When the nightmares chased me from sleep, Con had already gone. I should’ve been relieved at his absence while I examined my hands, seeing that I still had them both, but I missed his comforting presence. With a sigh of regret—tempted to go look for him and knowing it to be futile—I reached for the dreamthink instead.
Lying in the sheets that smelled of my husband and sex, I let my mind wander out to Calanthe. The birds showed me the rising sun. The fish swam through crystal waters, fat and pleased. Unease rippled through the people in some sharp bursts, but for the most part they rose lazily from their beds, or worked at their morning tasks, with their usual songs and greetings.
No foreign fleet in Calanthe’s waters. Not yet.
It lay out there, though, like one of the tropical storms still far beyond the horizon, spinning its way toward Calanthe. And this one I would not be able to send gently around us. I could only hold it for Con’s ideal arrival time. Trust him to take it from there. The manacled wolf, now free of his chains, and at the helm of the vessel I rode on. I had no choice now but to travel through the fire with him, and either perish or emerge on the other side.
By tomorrow, I’d know which it was. There was a restfulness to that, a fierce resolve in enduring the fury of the storm unleashed. No more hiding. No more waiting and dreading.
Because I had the time—no Morning Glory waiting for me to wake—and because it might be the last time, I cast my mind all over the length and breadth of Calanthe. I visited every part of the land and water and air of my realm, drawing succor from the vitality and innate joy of my home and mother, touching all those lives and sending my love. I wanted them to know that, if I was forced to leave them, I didn’t want to go.
I found nothing to answer the questions in my heart, however. Whatever Con had been about to confess, I’d been relieved that he hadn’t. We’d made vows to each other, tied our lives and fates together. We didn’t need emotional declarations to muddy the waters. Any more than they already were.
I stretched, deliberately making noise, and Ibolya peeked through the barely cracked door. Seeing me awake, she came in, gorgeously dressed for the day ahead, and curtsied. “Arise, Your Highness,” she said with a smile. “The realm awaits the sun of Your presence.”
And so it began.
Con took one look at my gown and swore viciously under his breath. Striding across the courtyard to me, he took me by the arm and guided me away from my entourage of ladies and anxious Cradysicans.
“Did you have to announce we’d be facing battle to the entire world?” he hissed in my ear.
“Yes,” I replied. “To present Myself otherwise would be a lie, and I won’t lie to My people.” Besides, the gown made me feel better. Not exactly armor, but the finely wrought overlapping leaves in shades of gold and silver gave that look. Without underskirts or my usual framework, the skirt flowed light and loose, allowing me to step quickly on flat-heeled golden boots. I wore no flowers today, only the jeweled designs of bloody roses interspersed among the metal leaves. Matching gauntlets covered my arms, finishing with points at my hands, and rising to frame my throat with curling thorns. No elaborate wig for me today, I wore one I’d asked Nahua to modify—a sleek black cap of hair that lay close against my scalp, just enough for my crown to be pinned to.
“You’re wearing armor,” I added. He looked intimidating, dangerous, and ferally sexual, too. With his hair loose, the black armor of leather, metal pins, and the cloak of stitched skins, he could’ve stepped out of my dreams. We’d come some distance together that I found him fatally attractive instead of terrifying. In those scarred hands, I’d placed the salvation of my realm, and possibly of myself. Not that I expected to be saved.
“Yes,” he said, “but people expect it of me and my people. You know perfectly well what kind of message you’re sending.”
“True.” I gave him a cool, unrepentant smile, letting him see that I wouldn’t back down. Nor would I hide. “I brought it with Me all this way, expressly for this purpose. I can’t not wear it,” I finished in an aghast voice, mimicking one of the fashionable ladies of court.
With a shake of his head, suppressing a smile, Con picked up my hand, examining the scarlet sheaths of my nails. “In the mood to kill, then?”
“Let them come at Me,” I replied. Our gazes caught and held, and we shared for a moment that same bloody determination to fight. He acknowledged it with a hint of ruefulness. “I have a gift for you,” I said.
“Now?” He seemed taken aback, even embarrassed, making me wonder what he thought I intended.
“Yes. Because this might be my last opportunity.”
“Don’t say that.” His hand tightened on mine.
“Of peace and quiet,” I clarified. “Soon we’ll be consumed in activity.”
“Oh.” He relaxed, but barely.
I signaled to Zariah, who came forward, the wolfhound at her side. She curtsied, and the hound sat at my heel, looking Con over as Zariah withdrew.
“That’s the biggest dog I’ve ever seen in my life,” Con commented with some awe.
I laid a hand on the wolfhound’s head. “This is Vesno. He wishes to be your companion.”
The wolfhound’s jaws opened, tongue lolling out in a canine grin, and he woofed softly at Con.
“My … companion?” Con seemed unduly stunned. “The … dog wishes?”
“I can touch his mind, Con,” I explained, stroking Vesno’s silky head. “I asked and he affirmed. He is one of Mine, so I will be able to see through his eyes, hear through his ears. He will defend you.”
“And report on me to you,” Con finished wryly.
