Chapter 9
The Scouting Calm Before the Strike
While the goblin with the shock-white hair stared slack-faced at me, as if I were an apparition likely to vanish without warning, Cosette argued with the judges.
She puffed out her chest and claimed that Alonso had no authority over this tribunal.
According to the vicious parvnit, the magistrate should sentence me to death right there and then, and order my sentence carried out immediately to boot.
Execution, she insisted, because of course she did.
If Death weren’t so openly prejudiced against small, squeaky creatures, I would have guessed Cosette was working for him, striving to meet a quota through the unfriendly end of a guillotine.
Our audience bubbled with excitement. Zaragans had an instinct for drama.
As if they heard a silent call to bear witness, the crowd multiplied, nearly filling the small courtyard and spreading onto another raised platform with a gallows and guillotine, its blade glinting beneath smears of old blood.
I ignored their attention and the curiosity of the prisoners at my sides, and kept my eyes on the goblin’s. I’d never seen this particular goblin before. Yet I felt as if I could drown in the big, dark, pupil-less eyes that reminded me so much of my servant Marina’s.
If she were here, she wouldn’t hesitate to give Cosette a smackdown. It wouldn’t matter that violence from a goblin was forbidden under the strictest terms.
For me and only me, Marina always broke the rules. Even Teo was a far second.
The fae-judge banged her gavel. Cosette rose her voice to be heard over the crisp clanging as of a bell.
Perilous emotion swelled then crashed inside me, over and over like the waves of the ocean I’d so barely survived.
Too much had happened in a shockingly short amount of time. Too much was drastically different from what it should be. The stakes were too high, Teo too far away, if he lived at all.
Since my shattering heart had first jerked me back, the answers I so desperately needed were almost, almost within reach. Alonso would certainly know where Teo was. If he told me Teo was alive despite our broken connection to each other, I’d believe him.
It would be true.
But Alonso was no drake and had never been one. His path wasn’t to rise through the rungs of the aristos but to be born already a prince heir of the D’Arco dynasty.
There was no one in the entire Opalese World with greater authority than Alonso. Even his queen, Rafaela, ultimately had to submit to him since it was his blood and not hers that sang the melody attuned to this land.
And yet, while Cosette argued, and the goblin stared, and the judges and crowd and other prisoners darted looks my way, none of them suggested that the goblin had gotten his title wrong. No one explained how Alonso might be a drake when he’d been destined to be a king.
When the goblin’s eyes welled, tears pricked my own. Shocked to discover myself about to cry in front of an audience, I sucked in fortitude and blinked savagely.
Rafaela might be second in rank to her husband, but her unyielding expectations and unforgiving ruthlessness knew no equal. If she heard I’d been crying, she’d march me up the steps to the guillotine herself and tuck my head close to the catching pail.
Weakness was a mortal sin.
Excuses were more weakness.
After an irritating amount of gavel clanging and calls to order, a sullen Cosette led me to the palace with an entourage comprised of half a dozen guards—all careful to keep their weapons beyond my reach—and the goblin with the emotional eyes.
My hands were cuffed behind my back and bound with shadole faithum, and my power was still dampened.
I was a splinter of my usual self.
No blood power.
No Teo.
Weakened by my captivity.
Even so, the white-haired goblin kept casting expectant looks at me, as if he knew I was no mere murderess, as if I were going to break myself free at any moment. At one point, he arched a bare brow at me that seemed to demand, Well?
“Do I know you?” I half-mouthed, half-whispered over the sure-footed steps of the soldiers climbing the cobbled path to the palace and the annoying buzz of Cosette’s wings.
“Shut up,” snapped the guard closest me, a brawny human who was too thickly muscled to be as agile as I was.
Behind him, the goblin smiled, and recognition sparked in that gesture. Where did I know him from?
“You seem famil—”
The guard backhanded me on the mouth.
My head spun, my lip split, and I tasted blood.
The goblin’s smile slid off. His dragon feet pattered rapidly as he hurried to put distance between himself and the backhander.
The goblin called over his shoulder to him, “You’re going to live to regret that.” Then, under his breath so that no human would hear, he muttered, “For however long you live.”
