When I stood, I let out a garbled growl. My head swayed as the aching heat in my stomach turned blistering, but I managed step after labored step, until I was at the modest ship’s narrow gangplank.
It wasn’t a polished naval vessel but a small merchant ship. Clearly it had once been fine, with its intricate carvings and gilded nameplate. Now it was old, if not well-kept. Fluttering at the top of the center mast was a gray flag, emblazoned with a black flower and a scrollingM.Lachlan stood at the rail, talking to a ship captain who looked both willing and annoyed to oblige him.
The captain glared down at me, revealing her face from below her wide-brimmed hat, and I started. With those glinting, assessing eyes, straight but strong nose, and mischievously tilted mouth, she looked just like Lachlan. She gave me a long stare, a curt nod, and then she turned away and disappeared onto her deck. A moment later, Lachlan hurried down the gangplank, carrying a small writing box.
“Is that your sister?” I asked, as he set the box atop a small crate and began pulling out parchment, a bottle of ink, a blotter, and wax.
“Yes. Older.” He held up the black quill. “We’re too alike to be close. But she liked Agatha. So she’s agreed to deliver your letter and give us a dinghy.”
I nodded and began to scratch across the parchment. The letters looked as frail as I felt.
To the Isle of Seraf’s royal council,
In the battle that the Isle of Seraf waged upon Varya, your king, Nemea Miros, fell. He lay upon his back as I, Imogen Nel, daughter of Nemea Miros and the Great Goddess Ligea, ran his own sword through his neck. As his executioner and child, I claim his throne by force and by right. I commit to ushering in a new and prosperous age for the isle and its people.
That was all I could write before my hand began to shake too violently. It wasn’t the pain alone that made me tremble, but something in seeing those words in stark black and white, true and eternal. Lachlan read over the letter with his brows steeply pitched, before he began folding it to seal.
“Wait.” My heart struck my ribs as I wrote one final line.
I, your queen, will return home for my throne shortly.
Lachlan then folded the note, poured the wax he’d prepared, and took Nemea’s sword that hung at his hip into his fist. He held up the little rounded pommel where a knotted, tooth-bared eel was carved and pressed it into the dark green pool of wax. It lefta ferocious, fanged impression behind. Something portentous twisted through me to see it.
To claim that emblem, and all it encompassed, as my own.
Lachlan packed the writing box as the pulleys on the side of his sister’s ship squeaked and clicked. The promised dinghy lowered slowly to the still water below. I could feel the movement of the sea beneath the damp dock wood, could feel that pulsing in my hurting stomach. My head spun from the heat and time seemed to ebb and flow again, swirling like a strange current, because in another breath I was in the little boat, sitting across from Lachlan, who held a worn oar in each fist.
Masts and hulls towered high above as he navigated us out into the open bay. “I’ll row us through the port. You’ll take over when we hit open water.”
I nodded. Theodore’s ship was nearly too far away to see clearly now. Sweat beaded over my skin. I swiped a hand across my forehead and unlatched my cloak’s clip.
Lachlan adjusted on his bench, nervously. “You feel like drowning me?”
I glared. “I’m just hot.”
“It’s cool out.” He gnawed the inside of his cheek, clearly suspicious. The sweeps of his oars grew sharper, before he let out a grunt. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me your favorite color,” he snapped. “Bloody fuck—tell me what happened to you and how bad it is, Imogen.”
The boat bobbed over the turquoise water as my sluggish mind tried to parse what exactly to say. Selfishly, I didn’t want him to see me as corrupted. I wanted to keep whatever tenuous camaraderie we’d found intact, and I expected that admitting that my bargainwith Eusia had involved an illicit spell might wreck it. “Nemea stabbed me,” I finally said. “Before I… killed him.”
His mouth flattened into a grim line. “Theo will fix it.”
Theo.
The water sluiced and the wind whistled around my ear. My mind and task were set, but simply hearing his name drew my thoughts to him, as if it were a lure. I could almost feel the hot rush of his power penetrating my body, could feel the memory of his calloused hands pressing into my flesh. Memories of his lips, skin, breaths.
Only the king will do.
My jaw stung with a rush of saliva, and I gripped the bench beneath me. I wanted him with an uncanny hunger that felt like it might never be sated. I closed my eyes, breathed, and used every bit of strength I had to shove the want away.
“Imogen?”
I opened my eyes to Lachlan’s wary stare. Shook my head. “No,” I said. “I won’t be near enough to Theodore while I’m on that ship for him to heal me.”
He gave me a blank stare. “Like hell. I’ll make him heal you from across the deck if I have to.”
