While Lia met with Dearsley in the map tower, so she could see the damage, she said—Sondra and Ibolya acting as her escort—Vesno and I went to find Kara. He was down at the shipyard, still working on the repairs to the Last Resort. Boats of all kinds crowded the working harbor, unfortunately making the place look like a ship’s graveyard, given the sorry condition of most of them.
The dreadful fallout of the Battle at Cradysica continued to rain down, along with the more recent ravages to other parts of the island, and ever more broken boats had been towed to the busy shipyard near the palace. While we’d been off at Yekpehr on the rescue mission, the ship builders had triaged the wreckage. The most salvageable ships had been dry-docked and swarmed with workers—many of them my own people assisting the Calantheans—while other vessels had been drawn up on the long beach or floated nearby. I spotted only one of the three battleships we’d taken to Cradysica—not surprising, as the other two had seemed irredeemably sunk—and that one looked pretty beat up.
Another tier of boats that could still float were anchored a short distance out. Most of those had little left of the upper decks, and it looked like staying above the waterline was about all they could do.
Beyond that, on a long spit of flat rocks, hundreds of other boats of all sizes had been piled up, clearly junked and intended for salvage. The immensity of that pile loomed as large as my guilt.
You wrought this, they seemed to scream. All for your ego.
“Conrí!”
I started at the shout, for a moment hearing it as yet another accusation, then shook myself out of the daze, Vesno nudging his head under my hand. I was still running on far too little sleep, and while the mind-blowing sexual adventure with Lia the night before had been absolutely worth it, we hadn’t gone to sleep until very late. Or very early, more like. But we’d both slept hard and peacefully.
A blessing from Ejarat right there. I’d never imagined sex like that could be so cathartic. It had been for her, too. At least I’d done that right, given Lia what she needed. I’d never felt so powerful as when I’d had her trembling at my mercy. The way she’d looked at me when I finally carried her to our bed in the palace in the wee hours … She might not love me—Sawehl knew I’d given her no reason to—but she did trust me, and had some kind of affection for me. That could be enough. I hardly deserved more.
“Conrí.” Kara’s hand clapped my shoulder. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?” He narrowed his dark eyes. “You’re not drunk, are you?”
Drunk on fantastic sex, maybe. I shook him off. “Still catching up on sleep. How are repairs on the Last Resort?”
As we walked the short distance to the dry-docked yacht, a worker popped up from the deck and, seeing me, strode down the gangplank. Vesno dashed up to greet him like a friend. Realizing it must be Percy, I eyed him with some bemusement. He wore rough coveralls and thick-soled boots, and had his hair tied back in a functional club. With none of his usual finery, he looked efficient and almost plain—and when he stripped off his leather gloves, no jeweled nails graced his blunt fingers.
He raised a brow at my perusal. “Did you think I’d waste good clothes on the shipyard, or risk breaking a nail?”
I grinned at him. “I guess I did.”
He sniffed in disdain. “You’re such a brute, Conrí. Did you enjoy your adventure in the Night Court?”
Taken aback, I hesitated too long and Percy pounced.
“Oh,” he crooned. “You did. You’re blushing.”
No way was I blushing. Sawehl take me for an idiot.
“You went into the Night Court?” Kara asked. “The actual Night Court, itself—past the maze?”
“Yeah, what of it?” I made sure to sound absent about it, studying the Last Resort as Vesno charged ahead up the gangplank.
“Nothing, Conrí. Just … surprised.”
“Clearly you know about the maze and how to get there,” I noted, heading around the side of the ship to where the worst damage had been.
“Because I was warned away,” Kara replied stiffly, pacing beside me.
“Uh-huh.”
“Did Her Highness go with you?”
“None of your business.”
“Yes!” Percy crowed at the same time. “She did, for the first time, ever. Everyone is talking about it. But information is sadly scarce on what you two got up to. So spill.”
“How are the repairs coming?” I asked.
“They’re nearly complete,” Percy answered. “And my lifeboat will be ready as soon as tomorrow to be put in the water and sailed for a test run.”
“Good,” I grunted, peering up at the underside and the new planking that had been sealed and awaited a final coat of paint. “If all goes well at the temple, we could sail for Yekpehr in a few days.”
