As the council chamber emptied, leaving Tobiah, Melanie, James, and me alone, I drifted to the window from where Melanie and I had watched the bridge explode.
“He had a point about the bridge,” Melanie said. “The Red Militia was thorough when they collapsed it. Forty-seven people died.”
“I didn’t think we’d see anyone else from the Indigo Kingdom. At least not for a long time.” Outside, the bridge was jagged and broken once more. Gulls circled the dust plumes and remnants. “It was obviously a powerful flasher who made the bridge whole while you came across. All that magic contributed to the wraith, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t care. I’m just happy to see you again. All of you.”
“Radiants,” Tobiah said. “I thought we agreed radiants.”
Through the notebook. “Yes. We did.” I wanted to ask why he’d stopped writing and if he’d seen all the letters I sent after, but when I glanced at him, his eyes were still on the bridge. Muscles tensed in his jaw and neck and shoulders.
He’d survived war and loss and now the wraith.
This morning I’d believed he was dead. Now I faced days or months or years with only a door between us at night, but it might as well have been a kingdom. That door was Meredith and the wraith boy, and the never-fading memory of what he’d done to her.
I understood now what I hadn’t before: Chrysalis wasn’t good or bad; he was simply power. He wasn’t human, but he was part of me, a reflection of my desperate wants.
Last autumn, Black Knife and I had talked about flashers and their magic, and why they might use it even knowing the wraith was coming. I’d said they were desperate, and their desperation made them dangerous.
Chrysalis was my desperate danger.
I’d created him. I was responsible for him. And though I hadn’t wanted him to bring down the cathedral or kill Meredith, I’d wanted to be somewhere else and see the night sky, and I’d wanted Tobiah not to marry Meredith.
I understood, now, and how it might be unforgivable.
FORTY
THE BALLROOM WAS heavy with the beat of music, but the dancing hadn’t yet begun.
I lingered on the threshold, watching everyone mingle. Though I recognized people from both kingdoms, they weren’t as separated as I’d thought they’d be. Francesca spoke with Jasper and Cora Calloway. Lady Chey flirted with Kevin, who watched his tutor, Alana Todd, as she sipped from a glass of wine. Sergeant Ferris smiled at Paige.
The two kingdoms merged into one right before my eyes.
One figure stood apart. He wore solid black, with high, elegant boots and long tailcoats. The way he moved around the room was just like Black Knife: fluid and focused. When a soldier came up to him and spoke into his ear, he offered only a clipped nod and quick dismissal.
“Your Majesty?” The herald lifted an eyebrow, and I stepped forward. He turned to the ballroom to announce me: Her Royal Majesty Queen Wilhelmina Ileen Elizabeth Korte.
I forced myself to smile as the music seemed to swell and every eye focused on me. I was impossible to miss, dressed in another gown of Aecorian red silk that glittered when I moved. The style was more modern than the coronation gown, but the designs across the bodice and sleeves were similar. This gown, too, boasted a useless cape, but it was shorter and lighter, made of a flowing layer of tiny-beaded silk.
Now that everyone was staring, I made myself look over the crowd appraisingly, as though I’d just arrived and hadn’t been watching everyone for an entire minute. I met eyes, smiled warmly, and thanked people for coming tonight.
I said the things a queen would. I walked the way a queen should. As I greeted people by name, I ignored the discomfort knotting in the back of my thoughts. It was too late to change my mind. I’d gotten what I always wanted, and now I had to live with it.
A tall, dark figure stepped in front of me. “Dance?” Tobiah’s tone was somewhere between exhausted and annoyed, but when I met his eyes there was something else. There was something desperate and starving in his gaze, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe with the way he was looking at me.
He hadn’t moved; he was a still shadow of a king, so striking and familiar, but foreign all the same. His face had barely shifted from the cool mask of a monarch, but I’d seen it. Like I’d learned to see behind the Black Knife mask, I could see through this one, too.
“I would love to dance.” My heart pounded in my throat as I took his offered hand, and together we made our way to the center of the floor. The music shifted, and people cleared away.
The dance took us in measured steps around each other, like two predators circling. We couldn’t speak about anything important, not with so many people watching us, but our eyes stayed locked.
To others, it must have looked fierce, like there was a battle between us, but the reality was deeper: I saw straight into his grief.
This was a king who’d lost everything. His father. His fiancée. His kingdom. His home. He’d been helpless to stop it; it was all so much bigger than him.