Chapter
Eleven
nce, when I was a young girl, I almost died.O Teller and I were in the throes in a months-long tree-climbing duel, and I’d set my sights on a towering cypress edging the marsh that was nearly twice the height of his tallest conquest.
A third of the way up, the spindly branches grew too thin to support my weight, but pride—and my brother’s teasing— goaded me into ignoring my instincts. Up and up I ascended, until a fateful snap had me tumbling head-first into shallow water.
It’s hard to say whether it was some benevolent god, my secret Descended blood, or just dumb luck that kept my neck from snapping in that collision into the rocky shores. When I finally came to, my lungs were full of water and my limbs were too numb to move. I watched in horror as the world slipped slowly away and a cold, hollow dread took its place.
Stumbling upon Henri, my mortal best-friend-turned-lover, in the middle of the royal palace with the Crown of Lumnos on my head felt exactly like that moment.
I stared helplessly as emotions rotated across his face like spokes on a carriage wheel.
Shock, then confusion.
Realization.
Grief.
Then anger. So much anger.
I said something—his name, or maybe some feeble explanation—but I couldn’t hear it. I could feel my mouth moving, feel the throb of my pulse, feel my gauzy dress turn to lead and pull me down, down, down into the dark, but the only sound in my ears was Henri’s voice and the words he kept repeating.
“You’re one of them. You’re one of them.”
I staggered a step toward him. He recoiled as if I were some noxious disease he might accidentally contract.
“You lied to me.”
The hate in his eyes was tangible. I could swim through it. Drown in it.
“I didn’t know,” I pleaded. “I swear, Henri.”
“Didn’t know?” he spat.
I took another step. He dropped the sack he was carrying, piles of letters spilling across the marble floor. He must have finally convinced his father to let him take over some of the palace courier duties.
Just my luck.
Henri’s hand went to the hem of his tunic and slid toward his navel—toward the small, flat blade that I knew he kept concealed in his waistband.
A knife the guards at the front would have missed when they searched him for weapons.
He was going to stab me.
Henri. My Henri.
He saw me note the gesture, and he froze. For a brief moment, we both understood each other in the most wretched, painful of ways.
Guards near the entrance took notice of the open hostility on Henri’s face and closed in around us, swords sliding from their sheaths with an ominous scrape. Nearby, nosy servants pretended to busy themselves with an invisible task, while a pair of Corbois cousins unabashedly gaped from an adjacent room.
Too many curious eyes. Too many honed ears and sharp blades.
I straightened, raising my voice with manufactured haughtiness. “You there, courier. I have something I’d like you to deliver. It’s a message to someone I value very dearly.” My eyes flared wide. “Will you follow me to my study so I can retrieve it?”
Every quivering atom begged him to hear my unspoken plea: Give me a chance. Don’t give up on me yet.
My knees almost buckled at his barely discernible nod.
Two guards stepped forward to join us. “No escort is necessary,” I commanded, waving them off despite their wary stares
of disapproval. “We’ll go alone.”
The problem, I realized, was that I had no idea where the Crown’s offices were. Though Eleanor had mentioned them on her tour, the only two rooms in the palace that I could both find on my own and remain in undisturbed were the palace dungeon and my bedchambers.
Neither was ideal, but I suspected if I led Henri to the dungeon and its dark, caged cells, his blade would be embedded in my side before I had a chance to explain.
My chambers it would have to be.
I kept my face forward as I marched down the halls, too scared to look back and see the hatred in his eyes. With my thoughts so flustered, I made it almost all the way to the royal wing before I realized I no longer heard the click of his footsteps behind me.
I turned to see him fifty feet away, his focus glued on a door set slightly ajar. Whatever he was watching had captured him so completely that he didn’t even notice me as I came up beside him.
I followed his line of sight into a small reading room. Nestled in a back corner, Luther and Aemonn were arguing heatedly in hushed voices.
My insides lurched. If Aemonn saw Henri sneaking into my bedroom... I doubted whatever secrets Luther held over him would be enough to buy that level of discretion.
I grabbed Henri’s arm. “We have to go. They can’t see you here.”
A thunderous crash came from the room. When I looked back, Aemonn wore a vicious smile despite hanging from the wall, legs dangling, held in place by the hand Luther gripped around his throat.
That conversation was not going well.
I yanked on Henri’s sleeve. “We really, really have to go.”