“Did you hear me, Conrí?” Percy’s voice rose. “I will not let you borrow my lifeboat again unless I receive some quid pro quo.”
“I thought you wanted to destroy Anure as much as any of us.”
“I do. But I can’t just twiddle my thumbs in the meantime. You are in possession of valuable gossip. I want it.”
I straightened and looked the smaller man in the eye. “No.”
He wasn’t intimidated in the least. Folding his arms, he didn’t budge. “Don’t be such a prude, Conrí. This is Calanthe. It’s hardly a big deal. We all talk about this sort of thing.”
“Then you’ll easily find someone to tell you.”
He unfolded a hand to wave it in disgust. “Those Night Court servants. So closed-lipped. Their sacred duty, blah blah blah. You have to give me something.”
Clearly I should send Hyacinth that something. A reward for her discretion. “Don’t have to. Not going to.”
“Then find another boat.”
I put a possessive hand on the keel of his, baring my teeth in a grin. “I like this one.”
“Besides the fact that it’s still our only seaworthy ship of any size,” Kara put in.
Percy lifted his nose. “Too bad you can’t have it.”
“Her Highness will simply commandeer it,” I pointed out, very reasonably.
“She would never,” he retorted. “Clearly, Conrí, you are unfamiliar with the Calanthean laws that assure sanctuary to asylum seekers, including the goods they bring with them.”
Really? I glanced at Kara, who shrugged his ignorance.
“Her Highness has no interest in looting the possessions of Her subjects,” Percy filled in archly. “She is a good and noble queen.”
“True,” I agreed ruefully. Lia and I would discuss this law of hers. “Too bad for you that I’m a rapacious brute with no regard for niceties.” I patted the boat. “Consider your yacht commandeered, Percy.”
He dropped his folded arms, opening and closing his mouth like a stranded fish. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“Already done. Kara, what supplies do you need?” I whistled for Vesno, who came bounding up, soaking wet from a romp in the bay. We walked away, leaving Percy fuming behind us. “You might keep an eye on him,” I said quietly. “Make sure he doesn’t sabotage the yacht.”
“He did us a favor lending us the Last Resort, Conrí.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m not trading Lia’s privacy for his favors.”
“For your sake or hers?”
“Same thing.” As I said it, I knew it was true. What had happened between us was too … precious to expose to gossip. “We’ll need more ships than the Last Resort,” I said, “depending on how many royal captives there are.”
Kara looked taken aback. “You think there are more than a dozen or so?”
“I don’t know, but I was thinking—if Lia’s theory is right that Anure has at least one captive for every kingdom, including the tiny ones…”
Kara whistled low and long, squinting at the listing battleships, then scanning some of the fishing boats we’d stolen from Hertaq. “I’ll see what else I can scrounge up.”
I clapped his shoulder. “Thank you.”
I returned to the palace via the gardens, passing by Dearsley’s offices and noting they were empty—which meant Lia was still at the map tower with her adviser. Since she’d given me a pass on the meeting—I knew most of it already, and she could fill me in on anything new—I decided to make a quick side trip while she was still occupied.
“Come on, Vesno. Want to see some pictures?”
The wolfhound woofed doubtfully but still faithfully followed at my heel as I turned down the quiet hallway to the portrait gallery. Not many people came this way—and the ones I did encounter acted a lot like they did in the Night Court, offering distant greetings and plenty of privacy.
I doubted that Lia—or her father, who’d started the collection—had meant for the gallery to become a kind of shrine, but for those of us refugees from the forgotten empires and scattered kingdoms, it was the one place we could go to see something of our homelands. I’d made a number of visits to the gallery before Cradysica, but hadn’t been back since. When I’d haunted the place before, though, I’d come to recognize a few of the other frequent visitors, all of us going to our own personal collection of portraits.
The gallery probably wasn’t meant to feel like a tomb, but the dim light—to protect the art—and profound silence gave it that feel. They’d packed the walls with portraits, landscapes, and other paintings, drawings, etchings, and renderings. Not arranged to please the eye, but grouped by cities within kingdoms. One wall held art that couldn’t be traced to any particular place, orphaned works like Lia’s new crown.
