Now all of it was half undone. Before the statue of Ligea, who stood beneath the western stairs, two maids worked together to fold a deep-green-and-gold banner, making crisp creases. They tucked it neatly into a basket at their feet.
“What happened?” I asked in a wobbling hush. “Did he call it off?”
Lachlan’s look hardened with confusion, a wariness filling his gaze before he eyed the paneled wall at the base of the western stairs. “Let’s keep moving.”
I dug in my heels. “Did he call it off?”
“Please,be quiet, Imogen.” He scanned the room once more and whispered, “No.”
“Then what…”
“Not here.” He started us toward the far wall and the narrowdoor hidden there. Each step had me feeling like I might drop, but he took my arm when my knees started to give. Hinges squealed, and I hobbled into a small, dark room. An armory. There was a small hearth, a handful of lit lamps in their holders. Maces, and flails, and battle-axes hung on the pitted stone walls. An old table and chairs took up the center of the space.
Lachlan bolted the door. His even mask fell away, replaced by dire intensity. “Where did the empress take her?”
“To Anthemoessa.” An awful cold crackled through me. “Where Eusia is.”
He leaned against the wall as the color drained from his cheeks. His skin looked suddenly waxen as he sorted through battering thoughts.
“Tell me what’s happened with the wedding.” I spoke too strongly, making pain flare deep in my middle. “Yesterday, when I left—”
Lachlan gave his head a sharp shake. “Yesterday?” The word broke in his throat. He shook his head again. “It’s beentwodays, Imogen. Two fucking days since you left.”
I sucked in a breath. Held it. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it—that I’d spent two whole days on the water, fighting toward land in a spell-sick stupor, clinging to a meager, inactionable plan, while Agatha sailed nearer and nearer to danger. By now she might have reached it.
“How far is Anthemoessa?” My voice was small and frantic.
“Just over three days.” Wood scraped as he pulled the nearest chair from the table and collapsed into it. He clutched his short hair in his fingers. “But it’s impossible to get to.”
I gaped at him, trying to transmute my pain, and shock, and anger into something violent enough to sustain me. “Stand up, you ass.” His head snapped to me, wet eyes to mine. “You have pinedfor her for a lifetime andnowyou collapse? When she needs you most?”
He glowered. “What can we do? You’ve been proscribed—”
“No thanks to you.”
“It wasn’t me. The council put it to a vote at Eftan’s insistence,” he said. “Everyone in the palace knows who you are. They know you’re to be imprisoned until trial. Admitting to regicide, like you just did in the garden, won’t help you either.”
“Tell Theodore to pardon me.”
He shook his head. “He’s not here.”
A new pain tangled in my chest. I took a small step back like I could escape what he would tell me next.
“The wedding has been moved to Theo’s ship.” Lachlan spoke in starts and stops, like it took effort to form the words. “After that battle, after you went missing, Theo snapped… he altered all the wedding contracts. They set off for the docks a couple hours ago. They’re headed to Obelia so Halla can have a proper wedding celebration with her own people.”
I had to play the words over again in my head, had to fight to keep my stumbling heart intact. I needed Halla. I needed to get to Agatha and Eusia. I shoved the insatiablewantI felt for Theodore as far down as I could.
For a long moment, our gazes held. I could nearly feel the charged air between us slowly turn our sorrow and terror into an unmapped, awful idea.
“Lachlan.” Despite how it ratcheted my hideous pain, I forced a deep breath. I clung to the table’s edge to keep myself upright. “We need to get to that ship.”
2
Theodore
I was the first to arrive on the ship. I’d slipped from the palace before Halla and my council and courtiers, then into the stables. I made my guards ride ten lengths behind so I might have at least the illusion of solitude.
Now my stateroom door was locked, the curtain drawn over the Siren in the stained-glass window, and I carefully unfolded one of the books I’d stolen from the hermitess. Its oil paper and linen wrappings unfurled over the table, offering up its flaking, silvered title.
