Zavier’s words stole Amarande’s own from her lips, though it was like she’d said nothing at all. Weren’t they hearing her? Or were they willfully ignoring what had plainly happened? What they’d agreed to and lined out on the parchments scattered about the Sand and Sky.
All heads swiveled Zavier’s way. He was standing now, tall and menacing and staring down Amarande, who remained seated. Trying to make her feel small.
Amarande was so tense she might snap into a million pieces.
“In the past two weeks,” the king started, in a booming and menancing tone, “Ardenia has lied about what happened at the wedding of Renard and Amarande, it has lied about the birthright of its new king, it has lied about Amarande’s death at the hands of Pyrenee. What else has it lied about?”
“Nothing else!”
No longer able to sit there and take it, Amarande shot to her feet, appealing to the room with pleading power in her voice. “It’s a trick. Magic! Pyrenee is trying to rewrite the narrative. I killed him—why would I lie about doing such a terrible thing?” She spun to Renard, his ever-grinning face supplanted over the version of him that haunted her on the backs of her eyelids, pale and bleeding out. “You died.”
Renard thrust his arm toward her and rolled up his sleeve. “Feel my pulse, Your Highness. Go on. Feel it.”
Out of sheer stubbornness and shock, Amarande did as he asked, slapping two fingers to the pulse point at his wrist.
The veins beneath thumped with life.
Her hand shot back in visceral disbelief. As if he’d tried to bite her. Renard’s lips kicked up, a laugh crawling out into the space between them. He offered his wrist to the other leaders, but they declined. Amarande sank on shaky legs to her chair. Next to her, Ferdinand pressed a big hand to her elbow.
In the new silence that followed, Renard seemed to gain power likea gathering black hole—a mark upon the night sky, devouring stars and souls in its wake.
“You believed your love dead, and yet he sits here before us all now, a king.” Renard’s gaze was too heavy on Amarande’s bare skin. “Perhaps, my queen, the problem isn’t us, it’s you.”
Amarande’s own heart pounded wildly in her chest. Warring between relief that her first kill hadn’t been that at all and disappointment that he wasn’t dead.
Renardmurderedher father—she didn’t know it when she’d killed him, but now that she did… that was worthy of what she’d done.
Wasn’t it?
“Iama king,” Luca answered, “and I stand with Queen Amarande’s accounting of the events.”
“Of course, you do, wolf cub. Love often results in stupid, regretful pronouncements.” Renard’s tone and body language cast Luca aside as something weak, to be pitied. His attention swiveled to the rulers of the southern kingdoms and their bevy of councilors. “Surely we have something more important to discuss thanthese lies,which need no more attention.”
“King Renard,” Zavier began, before returning to the original question laid before them at Pyrenee’s entrance, “we were simply voting on the matter of if blood-born Sand and Sky queens should be allowed to rule on their own.”
“Ah, in response to our newly crowned Queen Amarande, I assume.”
Amarande’s skin crawled as Renard again read her face with interest. Across the way, Luca tensed, his shoulders turned completely toward Renard. If he were a different sort of person, Luca might be inclined to throw a punch. Amarande certainly wanted to.
“Yes. Ardenia has announced my niece as its queen after the abdication of their recent king, Ferdinand.” Here, Zavier indicated to her hulking brother. “It is in the view of Myrcell and Basilica that this coronation was in violation of current Sand and Sky precedent that we think it is important to maintain.”
Renard’s ghostly blue eyes swept between Sendoa’s children. His lips kicked up again as he inclined his head to speak. “My, you are an interesting surprise, Ferdinand. Is it true you are the general’s love child and not a reincarnation of King Sendoa growing into his frame?”
Ferdinand simply glared at the king.
Oozing forced geniality, Renard leaned toward Luca as if they were to gossip. “Hecantalk, can’t he? Or did a voice not come with his likeness?”
Luca didn’t answer. Ferdinand nor Amarande either. This only seemed to amuse Renard more.
“And the vote is currently tied?” Renard asked with an upward tick of one blond brow. “The old guard versus the young lovers?”
Again, Amarande squeezed her nails into her palms, balled in her skirts, simply so she wouldn’t claw the hint of glee from his impossible skin. “I have just reminded the ruling council that Pyrenee elevated your mother to queen less than a fortnight hence. Perhaps Pyrenee would support an update to this arcane and ridiculous law.”
Renard’s face hardened into something truly scary now, the dark wells under his eyes shimmering gray in the light. “My mother spent months poisoning me in the same way she killed my father. Once my brother deduced an answer as to why I often felt ill, I took matters into my own hands, yes, and moved the needle so that I might become king before she murdered me, got married, or managed another way.”
“Moved the needle?” Amarande leaned forward, itching to draw blood. From this vantage, she could slam his eye socket into his own knee and win a brawl from there. “You meanpoisoned my father.”
A smile slid across that dangerous face.