I always went straight to one portrait, dominating the center of the wall that held Oriel’s art. The royal family. My family. Lia’s words on regrets had been on my mind, and one of my many regrets at Cradysica had been that, as often as I’d visited this portrait, I’d never been able to bring myself to look at Rhéiane’s face. I’d assumed her dead, and in the most horrific way, but now that I knew she might be alive … Well, I wasn’t sure I remembered what she looked like, and if I was going to rescue her, I’d dammed well better be able to recognize her.
Not giving myself the opportunity to lose my nerve, I strode up to the painting, pointed at Vesno to sit, and looked right at Rhéiane.
It felt like a punch to the gut.
I had forgotten, far too much. I should’ve looked at Rhéiane’s portrait long before this, because I realized in that moment that I’d been carrying around the last image I’d had of her. The blood, and tears, and screaming … I shook that away and determinedly stared at this version of my sister. Painted not long before Anure began his campaign of terror and destruction, Rhéiane had been about sixteen, and beautiful with the first blossoming of womanhood.
With hair dark as a raven’s wing, like mine, but glossy and waving to the backs of her knees, she smiled impishly, full of merriment and vitality, her tawny eyes seeming to sparkle. She and Sondra had been fast friends, and I’d remembered Sondra as the beauty, but that had clearly been a little brother’s blindness. For Rhéiane had a radiance to her of intelligence and personality. And the sight of her face brought back a rush of memories, of her teasing me, reading to me—even yelling at me not to mess with her stuff. Which I always had anyway.
Some deep place in me stirred, like a seed putting up a shoot in soil long since dried and cracked. I remembered Rhéiane, and it was good.
Stepping back, I surveyed the wall full of images I’d previously ignored. Paintings of the crown city of Oriel, with the palace high on a craggy hill, tumbling in tiers to the buildings of the town. The seven walls circling in rings marking the various sections of the city, then opening to the rich pastureland below. Low stone walls wended through field and orchard, making designs.
There were more—paintings of famous people of Oriel I barely recalled learning about—and other scenes I didn’t recognize. A mirror-bright lake with snowcapped mountains beyond. Another city, bounded by three rivers, arched bridges spanning them. I had no idea where that might’ve been.
What did Oriel look like now? I guessed I’d pictured it like a scoured wasteland of ash and bare rock, much like Vurgmun. Probably the beat-up, grief-ridden boy I’d been had seen the mines at Vurgmun and painted all the world in those colors. Past time, probably, to rethink all kinds of things.
As I left, Vesno happy to escape the boring place I wouldn’t even let him investigate, I passed someone in a violet cloak, kneeling before another grouping of portraits. They made the sign of Yilkay’s blessing and stood as I came abreast, tipped back the cowled hood to reveal short silver hair.
“Good morning, Conrí,” Brenda said.
“Brenda.” I nodded at her, then looked curiously at the wall.
“Derten,” she offered, turning to look, too.
“Your homeland?” I asked. I was uncertain of polite manners in the best of circumstances, and among my people we observed the tacit courtesy of not asking about the past. It was easier that way, but maybe not better. I should’ve tried to remember the good things a long time ago.
“Yes. Next to fall to Anure after Oriel.” She tipped her head to me apologetically.
“I remember Derten,” I said, realizing I did. So many memories returning, as if by allowing a few, I’d opened a crack that kept widening. “You were allies of ours.”
“Bad ones. Derten failed to come to the aid of Oriel when your father called. Or maybe you don’t remember that.”
I shook my head. “I was a boy still, and a wayward one. My parents had decided to give me a few years before they tried to get me to sit still and listen to politics.” When she snorted, I smiled wryly. “Unfortunately, I think Lia faces the same frustration today.”
“Her Highness has a canny mind for politics,” Brenda acknowledged, “but you bring other talents to the table. You make a good team that way.”
With nothing to say to that—too much hope and too much regret there to touch—I studied the portraits. “Are you up here?”
