Page 30 of Crown of the Dunes

Her hand tightened in my hair to the edge of pain, and I relished it. “You left me. Just like they all do—you abandoned me.”

Her voice was as sharp as a knife, and I could tell it came from that well of anger deep within her. The one that she tried to hide, but it called to the knot of darkness at the base of my skull.

“I would not. I’ll rip down the walls of Kelvadan with my bare hands to get to you if I have to.” My fingers tightened around her hips, firm enough that they might leave bruises if this were more than a dream.

“But would you surrender if that’s what it took to get me back?” Her eyes hardened. “When you pulled me into this dream, you were the one on the throne, and I was an exile kneeling at your feet.”

A shiver ran through me. It was a vision of how life might have been if I had never run away from my parents. Perhaps I would have been the King of Kelvadan, and she would have wandered into my city looking for safety.

“I only want the power to heal the desert,” I gritted out through my teeth.

“And you would leave me behind if that’s what it took to get it.” Keera’s tone was fierce and accusatory, but her eyes shimmered.

I tried to pull her to me, to crush her into my chest and promise her I had meant every word I had promised her on our journey through the desert. Instead, her body became less solid in my arms, slipping through my grasp like sand through my fingers until I was falling backward. It was as if the strings of magic in my brain holding me close to her had snapped, leaving me untethered as I hurtled backward through space.

My back hit my sleeping mat so hard it knocked my breath from me, as if I had actually fallen from the sky back into my tent. I gasped for air as the feeling of cold sweat coating my skin pulled me back into my body.

Even more desperately than I reached for air, I grasped for the connection to Keera within me, fearing it had been cut.

The thread was pulled taut and shivered under my mental touch, alive and present as it ever was. I let out a shuddering breath of relief.

I had to get to Kelvadan, and soon.

Chapter seven

Keera

My skin tingled from scrubbing by the time I stepped out from under the trickling water in my rooms at the palace. The dust had crusted onto every inch of my skin and hair, dried on by sweat as I scrubbed the painted words from Kelvadan’s outer wall, but I could still see the shadow of where they had been painted, cutting a rift in the city more easily than a sharpened blade.

The Viper is the true heir to Kelvadan.

The words haunted my waking hours, while visions of Erix on the throne plagued my dreams. Although he hadn’t been Erix—he was the Viper, mask firmly in place and gloves on, until I peeled them off his scarred fingers.

I didn’t know yet who had written them, but I had taken it upon myself to remove them.

Now, I had rubbed at my skin with a bar of lightly fragrant soap for long minutes, making this the longest I had stared at my own skin since the fight with the lava wyrm.

I had only bathed perfunctorily since I left the infirmary. Now, as the suds rinsed clean to reveal the subtle texture of scars and rippled flesh, I was forced to confront how much of my skin had been charred away by the lava wyrm.

How close I had come to death.

Bile burned the back of my throat, and I screwed my eyes shut as I stood naked and dripping water in my empty bedroom.

Erix had taken me back to Clan Katal while I was burned and delirious, which still stung of a betrayal, but he also must have gone to incredible lengths to keep me alive. Such thoughts swirled endlessly in my mind: the conflict between my desire to protect Kelvadan at all costs and the endless yearning to hear his voice, to let him hold me like he had crushed me to him in my dreams. I wanted to rage at him—to be angry that he had left me in this city after I told him I loved him in all his brokenness—but as he clutched me to his chest like I was the only thing solid in his world, I had melted. I had belonged the way I ached to belong to this city.

But even though Erix had moved mountains to save me, he was all but lost to me right now.

Of course, Queen Ginevra had nearly lost her life trying to save me as well.

I sighed heavily as I grabbed a clean cloth to scrub myself dry, my newly healed skin still itching and burning at the touch. Tossing it aside once I was dry, I reached for the soft pants and cropped vest laying on my bed—one of the new outfits that kept appearing in my rooms. Whenever I asked Neven about them, he would just shrug and comment on how it was important to “look the part”.

As I tied the vest shut with a beautifully embroidered sash, sporting a pattern of golden larrea flowers, I contemplated what it meant to be the heir to Kelvadan.

Inside me, the emaciated, lonely exile salivated at the idea, just as she had at the food at Neven and Aderyn’s table when she first arrived. Nothing could possibly signal that I belonged more. That I had found a home.

I shoved away the voice inside me that whispered in the dead of night that I wouldn’t be able to do it.

That Erix had run away from this responsibility for a reason.