Indignation vibrated through my veins in imitation of my blood power. “He’s right.” My fury tingled through the balls of my feet as they touched on the cobbles. Nearly at the entrance now.
“You wouldn’t have done that if you knew who I am.”
“I wouldn’ta done that if you kept your mouth shut. Need me to hit you again?”
I smiled like I was brimming inside with the richest nectar. “No, the once was plenty.” I batted my lashes a few times while my grin spread.
“Oh, fiery flames. Here we go,” mumbled the goblin, holding a satchel he wore across his chest tight to his side in case he made a run for it.
“What’s your name, soldier?” I asked sweetly.
The guard’s eyes darted from my face to my boobs to my lips. I’d gone too sweet.
“Name’s Arno.”
I beamed. “Great. Arno. I’ll be catching you later, Arno.”
He sucked on his lower lip with a sibilant hiss. “I’ll be looking forward to it.”
“Shouldn’t be,” breathed the goblin. I didn’t think even the ever-observant Cosette heard.
I chuckled.
Then my smile fell.
Zaraga’s royal palace hugged the cliffside, with nothing between it and the ocean but a sheer drop capable of breaking even a s?nglure upon jagged rocks.
We rounded the palace, and with sight as sharp as a feethle’s, I forgot all about curious goblins and idiotic brutes, and stared.
The palace was built of stone quarried from the opposite side of this very cliff.
It first hunched atop the crest and then rose, as if caught midway through diving into the crashing water below.
It looked largely the same as when I’d last seen it: dark stone, narrow windows, turrets high up.
That was something. After all the unnerving variances I’d been noticing, it was a whole lot, actually.
But then Arno guided me with a hand—which he wouldn’t be keeping for much longer—to the small of my back straight up to the main entrance of the palace.
Matching crests adorned the bronze-wrapped wood of the double doors that stood three floors in height. The familiar crown with a pair of broadswords crossed beneath it had been a symbol of the D’Arco dynasty since Alonso’s ancestors first claimed this land.
To either side of each D’Arco crest, another bracketed it. Two dragons standing back-to-back, spewing flame, with a single crown hovering above their heads. The crests of the Rubors. The ruling dynasty of Domdurro, carved in bas relief, their edges were worn soft.
The first pair of guards didn’t slow before banging through the doors. The goblin gasped, running to block their progress. He held out knobby arms to both sides. “Halt!”
The guards hesitated but obeyed, glancing back at Cosette.
“Proceed,” she said with a flourishing hand wave, as if she were the hostess here.
“You shall not,” the goblin thundered.
Dragon-footed pitter-patter began dashing toward us from the halls leading off from both sides of the grand foyer.
“This is the House of D’Arco. You shall show appropriate respect or leave.”
The pitter-patter sped up, and also pounded down an upstairs hallway. Lumoons floated downward from where they’d bobbed along the arched ceiling.
Cosette zipped to the front, buzzing in front of his face.
“This fortress is the seat of a territory belonging to the empire. I am a soldier of the empire. An investigatory soldier. I am under the authority of the emperor here, as are you. And as I am an officer of the empire, your obedience is to me. Your duty is to me.”
“It would behoove you to reconsider before you speak,” slithered a voice from around a corner that never failed to chill my blood by several degrees. “Or you may find yourself quickly relieved of your wagging tongue.”
Rafaela Eudova, who was mother queen consort of Zaraga last time I saw her, and who appeared to be every bit the queen still, sauntered onto the second story landing with a goblin, face flushed blood-green, at her heels.
I’d heard the goblin’s approach but not hers, and my hearing was as sharp as my eyesight.
She padded silently down one spiraling staircase like a large jungle sneakle, all purposeful, graceful movements, all rippling raw power.
The scouting calm before the strike.
My mother was as captivating and commanding as ever.
Her astute eyes roved quickly over the parvnit, guards, and goblin before landing on me.
The woman who never faltered—whom I’d not once seen flustered or even surprised—stumbled sideways to clutch the railing, her other hand pressed to her chest. Her eyes …
those eyes that always seemed to reveal my every vulnerability … bore into mine.