“Me? No.” She shook her head for emphasis, then laughed without humor. “I was wayward myself. And a sixth child, after three brothers and two sisters. I hung out in the armory most of the time, decided I must’ve been adopted, the way I didn’t fit in, then ran off with a traveling mercenary group when I was fourteen. Thought I’d show them all.” She nodded at a portrait of a large royal family. “Missed the sitting for that one.”
“You were a princess?” I asked with too much surprise, because she barked out a laugh and wagged a finger at me.
“We come in all types, Conrí.”
“I apologize.”
“No need. As I said, I never fit the princess mold. When Anure took Oriel, I went home. My father immediately put me in charge of our military.” She turned and faced me, expression set. “If I’d stayed home, I might’ve been general when Oriel called—and I would’ve come. If we’d stopped Anure then…” She shook her head, then unfastened the clasp of the violet mourning cloak at her throat and bundled it under her arm. “So you see. It’s me who owes you the apology.” She bowed, low and formal.
I gripped her shoulder, levering her up. “You can’t think that way. The if-onlys will make you crazy.”
Her eyes unexpectedly filled with tears, an odd sight in her tough warrior’s face. “I know. But I keep thinking, if I’d just stuck it out, I could’ve made a difference—and maybe gotten to know my brothers and sisters. As it was, I lost them all and became an actual orphan. A bitter joke.”
I had no answer to that, so I just squeezed her shoulder. “But you’re alive now to make a difference.”
“Yeah, about that…” She turned and started walking, Vesno bounding up from his patient sitting to trot between us. “According to your theory, Anure has one of my siblings.”
“It’s really Lia’s theory.”
“I keep trying to figure who.”
“You didn’t see any bodies?”
“Dertens cremate their dead. And I was at the front lines fighting Anure’s army when a strike team went to da’Derten. Our primary fortified city,” she added when she saw I didn’t know it. “The entire ruling family was killed. By the time I got back, they’d all been burned and committed to the sea. Or so I’d always thought.”
I nodded, understanding all the things she didn’t say, and we walked on in silence.
“Hey, want to see something?” Brenda stopped at the collection of orphaned art near the entrance. Sunshine, birdsong, and the flower-scented air of Calanthe streamed through the giant open doors, three times my height, dispelling some of the funereal gloom of the gallery. She pointed at a life-sized portrait of an elaborately gowned woman. Perfectly coifed and wearing a crown, she smiled serenely out at the viewer. “Recognize her?”
“Should I? I don’t—wait. Agatha?”
“I think it has to be. The likeness is uncanny.”
“A princess, or a queen?”
“That looks like a queen’s crown to me, though I don’t know.”
“You never asked?”
She shook her head, grimacing. “We don’t ask, do we? And I don’t know that she even realizes this portrait is here. You know how it is—some of us visit here religiously and others can’t bear to. She’s one who doesn’t, and I’ve never quite brought myself to mention it to her—I just happened to glance at it one day and boom! That’s Agatha, or a twin sister. Could be her mother, I guess, but I think it’s her. The dress style isn’t that old.”
I studied the image, finding it hard to reconcile the plump, even merry woman in the painting with thin, enervated Agatha the weaver. Brenda was right, though: The resemblance was too perfect to be coincidence. “And she was captive in Yekpehr, but escaped.”
“Yeah. I was surprised as you all to discover that tidbit.”
“Have you spoken with her since we returned from the citadel?”
“Last night was the first time she came out of her rooms since you got back. She only stayed for a little while.”
“Think she’ll go back with us?”
“Hard to say—but I’ll find out.”
“Thanks, General.”
She smiled a little at that, though sadly. “By the way, I will go with you.”
“You sure?”
“Never been more sure. If one or more of my brothers and sisters are in there, I owe it to them to do this.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I made it back to our rooms ahead of Lia, but just barely. I’d just poured some fresh water for Vesno from a pitcher into a bowl at the station Ibolya had thoughtfully set up for him when the doors opened and Lia glided in.
Even though Lia still hadn’t resumed the ritual of entertaining the Morning Glories, I’d vacated her bed at Ibolya’s knock and left the ladies to their grooming. So aside from a sleepy wake-up kiss, I hadn’t seen Lia yet that day.
