31 AMBROSE
ABOARD THE FORESIGHT
“You seem to be getting along better.”
Riven said by way of greeting as he stepped up behind me.
I nodded slowly, and crossed my arms, leaning against the side of the ship. “Only because she’s adaptive.”
“What does that mean?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Lonnie dancing across the deck of the ship, practicing the swordplay I’d spent every moment of the last several days teaching her.
After a difficult first session, in which I expected she would never pick up a sword again, she’d steadily impressed me with her improvements. With each new move she mastered, my apprehension lessened. At least now, she would be able to defend herself when we arrived in Underneath.
“If I didn’t know her magic was suppressed, I’d say she has some enhanced ability to survive, no matter the circumstances,”
I told Riven. “Maybe it’s just a learned personality trait, what with all the times Rhiannon moved her family around.”
Riven didn’t say anything to that, but he didn’t have to. Voicing the thought aloud made me all but certain it was true. Rhiannon had been, and still was, a terrible mother, but she’d certainly raised capable daughters—if only by accident.
I smiled widely, as I watched Lonnie take a large slash in the air, and spin around, as if fighting two invisible opponents.
Riven looked sideways at me, his expression assessing.
“What?” I asked.
“Have you told her where we’re going, yet?”
I nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“Did you warn her about Rhiannon?”
“Not yet.”
I frowned. “Let me worry about that. I’ll tell her when the time is right.”
“And when is that?”
Riven asked.
“When I think she’ll believe me, and not go running straight to her mother and into a trap.”
“There’s hardly any time left. We’ll be arriving tomorrow evening.”
I pushed off the edge of the ship, and strode in the direction Lonnie had gone. “Then I’d better make tonight count, hadn’t I?”
Later that night, I eased the cabin door open to find the lamps already extinguished, and Lonnie lying in bed, her back to me. I sighed. Despite what I’d told Riven, I was not willing to wake her just to continue my efforts to make her like me.
It sounded absurd. I was over two hundred years old, and I was spending my time trying to slowly coax a woman into wanting me, like some inexperienced nineteen year old. It was possibly the most ridiculous thing I’d ever bothered doing, and by far the most difficult.
Lonnie was emotionally broken, confused, and incredibly stubborn.
In the days after we’d talked about her sister, I’d been afraid I’d made a terrible mistake bringing her here, but somehow, she’d seemed to pull herself back from the brink of devastation.
I thought her cold shell was finally thawing, ever since I’d saved her from the Charybdis. Of course, there was still an absurdly long way to go, and a disheartening number of obstacles in our way.
For one thing, despite her appearance to the contrary, she was clearly still grieving.
For another, she had some absurdly human views about monogamy that made her unwilling to even acknowledge half of what I said or did near her. That hadn’t come up per se, but I’d watched her excruciating back and forth with my brother for long enough to know it was the case. Even without prophecy, I knew that one day I’d become as frustrated as Bael, trying to convince Lonnie that it was perfectly possible to have more than one mate. In fact, for her, it would be almost impossible not to…at least, once she finally started using her powers correctly.
Of course, that was one of the problems in and of itself. Until Lonnie accepted her own magic, and stopped acting like the human she’d been raised to be, instead of the future queen that she was, we’d never get anywhere.
I walked as silently as possible across the room, trying not to wake her. At least she was sleeping in the bed now, rather than on the floor.
That had been another miscalculation on my part. I’d thought she would eventually relent, and sleep in the bed with me, but clearly I’d underestimated both her inflexibility and her resilience. Of course she would refuse to give in, unless the alternative would actually kill her as with the dinners I’d forced on her. I took it as a good sign, therefore, that she’d accepted the peace offering of the larger bed.
If I were a gentleman, I would have left her to sleep on her own.
But I wasn’t.
I felt in my gut that once Lonnie truly came into herself, she’d be a force to be reckoned with—strong and erotic and entirely in control of herself. She wasn’t there yet, though, and I knew that pushing her would only prolong the moment when I finally got to taste my queen.
Until then, every night we spent next to each other was a pleasant sort of torture.
Tonight was no different, and I bit back a curse as I slipped off my boots and shirt and climbed into the bed beside her. She didn’t move an inch as I moved into a more comfortable position, so I was startled when she spoke into the darkness. “Thank you for helping me today.”
I jumped, both at the shock that she was awake, and at the strange feeling of being surprised in the first place. It had been an entire week since I first found her in the barn, and I still wasn’t used to how if we were alone together, I was entirely blind to our future.
I raised an eyebrow. I would’ve bet she was allergic to the word thank you, as I didn’t think I’d ever once heard it escape her lips.
“You’re welcome, love,”
I replied.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
she asked.
I stared up at the ceiling, unseeing, unsure what answer I could give her. I wasn’t sure if she would want to know, or how she would take the knowledge that what had begun as a way to test myself, had long since turned into a personal obsession. How would she react if I confessed everything? How lovely I thought she was, how fascinated I was with everything about her, and how even though she held me at arm’s length, this past week had been the best I’d experienced in two hundred years.
“You must be accustomed to nicknames by now,”
I said, flatly.
She stiffened. “I suppose.”
I looked over at her, curiously. She reacted strangely every time I made the briefest mention of either Bael or Scion, and until now I’d ignored it, assuming she was preoccupied with her grief and anger. Now, though, I felt compelled to question it. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m wondering why your brother hates you?”
“Sorry?”
