Page 83 of Tale of the Heart Queen

“This Empyrium must have told her?”

“But why would they do that?”

“I’m not sure,” he says.

“What else happened?”

He continues speaking, recounting how he woke up and how he broke out of Zerra’s palace. The sadness in his voice when he recounts his time with his grandfather breaks my heart.

“Whose voice was in the Torch?” I ask when he tells me about how Garnet was forced to descend.

“I can’t even begin to guess,” Nadir says. “If we knew, it might answer some questions about what my father wants from you.”

I shake my head. “We never really discussed what Cloris said. She claimed she went to your father and revealed me and Tristan and Willow, but what did he want? What did she promise him?”

Nadir presses a thumb to his lip. “When you first disappeared from Nostraza, he didn’t seem to care other than making sure you were dead,” he says, and I watch as he continues. “But then he changed his tune and suddenly seemed intent on me finding you.”

“So maybe Cloris promised him something—whether the ark or something else—but when he couldn’t get to my magic, he gave up.” He looks up at me. “And something happened during those weeks you were looking for me.”

“Maybe,” he says as we both fall into silence.

“Zerra tried to force you into having sex with her?” I ask after a minute, my voice low and deadly.

He sighs. “Yeah. The extra fucked-up part is it’s obvious that anyone she brings up from the surface eventually succumbs to this weird kind of numbness. All her servants and helpers were like ghosts—present but not really there. After a living person spends enough time up there, that’s who they become.”

“I’ll kill her,” I growl, and Nadir’s face cracks.

“I love it when you’re possessive, Heart Queen.”

“I mean it,” I say. “She was already on my list, but now—”

“Lor, if she dies, then does the Empyrium get what they want from you?”

I sigh and take a sip of coffee.

“I had considered that,” I say, my heart feeling heavy. If this fate is inescapable, then I’ve been contenting myself that maybe Nadir could live with me. But even if he was willing to abandon his life on the surface, I couldn’t let him suffer the fate he just described. I also tell him what D’Arcy said about the death of one’s mate because now I’m wondering if the same thing might affect him if I’m sent to the Evanescence for good.

“You weren’t kidding when you said it was complicated,” Nadir says with a weary sigh as I offer him a weak smile.

We both fall into silence as we pick at our plates. I was starving when I woke up, but I’ve lost my appetite in the face of the ever-mounting odds piling up against us.

Then he gives me a serious look. “How did you destroy her palace? What did you sacrifice?”

My brow furrows, and I let out a deep breath.

“What is it?” he asks.

“You,” I say. “When she refused to give you back, I thought I’d never see you again, and I wanted to hurt her. When she said Herric’s name, I realized she never intended to release you. So I lost control—I truly thought you were gone forever.”

He slides from his seat and drops to a knee, his hands folding with mine. We press our foreheads together, needing only to hear our breath and feel our hearts beat.

“So now what?” Nadir says after a moment.

“We stick to the plan and head back to Aphelion.”

I look at him and nod, neither of us saying what’s next. We have to find the Crown so I can ascend. We need to get the arks of Aphelion and then Heart. That means confronting Rion once and for all. I started in The Aurora as a child and ended up in the Sun Palace, but everything keeps pointing me back to where I spent so many miserable years.

My gaze drifts north. Both Rion and Zerra want the ark of Heart for what I can only surmise are very different reasons.