In the Veins of the Drowning(14)
“Imogen.”
King Nemea’s voice was harsh and scraping as he strode through the fort’s doors. Behind him, his guards were an implacable wall of armor and blades. Evander stood at the center of them. He’d removed his dress coat in the tussle and his shirt was now rumpled and undone at the neck. In one hand he cupped his ritual bowl, in the other his sword. The disappointment in his gaze staked me to the spot.
Nemea’s cheeks were mottled red and beaded with sweat. Those colorless eyes of his locked with mine.
“Your Majesty.” I gave a stiff curtsy. “Is everything all right?”
His grunt sounded like scuffing stones. “That fucking boy-king can rot on the seafloor.” He lifted a ritual bowl, still coated with thick, wet blood, from his side. He grabbed my hand like an eel striking prey and ripped the bandage from it. “He fancies himself a benevolent king.” He took his thumb and dug it into the angry flesh around my cut. His touch was heavy, painful, forcing my stanched wound back to bleeding. “But it is not benevolence that makes a ruler mighty, is it, Imogen?” His eyes had grown bright with malice. Spittle collected on his lip like sharp white teeth as he forced each word out. I gasped as he squeezed and pressed, grinding the bones in my hand against each other.
My mind slipped outside my body from the pain. It floated above me. Heard my whimpering and saw my tears. “Stop. Please.”
Finally, he stopped, but he kept my hand in his. “It does not matter how powerful the ruler’s blood is. It does not matter that a ruler is good, or just, or fair. What matters is that they can keep hold of what is theirs, by whatever means necessary.” He turned my hand and placed a kiss on the back of it. “It is easy to be good when you’re blessed by the bloody fucking Gods. It’s when you are lowly, when you are nothing—like I was—that you learn to make your own power. And with it, you take what you’ve been denied.”
He stared at me for a long moment, holding the bowl of my blood, before he turned and made for the stairs that led down to the mountain road. His guards followed him, and I knew precisely where he would go.
To the sea. To offer my blood to his deity. To make his own power.
Evander slowed before descending. “I ordered you to go to your chamber.”
“I needed air—”
His eyes flashed as he shoved his sword into its sheath. “I don’t care. I’ll not risk you getting hurt.”
I skipped over the irony that was my aching hand, carved open by him. “There was no danger—”
He was before me in a breath, fingers biting into my jaw. “That’s enough.” He lowered his lips to mine, but it felt nothing like a kiss. It felt like a cracking whip, slashing through my flesh. “Get”—another kiss that felt like a leash, notching tightly around my throat—“to your chamber.”
He walked away like he knew I would listen, never once looking back. A blood bond between us would compel his true protection, but his protection was locked doors, and smothered needs, and obedience of my body and mind. A bond would bolster him and wear me down to nothing—I would become the headwater and he the river that I fed until I ran dry.
I needed to leave. I needed to get down this mountain, off this island, or every vital part of me would perish.
Inside, the courtiers were abuzz. I stopped at the top of the entry stairs, my wounded hand cradled against my chest, and watched them over the banister. They rose up from the ritual room stairwell, pooling in the center of the hall. They recounted the kings’ fight with glassy eyes and cheeks full of ruddy color, like they’d just gorged themselves on a fatty meal. It was easy for them to be entertained by these men—they weren’t at risk of being crushed between them.
The blood on my cheeks had dried and felt tight. I needed to wash quickly, bandage my hand, and then find Agatha. I’d tell her everything. Admit she was right about my engagement from the start, beg her to help me find a way out.
There came gasps and murmurs. The clank of armored men. I looked out over the banister once more. The king of Varya had ascended from the ritual room. He stood in the stairwell door, my blood flecked over his pale coat, looking severe as a graven image. The whole hall fell reverently, dreadfully still.
Envy ripped through me.
He could silence a room by simply entering it, could command awe, fear, without making a sound. He did not buckle under Nemea’s barbarity the way I did. How clear it was that he was something different, something greater than Nemea and Evander, who grasped and gnashed for dregs. No, the king of Varya’s greatness welled up from within, fed from a source that was entirely his own.
Clarity struck me, bright as a bolt. It pulled my spine straight and tilted my chin high.
It was not Agatha whose help I needed to get out of Fort Linum.
It was the king of Varya’s.
King Theodore took slow steps into the hall, and the crowd split like water around a stone to let him pass. His chamber was on the same level as my own, and if I knew Nemea at all, he’d put him in the worst accommodations the fort had to offer. A small, drafty chamber at the northeastern corner, with crumbling exterior stones that had been harassed by the winds since the day they’d been stacked.
Flanked by his guards, Theodore started up the stairs. His every movement was filled with muscled grace, and when he neared the top, our gazes crashed together. His eyes rounded, and I could only imagine how shocking I must have looked. Severe in my black wedding gown, dark hair windblown, blood smeared on my cheeks, smattering my chest like gruesome freckles. He still beheld me with disapproval nearing abhorrence, but his gaze dipped to my injured hand, which I held protectively against me, and his full lips flattened in what looked like concern.