Halla.
Her face was slack, her body loose. The bodice of her white gown gaped, and blood still trickled down the middle of her chest from the cut she’d given herself.
“Sit back down,” I snapped.
She shook her head. “I have always obeyed,” she said in a voice so small it sounded like it belonged to a child. “I have always beenso very good.” She took a step closer, forcing my back to the pool. “I thought it would earn me their love. But all it has given me is a cold, lying king as my keeper.”
“It’s not me that you’re angry with, Halla.” I held up my dagger, urging her to stop. “It’s your mother. And Eusia.”
She shook her head. Her eyes were unsettlingly wide. “What would you do to keep your power?” Her voice had dropped to a crazed hush. “That is the question chasing itself through my head. My mother gave everything and was willing to give more—to giveme—to keep hers. Eusia ripped apart her own body to grow her might. Your darling Imogen is following Eusia’s example to hold on to hers.” Another step. “What wouldyoudo, Theodore Ariti, the good and noble God-king of Varya?”
I let my body go still, let my face go remote. I wouldn’t show her how she unnerved me, but the question stuck in me like a dart. I’d told Imogen I would do terrible things to keep her and my people safe, but I was not willing to commit atrocities forpoweralone. For a crown, or for gold, or for acclaim.
At my silence, Halla came closer and gave a low, frustrated scream. “You cannot even fathom it, can you? Having no power. It has always been yours and it always will be.”
Imogen had once asked me the same question. Before I’d understood the depth of her mistreatment and helplessness. To see that rage and sorrow echoed in Halla made my stomach hollow. “Halla—”
She lifted her fisted hands and pushed them hard against my chest. The pool was at my back, but I held my stance. I gripped her wrists tightly, but she went on. “I understand now why my mother fought so for it, why Eusia did too. Why Imogen will take herself to the brink of death to best them both.” She jerked against my hold, teeth bared in a hiss of fury. “You made me apromise. You signed that contract. Someday I will find a way to make you keep it.”
She’d said it with such prophetic venom that a chill rippled my skin. With my hands still on her wrists, I pushed her backward, herding her toward the wall. Her spine hit the stones, and her fight gave way. She melted to the ground as I hurried back to the pool. Lachlan had lifted a distraught Agatha into his arms and was carrying her toward the stairs when the surface of the pool undulated.
The water rippled and splashed as Imogen broke through.
Her dark hair was plastered to her cheeks, her shoulders. Fingers trembled as she reached for the edge and pulled herself out. She shone wet in the torchlight, moving with purpose and ease, but the look in her eyes… desolate. Bleak.
On an impulse, I stepped toward her, but stopped at the flinty way she pulled away from me.
She settled on her knees beside the pool, breaths racing from exertion. The water rolled down her blank face, over her lips, down her neck.
“Imogen?” She didn’t look up at me. She didn’t budge. “What happened?”
The torchlight juddered over the wet lines of her body. Her mouth hardly moved. “She…”
“She what?” I took her chin in my hand, and forced it up. My heart fell at the bleakness on her face. “Tell me.”
Lachlan had stopped at the base of the stairs, Agatha curled up and whimpering in his arms, waiting tensely to hear what she would say.
Imogen shook her head, but it was Halla, sitting against the rough wall behind me, who spoke. Her voice was a reverential whisper, cloying and haughty. “I told you she was not in the pool.”
The humid air in the room thinned. Imogen’s bloodshot eyes flicked toward Halla and narrowed with menace, but she said nothing at all. She shook her face free of my hand and rose. Sodden and bedraggled as she was, she managed to hold herself tall and straight as she started for the stairs. She climbed past Agatha and Lachlan, not sparing them a glance, and left the four of us in the drawn and smoky silence of the chamber.
We found Imogen again out in the frayed garden at the back of the castle. The storm had slowed, the thunder a distant rumble on the horizon. Only a halfhearted rain fell now. The darkness was halfhearted too, and she sat tucked into the garden’s far corner, under what would have been a proud cypress but was now only a dried splay of ragged branches. Imogen’s hands were wrapped tightly around the edge of the stone bench.
With fresh air and space, Agatha had calmed. Lachlan had draped his shirt over her shoulders and led her over the flagstone path, toward Imogen, where she lowered herself to the bench beside her. Right away, Imogen took her hand and held it tightly, but her still-haunted gaze wouldn’t lift from the pavers before her. It made me feel weak.
Agatha’s voice came hoarse. “I need to apologize…”
“None of this is your fault.”
“But if Eusia wasn’t in the pool… Then what did I see?”
Imogen’s brows dove. “It was a trick of the orb light,” she finally said. “The only thing down there was a tangle of those veins.” Imogen ended the conversation with an abrupt kiss to the back of Agatha’s hand, as if that was that. As if whatever awful thing thathad happened in that pool had not crawled out with her like a parasite stuck to her skin.
Imogen was fiery and stubborn and incomprehensibly resilient. She’d lived her whole life keeping secrets, but I’d come to know her tells. What she’d just told Agatha was an outright lie. Agatha gave Imogen a placated, dazed nod. Exhaustion was pressing in on her. Her shoulders began to stoop, her head dipped.
Lachlan was already at her side. “We need to get you onto the ship to rest,” he said as he scooped her back up into his arms.
Agatha rested her head on his shoulder, melting into him. “I can walk.”
