“She is,” said Pyrrha. “We watched her die.”
“Then how?” But Camilla and Pyrrha didn’t answer. The Prince passed one hand over her dead blue-and-brown-spattered eyes and said, “Oh my God. This is the last thing we need. If he hears that yet another one of his duplicitous sluts betrayed him, he’s never going to come back from it. He’s so fragile right now. Not even if we scourge Antioch and fly the First flag from the tallest tower.”
Pyrrha said, “Cassy played long games.”
“This is—this is shitty,” the Prince pronounced, sounding curiously young and woebegone and frustrated.
Crown threw herself out of her chair and went down on her knees in front of the Prince—wrapped her arms around the Prince’s legs and put her cheek on the dead right thigh. The Prince reached out and tangled one hand in her bright, springy curls, and sighed a cold, dead, defeated sigh. When Crown spoke her voice was low and tender, the lowest and tenderest voice Nona had ever heard: “Baby, it sounds awful.”
“Corona, it’s death.”
“So stick it. Stick all this and come home with me … throw this all in and come to me.”
Nona would have immediately thrown everything down and gone to live with Crown, but the Prince was not so moved. She laughed a little and pulled at a handful of curls, dropped them to watch them bounce, and said: “Don’t be ridiculous.”
But Crown did not relent. “Come to me. I need you … we’ve been apart for such a long time, Ianthe. They took you away from me. They took me away from you. Let’s let them hang and go off on our own. Drop Babs. I’ll take that shuttle and meet you wherever you want to meet me and we’ll go … we’ll start over.”
At the bottom of her voice, Prince Ianthe Naberius said—
“There is no starting over, Corona.”
“There is. I know there is,” Crown said eagerly.
“But we’re closer to the goal than ever before.”
“Of course we are, you perfect genius,” said Crown, lovingly, and she took the dead gloved fingers, and she kissed them.
Every single dead soldier’s fingers twitched. Prince Ianthe Naberius raised hers, an involuntary movement almost, and that waxen, handsome face was an expressionless mask, with only the cool grey eyeballs moving in their sockets.
Then Crown said quietly, “We can do good work, Ianthe. I know people who need us.”
For some reason that was what broke the spell. The hand fell, and Crown’s face with it. Prince Ianthe Naberius smiled, ruffled those deep burnished curls, and laughed in the coldest way that Nona had ever heard.
“‘People.’ Oh, darling, you’re always everyone else’s girl. Don’t worry … I fully intend for us to be us, together, now … but I have the framework for it and you, my poor dummy, do not. Don’t worry about anything. Seriously, you need to relax. And to moisturise. And to cut your hair,” the Prince added critically, moving to stand. “I’m hagged as hell … believe me, you’ll know that when you see me … but you need some serious triage before I can do anything with you. I doubt you even have a skincare routine right now.”
She gently shook Crown off her legs. Crown sprawled back against the plain chair and closed her eyes as though something had hurt her. Prince Ianthe Naberius looked around the room, and remarked, “Where’s the live ones, Duty? I see a sad dearth of breathers.”
Pyrrha said, “Outside Deuteros’s room, as discussed. They’re ready.”
“What, every single one?”
“No. Five. Others on standby.” When the Prince turned to Pyrrha, Pyrrha added, “Didn’t like moving the bodies.”
“What? They need to harden up. We do much worse on the front.”
“They were never on the front.”
“Yes, that is becoming tragically obvious. We should have doubled troops here eight months ago. Well, hindsight is its own aptitude … Corona, now you’re laughing at me. This is not going down as a good day in my diary.”
Corona was laughing. She said, in a sickly-sounding voice, “Listen to you, talking military.”
“It’s a bit disgusting, I know, but habit forms quickly … habits do form quickly with me. Speaking of…”
Nona was not prepared for Prince Ianthe Naberius to step off the dais, stride lightly over the carpet, and stand in front of her again—she was too busy trying to will her eyes to stop streaming. She tried to step back again—she was too slow; the Prince caught her by the front of her shirt with one hard, gloved hand. Camilla turned her body toward them both, with her hands placed flat near her scabbards, but the Prince didn’t seem to care.