Capture the Crown (Gargoyle Queen #1) -Jennifer Estep Page 0,55

meant I still had a chance to escape—if I was smart. Rushing across the room, throwing the doors open, and running out into whatever corridor lay beyond was not smart. No, if I wanted to escape, then I needed to be cold, calm, and logical.

Given my haggard appearance, people would take one look at me and realize that I didn’t belong here, so I yanked a comb through my snarled locks, then examined the color. My shoulder-length hair was still a flat black with no hint of its usual dark brown. Good. Between that and the lavender tunic, I looked even less like Princess Gemma than usual.

I dabbed some light purple berry balm onto my lips and dusted my face with lilac-scented powder, trying to hide the dark circles under my eyes. I wasn’t very successful, but the makeup made me seem less like someone who had barely escaped death.

I opened the rest of the vanity-table drawers, searching for valuables. There was no money inside, although I found several hairpins studded with amethysts, which I stuck into my pockets. Perhaps I could trade them for safe passage away from here.

I didn’t see anything else in the chambers that would aid my escape, so I went over to the closed double doors, which were locked. I could have opened them with my magic, but someone might sense my power and come to investigate. Perhaps there was an easier way out of here.

So I headed over to the glass doors set into the wall. They were unlocked, and I cautiously opened one and peered outside. The doors led to a large balcony—one without any stairs.

I muttered a curse, but I walked over to the railing and focused on the ground some five stories below. If I had been at full strength, I would have tried to climb and float down, but given how weak I still was, I wouldn’t be able to hold on to the slick stones, not even with my magic. A frustrated growl tumbled from my lips, but I raised my gaze, trying to find another way to escape.

A gleam of gold caught my eye, and I glanced to my right. In the distance, the sun was rising over a river that curved through the landscape. Several ships bobbed along the water, heading toward a large port, and homes and shops flanked both sides of the river, stretching out for miles. Nothing unusual there, except for the buildings—tall, wide structures with clusters of diamond-shaped windows and steep, pointed roofs topped with black spikes that looked like arrows streaking up to pierce the morning sky.

My heart plummeted. Diamond-shaped windows and spike-lined roofs were a common style in Mortan architecture. Combine that with the water, which had to be the Meander River, and there was only one place I could be.

Majesta, the Mortan capital.

I dragged my gaze away from the homes, shops, and riverfront and studied the grounds immediately around me.

My balcony overlooked a courtyard made of dark gray stone. To my left, another balcony jutted out over the same area. Down below, a gray stone fountain shaped like a strix bubbled in the center of the open space, which also featured purple flowers planted in zigzagging rows.

The flowers were nothing special, but thick black vines covered with black thorns bigger and longer than my fingers twined through the blossoms before snaking across the flagstones and curling around the fountain. Helene Blume had once shown me a similar cutting in her greenhouse workshop at Glitnir, so I knew what the tendrils were—liladorn, an incredibly tough vine with thorns that blossomed into spikes of fragrant lilac.

There was only one place I had heard of where you would find this much liladorn. Things were even worse than I’d feared. I wasn’t just in the capital.

I was in Myrkvior—the Morricone royal palace, the very heart of Morta, and the most dangerous place on the Buchovian continent for the crown princess of Andvari to be.

* * *

Shock slithered through my body in icy tendrils, just like the liladorn had curled through the courtyard, and worry scraped against my heart like thorns dragging across my skin. Leonidas could have taken me anywhere in Morta, but he had brought me here, to Myrkvior, the royal palace. Why? Had he figured out who I really was?

Dread simmered in my stomach as I left the balcony, hurried back inside, and headed over to the double doors at the far end of the chambers. I reached out with my magic