“Not like that,” I protested, before his stern expression melted into a grin, the dimple of real happiness flashing into life.
Con crouched, holding out a hand to Vesno—the correct way, offering the back of his hand, fingers safely tucked in, just in case—and waiting for the wolfhound to come to him. Vesno sniffed, then licked Con’s hand. Con stroked the dog’s head, glancing up at me, emotion in his eyes. “This is the finest gift anyone has ever given me.”
“Good,” I replied, having to steady my own voice against the surge of unexpected feeling. “Every wolf should have a pack,” I added, managing to make that sound lighter.
“Thank you.” Con stood and touched my cheek. “Even your makeup looks like armor,” he noted. “The warrior queen. Lia, I want to—” His eyes flicked past me. “Ah, and here comes Ambrose, with my gift for you.”
Feeling like Con must have, I turned in surprise—with a sense of giddy pleasure. My subjects and emissaries gave me gifts all the time, naturally. Tokens to curry favor. Rare items to grace the Court of Flowers. Carefully preserved relics painstakingly smuggled to Calanthe for safekeeping. None of them were truly for me, for the woman. All were meant for Calanthe, and I dealt with them accordingly.
With a broad smile and a flourish, Ambrose presented me with a stick. Made of gleaming knobs of violet and pink, it looked like a finger from a giant. Con grinned at me, his dimple deep and delighted, and I remembered. A sweet tree-finger, he’d called it. I accepted it, scenting its candy perfume now, and raised a brow at Con. “Where’s yours?”
“I thought we could share,” he said, with an intimate smile. “Taste it.”
I examined the thing, uncertain. It looked too hard to bite.
“You lick it,” Con said, a laugh in his voice, and took the thing from me. Holding my gaze, he put the tip to his mouth, tongue swirling over it suggestively. I narrowed my eyes at the sensual challenge. Taking it back, I put it to my own mouth—painted scarlet like my nails—and mimicked Con. It was sugary and rich, with a flavor unlike anything I’d ever tasted. Full of the effervescence of magic. A little moan of pleasure escaped me, and Con threw his head back in a full belly laugh, hoarse, but uninhibited.
Ambrose only looked genially pleased. “It’s been a long time since I made one of these. I’m so glad You like it.”
“I do. Thank you.” I waited for Con to look at me, his golden eyes sparkling with a hint of the verve of that long-ago boy in the painting. “Thank you for this gift, Conrí. It may be the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever received.”
His big hand settled on Vesno’s head. Already attuned to Con, the wolfhound lifted his nose in affection, nuzzling Con’s wrist. “It’s not a lasting gift,” Con said. “Not like Vesno, or jewels, or—”
“I have no need of more jewels, nor more lives to be responsible for,” I interrupted, giving Vesno a mock scowl. The wolfhound grinned at me, undaunted, tongue lolling. “This is all the sweeter for being transient.” And because it was a token of the childhood I missed having, since I’d always been treated like a small queen, never a child. I suspected Con knew that, which was why he’d gone to the trouble.
He cleared his throat. “Since we’re more or less private, anything yet?”
Indeed, though people had thronged in the courtyard, either because of my presence, or because they sensed the imminence of some important event, they gave our trio a wide berth. Even Lady Sondra, wearing full battle armor like Con, I noted, remained at a discreet distance. When she saw me studying her, she looked quickly away, her mouth slanting down.
“Not yet,” I replied.
“Ambrose?” he asked.
Ambrose was slowly turning his staff, the emerald catching the sun and scattering prisms of light as Merle danced atop it, muttering. With a sharp nod, Ambrose’s eyes focused on it. “Anure has followed the bread crumbs. Even now the sea carries his ships to Cradysica.”
“Can he alter his course?”
“He is committed.” Ambrose’s gaze settled on me, and he gave me an apologetic smile. “I tied a magical suggestion to his obsession with Your Highness. He will not be swayed at this point.”
“When will he reach Calanthe’s waters?” Con demanded.
“Soon.”
Con squinted at the sun, calculating. “Lia, can you keep them from entering the mouth of the harbor until high tide, later this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, mind going to the next steps.
“And then what?” I asked. When Con hesitated, I let my nature shine through my skin, in warning and declaration of my intent. “Tell Me now, Conrí, and I will work with you. Keep Me in ignorance and I may foil your strategy.” Accidentally or on purpose, I left unsaid.
“We let him sail into the harbor and box him in with our ships,” he said. “They’ll be trapped in there, and we can blow them apart, one by one.”
“While they lob vurgsten at the shore,” I clarified, “and also blow your ships apart.”
Con nodded. “But not for long. If we time it perfectly, they won’t have much time before the tide turns, and Cradysica’s monster chews them from the bottom.” He said it quietly, and in a code, as if still concerned about Anure’s spies.
The understanding hit me with such force that I wanted to kick myself for not realizing his plan before this. “Clever,” I acknowledged. “It just might work.”
