A Queen of Gilded Horns (A River of Royal Blood #2) - Amanda Joy Page 0,36

days aboard.

He’d tried to broach the subject of Baccha, and Eva had ignored him, her attention focused solely on sharpening a dagger. “We should at least talk about it.”

“Talk about what?” she’d asked, distracted.

“What Baccha told me the night he left. Eva, he implied your magick—”

“I don’t want to talk about magick,” she’d bit out, each word edged like the blade she was honing. “I can feel something new inside, like a second pulse, but I need a break from magick. Whatever my family can tell me, I’ll listen, but for now . . .”

She’d trailed off, sheathed the dagger, and stood to lace her fingers through his. Then she’d kissed him too thoroughly for him to think of anything but the warmth of her lips, and he dropped it.

Now he wondered whether he should have pushed her. Maybe if he had, Eva would have known what to do when she fell. He hated his magick in that moment, making him feel every bit of her terror when he could do nothing. He would not forget how the feeling had swelled inside him, blotting out every other thought. Worse was that, the moment before Eva’s body struck the ground, her fear had turned to acceptance.

When he replaced Tavan in the seat at Eva’s bedside, Eva’s expression was smooth.

Yet still he felt the faint aura of pain radiating from her mind.

When Aketo was younger, he thought if he could just squint and stare long enough, he would be able to see emotions instead of feeling them. He thought if he could see them, he would escape having to feel what others felt.

But that was fantasy. Some emotions struck him as songs or flavors, or a certain rhythm and pulse to the air. None of that changed the very nature of his magick, which was to draw in emotions like they were his sustenance.

Jaw clenched, he grasped Eva’s hand and gathered her pain into his limbs. She would hate him if she knew how often compulsion drove him to do this. Drinking in small amounts of her, and everyone else’s, darkest emotions because instinct drove him to comfort.

But at least he could let her heal in peace.

Chapter 7

Eva

I woke in a field ablaze with crimson, persimmon, canary-yellow blossoms, their petals coated in iridescent droplets of dew. Around the field, great trees with vast trunks grew high into the sky so that only the silhouette of their leaves above was visible, blurring out all detail.

I sat up, the flowers’ fragrant nectar coating my tongue, and did not know where I was. An indigo sky made incandescent by a sea of flickering stars showed through the canopy of branches, but there was no moon that I could see, nor sun.

The chitter and click of insects filled the air, as well as birdsong and deeper, sharper calls that surely belonged to larger beasts.

For a long moment, I lay still, feeling the velvet petals crushed beneath my hands and thinking nothing at all. My mind was a void, offering no knowledge of where I was or why or how.

I took a breath, smelling the air, and finally stood, feet bare in the dirt. Wind lashed through the trees, causing my skin to pebble. And though horns still adorned my brow, my hands had changed back. My nails, though still long, were soft and useless compared with the bone-hard claws I’d become accustomed to.

My feet weren’t alone in their nakedness. I was nude from the top of my head to my toes, but as soon as I thought it, raw silk glided against my skin. I jumped as a simple rose-pink dress materialized around my body, falling to my ankles.

I took a step and well-tooled leather sandals laced my ankles. I was in my mindscape, then. In this place where my magick lived, the rules and laws of nature and creation shifted to suit the occasion. I’d avoided this place—and my magick—as a rule since leaving Ternain, and Baccha’s departure, half afraid of encountering him here and half terrified I’d never see him again. Or worse, that when I did, whatever new orders the Tribe laid upon him would make us enemies.

Now I had the where, but the why and how still escaped me. When I closed my eyes, all I could remember was the vague impression of a woman’s face twisted in anger; the more I tried to think back, panic filled my chest like an expanding balloon. No matter how much I thought return—just as