Chapter 4
The king didn’t deign to see me for a week. Only the two servants assigned to me came, tight-lipped, delivering my meals and taking away my trays. I wasn’t sure if King Nicosia’s absence was another tactic to get me to speak my secrets, or if his duties kept him away.
I wondered if it had anything to do with Renn.
I felt constant spikes of valor from him, of excitement and fear, as though he were in battle, followed by victory, or sadness, or even despair.
I tried to reassure him as best I could, but his emotions were so up and down, I was sure they drowned mine out.
One of the days, I spied soldiers moving off the palace grounds, my cheek pressed to the glass wall of the conservatory.
The barracks were to the west, not visible from this vantage, but I saw more men in Sestan military uniform than usual, riding on horses, making deliveries, preparing to march.
They were mobilizing, which meant something was happening in the south.
But was Cansere striking back, or was Sesta pushing in?
Had Renn mobilized his forces, or had he been in hiding this entire time, and I’d misread him completely?
All the while I built up the wall in my lumis, stronger and stronger, thicker and thicker.
My newest layer was a puzzle, each piece twisting and linked.
Ursa’s idea. When my efforts exhausted me, I either slept or thumbed through my stolen book of scripture, guided by Ursa, who knew the words far better than I did.
It was in Marks of Hem that something finally caught my interest: a lineage of the gods, which is repeated at the beginning of every new section. But in this one, it read The greatest Hem, to Salm, otso-Hem, to Rolys, otso-Salm, to Evat—
I sat up straighter and read it aloud to Ursa. “They used this term at the wedding. Otso. But it was otso-Zia.”
It seemed to be a prefix from an older form of our tongue. I read the paragraph again, as though I might understand something new from it, but the meaning was clear.
Otso. Son of, or descendant of. And the priest had called King Nicosia otso-Zia.
Son of Zia?
I thought of the stained-glass image of Nicosia beside the goddess and the gods-touched legend, and again of his likeness included with others in the all-gods shrine.
Air left my lungs. Surely this man didn’t count himself among the gods, did he?
It is not an empire of land I seek, he’d told me.
I felt Renn’s awareness down our link, as though he’d looked over my shoulder and asked what had troubled me.
All of it did. And with this, I no longer had any expectations of what would come next.
I was at the mercy of a madman.
At the end of that week, King Nicosia finally returned as the sun set, casting the sky in dusty shades of rose and mauve.
He came alone again, though I thought I glimpsed a guard in the narrow hallway leading to the door.
He didn’t carry a tray, or a puzzle, or anything else.
Just him, a black wardrobe, his violet cincture poking out above a belt with something swinging off its side.
He walked straight for me, his face holding a similar focus to mindreading, though he wasn’t in my mind, not yet. He had to touch me first to even try.
“I tried using magic, Nym.” The cool flatness in his voice had me on my feet before my mind understood the situation.
“I tried using magic, I tried being tough, and I tried to be kind. None of it seems to be working. So we’re going to try something else.
” He unsheathed a short truncheon from his belt and gripped it tightly in his bare hand, then smacked it against the open palm of his other.
Cold fear sluiced over me like a January rain. I stepped back from the tree. Memories of Ford rushed up all at once—his fist to the side of my head, his hand against my windpipe. I retreated another step, and another. “Please, don’t.” It came out barely more than a whisper.
King Nicosia reached the Egroran. He pressed his hand against it, and suddenly I couldn’t retreat any farther; he’d shortened my soulbinding, forbidding me from putting more than a few paces between myself and the tree.
“If it is so simple, you would not hide it.” He stepped away from the trunk and neared me, prowling like a wolf.
“No peasant is so loyal. So I’ll ask one more time, Nym. How did you heal the Canseren prince?”
I swallowed, but my spit stuck in my throat.
I tried to brace myself, because I knew this was going to hurt, and badly.
I was a healer, but I couldn’t prevent injury, only balm it.
Perhaps if I stayed focused, stayed inside my lumis, I could repair it as it cracked—as the pieces of me loosened and fell.
Maybe the fixing would distract me from the breaking.
My stomach clenched. Renn is going to feel it, too.
