AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The magic wakes me in a rush instead of the usual fight to pull myself from the stone. It comes on so quickly that I catch a moment of Rosemarie frowning at pages as if she’s angry at them before she glances my way. Those same pages she carried in earlier today. Except now she’s dressed in a lush robe of red flowers that gives a glimpse of cleavage and leaves her legs bare where she curls them on the couch.
“You look nice.” I fumble with the flattery and wish I’d picked a better word—beautiful, stunning, breathtaking. Any of those would be true, but no, I’d stammered out nice.
Jace stretches his wings and shakes as if he’s throwing off his stone form. “Hello, hotness,” he drawls, and when she smiles at him, I want to strangle him with my tail. I should’ve studied the paperbacks more thoroughly to learn the compliments that would earn me the same sweet grin. “I like that robe.”
“The Spidress came,” Rosemarie explains. “She brought this among other things.”
“Did you sleep?” he asks.
“Did you?” she answers without answering. She quickly gathers the pages she’d been studying into a stack—as though she’s trying to hide them. I work to focus on her trembling fingers and not the way her neckline dips, revealing smooth skin. “You both changed to stone so fast.”
I push from my uncomfortable position on the floor amid the crumpled remains of the chair. “The unpredictable magic gave us only a heartbeat of warning that the change was coming. What’s that you’ve been going over?” I slide the last in as gently as I can, which seems to have the subtlety of a banshee going full screamer in the middle of the keep.
“Letters,” she whispers, gaze bouncing anywhere except meeting mine.
Not letters she wrote. Not judging by the wear of the paper. I haven’t seen stationary so rich, heavy, and unrefined in ages. Not since…. Dyphena. Dreadful realization slams into me, twisting my gut and making my tail lash as though warding off the harrowing possibility.
“You found Dyphena’s unsent letters.” My voice comes out an ugly rasp.
Jace stops mid-stride on his way to Rosemarie, his skin paling to a mottled grey stripped of our usual blue. He goes preternaturally still with the chilling clarity he shows before battles. “She had unsent letters?” He chokes on the last. “What did you…Where did you find them?”
His changing the question makes my chest hurt. My brother’s pain and shame over what happened with Dyphena haunts me more than the souls who languish within the keep, waiting for the queen’s attention to help them cross the Bridge. “Will you let us see?” I ask Rosemarie, keeping my tone as neutral as possible. Feelings clog my throat, scary emotions that I’d rather skip for thinking, planning, and acting instead of getting stuck in experiencing them.
“I tried to read them.” She reaches for Hudyakis, a sure sign of her discomfort. Could the letters have been that terrible?
Jace takes a step back at the same time I move forward. The silence, interrupted only by Hudyakis’s happy purr and the distant calls of gargoyles from the courtyard, stretches out the stress of not knowing.
Rosemarie frowns at the pages, much as she has throughout the day, and I remember how she explained her difficulties in school to the Spidress. Maybe the problem isn’t the content of the letters, but the letters themselves.
I chance a guess without calling attention to her past struggles. “Is Dyphena’s handwriting hard to read?”
When she looks up with relief in her eyes, I want to crow, and while the romance guides from her realm didn’t touch on the wonder that is Rosemarie, I understand the pride those males talked about achieving in making their women happy. Satisfaction sparks in my blood.
“Yes,” she says, thrusting the stack at me. As soon as she distances herself from the letters, Jace joins her, and she leans into him. While I wish she’d cuddle up to me, I appreciate the view of long legs and tension melting from her shoulders. Jealousy stings, but I’ve given her an intellectual out, and he’s giving her emotional comfort. She nudges me with her bare toes, I drag her foot into my lap, and envy drains from me, leaving contentment as much as curiosity.
I flip through Dyphena’s letters, searching for hints as to the horror that was to come at her coronation and finding…none.
“So?” Rosemarie runs her pointed toe along the inside of my thigh, teasingly close to my growing erection. “What’d she say?”
I force myself to focus on the words and not Rosemarie’s scent as it grows sweeter. “She talks about the upcoming trials, her friendship with Jace.” Glancing at my twin’s face, I curse the doubt that creeps over his expression. “She seems sincere, brother, and it matches my memory of her actions.”
“Does she talk about her misery?” Guilt lashes through his words. “Her fear of staying?”
I scan the letters, skimming the information to give him an honest answer as quickly as possible. “No. She says she’s happy and fulfilling a noble purpose.” Studying the date on the final letter, I read the last passage twice. “She told her family she would be home to visit by the next harvest. That would’ve been a few months after coronation.”
“What?” Jace’s raised brows mirror my own surprise.
“Yeah.” I glance at Dyphena’s version of a see you soon sign off to her family. “She planned to go home.”
“Then what happened?” My twin leans forward. “How could she have plans one second and throw herself from the Bridge the next?”
I shake my head, going back over the letters. “She mentions fleeting thoughts that came on suddenly during training—a loss of hope, the need to run, a feeling of being trapped that she described as an overwhelming madness.”
“She didn’t mention those,” Jace says.
My thoughts exactly. “The way she writes about them, it’s as if she had trouble believing she experienced them, that perhaps she imagined them.”
“Magic.” Rosemarie sounds so certain, so royal. “After the wyvern attack, when Rona said dark magic clung to me, those were my thoughts. Except they weren’t mine.” She brings Hudyakis closer, and the soul guardian stops shaking long enough to glare at me. “Rona’s convinced Dyphena was murdered, that someone made her think those things, and I believe her.” Holding up a hand, she shakes her head. “I know you don’t, but you didn’t feel what was in my head. It was…” Her gaze goes distant and wounded. “Despair.”
