22. How to Sell a King
Lazaros
It was no easy thing, leaving Atlas and Alex in that bedchamber with my brother looking as I had never seen him before. Not even when our mother passed did he look so distraught, so pained… so lost.
Even when I knew her death had hit him just as hard as it had me. But this was something entirely different. This was the face my father carried when she was on her deathbed.
For years, I had watched my brother carry the weight of an entire world on his shoulders. Duty. Responsibility. The endless, grinding expectation of a crown he had never asked for. None of it had ever left much room for anything so frivolous as happiness.
Until his mortal had come along.
His fated anchor tethering the God in him to our world.
The only living being strong enough to tame him.
But it wasn’t just that. She had also managed the one thing not a single one of us ever could.
She had made him laugh… A genuine laugh.
Made him smile… A genuine smile. Made him look toward tomorrow for some reason other than obligation.
And now that fragile, hard-won happiness was slipping through his fingers like water.
Because of Demetrios.
It had to be.
The darkness that coiled inside Alex had to have come from him, it was far too familiar.
I had lived with it wrapped around my own mind long enough to know its particular coldness the moment I felt it.
Even if I still didn’t understand why Demetrios had wanted to tear my family to pieces, or destroy every soul in The?kós, he had used me to do it and chosen to wear my skin like a stolen coat.
What I couldn’t bring myself to believe was how Alex thought he was linked to us. That he was our brother. If that turned out to be true, I would sit myself down and eat hay with a donkey. That was how certain I was that she had it wrong.
But whatever his reasons, I would not let him win. If fate demanded a sacrifice before this was through, then it would be me.
Not Atlas.
And certainly, never Alex.
“So how, exactly, are we meant to do this impossible thing and kidnap a Gorgon King strong enough to kill the pair of us with barely a look?” Aster asked, and I dragged a hand back through my hair after we had moved farther from my brother’s chamber.
“Well, we’re going to need a good deal more than my bow and your horns. That’s for damn sure.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m saying.” He spread his arms. “We need a fucking tank.”
“A what?”
“A tank. Kick-arse earth machine. Rolls about on metal tracks, blows holes clean through buildings.” He grinned. “You’d love it.”
I tried to picture rolling up to the Gorgon King’s fortress in one of these earth-machines and blowing a hole straight through his pretty walls. Kick-arse indeed.
“The trouble won’t be getting in,” I said. “It’ll be getting out again with his entire army at our backs.”
“Right. So, I’ll ask again. How are we doing this? Because I don’t know about you, but I have never once stolen a practical god before, and I imagine they’re rather hard to put in a sack and toss over your back.”
I grinned and clapped him on the back.
“Lucky for you, my friend, I have a plan. And just the thing we’ll need for it.” I started walking. “Come on. Time to steal something else first, before we go and bag ourselves a furious king.”
The moment Aster and I reached the top of the hidden stairwell, I turned us toward my mother’s chambers.
Years ago, my father had given her ten Way Stones, crafted by a Way Weaver, so that she might travel between kingdoms and visit the family she had left behind.
Way Weavers were rare things now. Most were long dead, and there had only ever been one with the skill to forge a stone that a person could carry in their pocket and crack open to reveal a door between worlds.
Fortunately, my mother had never used all ten.
Unfortunately, she had left only two.
The three of us, Atlas, Father, and I, had agreed long ago to keep them for some dire emergency. This, I thought grimly, more than qualified.
But her door had not been opened in years.
I felt it the moment I pushed it wide. That strange, held-breath stillness.
The air was thick with dust and the ghost of a perfume I had not smelled for years.
Nothing had been touched. Nothing had been moved.
My father had forbidden it all those years ago, and not a single servant had dared to defy him since.
Her brush still lay upon the dressing table, a few strands of dark hair caught in its bristles.
Her shawl still hung over the back of the chair where she had left it.
A vase of flowers, long since crumbled to grey dust, still sat upon the sill.
It was less a bedchamber than a tomb. A room where time had come to a stop the day she died, and never started again.
I had not set foot in it since.