“It’s him.” He was transfixed, breathless. “The man I saw—the one who killed the mortal boy. That’s him.”
My chest squeezed tight.
Though I had already mentally convicted Luther for the horrific crime, a piece of me had clung to the hope that it was all some misunderstanding.
Now, it was a truth I couldn’t escape. Henri would never forgive me if he knew I was working alongside the man he despised so fervently that he’d been willing to die to bring him to justice.
“He’ll pay,” I said. “I swear it—I’ll make sure he pays. But I can’t do that if he sees you here.”
Henri glared at me, then looked back to the room, rage smoldering in his narrowed eyes. “Fine.”
I pulled him toward the royal wing, but I spotted a crowd of guards chatting outside of my rooms and froze. No matter how discreet Eleanor and Luther considered them, I wasn’t willing to bet Henri’s life on it. I tugged Henri around the corner and yanked him into the first bedroom I saw.
When I turned back, Henri’s face had shifted. He stared at the Crown floating above me, his anger giving way to something
far more devastating.
“You’re the Queen,” he murmured.
I wanted so badly to throw my arms around his neck and bury my head in his chest. To turn back the clock until we were no more than two naive youth, discovering what friendship could grow into with trust, honesty, and a little time.
A little time meant something very different for each of us now.
“I didn’t know,” I pleaded. “I swear to you on my life, on Teller’s life, I had no idea.”
His eyes snapped to mine, dark with distrust. “How is that possible? How could you not know?”
“I have the same questions myself, believe me. When the King died, this thing just... appeared. I thought it had chosen a mortal, until...” I flinched at the memory of the dungeon. “I didn’t truly know until last night.”
The hardness in his expression eased—just barely. “It was your birth father, then?”
“That’s the only explanation. My mother has brown eyes, and she has aged too quickly to be Descended.”
“Do you think she knew?”
That was the question I wanted more than anything to be able to ask her—and the question I most feared hearing the answer to.
“She had her secrets, but I have a hard time believing she would keep this from me. She always told us the big things, the things that mattered.”
Henri looked away, an indecipherable expression scrawled on his features.
“What about the flameroot powder?” he asked. “Was that part of all this?”
I started to deny it, but—was it?
I’d never told anyone, not even Teller, the full story. I’d only claimed that I had wild hallucinations and the flameroot had
made them stop.
But my mother knew.
All those years ago, as a scared little girl, I’d confessed the entirety of it only to her.
I’d told her that, in my visions, I could make the glow of candlelight paint a picture across the ceiling. I could persuade the shadows into leaving the corners of rooms and curving around me like a warm quilt. I could make them dance together, light and darkness, in a jaunty waltz. I’d told her that the bright and the dark were my friends, silent companions that answered to my beck and call.
In return, she’d told me I had a disease, and the crimson powder would make it all go away.
And it did—until I stopped taking it two months ago. Right before the voice that Luther called the godhood had begun urging me to fight.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I whimpered as the full breadth of my mother’s betrayal sank in. I staggered to a table and gripped the edge for support, blowing out air to keep myself from retching.
Henri’s hand gingerly touched my back. I focused on the feel of it, clung to it like a rope dangling off a cliff.
“The flameroot powder must have blocked my Descended side somehow,” I forced out between gasps. “And my mother knew. She knew my magic was coming in, and she—”
“Can it negate everything about the Descended?”
I looked up at Henri. His face had taken on a shrewd glint.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The other Descended traits. Strength, healing, hard skin and bones, long life. Could the flameroot block those, too?”
I was still struggling to breathe, fighting to keep my stomach from turning inside out. “I’m not sure. I don’t th—”
“Where did she get it? Do you have any more?”
“I destroyed my supply a few weeks ago. I don’t know where she got it, but I—”
“Could you get more of it? Or show me how to make it?”
My lips parted as realization dawned. “You want to use it as a weapon.”
Henri stilled. His eyes jumped to the Crown, then dropped back to me.
An awkward awareness passed between us—and a question.
Henri was a Guardian of the Everflame, a group devoted to infiltrating, even killing the Descended. He’d shown me the rebels’ faces, their meeting spots, the tattoo they used as a secret mark of membership.
And I was not just their enemy, but their enemy’s Queen. I could have every Guardian rounded up and executed for treason.
I could even have their friends and families killed as a deterrent. The Descended laws set no limits for the punishment of mortal traitors.
