but something so obstructive to the trials.
“My surly brother? You’re sure?” the prince asked, leaning close to the woman as though the proximity could help him understand what she was saying.
Brother? Cassi frowned.
He wasn’t a member of the royal family or he’d be in the trial, surely. She thought back to his stilted conversation with the queen, how the woman had made an effort to distance him from even the pretend role of playing her son.
A bastard, maybe, she wondered, of the late king?
“Lyana Aethionus might be my mate?” the prince muttered, voice clouded with disbelief.
The statement made Cassi freeze. Her curiosity turned into a sour, bitter taste on her tongue. The questions withered away, disappearing in an instant, as a painful knot curled in her gut at this new betrayal she’d be forced to endure. Because Lyana had no idea that the prince she thought she had met was a lie, and Cassi could never be the one to tell her—not without explaining the other secrets she’d been keeping all these years, which were far too important to expose before it was time, before her king was ready. Instead, she’d have to listen to her friend go on and on, plastering a smile on her face as her insides turned rotten, preparing to pick the pieces up when the truth came crashing down, as she was sure it eventually would.
But that was her role in life.
To lie.
To hurt.
To deceive.
Cassi drifted away from this trickster prince and his excited smile that had become sinister in her eyes, away from the imposter who had made her best friend believe he might be her salvation, away from the ravens and the conspiracy they had unintentionally roped her into. Her soul let go of the magic and she flew across the city, snapping back into her body. By the time she opened her eyes, there was a knock on her door, a chirping little bum-bum-bum that left no doubt as to who was on the other side.
Cassi winced.
She folded her wings to cover her face, as though hiding her shame might make it less real. But it didn’t. And the churning nausea remained even as she rolled to a seated position, wiping the sleep from her eyes and the grimace from her lips, trying to muster the will to stand and unlock her door.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself, closing her eyes and running her hands over her cheeks, through her hair, pushing loose strands from her face. It doesn’t matter who she picks as her mate, because she’s the queen who was prophesized. My queen. The queen who will save us all. And her mate is fifteen thousand feet below, waiting for her on a foggy sea. What happens in these trials is inconsequential. Irrelevant. It doesn’t matter.
Cassi could have repeated the mantra a million times, and it still wouldn’t have changed the way her heart dropped when she opened the door and stared into her friend’s sparkling eyes. Nothing would have—nothing but finally speaking the truth.
A few more weeks.
A few more weeks and this will all be over.
A few more weeks and I’ll be done.
A few more weeks—
“Cassi, you wouldn’t believe everything that happened,” Lyana gushed as she stepped into the room, not bothering with a hello as she flopped onto Cassi’s bed and fell back, dramatic as ever, letting her wings drape over the edges as every muscle in her body relaxed.
Cassi eyed her friend, trying to shrug off the lies and the guilty mood to sink back into the life that took place outside of her dreaming hours. “I have no doubt you’re going to tell me anyway.”
24
Lyana
He was doing that infuriatingly adorable thing of pretending she didn’t exist—heavy on the infuriating. Lyana tried to focus on the positive—Lysander seemed to be ignoring everyone else as well. The other princes. The other princesses. His own queen. Those brooding eyes of his were filled to the brim with resolve, focused only on the tests, on conquering each task one by one by one. And he was doing an impressive job.
He’d come first for the boys in the archery trial, bested only by the same person who had crushed them all—the Crown Princess of the House of Prey. Her aim had been so exact she’d pierced her first arrow with her second, so the wood fanned out like a flower around the bull’s-eye. She then proceeded to land four more arrows in the center rings of four different moving targets, stepping