“You alright?” Aster asked, quiet for once, lingering in the doorway as though he understood that stepping inside would be to step into something sacred.
“No,” I said, because there was no sense lying to him. “But it doesn’t matter. We’re not here for me or memories of those who have passed.”
I crossed to her writing desk and pressed the carved rose at its corner, the way I had watched my mother do a hundred times as a child. The hidden drawer slid open with a soft sigh. Two blue Way Stones lay within, pale and smooth, humming faintly against my fingers as I lifted them out.
My eyes drifted, despite me, to the great portrait above the bed.
The two of them. My mother, dark-haired and laughing, and my father with his hand at her waist and a look on his face I had only ever seen him wear for her.
Gods, they had loved one another. A love that was a thing of legend in these halls.
The kind that bards still sang about. And when she had been taken from him, it had not made my father stronger.
It had hollowed him out.
It had broken something in him that never once mended and left a great grieving emptiness standing where a king used to be.
It was why I had never let myself fall. Watching what love had done to him. Or should I say, what the loss of it had done to him, I had decided long ago that the surest way to ruin a man was to give him a thing he could not bear to lose.
And now I watched my brother live that exact nightmare. Down in that chamber, with the woman he loved fading cold in his arms.
My gaze drifted back to my father’s painted face, and that familiar guilt rose up to meet it like bile.
Because it hadn’t been grief that finally finished what remained of him.
It had been me.
My hands, wielding the darkness. Demetrios had been the one steering, I knew that now, his will wrapped around mine like a fist around a puppet’s strings.
But it had still been my body that did it.
My eyes were the last thing my father ever looked upon, and gods, the betrayal he must have read on a face that was not truly mine to wear in that moment.
I had wanted to die with the knowing of it. Might have, too, had Atlas not come and sat at my bedside in the infirmary. Had not gripped me by the back of the neck the way he had when we were boys and refused to let me drown.
‘If you do not bury this deep, it will consume you,’ he had told me, his voice rough with his own grief.
‘It will hollow you out the way losing Mother hollowed him, and there will be nothing left of my brother except the hating.’ He had held my gaze until I could not look away.
‘Alexandra risked everything to drag you back into this world. Do not make a liar of that gift by squandering the life she bought you on a crime that was never yours to carry, my brother.’
I hadn’t believed him. Not truly. But somewhere between that bed and this dust-choked room, I had decided I would act as though I did.
That I would carry on, and be of use, and save the woman who had saved me.
To let the rest of it lie quiet for now, if I could not yet set it down entirely.
It was the only way I knew to honor what she had done.
The only way I could think of to keep from becoming the ruin that grief had made of my father.
“It reminds you of them, doesn’t it?” Aster’s voice came softly from the doorway. “Him and Alex.” It wasn’t really a question.
“It does.” I closed my fingers around the stones.
“I think a love like that frightened my brother more than any army ever could. After what it did to our father… I think it became the one thing in all the world Atlas was truly afraid of. Wanting something that badly. Standing to lose it.” I let out a slow breath.
“So, I wasn’t surprised to hear from you that he fought it. ”
“For three years, he fought it, but he still searched for her, regardless. Oh, he would try to convince me that it was solely to use her to see if she was the key to opening the Rift, but I knew it was all bullshit. He was too obsessed with her, and not with just snatching her up but with her safety. Refusing to let others hunt for her, in case something went wrong.” Aster paused as if seeing the memory, “I remember what he was like whenever a new report came in, a new sighting of her. The look on his face, as if this would finally be the day he captured her. And thank fuck he finally pulled his head out of his arse when he finally did.”
A startled laugh escaped me. “Another of your charming earth-sayings?”
“You bet.” He grinned. “Picked up all the best ones over there.”
I shook my head, chuckling despite the weight of the room, despite all of it.
“Enough reminiscing, we will have plenty of time for that when she is cured of this darkness,” I said and crossed back to him with the two stones cupped in my palm. He held out one great hand. I pressed a stone into it, and he closed his fingers over mine, crushing it between our palms.
The chamber dissolved around us.