Her eyebrows rose. “Child, I told you the truth. He is not here. Both then, and now.”
She did speak the truth; I could feel it in her words. I pointed my spear at her and the Sylphs around us shifted. Enders dressed in their white leathers ghosted forward, their long sharpened staffs pointed at me. I should have cared, should have worried.
Yet I felt no fear.
“I know you speak truly. That does not make you right.” I lowered my spear, pressed the butt of it into the ground at my feet.
She clapped her hands together once. “Enders, ease off. She means me no harm. Where have you been, Lark? Two years you were missing, everyone thought you dead. Yet now you are here, back searching for your beloved father.”
I wanted to rage at her that he was anything but beloved. That he was needed only to fulfill his duty and name a proper heir. But those words would not form.
“An oubliette held me.”
A solid gasp went up through the room.
Aria leaned back. “How in the world did you survive?”
Bands of fear tightened over my chest at the mere thought of my prison. “I am here for my father. Either you will allow me to search for him, or I will tear your home apart. It is your choice.”
Beside me, Peta sucked in a tiny breath. Surprise filtered through the bond between us. From behind us, Shazer stomped a foot on the tile. “I will catch you if need be, Lark.”
The four women on their knees in front of the queen watched us with wide eyes. Except for one. She was on the far left and she stood. “I will not stand for this. I am the heir to the throne. Get back to the ceremony, Mother.”
“Noma, calm yourself, my daughter.” Aria spoke with a calm tone that brooked no argument.
“Old woman, you have been on the throne too long,” Noma snapped, her hand lifting as she turned her back on me. A flash of sapphire blue danced over her fingers and up her arms.
I had no doubt about what I saw. Noma could call water to her aid through the use of the sapphire stone. The fifth and final gem of the elemental world; she carried the Undines’ sapphire. She raced up the stairs to her mother’s side.
Those thoughts flashed through my mind in less than a single beat of my heart. I connected to the earth and the power rushed into me, filling me. I pushed off the ground in a leap and the stone beneath me buckled, but it didn’t slow me. I shot through the air toward Noma who had climbed to her mother and wrapped her hands around her neck. Water surrounded the queen’s mouth and nose in a bubble. Too thin perhaps for anyone else to see; but it didn’t matter.
I thrust my spear down as I sailed through the air, the blade aimed at the juncture of Noma’s neck and head. A perfect kill shot, one she wouldn’t even feel, it would happen so fast.
But a snap of wind caught me midair and sent me tumbling sideways into the mountain. The wind was knocked out of me and for a split second I thought it was a Sylph taking my air. I gasped in a breath and used it not for myself. “She is killing your queen!” I screamed.
White Enders leather filled my vision. “Then our queen should not have called her forward as a potential heir.”
I blinked up at Samara. She’d changed in the two years. Her eyes were hard, and there was a scar across her chin, jagged and white with age. “She’s using water to kill her. Not air.”
Samara spun. From where I sat, I threw my spear, drawing from the mountain. The spear shot from my hands and slammed into Noma’s lower back. Hardly a clean death, but she jerked away from her mother, a cry escaping her as she fell to the ground.
Aria stumbled backward, and the sound of water splashing to the floor seemed to fill the throne room. “Take her,” Aria gasped out.
The Enders were on Noma in a flash. Three pointed spears fell on her at the same time. Boreas, the queen’s favored Ender, and two others.
Aria wavered to her feet. Boreas went to her side and helped her stand. “Thank you—”
“My queen, there is no need,” he murmured with a smug-ass smile on his lips.
She slapped him, hard enough to leave an imprint on his face. “You would have let her kill me. It was Larkspur who stopped her.”
Boreas’s face went white; with anger or shock, I wasn’t sure.
Aria drew in a breath, bent and took something from Noma’s body. “Terraling, you know what this is?” She held it out to me, a stone of blue that swam as though it held the ocean within it.
“Yes.”
“Take it to Finley. The girl will need it.” Aria threw it to me. I lifted my hand to catch the stone, but my fingers never touched it.
A gust of wind caught the jewel and sent it skittering across the floor at Samara’s feet. She bent and picked it up, but that wasn’t what drew my attention. From behind her, a figure stepped out of the shadows. The one person I would gladly kill, and whose grave I would gladly dance on. The one who’d stolen my family from me.