Chapter 1 #2
He stayed a step ahead of me. He knew I could slip into his lumis as well.
Copied my wall. But he’d yet to penetrate mine.
He’d yet to see the crenellated puzzle of my lumis, built like merlons on a tower.
Hadn’t seen the green blocks of my sister, given to me so I might live while she perished.
Hadn’t beheld the shadowy stains across all of it, from when I had died, only to be pulled back to the living by her.
I supposed if Renn was gods-touched, I was death-touched. What a pair we made.
Most critically, King Nicosia had yet to witness the merlon of my heart half-shaped with translucent blocks, something like frosted glass.
Pieces of magic I’d created, tied off, and used to make myself whole.
Pieces I had to feed magic into on a regular basis, for they faded a little every day.
But the addition of those new pieces of myself was not the only change my lumis had undergone: Fine filaments of gold, the same gold that had burned so brilliantly in Renn’s own lumis, threaded through my heart merlon like vines of ivy—slender, lovely, and damning, should King Nicosia ever lay eyes on them.
My arm still ached from the blow I never received.
My pulse sped from something, a battle, perhaps, that I didn’t fight.
For a week, I’d felt things in my heart and my body that I did not and could not experience.
They could only be from him: the king who possessed the other half of my heart, literally and figuratively.
I feared what that meant for us. But for now, I still had a chance. We still had a chance.
“Why?” I asked, looking into King Nicosia’s eyes and finding little there. “Why are you doing this? Why attack Cansere? What do you want?”
Our countries had been peaceable for centuries. Dyadic continents separated only by a narrow strait. So similar, yet so very different. No one had expected the unprovoked attack on Rove.
The capital had fallen in a single night.
The corner of King Nicosia’s mouth ticked upward. “Perhaps, my dear Nym, if you share with me, I’ll share with you.”
Lie. I knew it for a lie. Everything he said was lies.
The manner in which the Sestan king prodded at me, pleaded, threatened .
. . the man seemed obsessed with Cansere’s king.
Most wouldn’t even recognize Renn Reshua Noblewight because he’d spent most of his life as an invalid indoors, chained to a bed in much the same way I was chained to this gods-forsaken mastiff.
So you’re the one who undid all my hard work, King Nicosia had said to me behind the thicket in Speth, my dress damp with snow.
I had theories, but they seemed so far-fetched, so impossible . . .
I swallowed my retorts, my questions, my curses. I refused to speak. I had a habit of letting my tongue get me in trouble, and I could not risk that here. Not with Renn in the balance. Even Ursa remained silent.
King Nicosia gave me a tight-lipped smile and stood. “Your choices, Nym. All consequences come from your choices.” He brushed off his slacks. “I’ll feed you when you’re willing to trade for it.”
And he left me alone in the bottom of his ship.
King Nicosia proved a man of his word.
I did not receive even water for the rest of the day, nor the next, though that night Rolys, god of the skies, opened the sky to rain and sleet, much of which fell through the grated door and into the hold.
The mastiff growled at me when I pulled on our soulbinding, which did not allow me to get more than six feet from it, to lap water off the floor, but the beast did not attack me. Well trained, that one.
I’d rather starve in this hold than spend another minute with Adoel Nicosia, so I supposed it worked out for the better.
The next day I began to feel delirious with thirst, and my stomach had cramped into a hard lead ball within me.
I slept a lot, hiding away from the ache of physical need, though upon one waking—somewhere midmorning, I presumed—I felt a distant fullness in my stomach.
I’d ingested nothing—I was starving. I’d lost weight and continued to do so, my ribs more defined when I felt them through my dress.
And yet for a few hours, I felt a distant fullness that was not my own, which only lent to my building theory about my split heart.
I never told Renn I loved him. Three times he’d confessed to me, and I’d failed to reciprocate.
What if I never got the chance?
I spent much of my time—how much, I wasn’t sure—in a state of half-consciousness, lost in the realm between wakefulness and sleep, often dipping into the latter.
When I woke again, evening light poured through the open hatch.
I jolted to alertness, surrounded by water, thinking at first that I’d been thrown overboard or that I was hallucinating.
But there were puddles of water all around me.
I pressed my palms to the ship’s wooden floor and drank, only to spit it out again. Seawater.
