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My eyes begin to burn from being held open too long. I try to blink, but my lids slide shut and stay that way, no matter how I fight to open them. My lashes are made of stone, my lids weigh more than the leather armor lying heavy on my bound chest.
The armor is stolen, too. I snatched it from Thyne’s cot the morning I left, though I knew he would give it to me if I asked. Thyne would lie down and let me use him as a carpet if I told him to, though, of course, I never would. What’s the point in walking on a broken man?
What’s the point in walking on an unbroken man?
The thought confounds me, making my head ache even more than it did before. What is the point in walking on an unbroken man? Is the question nonsense, or a riddle I must answer in order to gain passage out of this limbo world inhabited by gods and monsters and the ghosts of all the people I’ve failed in my seventeen years of life?
Failed, when I was so certain … so determined …
I’m dimly aware of the god patting my cheeks, but it’s too late for him to draw me out. I am sinking into myself, back into the mists of my mind.
I run down a red mud road, past Janin, my fairy mother, who cradles Thyne in her arms, mourning the son who might as well be dead after what I did to him. I run past my mother, covered in the wasted blood she used to bless me. I run until I reach the outskirts of Mercar, and then on through the abandoned city, down roads where ancient buildings have begun to crumble beneath a bruise-black sky.
I throw myself through the castle gates into the royal garden, where the sacred Hawthorn tree’s leaves flame crimson red. I hear my brother scream from somewhere deep within the castle and run even faster. Faster and faster, but I can’t remember the way to the throne room where Ekeeta conducts her rituals. I can’t find Jor, can’t free him, can’t do anything to right my many wrongs.
It should be me, I think as I race down one empty hallway after another, alone but for the sound of Jor’s tortured cries. I’m the one Mama blessed.
I should have done more to protect my brother. I should have insisted we put an end to our twice-yearly visits, no matter how careful we were when traveling under the cover of night. The entire point of being raised in separate corners of the world was to prevent both of Norvere’s heirs from being killed or captured at once. I should have insisted we stay apart. I should have listened to the fairy elders and married the king of Endrean and his navy of five hundred ships. I should have heeded Janin when she warned that there is a difference between bravery and pride, but I didn’t, and now my pride will be the ruin of the world.
I finally turn the corner to the throne room, only to find the doors locked against me. I push and shove. I slam my fists into the etched metal where my father’s family seal—thorns lifting a red-sailed galleon from the sea—still marks the door, but all I receive for my efforts are broken bones. Something cracks in my right hand and pain blooms in my fist. I fall to the ground, clutching my arm to my chest as Jor’s screams cut off with a terrible sudde
My brother is dead.
I know it the way I know the sun is hot and the seas are blue. Jor is dead. My sweet brother, my best friend, my last living family member and the only person it is safe for me to love, is gone. He will never grow into those extra inches and broad shoulders he sprouted this year. He will never be a man or a beloved or a father. He will never celebrate his fifteenth birthday.
“I’ll kill you!” I scream, ignoring the tears that run down my cheeks. “I’ll cut your heart out!”
“You’ll do no such thing, child.” The queen is suddenly in the hall before me, staring down at me from her great height.
She is sixteen hands if she’s a finger, a long, lean column in her ivory dress with the gold trim. Her face is as taut and firm as it was when I was a child—youthful and pretty in its gaunt way, though I know she is close to two hundred years old—and her bald head is concealed by a mass of golden hair. The wig looks real, but it is not. It is a lie, as everything about the false queen is a lie.
I leap to my feet, determined to kill her with my one good hand, but when I reach for her my arm goes limp, falling to hang useless at my side. I ca
“Give yourself to me, Aurora,” Ekeeta says. “There is nothing left for you to live for.”
“Stuff yourself,” I growl, wishing I could sink a dagger into her heart.
“It’s a shame.” Ekeeta leans down until her eyes are level with my face. Her thin lips stretch, but she doesn’t show me her sharper-than-human teeth. “One would think your mother would have wished for intelligence for you along with your other gifts. But Rose wasn’t known for her thinking, was she? Poor, pretty … dead thing.”
With a howl, I lunge for the ogre queen’s throat, but the moment my clawed fingers touch her flesh she vanishes, leaving nothing but a pile of biting beetles behind.
The beetles tumble over each other as they scuttle along the floor, fleeing the boot I bring down upon them again and again. I stomp them to juice, panting with panic born in my days in the dungeon when I woke with beetles nesting in my hair, crawling along my throat, creeping beneath my skirt to leave bite marks up and down my legs.
The last of the insects disappear beneath the throne room’s door and I collapse against the wall, covering my face with hands, weeping in a way I haven’t in years. I weep for Jor and Thyne and Janin. I weep for the people of Norvere, who will never be free of the tyra
I weep for what feels like years and am still crying when I’m plunged into a world of cold, where there is no air to breathe.
My eyes fly open and I suck in a lungful of water as I’m pulled to the surface. I see bleary gray sky and my own boots sticking out the end of a watering trough, and I cough loudly before a rough hand covers my mouth and a voice hisses in my ear—
“Quiet, little man. These ragers are drunk, not dead.”
I shove the hand away and spin to face the voice, sending water sloshing out onto the grass in the process.
Behind me, squatting with his thick arms crossed atop the rough wood of the trough, is the young god, looking far less godlike in the thin morning light. He’s still the most stu
A god wouldn’t have a faint bruise staining one cheekbone or the begi
Worship of all gods, human and immortal, has been forbidden in Kanvasola for years, ever since the Immortal King Eldorio decided to live forever and ordered his country to worship him instead.
“You speak the language of Norvere?” the boy asks, hesitating only a moment before asking me the same question in Kanvasol.
“Who are you?” I ask in my native tongue. I know a bit of Kanvasol, but not enough to carry on a conversation. “What do you want?” I shiver but make no move to step out of the water. My head is clear and my stomach settled for the first time in days, and the cold is at least partially responsible for banishing the haze of the Vale Flowers.
“I’m Niklaas of Kanvasola, eleventh son of King Eldorio,” he says with a grin and a slight bow of his head. “And you are Jor, the lost prince of Norvere.”