She grabbed the wrist of his sword arm, digging in her fingernails.
But Sirin had two arms and two swords. He raised the second and swung at Essie, trying to kill her.
Before he could, Roa plunged her knife into his throat.
She felt the sharpened tip sink into soft flesh. Hot flecks of blood splattered her wrist. Both sabers clattered to the ground as he grabbed for his neck.
Roa kicked the weapons out of reach and stepped back, wide-eyed and breathing hard.
Essie screeched and flapped her wings, wanting to claw out his eyes.
Essie,Roa called when he fell to his knees.
But Essie didn’t stop. She was a flash of white feathers and gleaming talons.
“Essie!”
At the sound of Roa’s voice, her sister paused. She shook her white head, as if shaking off her bloodlust, and flew to Roa’s outstretched fist. Sirin’s eyes had gone wide, showing the whites. Blood streamed from the smiling gash in his neck, running down over his hands.
When he crumpled to the ground, dead, Roa’s body shook from the shock.
In the silence, she lifted the bloodied knife in her trembling hand.
She’d killed men during the revolt, but that was different. Those men were nameless. None of them had stood guard outside her door while she slept.
She remembered the way Sirin’s hands had trembled too. As if he was afraid.
Roa forced herself to walk. To crouch down over the body of her dead guard and wipe the blood from her knife on his shirt. After sheathing it, she was about to rise when the sight of something half hidden in his pocket stopped her. Remembering Sirin’s conversation with the guard at the gate, Roa reached into the pocket and pulled out a wooden seal with an image carved into the base. An image of a black dragon with a red heart of flame.
It was Dax’s official seal. He sometimes gave it to Safire or certain trusted members of his staff when he needed to be in two places at once. It was a way for someone to carry out the king’s orders in his stead.
As Roa stared down at her husband’s seal, taken from the body of her dead guard, a sick feeling festered in her belly.
He wouldn’t...
Or would he?
Hadn’t Roa been plotting against him this very night? Wasn’t she a threat to his throne?
Shakily, she rose to her feet, gripping Dax’s seal hard in her hand. It was only as she walked out of the alley, heading for the palace, that she noticed her sister’s silence.
“Essie? Are you all right?”
Essie didn’t answer. Her mind was completely blank.
Essie’s silence continued all the way back to the palace. Roa asked her where she’d gone, how she’d come back. But it was as if her thoughts weren’t getting through to Essie. As if Essie’s mind were shrouded in fog.
I couldn’t find my way,Essie had told her that night in the sand sea.I couldn’t remember where home was.
Roa knew what it meant. Essie was running out of time.
At the palace, the soldat whose gaze crept over her earlier was surprised to find Roa alone.
“Where’s Sirin?” he asked, opening the gate for her. The huge, iron door—meticulously cast in repeating patterns of moons and namsaras—creaked as it opened.
“He needed to rid the king of a problem,” she repeated numbly, stepping through and past the soldat, leaving him to draw his own conclusions.
It was midnight now, and the palace was quiet. A few guards stood at doors or paced entrances to rooms, but no servants walked. Roa’s footsteps and the soft hush of her gray wool dress brushing against her legs seemed unnaturally loud in contrast.
