49

The Truth has a Way

I stare at Reven, for once at a total loss for words. Because I was going to tell him, just not like this. And yet all I can think is that I like the sound of my name in that hard, smooth voice. Like a caress.

I have never been more aware of what each individual part of me is doing than in this moment. Breath blowing through my nose hard enough to make a sound in my head. My body still entwined with his. My entire being feels wobbly, though I am not sure which part of what has happened is causing that.

But mostly I am aware of my face.

Shock holds my expression immobile as I stare at him, trying to get my brain to contribute to the conversation.

“Who are you?” Reven’s voice is an unforgiving snarl. His grip on my hand tightens, betrayal in his eyes so bleak, I flinch. “Answer the question…Meren.”

Okay, maybe I don’t like the way he says my name when it’s like that, a harsh curse of a word.

I clear my throat. “My name is Princess Mereneith Evangeline XII of Aryd. Princess— Queen Tabra is my twin sister.”

If a gaze could inflict physical harm, Reven’s would definitely have maimed me. A blaze of fury flares in those cerulean depths, and yet no answering fear rises up inside me.

He jerks away from me, and my gaze traces over the sublime contours of his body, which is rigid with anger.

He throws a wad of clothes at me. “Get dressed.”

I swallow and do so as quickly as shaking hands will let me, aware he’s doing the same by the rustle of noises. I only pause when I realize he’s provided me with new knives. I want to say something but don’t, strapping them on.

When the room goes quiet, I get to my feet and face him. I’m not sure how long we stand there, staring at each other. I’m trying to get everything inside me to line up, thoughts and emotions all tumbling together, then pulling me in a thousand directions.

“The body double setup was the truth?” he asks. But I don’t mistake the quiet of his voice for a softening of his anger.

“Yes. But I’m the double, not her.” I sigh. “Second born, second best.”

He makes a sound deep in his throat, but I don’t know what it means.

“Goddess,” he mutters more to himself. Then pins me with a searching look, one rippling with surprise. “That was you. In Enora. The girl at the gate.”

Shock is an old companion by now. “How did you know?” My face was covered, and I disguised my voice.

“I don’t know. Something in the way you feel in the dark. Familiar.”

Oh. “I live in Enora when I’m not standing in for Tabra. Sometimes I escape into the desert.”

He jerks his gaze away as if coming to terms with something. But maybe I’m wrong, because when he turns back to me, he’s controlled again. “If you’re the princess’s twin, that makes you royal.” His brows lower. “Why are you acting like some kind of glorified bodyguard?”

Obviously, like me, he saw only flashes of memories during that mind-share. “As I said—family tradition.”

His jaw works. “This is truly not the time to be flippant.”

“I’m not,” I assure him. It’s not flippancy—it’s guilt. I should have told him sooner. I know this. “I was going to tell you. The secret I was going to share on the boat, before we found the glass in my side.”

He crosses his arms, not voicing his doubts aloud, but they’re there to see plainly. I sigh again, then start telling him. Everything. Doing my best to explain the hows and whys.

He listens in stone-statue mode with the intense staring. The man should think about taking up with gargoyles—he’d fit right in. But he doesn’t interrupt. At one point, I think maybe he’s angry again. Something in his face shifts. A Shadow, maybe? But he says nothing, so I keep going until it’s all out there. Unvarnished truth. The basics, at least.

“So I took the wrong princess but got the right Hylorae,” he muses when I’m finished.

I drop my gaze to the ground because I don’t want him to see how that hurts. Deep. Once again, the person I am underneath—Meren Evangeline—isn’t worth anything on her own. Even after what we shared.

I should be used to it by now.

“What about the whispers of an uprising you told me about? Was any of that true?”

The question brings my head up. “Yes. I hear about it when I’m not with my sister. When I live among the people.”

“So your sister needs you there,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. He frowns. “What is your sister’s power?”

“It should be soul-related, but she hasn’t come into it yet. I was early with mine, so Grandmother made me keep it secret.”

He runs a hand over his jaw, brows pulling down into a frown. Then he pauses, gaze turning distant like he’s sifting through memories, head cocked and shoulders growing tenser by the minute.

“The sand nymph,” he whispers to himself. He snaps his gaze to mine, urgency in every nuance of his expression. “A sand nymph was at your birth. I saw her, in the visions just now.”

I frown my confusion. “Of course. One comes to the birth of every royal and authoritate in Aryd, or anyone else who can afford them. They bless the newborn baby.”

Or babies, in my case.

“I don’t think she was there to bless.” He frowns, again looking inward, but shakes his head hard like he’s trying to knock the memories into some kind of sense. “She…” He squeezes his eyes shut, and I can see them moving under the lids.

I stand there, waiting, so confused and tired of being that way. Because if I learn one more horrible thing that I can’t do anything to fix, I might scream.

Darkness pulses around him, and his eyes flash open, troubled, grim. “She was there to curse the baby. The women in the room didn’t catch what she was whispering, but I could hear it in the vision.”

Icy dread reaches through my body to strangle my insides with a searing grip. “What?”

No. Oh goddess, no. Tabra.

