War Storm (Red Queen) - Victoria Aveyard Page 0,3

How can I really fault him for that?”

With a will, I meet Farley’s eyes and search. She doesn’t have an answer for me, at least not one I would like. Her teeth worry at her lip, biting back whatever she wants to say. It doesn’t work.

She scoffs, trying to be her version of gentle. As prickly as ever. “Don’t apologize for him and what he is.”

“I’m not.”

“It certainly sounds like it,” she sighs, exasperated. “A different king is still a king. He might be a brick, but he knows that much.”

“Maybe it could have been the right thing for me too. For Reds. Who knows what a Red queen could have done?”

“Very little, Mare. If anything at all,” she says with cold surety. “Any change that might come from putting a crown on your head would be too slow, too small.” Her voice softens. “And too easily undone. It wouldn’t last. Whatever we accomplished would die with you. Don’t take this the wrong way, but the world we want to build has to outlive us.”

For the ones who come after.

Farley’s eyes bore into me, intense with her almost inhuman focus. Clara has Shade’s eyes, not Farley’s. Honey, not ocean. I wonder which pieces of her will one day belong to Farley or to Shade.

The breeze rustles Farley’s freshly shorn hair, dark gold in the shadow of the clouds. Beneath the scars, she’s still young, just another child of war and ruin. She’s seen worse than me, done more than I ever have. Sacrificed and suffered more too. Her mother, her sister, my brother and his love. Whoever she dreamed of being when she was a little girl. All gone. If she can keep pushing forward, still believing in what we’re doing, so can I. For as much as we butt heads, I trust Farley. And her words are an unfamiliar but needed comfort. I’ve already spent so much time in my own head, arguing with myself, that I’m beginning to get sick of it.

“You’re right.” Something inside me lets go, allowing the strange dream of Cal’s offer to spiral into darkness. Never to return.

I will not be a Red queen.

Farley gives my shoulder an almost painful squeeze. Despite the healers, I’m still sore, and she still has a wickedly strong grip. “Besides,” she adds, “it wouldn’t be you on the throne. The Lerolan queen and the king of the Rift were very clear. It would be her, the Samos girl.”

I snort at the notion. Evangeline Samos made her intentions obvious enough back in the council chamber. I’m surprised Farley didn’t notice. “Not if she can help it.”

“Hmm?” Her gaze sharpens and I shrug.

“You saw what she did in there, how she provoked you.” The fresh memory flashes. Evangeline calling upon a Red servant in front of everyone, smashing a goblet, forcing the poor maid to clean it up, simply for the sport of it. To anger every red-blooded person in the room. It’s not hard to understand why she did it, or what she hoped to accomplish. “She wants no part of this alliance, not when it means she has to marry . . . Tiberias.”

For once, Farley seems caught off guard. She blinks, perplexed. Albeit intrigued. “But she’s back where she started. I thought—I mean, I don’t pretend to understand Silver behavior at all, but still—”

“Evangeline is a princess in her own right now, with everything she ever wanted. I don’t think she wants to go back to being someone else’s. That’s all their betrothal ever was to her. And him,” I add, with a pang of heartache. “An arrangement for power. Power she already has now, or”—my words falter a little—“power she doesn’t want anymore.” I think back on Evangeline, on my time spent with her in Whitefire. She was relieved when Maven married Iris Cygnet instead of her. And not just because he was a monster. I think because . . . there was someone else she cared about more. More than herself or Maven’s crown.

Elane Haven. After her house rebelled against him, I remember Maven called her Evangeline’s whore. I didn’t notice Elane at the council, but much of House Haven stands behind House Samos, allied to them. Shadows all, able to disappear at will. I suppose Elane could have been there the whole time and I wouldn’t even know it.

“You think she would try to undo her father’s work? If she could?” Farley looks very much like a cat that just caught a particularly fat