She’d continued in the same vein as the night before, wearing a slinky gown that looked almost like a dressing robe to me. Except fancy. A pretty coppery color that matched some of the dark gold in her new crown and brought out her pale skin and jewel-like eyes, the robe had long sleeves that ended in huge cuffs bordered with a black angular pattern. The deep vee in front, bordered with the same pattern, showed off a lot of her breasts—which were obviously otherwise naked—and then a big black sash twice the width of my hand cinched her waist, tied off to the side in a giant, intricate bow. The robe divided over her long, lovely thighs, skimming to her sleek black heels. Along the bottom hem, stylized figures danced along the angular border, as if in worship. Hard to blame them.
Spotting me, she blushed, a pretty pinking of her high cheekbones. I grinned at her and she rolled her eyes. Yeah, the pair of us. You’d think we were kids.
Sondra muttered something and stalked over to flop on a sofa while Ibolya started to greet me, then cried out in dismay. “Oh, Conrí, I’d just had him bathed.”
I followed her gaze to Vesno, currently lapping up water and shedding sand with equal enthusiasm. He’d probably tracked it all through the portrait gallery and palace, too. Oops. “Sorry, Ibolya.”
She gave me an exasperated look, and I couldn’t help smiling. I’d rather she treated me like a pain-in-the-ass brother than the formal bowing and scraping. Of course, that made me think of Rhéiane, and her brilliant smile, her youth and innocence. Would any of that girl remain? I pushed that thought aside. I was going after her as soon as I could. I had to help Lia wrestle Calanthe first. Since it was my fault she had to do this in the first place, I owed her that.
“I’ll have to see him bathed if he’s going to ride in the carriage with You, Your Highness.”
Lia looked up from a scroll she’d been reading, one of a number that had been piled on her private desk in the short few hours we’d been gone. “No need. He’ll just get dirty again, since we’ll be riding to the temple.”
“Ride, Your Highness?” Ibolya repeated, somewhat faintly.
“Yes, on horseback,” Lia clarified unnecessarily, sliding me a serene look, her eyes dancing with mischief. “Conrí prefers it.”
“Ambrose is not fond of riding horses,” Sondra commented.
“But he can do it, and has,” I supplied. “Is Ambrose coming with us, though?”
“Yes.” Lia tossed the scroll aside, rubbing her twig hand with the good one. It must be itching or aching. Both, maybe. Her face darkened with concern. “I’ll need him to reach Merle before I attempt anything else. More disaster reports have come in. Abating the storm helped, but the earth tremors are worsening. I don’t want to delay any longer.”
“How soon do you want to leave?”
“Immediately. I can leave as soon as we pack some things. The path isn’t long or arduous. We should be able to reach the temple in a few hours.”
“I’ll roust out Ambrose while you do that,” I said. This time I’d be prepared and grab a ladder along the way.
“I’ll help you,” Sondra offered, sounding resigned as she stood. “Ejarat only knows how long it will take, though.”
“No time at all,” Ambrose declared, breezing through the double doors that opened of their own accord, the surprised guards still reaching for the handles. “Really, Conrí. You should know I’m never late. And I love horses. I live to ride. Get your facts straight.”
I shook my head, catching Lia’s amused smile. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
In less than half an hour, we’d mounted and were riding out. Lia had planned that outfit with this in mind, it turned out—no surprise there—and wore close-fitting silk pants under the robe, in a matching copper color. She’d traded the heels for soft black leather boots that hugged her calves and chimed with copper chains. She also wore a matching black glove on her good hand, which held the reins, while she tucked the twig hand into a loose pocket, the orchid above it lush in similar shades of copper and purple.
Though a crowd had gathered to see us off, showering us with flower petals, once we left the palace grounds, we turned onto a quiet trail through the forest that went inland. “This is the Pilgrims’ Path to the temple,” Lia explained as we rode side by side.
Ambrose and Ibolya rode behind us, chatting amiably about flower varieties, by the sound of it. Sondra brought up the rear, sulking because Ambrose had dodged teaching her to use the stolen walking stick, which she’d brought along, thinking to have the wizard’s undivided attention for a few hours. Vesno, naturally, raced ahead—periodically returning to check on our sadly slow progress.