Or I could let him go—forget I knew him or the Guardians or any of it, and pray their maneuvering never targeted me. I could watch my best friend, the man I cared for as deeply as I’d ever cared for anyone, walk out of my life forever.
Or...
“I can try to get some more,” I offered weakly.
Simple enough words, but they said everything: I choose you.
He frowned, carefully studying my reaction. “You’re still willing to help us?”
I slowly raised my hand to his face. I was terrified he would stop me, or recoil as he had earlier, but he held stone still as my fingers grazed his cheek.
“I’m still me, Henri. I’m still Diem. And... I still love you.”
I’d never said those words to him before.
And, if I was being honest, saying them now filled me with something closer to shame than affection.
But I was desperate. So terribly, urgently desperate.
My mother was gone, maybe forever. I’d already caused my career as a healer and my relationship with my father to implode. Life as I knew it in Mortal City was over. If I lost Henri, too—what would even be left of me?
Though Henri said nothing, his eyes betrayed the melee between his heart and mind. It was a seed of hope I frantically began to cultivate.
“You asked me to marry you,” I said. He winced. It would have hurt less if he’d punched me in the chest, but I pushed forward. “If you’ll still have me, we could do this together. I could use this Crown to help you—and help the mortals, too.”
The battlefield of his expression shifted—slowly, cautiously, toward a possible future.
“There’s a ball in a few days’ time. I’ll be presented as the new Queen to the most powerful Descended in Lumnos. All the Twenty Houses will be there.” My voice was rushed and breathy. “You could come as my escort—maybe you’ll overhear
something useful, or—”
“Or we could attack.”
The words were a challenge. Another unspoken question: How far are you willing to go?
“Gathered all in one place, they’ll be easy targets,” he said. “We could decimate their numbers in one strike.”
My mind jumped to the attack on the armory. The guards I’d tended, their faces burned beyond recognition. The man I’d found inside, his throat slit open so savagely that even his healing abilities couldn’t save him. Perthe, who would have burned alive if I hadn’t pulled him out.
My stomach felt oily and thick. “It’s too soon. I won’t have authority as Queen until I’m coronated. We should wait until
then.”
I wasn’t sure if he bought my excuse.
I wasn’t sure if I bought my excuse.
Slowly, Henri nodded. “You’re right. We can’t play this hand too quickly. A Guardian Queen is too good an opportunity to waste.”
I whooshed out a relieved breath—a bit too loudly. “So you’ll come with me to the ball? As my betrothed?”
He hesitated again.
All at once I was overwhelmed with the possibility of losing him and the need to lock him at my side, in body and in spirit.
I latched my arms around his neck and pressed my body close, straining my face upward until our foreheads met.
“I need you. I can’t do this without you.”
His eyes jumped around my face, ablaze with an explosive mix of new uncertainty and old desire. His fingers curled around my waist, then paused.
“Please, Henri,” I begged. “Stay with me. Rule with me. Be my King.”
The words ignited us both.
All at once we were kissing, touching, gasping, pleading.
My lips crushed against his, then roamed across his skin as I pledged him my immortal loyalty with my mouth and tongue.
His fingers twisted in my hair, and I could tell he was feeling for the Crown, marveling as I had at how it could be so vivid and yet as untouchable as air.
His hands slid to the filmy fabric straps along my shoulders and pushed them down, his palms rolling over my peaked breasts. I let out a soft moan, my pleasure stemming as much from his touch as the relief that he could still desire me, even in
my tainted, repulsive Descended body.
“Say it again,” he said gruffly.
“Be my King,” I rushed out, cupping his face in my hands. “The first mortal King of Lumnos.”
He shuddered with a groan, then hauled me up and wrapped my legs around his waist so he could carry me to the bed. I was feverish, barely breathing, too scared that if I paused for even a moment to listen to the doubts needling at my thoughts, Henri might change his mind and give up on me forever.
“We can finally make them pay,” he murmured between kisses. “They’ll never take anything from us ever again.”
Clothes began to slide away. First his tunic, cast absently to the side as I greedily clutched at his solid shoulders. Then his waistband was low on his hips, his hunger for me rumbling in my ears. Then my skirts were rising as his coarse palm grazed my calves, my knees, my thighs, up and up until my breath caught and—
A throat cleared in the doorway.
Luther was standing at the entrance.
