Each breath became more difficult than the last. There wasn’t enough air in the small bathroom, the shop, the whole town. She felt faint and fevered and ill and cold and hot and a tinge seasick, despite never having been at sea and therefore having no idea what it felt like to be seasick in the first place.
“I think I’m dying,” Risa told Maria, stumbling toward the door, her hand grasping the knob. The door held fast, and her vision turned to pinpricks and starbursts of white, darkness crowding the edges. She slid down onto the cool tiled floor as pain burst from her chest, flames licking up her body in a roar of heat.
The young girl stepped over her, face blank. “Yes, you are.” She pulled a key from beneath her shift, fitted it into the keyhole, and opened the door. “It would have been me,” she whispered before slipping through the crack.
Risa could do little else but watch her go as darkness claimed her.
CHAPTER NINEIn Which the Girl Attempts to Survive (Again)
Risa awoke to a raging headache, but at least she could breathe again.
She was in a study that looked so familiar it brought her a swooping sense of vertigo. A grand desk was stationed before a large window, and floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowed with books spanning several topics. Darkness had fallen, and a four-pointed chandelier cast a golden glow that she begrudgingly compared to the color of the prince’s eyes. The settee on which she lay—her feet dangling off the edge—was a shade of blue similar to the one tucked into her father’s office. If it weren’t for the strange globes housing floating blobs and miniature people-shaped figures frozen in amber liquid, she might have thought she was home.
Other differences became apparent as Risa got her bearings. The window behind the desk should have overlooked the back of thehouse, but the iron bars across it made it difficult to tell what lay beyond the glass. Pa’s desk would have been piled with documents and decrees and orders sent by the king; tallies for the town’s census; the quarterly petition that called for his dismissal as mayor on the grounds that his daughter was the worst; and the official ruling that the grounds for dismissal were illegal, because hating someone’s daughter wasn’t a good reason to fire them. The desk in this study had only one very big scroll, which spanned the entire surface, its heading too small for her to read from where she was sprawled.
Then there were some of the book titles that, after some investigation, made her hair stand on end. Hidden between history tomes and war books were titles likeSlim Pickings: How to Sacrifice People to Farcical Entities,So You Want to Be a Cult Leader?, andDon’t Mess with Gods: A Guide on Perpetuating Fear in the Average Townsperson.
Maria’s foreboding words came back to her.Shit.
The biggest difference from the study she knew so well was the presence of the prince seated in an armchair near her feet and Maria pulling at a large brass doorknob that refused to give way.
“She’s awake!” Prince Javi declared. There was a flush spread across his cheeks and face, eyes unnaturally bright. But strangely, when Risa tried to peer closer, her vision started to warp.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, swinging her legs over the side of the settee. A mistake, since standing while looking at him made her woozy. Vision swimming, Risa tried to steady herself with little success and sagged onto her seat.
Maria glanced back from her battle against the door. “I’m helping. I’m not sure what he’s doing.”
“We’re locked in here,” the prince informed Risa with a wink. Had he somehow turned redder in the last three seconds?
“Where’s Brunie?”
He shrugged and sought a peek beneath the collar of his new tunic, which was the same gray as hers and shimmered whenever he moved. “Not here.”
Risa pulled her eyes from him and directed her next question to Maria. “How exactly is that helping?”
“I brought him.” Maria indicated the prince. “We discovered the door automatically locks.”
Something snagged Risa’s attention, and she focused once more on Prince Javi. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m drunk!” he declared. Then burped for good measure. “Oh, and blond.”
Thatwas it.
His beautiful dark curls were now limp corn-silk-yellow locks plastered against his sweaty forehead. And now that she looked at him, the undulating waves of seasickness aside, she could tell that he wasn’t merely drunk.
“You’re the prettiest witch I’ve ever seen, and I know two,” he told her earnestly.
He wassick.
Risa tore her gaze away, and not just because his words made her heart falter. But because looking at him niggled at something deep in her mind and sent a spark of heat racing across her skin. It made her feel a different type of sick, and she had plenty enough of that without Prince Javi’s help.
Whatever. Right now she had to sober him up somehow.
After giving her stomach a stern talking to (silently, of course), she tried standing again and found she wasn’t as dizzy. She vaultedtoward the books, scanning the titles in hopes that the mayor—in addition to being obsessed with conducting sacrifices and brainwashing towns—was interested in witchcraft and spell books.
Wait.
Sacrifices?