“The nymph started to curse Tabra, but she stopped—” He cuts himself off. The rage that roils over his features is not at me, and yet it scares me maybe more than anything else I’ve gone through in the last few days. “She cursed you instead,” he says, the words as heavy as lead.

Shock holds me as still as the desert on a windless night.

He must see it in my face because suddenly he’s in front of me. Not touching, not cupping my head. I think he’s still too angry with me for that. But he’s there.

“What kind of curse?” I force myself to ask through stiff lips.

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t see that. But I think Eidolon has been waiting for it to kick in—”

The blood drains from my head so fast, I’m probably white as the snow fields. Because Reven was wrong in his assumptions about me and the king. “He doesn’t want me.”

He frowns. “What?”

“Eidolon doesn’t want me. He wants Tabra.”

Reven turns even more intense, if that’s possible. “What do you mean? Of course he wants you. The sand, the portals, the curse…”

It all made sense, which is why I believed him. But this curse… The sand nymph was sent by Eidolon. I feel the knowledge deep in my bones. Perhaps the king could use me for those things Reven said, but if the curse was supposed to be on Tabra, not me, then the sand nymph defied the king.

Her reason right now doesn’t matter. But the king’s…

Oh goddess. Why did we never see this sooner? “I think he needs a soul power.”

“What?”

I clear my throat and say it louder. “What if he needs a soul power?”

“Explain.”

I wish I could reach out, hold on to Reven, center myself on him, because I have to say this. “I told you why I’m Tabra’s body double. But Eidolon is why we do this. Because he keeps taking Aryd queens and killing them.”

He waits for more.

“Almost every one he’s taken were Enfernae who wielded a soul-related power.” The words come out as a stark whisper. “One could heal broken souls. One could feel souls, like identifying personalities. There are others.”

He shakes his head sharply. Once. Twice. “No.”

“It makes sense. You were there for at least one of those killings, and she had a soul power.”

He rears back at that. “How—”

“I saw it in my visions of you. Don’t you remember?”

“I—” He shakes his head. “The memories before I split are…difficult.”

As in, the Shadows won’t let him see.

We both fall silent, thinking.

“But you said the queens he took…” He’s pacing the room now like a caged Devourer. “He never came for your grandmother’s twin?”

“No.” Omma’s power is even lesser. “It doesn’t happen every generation. There doesn’t seem to be rhyme or reason for it.”

“What does she do?”

“Omma can see which afterlife a soul will be sent to.” I always thought she was a little bitter about that. It’s not exactly helpful. Which could be why Eidolon didn’t bother with her. “Maybe weaker powers aren’t worth the effort or risk?”

Reven shakes his head. “That’s not it. There has to be a reason he’s more interested in the Enfernae than the Hylorae. Has he only ever taken the queen? Never the second born, the body double?”

“It’s a mix of both. So maybe it’s not about who’s queen.”

“All those taken were Enfernae?”

“No.” I’m nodding slowly now, thinking over every detail Omma and Grandmother ever told me about this. “But what if he got those few Hylorae on accident? Or something.” It’s a stretch. “What if he’s waiting for a specific manifestation of the soul ability, but we haven’t produced it yet? It would explain why he lets the twin stay on the throne after he kills her sister. He needs our line to continue until he gets what he needs.”

There are holes I’m not seeing to this explanation, but it feels right. An immortal king doesn’t just torture a royal house for centuries with no reason.

He needs us.

“That has to be it right?”

Reven deflates a little, then goes quiet, like he’s turned his gaze inward again. “I was wrong,” he whispers.

“What about?”

He blinks as if returning to me. “The reason I thought… Goddess, I assumed he wanted you for a portal because of a memory from when I was his shadow. Not the one you saw, apparently. He was demanding a woman make a portal. When she couldn’t…” He swallows. “He killed her.”

Holy mother goddess of all that is dear and dreadful in this world. Reven was there when my ancestress was murdered? No wonder he took the Shadows and ran.

“But you’re right. If the nymph was supposed to curse Tabra, who will be a soul Enfernae—” He closes his eyes abruptly. “Fuck.”

“What?”

“Me.” He opens his eyes. “The curse—at least, I think—was because of me. He sent the nymph only a few years after I left and took all his Shadows. It’s so obvious.”

“Um. Not to me.”

“The nymph would know which one of you was the soul Enfernae. Might even know what form your sister’s powers will take. Whatever he wants from that half of your line, even if she doesn’t have it, he can’t risk letting it—her—slip away. Because I stole his Shadows. I took his immortality. She’s his last hope.”

If I had gone white before, Reven does his best to compete now. The fact that this man, who I’ve known such a short while and yet have come to see as someone almost unbeatable, could experience even a portion of that fear only feeds my own.

This has to be the king’s plan. Or at least part of it. Whatever Eidolon needs from my line, he must be desperate—the curse, that amulet, and now, in less than three days, he’s going to marry my sister.

He has never done any of that before. Not that I know of.

If we’re right, Reven and I have both made terrible mistakes.

The shadows shift around us strangely.

I take a quick peek at Reven’s face and very carefully take a step back, the same way I would step away from a coiled snake. Because the face looking back at me is no longer him.