Page 126 of Crown of the Dunes

“The antidote,” I hissed. “We upheld our end of the bargain. Now heal her.”

“Oh, but the city isn’t all I want. I’ll give you the weaver in exchange for Kelvadan’s surrender, but I’m after something more powerful.”

My heart rose into my throat, and the weight of the broken gemstone tucked into my sash suddenly increased the second before he said it.

“The Heart of the Desert.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but I couldn’t help the way my face spasmed. After a decade of wearing a mask, I did not have the practice schooling my face that an experienced diplomat would. He could read me easily.

“But you’ve talked about it before. In your letters. You said you and Keera would be able to retrieve it together,” he drawled.

My brain skidded to a halt at his words, struggling to piece together the reality that had been violently shattered in a matter of hours, like broken shards of pottery that wouldn’t quite fit.

“You intercepted the letters,” Keera gasped, catching on before me. Her voice was a whispered rasp.

Calix smiled, and despite the blood on his hands and Neven’s continued whimpering in the background, it was not a cold, calculating smile—it was the warm, open smile he had worn during all his manipulations. Its genuineness was even more unsettling than if it had been fabricated.

“When I was out sending my eagle to my father, I noticed one particular falcon that kept fluttering around the castle. Birds tend to like me, so I had no issue persuading it to give me its message,” he said. “At first, I thought I was simply disrupting Kelvadan’s chances for peace by sending the messages back. After all, a city at war would be more willing to make a deal that gave me a foothold of power in the desert. But then I read of the Heart, and I knew I had my answer.

“See, the ocean that connects the islands of Viltov has magic too, but there are few left who believe in it, and our armies rely on machines of war these days. But I have sailed the seas long enough to know there is a power that lurks in her depths—long enough to believe there is a magic in the earth here as well. The power of the ocean is fickle and dangerous, but if I could acquire this Heart—a power I could hold in the palm of my hand? Viltov could conquer Doran once and for all.”

“The Heart of the Desert would not respond to one who didn’t love her—who didn’t have her soul,” Keera snarled, fierceness imbuing her words despite the blood that bubbled on her lips. “You can’t even ride a horse.”

But the truth currently burned a hole in my pocket. We had found the Heart, but its power was gone. The inexorable call of power I had felt behind the doors to Alyx’s tomb was nowhere to be found, the lumps in my pocket nothing more than inert gemstones.

I did not know if I could restore the Heart. I had no idea how to fix it. But I could still save Keera.

Slowly, I reached into my sash, and my fingers closed around the hard planes of the Heart. Calix’s eyebrows rose in interest while Keera’s face fell in despair as I pulled forth the crimson gem.

I opened my fingers to reveal one stone in my open palm. The way the remaining sun, all but disappeared behind the mountains, made it glimmer and glow like fire. It gave me hope that Calix would know nothing was amiss.

The stone was cleaved so neatly in two that it might have been done by a gem smith, and I kept the long, flat side against my palm, to disguise the fact that this was just one half of a whole. Calix clearly could not feel the power of the desert, and he would not know that this piece of red crystal didn’t spark with the life inherent in every stone and creature of this land.

Keera whimpered. “Don’t give it to him. You have to restore it. There’s still hope.”

I closed my fingers around the gem, but I refused to look at her. She hadn’t given away that this did not hold the power Calix sought, but the pleading in her tone was almost enough to make me break. Keera still had faith that I could somehow set this right—that the stone could be healed.

That endless hope was what had kept her alive for a decade of solitude. But without her by my side, I would have none of that hope.

“I will give you the Heart if you give her the antidote,” I bargained.

Calix’s lips twisted up in satisfaction. Now it was his turn to reach into the pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a small green vial.

“A heart for a heart,” he murmured.

I nodded my agreement.

Using his grip in Keera’s hair, he hauled her to her feet. I gritted my teeth at the way she cried out in pain. Her legs trembled as they struggled to hold her, clearly only staying upright due to Calix’s grip.

The tether at the base of my skull lurched, and I tried to grasp onto it, finding it slippery with pain and fear. I tried to find any sense of reassurance to push toward her in the tumult of my own magic, to tell her it would soon be over. Nothing seemed to stick though, as a strange sense of cold resolve pulsed toward me.

Calix used his thumb to pop the small cork from the vial and held it up as if in a toast.

“Here’s to you, former Queen of Kelvadan.”

Chapter thirty-three

Keera