I stared, truly without words. My arms started to shake and burn and I could no longer hold myself up.
I collapsed back on the bed, my hands opening and closing into fists at my sides as I stared up at the high beams in the ceiling, listening as the king of Lagonia’s faint laughter faded from my chamber.
FIFTEEN
Luna
SLEEP WAS IMPOSSIBLE. The bed was too big. The room too empty. The castle creaked and settled all around me, the eons-old stone sighing its old bones. The wind whipped and howled outside, pushing against the mullioned glass panes like a living thing trying to get inside. For a moment, I thought I heard a dweller’s eerie cry far in the distance—a world away from here.
I had never been truly alone. I’d always had Perla and Sivo, if not in the same room with me, then in the room beside me. The cadence of Perla’s gentle snores lulled me to sleep through childhood. When I finally left the tower, I’d had Fowler. Even on the Outside, in the great open space fraught with danger, he’d been there beside me every night.
The murmur of voices at my door brought me into a sitting position on the bed. I flattened my palms on the mattress, ready to push up and bolt if needed.
The door creaked open. Robes rustled and I smelled the faint aroma of incense. The bishop.
I crouched on my knees atop the bed. “What are you doing in here?” So much for the guard protecting me.
His ankle joints popped as he advanced with more speed than I would have thought a man of his size capable.
I scrambled to get off the bed, but he was there, the great mountain of him blocking me. I fell back, desperate to avoid contact, the heels of my hands holding me up on shaking arms. His intent was harm. I smelled it on him, bitter as charred ash on his sweating skin.
“You should never have come here,” he hissed, his voice wild in his zealotry. “You’ll bring ruin on us.”
I cringed at the stink of his onion-laced breath gusting in my face—and there was the stale aroma of that drink that had made me fuzzy-headed. “I don’t suppose it makes a difference that I don’t want to be here either.”
He continued as though I had not spoken. “The king doesn’t understand, but I do. You’ll bring war to Lagonia.”
“Aren’t we already at war? With this eclipse? With dwellers?”
“Precisely why we don’t need the addition of a war with Relhok.” He reached out and closed his hands around my neck. “I could open those doors and toss you off the balcony. It’s a long drop down. Can’t even see the bottom at midlight. No one would ever know what happened to you.”
I gasped at the dig of sausage-thick fingers around my throat. “Let me go,” I choked out, clawing at his slowly tightening grip. I hadn’t been through so much, come so far, to let it end like this.
“I could end you now. Save us all. God would forgive me.”
My legs thrashed, nails scoring the backs of his hands as he squeezed, crushing my windpipe.
I couldn’t breathe. A roaring filled my ears. It seemed the worst thing. Not dying, but dying like this. I had assumed it would be at the hands of dwellers.
The pressure in my head suddenly lightened and I felt like I was drifting. I didn’t feel the sweating, fat hands at my throat anymore.
Then the lightness vanished.
Pain returned as air filled my starved lungs. I clutched at my burning throat. It was a blissful sort of agony, though, because it signaled life. I wasn’t dead. Those crushing hands were no longer on my throat.
Dimly, volume returned. I sucked air in over the sounds of scuffling and harsh voices. Bone cracked against something thick and solid. Frand cried out shrilly.
I sat up, listening, one hand still wrapped around my throat, massaging the tender skin.
“Please, please, Your Highness,” Frand blubbered, dragging himself on the floor to get away from the prince. “I beg you! Stop!”
The prince’s boots followed after the large body, biting hard into the stone floor. His silken voice slid over me, filling me with a strange sort of relief. “You’re fortunate I’m nothing like my father, Bishop Frand, or you would not be leaving this room alive.”
“Th-Thank you, Your Highness! You are so generous,” the bishop babbled. There was the sound of a sloppy, wet kiss on the prince’s boot.
“Get off me before I change my mind!”
Frand whimpered and retreated, bringing his hands up to cover his blubbering face.
Chasan crouched over the pathetic man. “Now heed me. If anything, anything at all, happens to this girl, I will come for you. Your head on a pike in the courtyard. That will be your fate . . . your legacy.”
The viciousness of his threat startled me. I would not have thought he cared enough to bother. When his father proclaimed that we should marry, he did not seem any more happy about it than I was.