she certainly doesn’t look it. While everyone else is dirty, if not still bloody, Evangeline Samos looks fresh from a cold bath.
“Get out of my way” is all I can manage, trying to step around her. Farley halts, looking on with a glare.
“Let her go, Samos,” she snarls.
Evangeline ignores her. Instead she seizes my shoulders, forcing me to look her in the eye. I resist the familiar urge to deck her and instead let her look. To my surprise, she searches me over, eyes lingering on my many cuts and bruises.
“You should see a healer first; we have plenty,” she says. “You look horrible.”
“Evangeline—”
She sharpens. “He’s fine. I promise you that.”
My eyes snap to hers. “I know that,” I hiss. “I saw him with my own eyes.” Even so, I clench my teeth at the memory, too fresh and still too painful.
He’s alive; he survived her, the nymph princess, I remind myself. His brother’s deadly queen. I could wring his neck for doing it, challenging a nymph in the middle of the Bay. I’ve seen Tiberias Calore balk at swimming across a stream. He hates water, fears it like nothing else. It’s the worst and easiest way for him to die.
Evangeline bites her lip, watching me. She likes something in what she sees. When she speaks again, her voice is changed, softened. A featherlight whisper. “I can’t forget it. How he sank like a stone, armor and all,” she says, moving close enough to speak in my ear. The words twist around me, prickling on my skin. “How long was it until the healers got him breathing again?”
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying not to remember. I know what you’re doing, Evangeline. And it’s working. Tiberias, pale and dead, his body soaked through. Mouth parted, eyes open and empty. Unseeing. Shade’s body was the same, and it haunts me still. When I open my eyes again, Tiberias’s corpse is still there, hovering in my mind. I can’t shake the sight.
“That’s enough,” Farley says, stepping bodily between us. She all but hauls me away, with Evangeline smirking.
She falls into step behind us, prodding me in the right direction like I’m a cow being led to pasture. Or slaughter.
I don’t know Ocean Hill, but I know palaces well enough to know what I’m looking for. We climb a garish, winding stairwell to the residences, a floor dotted with royal chambers and apartments. Up here, away from the more public levels, the dust is worse than ever. It puffs up from the carpet in clouds. Coriane’s colors are all over. Gold and yellow, pale and worn. Forgotten everywhere but here. I wonder if they bring her son pain. Her son who almost joined her in death.
The king’s chambers are vast, opening off a guarded entry lined with Lerolan soldiers. They share Anabel’s colors and her coloring. Black hair and bronze eyes. Tiberias’s eyes. No one stops us as we pass, stepping into the sunken room now serving as a receiving chamber. A very crowded one.
I see Julian first, his back to the arched windows looking out on the now-sparkling Bay. It gleams blue in the afternoon sun. He angles his face to me, features pulling into an expression I can’t name. Sara Skonos stands at his side, her posture violently straight with her hands clasped in front of her. Though her hands are clean, the sleeves of her simple uniform are crusted to the elbows in both red and silver blood. I shudder at it. She doesn’t notice me at first, focused on the mountainous man in the center of the room. He sinks to his knees.
Farley quietly takes a seat, maneuvering herself in between a pair of Scarlet Guard lieutenants. She gestures for me to join her, but I stay put. I prefer the edges of this particular crowd.
I’ve never officially met the ruling lord of House Rhambos, but I recognize his bulk, even kneeling. His robes are unmistakable, resplendent in rich chocolate and crimson edged with precious stones. He is their leader, and the ruling governor of this city and region. His hair is dirty blond giving over to gray, braided back from his face in once-intricate rows. They’re coming undone, either from the battle or from the great lord pulling at his hair in desperation. I suppose both.
Silvers are not accustomed to surrendering.
I exhale, and will myself to look up from Rhambos’s shoulders to the true king standing above him. Sword in hand. The sight of him erases the corpse