In the Wake of the Ruined (The Siren Mage, #2)(107)

I’d thought the empress was the mastermind, the one who would stop at nothing, who was determined to use Halla—and everyone around her—but a well of sickness opened in me at a new thought: What if Halla had her own goals? What if she was striving for something else altogether? Something we hadn’t accounted for.

I pushed back my chair with a loud scrape, just as calls for the bridegroom began ringing through the notes of the pacy music. I was not fit for magic, I did not have white-eyed visions, but the way my skin pricked, the way my spine went terribly cold, was most certainly an ill omen.

I glowered down at Markis. “Has Lachlan arrived?”

He sat up quickly, ran a hand down the front of his brown waistcoat. “I saw him and his wife not long ago. In the main hall.”

A throng of partygoers was coming toward me, hands waving, urging me to start the hunt for the bride. “Find him.” I wavered suddenly, uncertain of Markis’s trustworthiness. “Tell him and Agatha to come to me, and if you don’t, you’ll be joining Eftan in the dungeon.” I started around the table and out into the crush. “And if you see Imogen, tell me at once.”

The beating, staccato music had turned grating, as had the huddle of drunk revelers who followed me out of the ballroom and into the main hall. To appease them, I limply searched an antechamber near the stairs. I ducked my head quickly into a neighboring room. But I fought my way through the wall of people with determination until I could make out the doors to the altar room where I’d left Imogen. Our guards still stood before it. Which meant that Imogen had yet to come out. The sudden urge to see her, to know that she was all right, was overwhelming.

I shoved the man before me with such force that he nearly fell. “Out of my way.” A fresh wave of laughter and cheers came from behind me, but my ribs felt like fracture. I stormed toward the altar room. “Where is she?”

All of the guards looked dumbfounded. “She’s within, Your Majesty.”

I shouldered my way inside. The light of the candles on the far end of the room flickered. I stopped in the aisle, eyes locked on a blood-strewn statue of Eusia. The chamber was empty.

My knees threatened to give. I gripped the bench at my side.

“Theo?” Lachlan said.

I spun. Agatha stood beside him, her face as gray as the gown she wore. Her mouth gaped as she stared at the bloodied altar. Partygoers filed into the hall beyond the open doors, but I could only take them in in pieces, as if the whole world had shattered into sharp, blinding shards. The glint of a jewel, the flash of white teeth.

“She’s in a gold gown,” I managed to say, unsure why I was describing her. “Her hair is down.”

Agatha locked eyes with me. “She’s gone?”

I nodded. “Yes.” Reflexively, Lachlan pulled his sword. “The empress must have taken her—”

Agatha reached for Lachlan, bracing herself on his arm. “The empress isn’t here. I caught a glimpse of her through the door of her throne room in the keep as we were leaving. A servant was tending to her. She was pacing in front of her throne.”

“She could have sent anyone.” I touched the dagger at my hip. “Take a carriage back. I’ll set my guards searching here for her first, and then I’ll meet you.”

“But what if she’s here?” Lachlan asked. “What if Eusia is down here and the empress is keeping her hands clean? She might have given the task to someone—”

“No,” I said, adamant. “The empress never let her own daughter into Eusia’s sanctum. She’s hoarded Eusia for all these years. She will be the one to gift Imogen to Eusia.” The short moment they took to let that absorb felt like a lifetime. “Go.”

We started toward the laughter and chatter and buzzing music beyond the doors. Agatha and Lachlan disappeared into the crowd almost instantly, and as I hurriedly spoke to my guards, the guests cheered and hollered and began herding me back out into the center hall. My guards had gotten their directions though, and ducked into the sea of people with purpose, splitting up and sweeping through halls and adjoining rooms.

A new waltz spilled from the ballroom, beaconing half the people surrounding me to rush toward its doors for a dance, and that was when I saw Markis, cutting quickly toward me through the middle of the crowd, a curiously intense look in his pale green eyes.

I gripped his shoulder. “What is it? You found her?”

He kept his voice low. “I haven’t seen Queen Imogen, but I did spot your wife sneaking out a back hall. A servant told me that it leads to a small sculpture garden. Beyond that are the stables.”

The stables. That cold prickling sensation fell down my spine again. “Show me.”

Markis led me as quickly as the dense crowd would allow. Through the center hall, past the quickly unraveling partiers in the ballroom. Past one ostentatious room after the next, until the hall came to a dramatic end at a towering door, laden in hammered gold. Engraved in its middle was the shape of a diamond. Two elegantly wrought hands tugged its sides open. I knew the emblem’s meaning instantly.

Eusia’s would-be death wound, held wide by her own hands for all her devotees to see.

I pulled my dagger and pushed the door open, trudged and met a wall of icy air and a garden of white pillars. The dozen statues here had become towering piles of snow, but the night was clear and bright, and pressed into the thick layer at my feet was a path of small footprints leading to the opening in the high garden wall.