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Love made you blind to certain things, but even taking that into account, it didn’t make sense. If she felt something special for Leir when he was toying with truths, then she might have looked the other way when she didn’t feel the same for the king. Especially if she’d been as young as she appeared from the statue.
“Your mother showed me the moment before she died and what she said to the king.”
“What did she say?”
“She told him she loved him.”
Arkimedes had to prop himself up against the base of his mother’s statue. It was as if the ground was dropping out from beneath him.
“I didn’t remember everything she shared with me until your father was talking to us.” Nava shook her head, anger ringing through her words. “But I thought his voice sounded familiar. I should have known earlier?—”
“The memory she shares is a lot to take, Nava. Particularly the first time you experience it.”
“What if the emissary actually is your father, Ark? Perhaps we can speak with him. Make him stop this madness before it’s too late.”
Arkimedes sympathized with Leir. He wouldn’t survive with an intact mind either if someone tied Nava to a tree and sentenced her to die such a horrible death.
Still… He didn’t think Leir was his father. Not that it mattered, because they were both evil. Even though the queen might have been his mate, she had also been with the king while he was away. Arkimedes had inherited the Curse of the Fallen, and only the king and Arkimedes possessed the power to strip souls from the people around them.
“Even if he is, there’s no way we’ll convince him to change his plans. He’s out for blood because he can’t die otherwise. He’s willing to kill both you and Ari. He doesn’t care about the thousands of innocents in this kingdom who will die if our bloodline disappears. He’s neither a fatherly figure nor a lost soul.”
“Which brings us to our initial problem,” she said. “We have to stop him, and the only advantage we have is whatever godly magic you absorbed from Alera’s potion. We don’t even know what that is.”
He’d be damned if he knew. Other than poisoning him at the docks, the spell had done nothing.
“I know.” He rubbed his chin, studying the curve of his mother’s round cheeks, made from polished marble, sculpted so exquisitely. “We can use her against him.”
“How? Can you call on her spirit to come and beat some sense into him?”
“I would love to see that.” He squashed a smile and cleared his throat. “We can’t predict when or where she will show, but perhaps we can distract him if we find something of hers that she might have worn back in the day. Or a letter, a diary—a gown?”
Arkimedes opened the door, revealing a grand, yet bleak room shrouded in darkness. Someone had hastily draped blankets over its furnishings, and a fine layer of dust had accumulated on every surface. Spiderwebs covered the broad windows, the bedposts, and the end tables.
They tiptoed inside, taking in the abandoned chambers that had once belonged to his mother. Painted in light colors, they were the complete opposite of his father’s. Blankets were piled up on the four-poster bed, and the drawers of the dresser by its side looked as if they had been closed in haste.
No one had bothered to come in here to make the bed. A wave of emotion rolled through him, starting in his gut and traveling up his body, taking hold of his throat and choking him. He drew an angry breath just as the fireplace sputtered to life, burning dust and sending fragments of old, ashy logs dancing into the room.
Nava jumped away from the fire with a scream. “That always scares me,” she said, placing a hand over her chest as she took deep gulps of air. Then she glared at the ceiling, as if the castle had personally wronged her.
“At least it’ll get warmer now.” He wandered over to the dressing table and rubbed his fingers over the dusty surface, picking up a silver hairbrush with white bristles. “Leir is a skilled fighter, and his sword is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. He has been doing this for a long time, and he heals quickly.”
Wait a minute. That was it. They had been going around in circles trying to find an artifact to defeat Leir—when he had been holding the perfect weapon the entire time.
“And there will probably be demons everywhere.” Nava wrapped a protective arm around her stomach, gripping the fabric of her dress over the side of her ribs, where she’d been gored.
“We can steal his weapon,” he whispered.
Her eyes widened as she met his gaze. “Of course. His sword is an artifact.”
Arkimedes nodded slowly.
“So…we distract him with something that belonged to your mother and that way we can get close enough to steal his weapon?” Nava crept deeper into the room, pulling at the half-open drawers.
Every hair on Arkimedes’s body stood on end all of a sudden. There it was again—the sensation of being watched. Frigid air seeped under his trousers, a touch of death in the little warmth they had gained. He dropped the hairbrush on the rug and glanced up at Nava, who was clutching the garments she’d plucked from the dresser to her chest.
Her mouth hung wide open before she screamed, and her skin had turned several shades paler. On the other side of the room, his mother’s spirit floated, pointing at the settee by the fire.
Arkimedes jerked away, and pain shot through him from his healing wounds. He lost his balance and fell onto the carpeted floor. His heart thundered against his ribcage, and it took him a long moment to breathe past his panic.
