ducked into the sea of people with purpose, splitting up and sweeping through halls and adjoining rooms.
A new waltz spilled from the ballroom, beaconing half the people surrounding me to rush toward its doors for a dance, and that was when I saw Markis, cutting quickly toward me through the middle of the crowd, a curiously intense look in his pale green eyes.
I gripped his shoulder. “What is it? You found her?”
He kept his voice low. “I haven’t seen Queen Imogen, but I did spot your wife sneaking out a back hall. A servant told me that it leads to a small sculpture garden. Beyond that are the stables.”
The stables. That cold prickling sensation fell down my spine again. “Show me.”
Markis led me as quickly as the dense crowd would allow.
Through the center hall, past the quickly unraveling partiers in the ballroom.
Past one ostentatious room after the next, until the hall came to a dramatic end at a towering door, laden in hammered gold.
Engraved in its middle was the shape of a diamond.
Two elegantly wrought hands tugged its sides open. I knew the emblem’s meaning instantly.
Eusia’s would-be death wound, held wide by her own hands for all her devotees to see.
I pulled my dagger and pushed the door open, trudged and met a wall of icy air and a garden of white pillars.
The dozen statues here had become towering piles of snow, but the night was clear and bright, and pressed into the thick layer at my feet was a path of small footprints leading to the opening in the high garden wall.
I glanced back at Markis. “Stay and keep looking for Imogen.”
He nodded eagerly, his face tight with a look too close to guilt for my liking. “I’ll look for Aleka too.” He gulped. “I’ve not seen her since we arrived.”
I nodded, as the blunt pain of betrayal knocked my ribs. The trust I’d had in my council had been a sham from the first. An impostor dressed in familiar trappings. But I raced into the biting night, leaving Markis looking contrite in that palace doorway.
As I curved around and down an ice-slick slope, toward the stable doors, I thought I caught a glimpse of Halla’s glowing hair snapping in the wind.
But I couldn’t spot the white skirt of her wedding gown, nor the glint of its jewels.
The stables sat alone in the clearing. They were hulking and unrefined, made of the same sooty stone as the palace.
The heavy wood door sat wide open, and I stopped hard just within. A smattering of grooms and stable boys tended to guests’ horses.
“Where did she go?” I barked to one of the boys, who held a bucket up to a gelding’s muzzle.
His pale eyes were like saucers that darted from the dagger in my fist, back up to my face, then to my crown. “Who, Your Majesty?”
My breaths plumed white steam. I started down the straw-strewn aisle, not waiting for the boy to capitulate and give his princess up to a foreign brute. “Halla,” I yelled.
The only reply was whickering and crunching straw. I was seized by a singular, fury-driven sentience. Every ripple and pull of the air in the stable felt like a finger dragged across my skin. I stalked to the second-to-last stall on the left as if drawn there.
She was pressed against the stable wall, her face pinched and white. A dark fur cloak hung over her shoulders, but when I saw the red sash down the middle of her ritual robe beneath, I felt the blood leave my body as violently as if I’d been gutted myself.
I pressed the dagger to her throat, hard enough to draw blood. “Take me to her now.”
Halla didn’t flinch from the prick of the blade tip. She held my eyes with such unnerving steadiness that it felt like a threat. She swallowed and finally said, “You’re a selfish bastard, Your Majesty.” She said it with relish, like she’d wanted to say those words to me for a long time.
They didn’t sting, “That’s right. I am.” I gave the blade a jolt and Halla’s eyes squeezed shut. “Where is she?”
“In the mountains,” she said, voice shaking. “With Aleka.”
“With—” My disbelief had me pressing the blade in harder than I’d meant to.
Halla cried out as a bead of blood ran down her neck. “I swear on Eusia. On my life.” She lifted her hands. “Aleka planned everything. She told me to go to the castle keep—she’s taken pity on me. She said she would finally take me to Eusia.”
Aleka. Her name rocked through me so forcefully I had to fight to keep the blade I held firm. Had to bite down on the impulse to assault Halla with questions, because in the end, if I lost Imogen, the answers would not truly matter.
She must have seen the way my fear was solidifying into rage, because her entire body began to tremble. “Please,” she whispered. “We’ll go together. To the mountains—to the keep. There’s a back road that will get us there quickly.”
My utter lack of trust in Halla for sense made me hesitant to lower my blade, but the longer I stood here, the nearer I came to losing Imogen. “Get me a horse,” I commanded.
Halla nodded. “The next stall. A good mare.”
Finally, I brought down my dagger. The moment I did Halla ducked quickly and raced to mount the mare herself.
“Fuck.” I rushed to the stall across, throwing myself atop a furious, bare-backed gelding, and watched as Halla raced from the stable, snowy hair blowing behind her as she charged out into the black night.