She tangled her fingers in his collar and pulled his face toward hers, and for a strange, disorienting second he thought she meant to kiss him. The memory of another night flared in his mind—a point made with bodies pressed together, an argument punctuated with a kiss—but now she simply pressed her thumb to his forehead and drew a short line above his brows.
He lifted a hand to his face, but she swatted it away. “It’s supposed to shield you,” she said, nodding at the windows, “from whatever’s out there.”
“I thought that’s what the palace was for,” he said darkly.
Lila cocked her head. “Perhaps,” she said, “but only if you plan to stay inside.”
Alucard turned to go.
“God be with you,” said Bard dryly.
“What?” he asked, confused.
“Nothing,” she muttered. “Just try to stay alive.”
II
Emira Maresh stood in the doorway to her son’s chamber and watched the two of them sleep.
Kell was slumped in a chair beside Rhy’s bed, his coat cast off and a blanket around his bare shoulders, his head resting on folded arms atop the bedsheets.
The prince lay stretched out on the bed, one arm draped across his ribs. The color was back in his cheeks, and his eyelids fluttered, lashes dancing the way they did when he dreamed.
In sleep, they both looked so peaceful.
When they were children, Emira used to slip from room to room like a ghost after they’d gone to bed, smoothing sheets and touching hair and watching them fall asleep. Rhy wouldn’t let her tuck him in—he claimed it was undignified—and Kell, when she’d tried, had only stared at her with those large inscrutable eyes. He could do it himself, he’d insisted, and so he had.
Now Kell shifted in his sleep, and the blanket began to slip from his shoulders. Emira, unthinking, reached to resettle it, but when her fingers brushed his skin, he started and shot upright as if under attack, eyes bleary, face contorted with panic. Magic was already singing across his skin, flushing the air with heat.
“It’s only me,” she said softly, but even as recognition settled in Kell’s face, his body didn’t loosen. His hands returned to his sides, but his shoulders stayed stiff, his gaze landing on her like stones, and Emira’s escaped to the bed, to the floor, wondering why he was so much harder to look at when he was awake.
“Your Majesty,” he said, reverent, but cold.
“Kell,” she said, trying to find her warmth. She meant to go on, meant his name to be the beginning of a question—Where did you go? What happened to you? To my son?—but he was already on his feet, already taking up his coat.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said.
Kell scrubbed at his eyes. “I didn’t mean to sleep.”
She wanted to stop him, and couldn’t. Didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said from the doorway. “I know it’s my fault.”
No, she wanted to say. And yes. Because every time she looked at Kell, she saw Rhy, too, begging for his brother, saw him coughing up blood from someone else’s wound, saw him still as death, no longer a prince at all but a body, a corpse, a thing long gone. But he’d come back, and she knew it was Kell’s spell that had done it.
She had seen now what Kell had given the prince, and what the prince was without it, and it terrified her, the way they were bound, but her son was lying on the bed, alive, and she wanted to cling to Kell and kiss him and say Thank you, Thank you, thank you.
She forgave him nothing.
She owed him everything.
And before she could say so, he was gone.
When the door shut behind him, Emira sank into Kell’s abandoned seat. Words waited in her mouth, unsaid. She swallowed them, wincing as though they scratched on the way down.
She leaned forward, resting one hand gently over Rhy’s.
His skin was smooth and warm, his pulse strong. Tears slid down her cheek and froze as they fell, tiny beads of ice landing in her lap only to melt again into her dress.
“It’s all right,” she finally managed, though she didn’t know if the words were for Kell, or Rhy, or herself.
Emira had never wanted to be a mother.
She’d certainly never planned on being queen.
Before she married Maxim, Emira had been the second child of Vol Nasaro, fourth noble line from the throne behind the Maresh and the Emery and the Loreni.
Growing up, she was the kind of girl who broke things.
Eggs and glass jars, porcelain cups and mirrors.
“You could break a stone,” her father used to tease, and she didn’t know if she was clumsy or cursed, only that in her hands, things always fell apart. It had seemed a cruel joke when her element proved to be neither steel nor wind, but water—ice. Easily made. Easily ruined.
The idea of children had always terrified her—they were so small, so fragile, so easily broken. But then came Prince Maxim, with his solid strength, his steel resolve, his kindness like running water under heavy winter snow. She knew what it meant to be a queen, what it entailed, though even then she’d secretly hoped it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen.
But it did.
And for nine months, she’d moved as if cupping a candle in a very strong wind.
For nine months, she’d held her breath, buoyed only by the knowledge that if anyone came for her son, they would have to go through her.
For nine months, she’d prayed to the sources and the nameless saints and the dead Nasaro to lift her curse, or stay its hand.