“Ruined power is the only thing that matters when inheriting the throne?” he asked skeptically.
She shrugged. “It’s no more arbitrary than the firstborn inheriting.”
“I guess.” He looked at her for the first time since they’d started the conversation. “Was your mother disappointed?”
Em shook her head. “No. She thought I had other powers. Nonmagical ones, I mean.”
“Like what?”
“She said my strengths were being rational and calm. The ability to make people fear me. She said I inherited that from her. She had big plans for me, apparently. Leading armies and working as an extraction specialist.”
“An extraction specialist,” Cas repeated.
“Extracting information from people,” she said. Her guts twisted, and she had to look away from him. Would her mother have given her a choice? Or would that have been her job, whether she liked it or not?
“My father always said that extraction was Wenda’s specialty,” Cas said, his tone betraying a hint of bitterness.
Em stared at the water, wishing he hadn’t asked about her mother.
“He said her torture methods were unlike anything he’d ever seen. It was one of the reasons he had to invade.”
“And was that also why he took Olivia?” she snapped.
“Maybe he feared that her daughters were going to turn out exactly like her, considering she was already preparing one of them for a career in torture.” His voice rose, the oars moving faster.
“I can think of worse things than turning out like my mother!” As soon as the yell left her mouth she regretted it, but the anger swirled inside of her too violently to back down.
“I can’t think of anything worse, actually,” he spat. “She tortured people for fun—”
“Your father just tortured one of my best friends!” she interrupted.
“And your mother would have tortured every person in Lera if given the chance!”
“Well, she wasn’t given the chance, was she?” Em shouted.
“And maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Cas said tightly.
“Lovely. Please go on about how you think it’s so great that my mother is dead.”
“Really. You’re telling me that you aren’t celebrating that my father is dead.”
She pressed her lips together. He had her there. Lera—and the rest of the kingdoms—were much better off without him.
And maybe she could understand why Cas felt that way about her mother.
“Perhaps we should just both agree that both our parents were horrible people,” Cas said drily.
She let out a startled laugh. Cas cocked one eyebrow at that reaction, and she felt a fresh wave of almost hysterical laughter bubbling to the surface. She leaned over her knees, her giggles echoing across the river, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle them.
She caught a glimpse of Cas’s stony face, and she knew the laughter was going to dissolve into tears. The ache of keeping them in pushed at her throat, and her attempts to force the tears away were entirely unsuccessful. They spilled down her cheeks. She pressed her forehead to the tops of her knees.
“Are you crying?” Cas asked, like it was the first time he’d ever seen anyone do it.
She didn’t want to admit it out loud, so she remained silent and tried not to let her shoulders shake.
“You’ve lied to me, attempted to destroy my kingdom, basically killed my father, and now you’re crying?”
She sniffled. The boat tilted slightly, and she peeked up to see him scanning the area, holding the oars out of the water.
“I . . . I can’t even go anywhere,” he said. “I’m stuck on this boat with you, watching you cry.”
She wrapped her arms around her legs as she tried to get ahold of herself.
“It’s been a bad few days,” she mumbled.
He was quiet for several seconds. When he finally spoke, his voice was softer, calm. “It really has.”
Em woke to Cas yelling her name.
She jerked awake, her brain cloudy and her body stiff. She’d fallen into a deep sleep, and it took several seconds to pull herself out of it.
When the fog cleared, she realized the boat was going very, very fast.
And the noise . . . what was that?
She whipped her head around, squinting in the dim, early morning sun. A waterfall. It was still too dark to see it, but from the speed they were going, they must be rapidly approaching it.
Cas grabbed her hand, the boat lurching dangerously to the right. “Get out of the boat!” he yelled. “We’re going over—”
His sentence ended in a gasp as the boat tilted down.
She lost Cas’s hand as the water swallowed them both.
THIRTY-THREE
CAS GASPED AS he surfaced from the water. His entire body stung from the impact, but he hadn’t hit anything solid.
He couldn’t say the same for the boat, however. Pieces of wood bobbed on the dark river.
Em was nowhere to be seen.
“Em?” He splashed in a circle, desperately squinting in the darkness. “Em!”