I couldn’t stop it. I wouldn’t stop it. If I told him, he’d sort out the connection. He’d hurt me to hurt him. Right now, he was only hurting me to get answers. If that didn’t work . . . maybe he’d move on to another plan. But I couldn’t tell him.
Knowing he wouldn’t allow me to put him off any longer, I tried to hide the quiver in my voice when I replied, “He’s a king, now.”
Adoel Nicosia launched at me. I dropped to the floor, knees to my chest, arms over my head, and leapt into my lumis, through the black wall and to the gold-threaded merlon, throwing myself around it to protect it.
“I’m here, Nym!” Ursa cried. “I’m here. Just focus on me. Focus on me!”
I wondered if Princess Eden could hear my screams the way I’d heard hers.
They did nothing to stall the Sestan king’s hand.
I woke in front of the window. Morning. Of the next day, surely.
I’d healed most of the damage, but there was so much, I’d passed out repairing myself.
I hissed as I sat up, bones aching from the hard floor, bruises thumping with my pulse.
I dowsed on myself and mended the rest of the breaks until the pain ebbed, but memory of it stuck in my mind. I shuddered, and then I cried.
Worry blossomed in my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to Renn, despite knowing he couldn’t hear me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“I can’t feel it, Nym. Please stop apologizing.”
Ursa misunderstood me, but I didn’t mind.
Ursa rarely spoke to me in the presence of others, but she had been there through all of it, crying alongside me, murmuring stories in my head.
They’d failed to distract me, but the effort comforted me now.
Not a bruise or bump marred my skin, so why did I still feel each and every one of them?
“Maybe we can give him what he wants,” Ursa offered. “Or let him think we are. If we figure it out now, if we practice, maybe it will work.”
If Adoel Nicosia had been truthful in only being able to mindread active thoughts, perhaps we had a plan.
I heard footsteps outside the conservatory the following afternoon, hating the whimper that escaped my throat as the door opened. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be unshakable.
I was not.
The king again, this time with a folded strap of leather in his hand. I fled as far as my leash would allow; he approached as far as the tree. “Tell me what I need to know, Nym.”
Tears brimmed on my eyes. “I-I already told you.”
“This game again?” he asked, and charged for me.
“Stop!” I screamed, hugging myself. The secondary worry in my chest increased—my spike of fear had surely crossed the strait to Renn.
I wished I could shield him from this. I prayed he was somewhere where the beating wouldn’t hurt him too badly.
Where enemies wouldn’t hear him cry out or see him falter and take advantage. “Please, here.” I gave Nicosia my hand.
Lowering the strap, a suspicious frown weighing down his face, the king seized my fingers.
I focused, burrowing the tiniest hole in my wall, shepherding through a slew of practiced thoughts.
I aimed for sympathy. I let him see my long journey to Rove, my indignation over it.
The draft letter, the queen’s dismissiveness.
I skipped ahead and showed my exhaustion every night.
The complaint about my smell and the coarse way Queen Winvrin had ordered me washed like a plow horse.
I showed him the servant Torr and the plague that killed him, my own body succumbing to it.
I showed Prince Adrinn shoving me up against a wall.
I showed myself standing in Renn’s broken lumis feeling utterly helpless, trying to thread together shards of colored glass.
Then, in hopes of earning his pity, I showed him the death of my parents.
Lord Fell handing me a purse of fifteen silver merits, as though that would help me and my seven siblings get by.
I showed him Vin breaking off our engagement, leaving me because I’d become too much of a burden.
I showed Ford getting caught in his lies and pinning me to my bed while my brothers worked the fields.
I even let him see my dead daughter in my arms.
And then I shut the crack entirely, pushing magic into my lumis to close the wall, refortify it, turn it, until the opening was undecipherable from anything else.
I came back to myself. Blinked. “That’s all there is.” My voice was rushed, breathy. “They got tired of waiting. I sat in that glass pile day after day, treated like a slave, desperately trying to piece it together so I could go home. Please, please don’t do this.”
King Nicosia’s green eyes were so dark, not even light from the window reflected in them. “Do you think I’m a fool? You’ve told me nothing!”
With a bare fist, he punched me low in the gut, hard enough to expel my air. Had I been pregnant, it would have been a killing blow.
“Run, Nym!”