I asked, startled. That wasn’t what I’d thought she would say at all.
She shifted very slightly into a more comfortable position, but still didn’t roll over to look at me. “Why does your brother hate you?”
That was what I’d thought she’d asked, but hearing it again didn’t make the question make any more sense. We hadn’t discussed Scion at all in the last week, except when I’d mentioned how she’d been healed after Riven shot her. I’d planned to heal her myself, thus making our week together easier from the onset, but I couldn’t say I was sorry that things worked out the way they had.
I wanted her to be happy, even if it wasn’t with me.
“Does Scion hate me?”
I asked, stalling for time.
She snorted. “You must know he does. What happened between you?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m wondering if I misjudged you.”
My heartbeat sped up. That was good—perhaps I would be able to make this evening count after all. “Scion might be angry that I left,”
I began. “But more likely it’s because I killed our father.”
She stiffened, and finally rolled over to look at me. “Why?”
I appreciated that she assumed there was a reason, rather than immediately condemning me as a murderer. “It’s difficult to explain.”
“Try.”
I sighed. I rarely explained myself to anyone, and even when I’d tried, few people understood.
I raised a hand in the darkness, tracing patterns through the air like the branches of a tree. “This is how the future looks to me. Like thousands of paths—of branches—all stemming off from a single decision, then each of those branches starts another set, and so on. There are endless possibilities, and every single moment could start the world off on a new path.”
“I didn’t ask for a lecture on prophecy.”
“It would be easier to justify myself if you could see every decision made in the last one hundred years, as I can. If you knew every decision that could’ve been made instead. Let’s say that my father wasn’t a good male, and letting him get anywhere near the crown would’ve spelled disaster for more people than you can probably conceptualize.”
“Why not just tell him that?”
I sometimes felt like the only player in an enormous game of chess, carefully planning out every decision to marshal my knights across the board toward the queen. My plans had been decades in the making, and now I was so close, I felt as if someone would knock my game board to the floor at the last possible second.
If anyone were capable of that, it would be the woman beside me.
“Because Scion, like me, believes in enacting the greater good for the largest number of people at the cost of anything else. If he knew everything I know, and was able to weigh that on the whole, Penvalle was a better choice than Belvedere, he would probably agree with my decision.”
She gave me a skeptical sideways glance. “But…that would be good, right? If he agrees with you.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. It was a good question, and one I’d certainly wrestled with. “No, it wouldn’t. Him forgiving me would have far reaching consequences that might derail everything I’ve spent thirty years lining up.”
“Lining up to break your curse,” she said.
It wasn’t a question, more of a loose statement, but I answered anyway. “Yes.”
“Because you’ve spent those thirty years searching for a worthy wearer of the crown,”
she said. “You’ll be the villain who burns cities to the ground until you can pull a single worthy hero from the ashes.”
I blinked at her. What?
It was such an odd statement, and so out of character for her, that it took me a moment to realize she was quoting me. Repeating what I’d said to her the day we destroyed the obsidian palace.
In retrospect, I might have said something a bit less dramatic…too late.
I shook my head, realizing I hadn’t yet answered her. “Yes.”
She looked me in the eye, and though it was dark, I could see every line of her face perfectly. “So…everything you’re doing is to break the curse?”
I nodded again. “Yes.”
“I want to help. I don’t know why I landed where I am, if it was fated or if I was maneuvered into place just like you’ve done with everyone else, but I’m done pretending it doesn’t matter.”
I furrowed my brow. Despite having an army at my disposal, I’d never had anyone help me who truly knew the purpose behind everything we did.
Would she turn away as soon as she realized that my every decision was morally gray, at best? What would happen when she was forced to decide between her own life, my family’s lives, and the lives of thousands of strangers?
I’d spent years searching, only to finally realize that there wasn’t any one person alive able to break our curse, so eventually I’d realized I would have to create one. Originally, I’d intended Scion to be the worthy one—the last Everlast king.
Now, I was more convinced than ever that it was Lonnie who ended our long suffering—one way, or another.
“It’s not a simple mission,”
I told her. “You could easily die.”
“I would rather die a mortal death in battle than spend a thousand years in hiding.”
I let out a long breath. Fuck, she was amazing.
Without thinking about it, or planning why I did it, I put out a slow, tentative hand. To my relief, Lonnie did not pull away and I gently ran my fingers through her long curls.
I tilted my head, slowly closing the distance between us until our lips were almost touching. Her eyes darted down to my mouth and her lips parted. She didn’t flinch away, and I inched even closer, my breath mingling with hers.
As my mind went blank, a bright flash of colors and images flooded my vision, blocking out everything else. The walls of the room blurred, and my surroundings disappeared as I was pulled into someone else’s mind.
Huddled in the dim, musty dungeon beneath the castle, I could feel the cold stones closing in on me, draining any glimmer of hope for escape. The only source of light was a small grate high above, casting eerie shadows that seemed to dance across the floor. The clanking of chains echoed throughout the cramped space, and I shifted uncomfortably on the rough floor. My back burned, as if I’d been whipped, and every movement was agony.
I blinked rapidly, and Lonnie came back into focus. Her face was a breath away, but she stared at me, bewildered and unsure. “What’s wrong?”
I released my hold on her. There were more pressing matters that demanded my attention, now. As much as it pained me, she would have to wait.
“I’ve just had a vision. There’s more than one person we need to save from the dungeons of Underneath.”
“Who?”
She demanded.
“Your mates.”