“Don’t let him kill you,” Ursa pleaded silently, hidden behind the basalt wall of my lumis. “It isn’t worth it.”
Isn’t it? I wondered, but Ursa could not read my thoughts, even if I wanted her to.
I felt Renn, still: guilt that belonged neither to me nor Ursa winding up through me like poisoned thorns—
I finally recognized the hold and noticed King Nicosia standing over me, looking tired, the way a parent looks tired at the end of a long day in a house full of children.
He had one hand propped on his hip. One of his soldiers came forward with a waterskin and handed it to me.
I snatched it from him before he could change his mind, drinking greedily, water running down my chin and joining my half-soaked dress.
My stomach cramped, forcing me to pause, but I held on to that bladder with both hands, nails digging in, protecting it like a mangy cur.
“I’m happy to feed you, as well. The best of foods,” King Nicosia offered. “I realize I’ve been unfair to you. Here I want your cooperation, your trust, and I treat you like an animal.” He gestured weakly to the mastiff. “Perhaps we could talk over dinner.”
I said nothing, but the king retreated, snapping his fingers as he did, and the mastiff took off after him.
My leash stretched to its limits within a few steps, forcing me to rise and follow.
I stumbled on my feet, clutching the waterskin, and blearily climbed up the slanted ladder after the dog.
The evening light seemed overbright to my eyes, and I winced, shielding them as I peered out to the ocean.
Was that land out in the distance? A glacier? I’d only heard of them, never seen—
Princess Eden.
I stumbled as I spied her near the port side, hands on the railing, wearing a scarlet dress cut in Sestan fashion, her cloak billowing in the wind, her long bronze hair tangling over it.
No ropes, no chains, but someone had fastened a heavy iron collar around her neck like she was an ox to be hitched.
If she tried to jump, that collar would sink her to the bottom of Salm’s restless sea.
Her pale face, sunburned, turned toward me. Eden’s eyes widened in recognition, lips parted, but that damn mastiff dragged me after its owner, who stepped inside one of the two ship’s cabins. I prayed the other one belonged to Princess Eden. At least it looked like she was eating.
The door slammed shut behind me, stealing my view of her and making me aware of my own shivering. The winter chill clung to my wet dress, and by the time Nicosia secured me in the cabin, my teeth were chattering.
Not all the shaking came from the cold.
“Sorry about that.” He tilted his head toward my clothes and moved to a small cupboard above his bed and pulled out a slim dress. Handed it to me. “We couldn’t get you to wake by normal means.”
So the water hadn’t come from sea waves, but from a bucket.
“Then perhaps you should have had a change of heart before dehydration nearly killed me,” I spat, my voice coarse, embracing my shield of anger.
I could heal away the edges of thirst, but no amount of magic could create water in my blood or food in my stomach.
He grinned. “So she does speak.”
I took the dress, eager to be warm. I hadn’t been warm in ten days. However, the king did not leave the room.
“Are you modest, then?” He sounded genuinely curious. “I know the Noblewights like to have their way with their servants. I wasn’t sure if you were among the . . . favored.”
I wanted to growl like the mastiff heeling at my ankles, but resisted. He was not entirely wrong. Prince Adrinn had . . . partaken . . . of many women at the castle, and I imagined elsewhere, too. And now his head, too, rotted on a spike in Rove.
Take care of my brother. His final words to me.
I felt the distance between Renn and I so acutely I shuddered.
The Sestan king turned around. “Quickly, if you would.”
I did not trust him. I trusted myself alone with very few men, especially if I were to undress.
But I would be miserable remaining in my soaked clothes, even if I dowsed to keep illness at bay, so turning my back, I stripped as swiftly as possible, glaring at the cabin door, daring a soldier or crewman to come through.
I even had to strip off my shift, making me feel doubly exposed.
The dress fit snugly, even with my weight loss, but the rich fabric had some give to it.
I could not fasten the dress myself, but I refused to ask for help, so I did as many buttons as I could, bending my wrists and shoulders at odd angles, hiding those I couldn’t reach with tangled hair that, unkempt as it was, reached a hand’s length past my waist.
I paused, staring down at the dress. Simple, modest, and white, its hem hit my big toe, too long for my frame. Canseren style. I knew this dress. It took me only a moment to place it.
Eden. Princess Eden had worn this before. It was cut to her measurements.