leaving out most of the Navakovrae lands to the east, the Darkwood and Emberhawk territories to the west, and the great river that separated the tribal lands from the Royal Province of Valinor to the north.
Ryon ignored Kira as she sat on the bench and Lysander as he stood there with crossed arms. They could wait. His stress melted away with every stroke of the quill.
“We don’t need one of your professional maps,” Lysander grunted.
“I don’t make anything less,” Ryon said, not caring if his cousin heard him or not. He pulled the second sheet of parchment out from under the first and wrote: Are you still working for the queen? He slid it over.
Lysander’s response was noticeably delayed. “Yes.”
Ryon’s heart constricted. His instinct was to yell at Lysander again for his work as the queen’s blade. An Emberhawk assassin had slain Ryon’s father, and although Lysander obviously hadn’t been the one to murder his own uncle, the similarities in occupation prodded the scar on Ryon’s soul.
Regardless, Lysander used his combat training as a former prince to do the queen’s bidding in the bloodiest manner. And though Ryon still wanted to believe the best about his aunt, she certainly didn’t care about Katrosi lives. How many of Ryon’s brothers-in-arms had Lysander killed under her command?
Ryon took a deep breath as he recalled every bend in the Silvermead and Mossu rivers, the smooth shores of Lake Mossu, and every switchback in the trade route between Jadenvive and Navarro. Another fight with his cousin wouldn’t do him any good right now. And if Kira learned that Lysander was an assassin, she’d probably be more scared than she ought to be. Surely Lysander didn’t pose a threat to them.
Ryon took the parchment back and wrote: Then you’ve given up on those crazy conspiracy theories about Aunt Deirdre.
If Lysander stared down at the parchment any more sharply, it would have caught fire. “She is not my mother anymore.”
Ryon masked his surprise. There was the cousin he knew. His childhood friend, who’d defended their younger siblings from all of the forest’s terrors with a wooden sword and a dare in his eye. The fierce heir, whom Ryon secretly wanted to be when he grew up. His big brother from a different father.
But when Lysander had lost everything, he’d needed something to blame. Queen Deirdre was the obvious choice, since she’d ignored tradition and taken the throne instead of passing it down to her firstborn son when the king died. Ryon didn’t blame him for being upset, but the amount of supposed sins Lysander piled on the queen was ridiculous—everything from forcing him to abdicate to killing his lover to taking his hearing to being possessed by an elemental.
Ryon considered his response carefully, knowing it was probably impossible to keep his emotions out of his words. If the queen is so evil, he wrote, why do you work for her?
“I don’t have a choice,” Lysander bit off. “Finish the bleeding map and get out of here while you still can.”
“Is everything okay?” Kira whispered.
Ryon cleared his throat, thankful for the interruption. Repeating the fight that had driven him and Lysander apart last year wouldn’t do anyone any good. His cousin was beyond hope.
“Yes,” Ryon answered. The ink swayed under his command, indicating the borders of the d’hakka forest. He straightened and inspected his creation. The northern coastline was definitely a little off, but that shouldn’t matter too much.
He tapped the quill on the edge of the ink vial. Now if only he knew where this pyramid actually was. And exactly where the d’hakka had dragged them from.
“The Roanoke camp is here—straight east.” Lysander pointed at a bend in the Mossu River just north of Jadenvive. “They haven’t been there long, so you should be able to catch them if you go quickly. This would be the safest route to Jadenvive, anyway.” He indicated a spot in the d’hakka forest and dragged his finger to Jadenvive, hovering above the wet ink. “If you went southeast from here—straight to Jadenvive—you’d be walking through a dozen more miles of d’hakka territory.”
Ryon marked the spots Lysander had revealed with dots, hoping the pyramid’s location would be accurate enough for Brooke.
“Please take me a little farther out of the way,” Kira said from the bench. Her baby blue eyes were each as full as the second moon. “I killed a d’hakka for you, remember?”
Ryon tore his gaze away. He knew exactly what she was doing, but that didn’t make her method