53
Iwaited for him to fall asleep.
He waited for me to do the same.
I could have sung him into a slumber. It certainly would have been a relief to unburden myself from his iron stare as he stretched his legs over his bed, leaned onto his pillows, and watched me with every sense of suspicion.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
The thought of taking his mind now, even just to send him to sleep, turned my stomach. So, I watched him instead, until the small hours of the morning.
“You should sleep,” I finally muttered, my own eyes groggy. It was exhausting, recovering from a shock. It wore me to the bone and beyond, stripping any morsel of energy from me it could find.
“I can ride on no sleep.” He wriggled into his pillows deeper, no sign of the fatigue that was slowly claiming me.
My chin tucked into my collar bone, and I pulled myself back into awareness, but a moment later, my eyelids drooped, heavy with the beckoning promises of sleep.
I woke to the early sunrise, dawn sending blue light over the horizon, and Kye’s steady breaths humming from across the room. He’d turned in his sleep, facing away from me.
“Oh.” Came a voice from the door.
A servant stood frozen, a tray of steaming tea and pastries in her hands. I recognized her; she also served my rooms. Our eyes met, and she blushed furiously enough to make a tomato jealous.
I could only imagine what the scene looked like to her. My wedding dress in a heap of pastels on the floor, my lace underthings torn and strewn about, and me, tied in a chair while Kye slept.
Mihaunain the sky.
“I’ll just… leave this in the other room.”
She spun on one foot, fleeing through the door.
“Wait,” I hissed.
The tray banged down on the distant wooden table, footsteps thudding across the floor.
I threw a glance at Kye and swore under my breath before singing softly. If humming could reach Diara through the walls, it could reach the servant. I wasn’t sure if it wouldincantKye as well. Did a mind have to be awake for it to become invaded with oxytocin? Or could theincantationpierce the veil of sleep itself?
The scent of chemical burn rolled through the bedroom from the open door.
“Come here,” I commanded, sitting upright.
She came, pupils dilated and unseeing.
I swallowed the resulting queasiness down, hardly able to look at her after my discovery the night before. “Free me.”
It took no time before I was unbound. There were only a hundred weapons in this moon-forsaken room. Rubbing the rope burn out of my wrists, I released her back to her palace duties, crossing the hall for a simple dress from my wardrobe. Then I left my suite, sprinting down the stairs.
Eleven days alone with Thaan.
There was little I could do to protect Kye. But there was one thing I knew would shield him for a short span of time. And maybe if hewitnessedthe strange prospect of Thaan singing, then trying to command him, he’d be able to see for himself the danger he was in.
Across the sky bridge, through the whipping wind of the parapets, down more stairs, along a winding corridor, my feet slowed as I approached a certain crane statue just outside a familiar door.
I’d let myself in once before, at Selena’s instruction. The key was hidden in the mouth of the crane. Attached to a floating cork, the only way to it was to call to the water through the throat of the dancing bird. I fished it out, creeping through Selena’s private quarters to the shared office at the end of the apartment. To the glass box of salt water, and the vine that had colonized along the floor and in the corners of the glass in the weeks since I’d planted it there.
Shedding my dress to keep it dry, I sank into the water, my fingers closing over a handful of the weed as I gently pulled it loose.
A door slammed. A door in Thaan’s apartments.
