Capture the Crown (Gargoyle Queen #1) -Jennifer Estep Page 0,159

grateful I am to be here.”

It was the truth. All the things I had taken for granted before had new meaning now, even something as simple as a quiet evening with my friends and family. I appreciated it all much more now—and I realized just how easily Milo Morricone could destroy it.

“I’ve been studying those tearstone arrows you brought back from Morta,” Alvis said, as if picking up on my dark thoughts.

“What do you think Milo plans to do with them?”

Alvis frowned. “I’m not sure. But if Milo has found some way to get the tearstone to channel his magic, then it can’t be anything good. Just those two arrows by themselves could be turned into powerful weapons. And if he has enough tearstone to make thousands more of them . . .”

He didn’t say anything else, but I could hear all the awful things he was contemplating.

Alvis must have seen me wince as his thoughts intruded on my own. “I can make you another pendant. A larger, stronger one to help you block out the thoughts again. To keep you from getting paralyzed like you have in the past.”

I had told him how everyone’s fear and panic during the Blauberg battle had overwhelmed me, just like it had during the Seven Spire massacre.

I shook my head. “No. I used your pendant as a crutch for far too long. It made me feel safe, secure, protected, and I wanted to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible. But I’m not a little girl anymore, and it’s time to grow up. It’s time that I stopped hiding from my magic, and my memories too.”

Alvis squeezed my arm. “You grew up the day of the massacre, Gemma. You will be a wonderful queen, and you will protect Andvari from the Mortans, just as Everleigh has defended Bellona from her enemies.”

“Do you really think so?” I whispered.

He smiled. “I know so.”

Alvis held out his mug, and I clinked mine against his, that one soft note drowning out all the noise, commotion, and doubt in my heart, at least for this moment.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, I said my good nights to everyone and left the study. I’d been in so many meetings with Father, Grandfather Heinrich, Rhea, and our advisors this past week that I wanted some quiet time to myself, so I went to my chambers. I stood out on the balcony for several minutes, breathing in the chilly night air and the floral perfumes drifting up out of the Edelstein Gardens in the center of the palace.

When I was calm again, I closed the balcony doors and stepped back into my chambers. I was going to soak in a hot bath when the freestanding Cardea mirror in the corner began rippling with a bright silver light.

I tensed. He had been calling out to me every night since I had returned to Glitnir. He must be able to sense that I was back home, the same way that I knew he was back in Myrkvior.

So far, I had avoided the mirror, but no longer. So I stepped in front of the glass and waited. A few seconds later, the mirror stilled, and a familiar figure appeared on the other side.

Leonidas.

His injuries had been healed, and no trace of Wexel’s beating remained on his face, although he probably had some new scars on his back from Milo’s whipping, and even deeper marks on his heart from Maeven’s betrayal. The cold, malicious part of me hoped that those marks pained him just as badly as his duplicity had hurt my own heart.

Delmira’s liladorn salve had gone a long way toward healing my own wounds, as had Leonidas’s pulling the pain out of my body and shoving it into his own. The Glitnir bone masters had managed to remove the coral-viper whip marks from my back, but ugly pink scars still marred my hands, both front and back.

Yaleen, my thread master, had offered to make gloves to conceal the marks, but I’d refused. I wasn’t a pampered princess any longer, and I wasn’t going to cover up the scars and hide from what had happened. I had done that with the Seven Spire massacre for too long. No more.

Just as I wasn’t going to hide from Leonidas any longer.

“Hello, Gemma,” he said. “You look well.”

“So do you,” I replied in a neutral tone.

The two of us fell silent, once again staring at each other and not saying what we really thought or