Someone has wounded you, he’d said nights before, offering to kiss the seal above the prince’s heart. But someone had done worse than that.
“He will recover now,” she said. “That is what matters.”
He wanted to say something else, to tell her he was worried, too (he wondered if she knew—how much she knew—about his summer with her son, how much he cared), but she was already moving away, and he was left with the words going sour on his tongue.
“All right then, who’s next?” said a familiar voice nearby, and Alucard turned again to see his thief surrounded by palace guards. His pulse quickened until he realized Bard wasn’t in any danger.
The guards were kneeling around her, and Lila Bard of all people was touching each of their foreheads, as if bestowing a blessing. Head bowed, she almost looked like a saint.
If a saint dressed all in black and carried knives.
If a saint blessed using blood.
He went to her as the guards peeled away, each anointed with a line of red.
Up close, Bard looked pale, shadows like bruises beneath her eyes, jaw clenched as she wrapped a cut in linen.
“Keep some of that in your veins, if you can,” he said, reaching out to help her tie the knot.
She looked up, and he stiffened at the unnatural glint in her gaze. The glass surface of her right eye, once a brown that almost matched her left, was shattered.
“Your eye,” he said dumbly.
“I know.”
“It looks …”
“Dangerous?”
“Painful.” His fingertips drifted to the dried blood caught like a tear in the outer corner of the ruined eye, a nick where a knife had grazed the skin. “Long night?”
She let out a single stifled laugh. “And getting longer.”
Alucard’s gaze tracked from the guards’ marked skin to her stained fingers. “A spell?”
Bard shrugged. “A blessing.” He raised a brow. “Haven’t you heard?” she added absently. “I’m aven.”
“You’re certainly something,” he said as a crack snaked up the nearest window and a pair of older priests rushed toward the novice working to ward the glass. He lowered his voice. “Have you been outside?”
“Yes,” she said, features hardening. “It’s … it’s not … good …” She trailed off. Bard had never been chatty, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen her at a loss for words. She took a moment, squinting at the odd gathering that they faced here, and began again, her voice low. “The guards are keeping the people in their homes, but the fog—whatever’s in the fog—is poisonous. Most fall within moments of contact. They aren’t rotting the way they did in the Black Night,” she added, “so it’s not possession. But they’re not themselves, either. And those who fight the hold, they fall to something worse. The priests are trying to learn more, but so far …” She blew out a breath, shifting her hair over her damaged eye. “I caught sight of Lenos in the crowd,” she added, “and he looked all right, but Tav …” She shook her head.
Alucard swallowed. “Has it reached the northern bank?” he asked, thinking of the Emery estate. Of his sister. When Bard didn’t answer, he twisted toward the door. “I have to go—”
“You can’t,” she said, and he expected a reprimand, a reminder there was nothing he could do, but this was Bard—his Bard—and can’t meant something simple. “The guards are on the doors,” she explained. “They’ve strict orders not to let anyone in or out.”
“You never let that stop you.”
The ghost of a smile. “True.” And then, “I could stop you.”
“You could try.”
And she must have seen the steel in his eyes, because the smile flickered and went out. “Come here.”
She tangled her fingers in his collar and pulled his face toward hers, and for a strange, disorienting second he thought she meant to kiss him. The memory of another night flared in his mind—a point made with bodies pressed together, an argument punctuated with a kiss—but now she simply pressed her thumb to his forehead and drew a short line above his brows.
He lifted a hand to his face, but she swatted it away. “It’s supposed to shield you,” she said, nodding at the windows, “from whatever’s out there.”
“I thought that’s what the palace was for,” he said darkly.
Lila cocked her head. “Perhaps,” she said, “but only if you plan to stay inside.”
Alucard turned to go.
“God be with you,” said Bard dryly.
“What?” he asked, confused.
“Nothing,” she muttered. “Just try to stay alive.”
II
Emira Maresh stood in the doorway to her son’s chamber and watched the two of them sleep.
Kell was slumped in a chair beside Rhy’s bed, his coat cast off and a blanket around his bare shoulders, his head resting on folded arms atop the bedsheets.
The prince lay stretched out on the bed, one arm draped across his ribs. The color was back in his cheeks, and his eyelids fluttered, lashes dancing the way they did when he dreamed.
In sleep, they both looked so peaceful.
When they were children, Emira used to slip from room to room like a ghost after they’d gone to bed, smoothing sheets and touching hair and watching them fall asleep. Rhy wouldn’t let her tuck him in—he claimed it was undignified—and Kell, when she’d tried, had only stared at her with those large inscrutable eyes. He could do it himself, he’d insisted, and so he had.
Now Kell shifted in his sleep, and the blanket began to slip from his shoulders. Emira, unthinking, reached to resettle it, but when her fingers brushed his skin, he started and shot upright as if under attack, eyes bleary, face contorted with panic. Magic was already singing across his skin, flushing the air with heat.
“It’s only me,” she said softly, but even as recognition settled in Kell’s face, his body didn’t loosen. His hands returned to his sides, but his shoulders stayed stiff, his gaze landing on her like stones, and Emira’s escaped to the bed, to the floor, wondering why he was so much harder to look at when he was awake.
“Your Majesty,” he said, reverent, but cold.
“Kell,” she said, trying to find her warmth. She meant to go on, meant his name to be the beginning of a question—Where did you go? What happened to you? To my son?—but he was already on his feet, already taking up his coat.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said.
Kell scrubbed at his eyes. “I didn’t mean to sleep.”
She wanted to stop him, and couldn’t. Didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said from the doorway. “I know it’s my fault.”
No, she wanted to say. And yes. Because every time she looked at Kell, she saw Rhy, too, begging for his brother, saw him coughing up blood from someone else’s wound, saw him still as death, no longer a prince at all but a body, a corpse, a thing long gone. But he’d come back, and she knew it was Kell’s spell that had done it.
She had seen now what Kell had given the prince, and what the prince was without it, and it terrified her, the way they were bound, but her son was lying on the bed, alive, and she wanted to cling to Kell and kiss him and say Thank you, Thank you, thank you.
She forgave him nothing.
She owed him everything.
And before she could say so, he was gone.
When the door shut behind him, Emira sank into Kell’s abandoned seat. Words waited in her mouth, unsaid. She swallowed them, wincing as though they scratched on the way down.
She leaned forward, resting one hand gently over Rhy’s.
His skin was smooth and warm, his pulse strong. Tears slid down her cheek and froze as they fell, tiny beads of ice landing in her lap only to melt again into her dress.
“It’s all right,” she finally managed, though she didn’t know if the words were for Kell, or Rhy, or herself.
Emira had never wanted to be a mother.
She’d certainly never planned on being queen.
Before she married Maxim, Emira had been the second child of Vol Nasaro, fourth noble line from the throne behind the Maresh and the Emery and the Loreni.
Growing up, she was the kind of girl who broke things.