“You were right, Bekah. My place will never be among you.” Safire looked up to Torwin on one side, to Asha on the other, then behind her to Dax. She turned her gaze on Roa last. “My place is right here—defending the ones I love.”
As Safire rose to her feet, Asha stepped up to her side, snaking a comforting arm across her cousin’s shoulders.
“Take her away.”
Thirty-Seven
In the weeks following Essie’s passing, Roa felt like a soldier who’d come home from battle without a limb, convinced she could still sense it.
But it wasn’t a limb she sensed. It was her sister. The hum had been glowing faintly inside Roa ever since she drove the Skyweaver’s knife into Essie’s heart. It wasn’t as bright or as warm as it once was, but it wasthere. As if Roa’s bond with Essie—now gone forever from this world—was still, somehow, unbroken.
She told this to Lirabel in the letters she wrote almost daily.
Her friend had returned to the scrublands weeks ago to prepare for her wedding. A celebration would take place tomorrow in the gardens of the House of Song.
Roa pushed the thought of it out of her mind, trying to focus instead on the Assembly meeting before her. Because when she thought about it, the sorrow welled up like blood from a cut. She wanted to be there, watching her brother and her oldestfriend bind themselves to each other beneath the mighty jacarandas of Song. Roa wanted to be the one braiding flowers into Lirabel’s hair and dabbing rosewater behind her ears and helping her into her dress.
But Roa needed to behere, in Firgaard. Because today the new council—one representative of the kingdom instead of purchased by the wealthy—had gathered to vote on the ancient law against regicide. They were here to decide whether it should be allowed to stand or if it was time to strike it down.
The king and queen needed to be present for the vote.
The sunlight streaming through the windows turned golden in the encroaching dusk and the round Assembly room brimmed with spectators, making the air hot and stuffy. Roa counted a dozen people falling asleep in their chairs or leaning against walls. It had been a long day of arguing and debating, and with one council member absent due to illness, the vote kept ending in a draw.
In order to break it, the council decided to give the king a vote.
Which was when the snoring started.
Horrified, every person in the room looked in the direction of the sound. Roa sighed, looking too.
Dax sat hunched in his pale marble chair, the image of a crown chiseled into the headrest. His cheek sat propped on his fist, his brown curls tumbled into his eyes, and his chest rose and fell with his snores.
Roa had spent enough nights in his bed now to know the sound of his snoring by heart.
These were fake.
Dax had been a bundle of coiled energy all day. His knee hadn’t stopped bouncing from the moment he sat down in that chair to the moment the vote came back a draw for the third time. In fact, if Roa looked close enough, she could see his knee bouncing now.
Somethinghad him excited. And an excited Dax was not a sleepy Dax.
He was feigning sleep. And Roa knew why.
This new council deferred to their king, always. It was Dax’s opinion they sought both in and out of Assembly meetings, never Roa’s. And here they were again, looking to Dax.
But if he was asleep, he couldn’t cast his vote.
“My queen?” The eldest councillor looked to Roa. She was a skral woman with long gray hair that fell loose down her back.
The queen glanced away from her snoring husband, fixing her attention on the ten men and women now awaiting her decision.
“What is your vote?”
A memory bloomed within Roa. She thought of the day of her earning. Of standing in the mist at her sister’s side, gripping her blade as her sister refused her own.
“The old stories say we belong to each other.” Roa spoke Essie’s words from that day to the room. “If that’s true, then our enemies are not our enemies, but our brothers and sisters.”
She paused, looking over the crowd of skral, draksors, andscrublanders. All of them enemies at some point, gathered together under one domed roof. There was so much work still to be done.
“Unless we treat all lives as sacred,” Roa continued, thinking of Rebekah and the others, guilty of treason, awaiting their sentences in dreary dungeon cells, “even those who’ve done unspeakable harm... we will never have peace.” She scanned the faces of Firgaard, all of them looking toher. Their queen. “So I vote to strike the law down.”
