Page 90 of The Crown’s Temptation

Teorin stood in the frame with color in his face for the first time since I had woken up in this place, his eyes clearer, his posture carrying something restored. Whatever the healer had done was already working.

"What is all the fuss?" he said.

"Where are the clothes I arrived in?"

He looked at me calmly. "I have them."

"You have them?"

"By the time we arrived at the Darkway most of your jewelry had fallen off. I collected what I could." He said it as though this were obvious, as though keeping a dying woman's clothes and jewelry was simply what one did.

"Bring them."

He brought them.

I went through everything piece by piece while he stood there watching. Most of it was gone. I went through the seams and the folds and at the very end, pressed into the lining of the collar, I found one ruby.

I closed my fist around it. "Leave."

He left.

I sat on the edge of the bed and let it all come at once.

The children I could not reach. Colsar on the other side of something I could not cross. My mother who I had just met for the first time in a room made of memory and would never meet any other way. The face chains gone. The rubies gone. Everything she had left me gone except for this one small thing pressing into my palm.

I cried in a way I had not let myself cry since I woke up here. When it was over I looked at the ruby in my palm.

The back of it was pointed. I pressed it against my cheek and pushed it through. Blood ran down my face and I did not flinch because my mother had not flinched and I was her daughter.

I wiped the blood away and thought about Petunis the day she gave me the facial jewelry.

"These do not fall," she had said.

I stood up. I opened the parcel Axar had given me.

It was time to go to the shoreline.

Part Three

CHAPTER 20

The Shoreline

Iopened the parcel Axar had given me and tucked it beneath my cloak.

Eravic Vaelor.

The name had been a promise in my mother’s memories and a warning in Axar’s voice. Trust him.

When I left my chambers, I found Dali waiting.

That alone surprised me.

Dali did not offer help freely. Not unless there was a reason.

"Eravic asked me to bring you," she said before I could ask why she was there.

I studied her.