“Does that mean no parade party?” I asked.
She slid me a tolerant smile. “It does. The journey is intended to be a time of reflection, an opportunity to meditate on Calanthe’s verdant beauty and to commune with Her.”
“Ah. Is that a hint for me to be quiet?”
“No.” A faint line drew her brows together. “I have no intention of communing with Calanthe before I have to.”
“That bad?”
She blew out a breath, glancing at me with a rueful grimace. “That might be overstating things. I’m keeping the communication minimal, regardless.”
I considered that. Lia was no coward, and she’d never shirked from a perceived duty. “I know it’s not because you’re afraid or lazy,” I said, deciding going with that thought was a start anyway.
“But I am afraid,” she replied softly enough that she couldn’t be overheard.
“What are you afraid of, exactly?”
She frowned at me. “Isn’t it obvious?”
I shook my head. “When I’m worked up and worrying about some battle or something, I—”
“You?” she interrupted. “The great and terrible Conrí, worried and afraid?” A teasing smile danced on her pretty lips, but I gazed back at her somberly.
“More than you know, Lia,” I answered. I didn’t say that the most afraid I’d ever been, though, was when I realized Anure had taken her. “Anyway, I ask myself, what exactly am I afraid of? What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
She chewed her lower lip, sharp teeth flashing in lethal contrast to the soft pink. “The worst that can happen is Calanthe will shrug off My grip, rise from the sea—killing us and the entire population of the island in the process—and rampage around the world in an unstoppable destructive frenzy.”
“Well, we won’t care about that part if we’re dead, right?” I pointed out.
She laughed, catching it back as if she hadn’t meant to. “I suppose that’s true. Grim, but true.”
“And if you don’t attempt this thing at the temple, what’s the worst that can happen?”
Tipping her chin as if I’d scored a point, she took a long breath. “The same.”
“There you are.”
She slid me a look. “My feral wolf: warrior king and philosopher.”
I snorted. “Do you really allow asylum seekers to keep everything they bring with them to Calanthe? No tithing or required gifts?”
“There’s a change of subject,” she noted, arching a brow.
“Did you still want to talk worst-case scenarios?”
“No,” she agreed fervently. “And yes, that is My law. Why do you ask?”
“Eh—Percy and I had a disagreement. I ended it by commandeering the Last Resort.”
“Oh yes. He came to Me about that.”
“He did? That was fast.” The little shit must’ve found her while I lingered in the portrait gallery.
“Yes. He pounced on Me outside of the meeting with Dearsley. He was most put out.”
Huh. I eyed her. “What did you say?”
She shrugged, eyes on the path ahead. “I told him that I don’t hold your leash, and that if he wanted to appeal your decision, he’d have to take it up with you.”
I laughed, appreciating her ever more. “Cagey of you, to sidestep your own laws that way.”
“It’s not sidestepping. There are simply certain loopholes introduced by your presence.”
“Meaning you find it useful to let me be the bad guy.”
“Why, Conrí.” She managed to look shocked and offended at once, one of her deliberately exaggerated expressions. “I can’t imagine how you’d come to such a conclusion. I am but a simple woman. How can you expect me to wield influence over the terrible and terrifying Conqueror of Keiost?”
I burst out into a hearty guffaw, enjoying the sly twinkle in her eyes—and that she’d forgotten to be afraid for a few minutes. “We make a good team.”
Something dimmed in her, even as she nodded vaguely. Well, shit. I’d been so pleased when Brenda said that, but Lia apparently not so much. “What’s that look for?” I asked.
She deliberately brightened, smoothing her face. “I beg your pardon?”
“Why did that bother you that I said we make a good team?”
Gaze steadfastly on the path ahead, she lifted her chin and firmed her lips. Stiffening her spine with regal resolve. “It didn’t.”
“Lia, talk to me.”
Sighing, she shook her head. “This isn’t the time or place for this conversation.”
“We have a few hours, right? And no one is listening to us, so this seems like the perfect time and place. You know we never get anywhere when we don’t communicate.”
“Well, you won’t like this communication,” she said, curling sarcasm around the word.