“It better work,” Con replied with a snarl in his voice. “The trick will be isolating which ship Anure is on. I want to make absolutely sure he’s dead. The sea can’t have him, not until I’m done with him. Well, and to minimize the blood shed in violence, of course.”
He didn’t fool me for a moment. Con gave lip service to that promise—and he’d make what he thought was a reasonable effort—but that wasn’t why Con wanted to kill Anure personally. Arrested by the glimpse of darkness in him, a level of obsession I hadn’t quite grasped before, I caught Con’s eye. “Does it matter?” I asked him, levelly, but with insistence. “As long as Anure dies, it doesn’t matter how it happens.”
“Maybe not to you,” he snapped. “I vowed to see him dead by my own hand. Nothing else will silence the voices of those who cry for justice.” He paused, looking unsettled, as if he hadn’t meant to say that last aloud.
Madness. “Be careful, Conrí,” I gave him the warning as potently as I knew how. “Don’t let how Anure dies become more important than that he does.”
“Don’t presume to lecture me, Lia,” he growled back. “We have something else to sort out, too.”
“Yes, we do. What is your backup plan?”
“Excuse me?”
Bright Ejarat, Con sounded just like me, arch and regal. “What happens if you commit all your ships and vurgsten to this trap and he escapes—what then?”
“He won’t escape. That’s why we’ve done all this planning.”
“Then you should also plan for the poss—”
“Plan for what, Lia?” he nearly barked. “Plan to fail? That’s a great way to lose. I plan to win.” He signaled for Sondra to approach, clearly done with that conversation.
“Yes, Conrí.” Sondra saluted. He updated her, and her face took on the same taut excitement, her gaze the same mad gleam. The pair of them, so excited to wage war.
“Today,” she breathed. “I’ll gather my team.”
“See you on the battlefield.”
She saluted again and jogged off, blond hair waving like a banner when the sea breeze caught it.
Ambrose met my gaze, knowledge in it, and Merle dug at his wing. He plucked a feather, black as the polished rocks from Vurgmun, and I watched as it drifted lazily to the ground in the still, warm air of the courtyard. The vague dread that had lingered from the nightmares intensified. Ambrose studied the feather’s fall as if it communicated something. For all I knew it might. Fortune-tellers, before Anure killed them all, had once claimed to read the future in all sorts of things. The dropped feather of a wizard’s familiar made more sense than a rabbit’s entrails or a collection of tea leaves.
From Ambrose’s uncharacteristically sober and resigned expression, the die had been cast. Con had set our path and whatever lay ahead, it would be terrible, indeed.
Con met my gaze, his face neutral and grimly controlled, the face of the hero who never flinched from the portents, forging ahead with bold determination. Nothing of my dimpled, passionate lover remained. He’d become all snarling wolf. “Will you wish me well?”
“Do I have your leave to clear out My people now?” I returned smoothly, then realized I stupidly still held the sweet tree-finger. Motioning to Ibolya, who hovered within easy distance, I handed it to her, then took the lemon-scented damp cloth she proffered, wiping my hands clean of the sticky candy.
“Yes,” Con said, watching me with an odd expression.
I spun on my heel, calling out orders for my ladies, for the priest of Sawehl, for the governor and head family. I would set evacuation of the human noncombatants in motion, then find a place quiet enough for dreamthink so I could send the animal populations on their way. The animals could move faster than the people anyway.
“Lia!” Con shouted, and I paused, looking back at him. “No kiss for luck?” He tried to add a cocky grin, but it failed to find traction on his harsh face.
“If you’re lucky, I’ll kiss you when you come back to Me,” I answered, and turned away from his disappointment. Never had I been more pressed to contain my true feelings. I wanted to hold on to him and never let him go. I felt hollow inside, afraid and full of dread. If I kissed him now, if I touched Con, I’d likely end up clinging to him, weeping and pleading. They’d have to drag me off him, and what a sight that would be.
Not behavior befitting a queen leading her people in a battle for their homeland. We would fight for Cradysica, even knowing what it meant to spill that blood on Her soil and waters. A paradox of the worst sort, dooming our homeland by trying to save Her, but intention matters. We could hardly stand back and do nothing to protect Her.
I took a step and gasped, my stomach clenching, head spinning. The sensation of looming dread intensified to a sharp peak. With a wrenching pain, I felt Anure enter My waters.
“Lia?” Con had his hands on my shoulders, and I realized I’d hunched over, clutching my belly, the orchid ring a firebrand burning through my blood.
“He’s in Calanthe waters,” I said, watching the black and bitter lust for murder flood his countenance, completely replacing that lingering hope for a farewell kiss. Would Con’s hatred forever eclipse whatever tender feelings he might nurture for me, for Calanthe, his new home?
“Where?” he demanded.
“Close. Two hours’ sail for the lead ship to the mouth of the harbor,” I replied crisply, feeling like one of his soldiers more than ever.
“Can you hold him for eight hours?”
“You won’t be here to tell Me when?”
“In case I’m not.”
“Yes, I can.”
This time, he strode away from me, Vesno at his side. I watched him go, regretting that I hadn’t kissed him goodbye.