I shoved the man before me with such force that he nearly fell. “Out of my way.” A fresh wave of laughter and cheers came from behind me, but my ribs felt like fracture. I stormed toward the altar room. “Where is she?”
All of the guards looked dumbfounded. “She’s within, Your Majesty.”
I shouldered my way inside. The light of the candles on the far end of the room flickered. I stopped in the aisle, eyes locked on a blood-strewn statue of Eusia. The chamber was empty.
My knees threatened to give. I gripped the bench at my side.
“Theo?” Lachlan said.
I spun. Agatha stood beside him, her face as gray as the gown she wore. Her mouth gaped as she stared at the bloodied altar. Partygoers filed into the hall beyond the open doors, but I could only take them in in pieces, as if the whole world had shattered into sharp, blinding shards. The glint of a jewel, the flash of white teeth.
“She’s in a gold gown,” I managed to say, unsure why I was describing her. “Her hair is down.”
Agatha locked eyes with me. “She’s gone?”
I nodded. “Yes.” Reflexively, Lachlan pulled his sword. “The empress must have taken her—”
Agatha reached for Lachlan, bracing herself on his arm. “The empress isn’t here. I caught a glimpse of her through the door of her throne room in the keep as we were leaving. A servant was tending to her. She was pacing in front of her throne.”
“She could have sent anyone.” I touched the dagger at my hip. “Take a carriage back. I’ll set my guards searching here for her first, and then I’ll meet you.”
“But what if she’s here?” Lachlan asked. “What if Eusia is down here and the empress is keeping her hands clean? She might have given the task to someone—”
“No,” I said, adamant. “The empress never let her own daughter into Eusia’s sanctum. She’s hoarded Eusia for all these years.Shewill be the one to gift Imogen to Eusia.” The short moment they took to let that absorb felt like a lifetime. “Go.”
We started toward the laughter and chatter and buzzing music beyond the doors. Agatha and Lachlan disappeared into the crowd almost instantly, and as I hurriedly spoke to my guards, the guests cheered and hollered and began herding me back outinto the center hall. My guards had gotten their directions though, and ducked into the sea of people with purpose, splitting up and sweeping through halls and adjoining rooms.
A new waltz spilled from the ballroom, beaconing half the people surrounding me to rush toward its doors for a dance, and that was when I saw Markis, cutting quickly toward me through the middle of the crowd, a curiously intense look in his pale green eyes.
I gripped his shoulder. “What is it? You found her?”
He kept his voice low. “I haven’t seen Queen Imogen, but I did spot your wife sneaking out a back hall. A servant told me that it leads to a small sculpture garden. Beyond that are the stables.”
The stables. That cold prickling sensation fell down my spine again. “Show me.”
Markis led me as quickly as the dense crowd would allow. Through the center hall, past the quickly unraveling partiers in the ballroom. Past one ostentatious room after the next, until the hall came to a dramatic end at a towering door, laden in hammered gold. Engraved in its middle was the shape of a diamond. Two elegantly wrought hands tugged its sides open. I knew the emblem’s meaning instantly.
Eusia’s would-be death wound, held wide by her own hands for all her devotees to see.
I pulled my dagger and pushed the door open, trudged and met a wall of icy air and a garden of white pillars. The dozen statues here had become towering piles of snow, but the night was clear and bright, and pressed into the thick layer at my feet was a path of small footprints leading to the opening in the high garden wall.
I glanced back at Markis. “Stay and keep looking for Imogen.”
He nodded eagerly, his face tight with a look too close to guilt for my liking. “I’ll look for Aleka too.” He gulped. “I’ve not seen her since we arrived.”
I nodded, as the blunt pain of betrayal knocked my ribs. The trust I’d had in my council had been a sham from the first. An impostor dressed in familiar trappings. But I raced into the biting night, leaving Markis looking contrite in that palace doorway.
As I curved around and down an ice-slick slope, toward the stable doors, I thought I caught a glimpse of Halla’s glowing hair snapping in the wind. But I couldn’t spot the white skirt of her wedding gown, nor the glint of its jewels. The stables sat alone in the clearing. They were hulking and unrefined, made of the same sooty stone as the palace.
The heavy wood door sat wide open, and I stopped hard just within. A smattering of grooms and stable boys tended to guests’ horses.
“Where did she go?” I barked to one of the boys, who held a bucket up to a gelding’s muzzle.
His pale eyes were like saucers that darted from the dagger in my fist, back up to my face, then to my crown. “Who, Your Majesty?”
My breaths plumed white steam. I started down the straw-strewn aisle, not waiting for the boy to capitulate and give his princess up to a foreign brute. “Halla,” I yelled.
The only reply was whickering and crunching straw. I was seized by a singular, fury-driven sentience. Every ripple and pull of the air in the stable felt like a finger dragged across my skin. I stalked to the second-to-last stall on the left as if drawn there.