“Try me.”
“Fine.” She didn’t sound annoyed, though. She sounded … sad. “Con, it doesn’t matter what kind of team we make. We both know that you can’t stay on Calanthe. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
Wait. What? I shook my head, tempted to thump my ear to check my hearing. “What under Sawehl’s gaze are you talking about, Lia? Where else would I go?”
She faced me with a long and resolute look. “Oriel.”
I stared back, feeling like I’d hit myself in the head with my own rock hammer. Stunned, I tried to process that, while she watched me think it through, compassion in her eyes, though nothing could disturb the impassive mask she wore.
“Oriel,” I breathed. Somehow, despite everything, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would go there. Home, some deep, long forgotten part of me murmured. Maybe Oriel Herself, calling out to me, like the voice of my mother.
Lia tilted her head, smiling wryly, as if she sensed me hearing that call. For all I knew, she could. She’d said she heard the voices of all the orphaned realms crying in her dreams. Oriel would be one of them. The land I’d been born to rule and had abandoned. Sure, Anure had ripped me from it, but when we escaped Vurgmun, it had never once occurred to me to go home to Oriel. But now, as if she’d pulled stuffing from my ears, I heard the siren song of home. Those paintings in the gallery had been calling, too. That lake, the city of bridges I didn’t even know the name of. They were Mine.
“See?” Lia’s smile turned sorrowful. “You have to go, Con. Oriel needs you. You are a king; that’s not something you can walk away from, even if you wanted to. I would never stand in the way of that.”
“Even if I go to Oriel, you can come with me.”
“I can’t. I cannot survive leaving Calanthe again. I have to be here, just as you have to be in Oriel. Only more extreme, because I draw life from Calanthe. Orchids can’t live on their own,” she reminded me with an attempt at a smile that failed miserably.
“Maybe I don’t have to be in Oriel,” I argued, feeling desperate. “What would we have done in that other time line of yours, if I’d come to court you and convinced you to be my wife?”
“Probably it would’ve been a condition of marriage that you stay here with Me on Calanthe.” She shrugged. “We’ll never know.”
“No, that makes sense.” I seized on that idea. “Rhéiane was crown princess—and older than me—so she can be queen of Oriel.”
“If it’s your Rhéiane in Yekpehr. If we can rescue her. If we can destroy Anure’s power. If we can elude the wizards. If I can return the nobles to their lands. That’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty, Con.”
I filled in the condition she’d been too circumspect to say aloud. If Rhéiane hasn’t lost her mind. “And all of that is if we don’t all die and slide into the sea by tomorrow,” I countered grimly.
She laughed, though I hadn’t meant it as a joke. “An excellent point.”
“A critical point. If we manage all of that, then yes, I’ll go home to Oriel—just to see if anything is even left of the land, maybe help Rhéiane get her footing—but then I’ll come back here, to Calanthe. Home,” I added belatedly, but not quickly enough to deceive her.
“When did you start thinking of Calanthe as home?” she challenged, those bicolored eyes so brilliant in their ability to see through me. “Be honest, Con. You don’t. And you shouldn’t need to pretend you do. You’d never set foot on My island until a few weeks ago. This is not a place that demands your fealty. Oriel does. We both know that.”
I struggled to find the argument to counter that. “My home is with you.”
She smiled, but it wobbled with heartbreak. “That’s a lovely sentiment, but you and I are not people who can indulge sentiment. If you gave up Oriel for Me, you would be forever second place here on Calanthe, a land that isn’t Yours. And in time any affection you have for Me would turn bitter and resentful. I don’t think I could bear that.”
“Can’t we just savor the moment then?” I pressed. “We’re alive now, together now.”
She managed a small smile. “I thought that’s what we had been doing.”
“All right then.”
“But Con—no more talk of marriage, please. Or being a team, or of a future that might never come to be. I can’t—” She firmed her jaw, lifting it and drawing her cloak of regal indifference around her. Not that it fooled me, not anymore.
“What can’t you do, Lia?” I asked quietly, the burr in my voice harsh. “Love me?”
Her eyes flashed as she glanced at me, quickly gone again as she focused on the path ahead. And didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.