Page 73 of Crown of the Dunes

“This situation is different,” Torin stammered.

My hands clenched into fists, and a horrible cracking rent the room. It cut through the silence that had pushed in on me as the desert threatened to pull me away in its inexorable flow. I gasped as I came back to myself.

Torin’s gaze was fixed on my feet, and I followed his eyeline down to the stone floor. Where once it had been a smooth, solid slab cut cleanly from the mountainside, now a large crack ran down it. Running from the throne at one end to the doors at the other, it divided the throne room nearly in two.

“Sands. It’s true.”

The murmured voice of one of the clansmen cut through the unnatural still air of the room.

“They will be staying,” I said, my voice low and hard.

Torin’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, but he only nodded, offering no more argument. Still, as he shuffled back toward the side of the room, he exchanged a look with Malachi that made my hackles rise.

I pushed those thoughts and turned back to Aderyn and the clansmen to make arrangements for them. I would not turn these people away, no matter the cost. The lonely exile that still lurked under the skin of a queen would not allow it.

Chapter eighteen

Erix

The evening breeze cooled my skin—sweaty from the climb up the outside of the palace—as I took in Keera’s empty chambers. Most nights, she was already preparing for sleep as I crested the edge of the balcony, but tonight, all that greeted me was the gently billowing curtains around her bed and a haphazard pile of scrolls on her dressing table.

I exhaled heavily through my nose before grabbing one of the scrolls and sitting down on her bed to look through it for clues to breaking blood glass—a pursuit that took up every spare moment I could find. After half an hour, the door to Keera’s chambers slammed open, and I looked up from the scroll in my hands to find her striding into the room, shoulders slumped and expression bleak.

“How was your day?” I asked, raising a brow as I took in her appearance.

She walked toward the bed and collapsed on it face first with a quiet oomph.

“Nobody died.” The words were muffled as she spoke them straight into the mattress.

I carefully set the scroll aside, knowing that it was unlikely to hold the information I sought anyway. “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

She rolled over and frowned up at me, upside down as she laid at the foot of the bed, and I sat near the head. Her only response was a scowl. I remembered a time when I chased that scowl, as I admired the lines of her face, but hadn’t yet known the beauty of her smile.

“Because if somebody needs to die,” I continued, “that is something I might be able to help with.”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Nobody dying today was a good thing. Unfortunately, it seems to be the only good thing I can say about today.”

Sitting up, she hunched over and put her face in her hands. I stared at her rounded back, and my heart twisted. Keera belonged sitting proudly on the back of a horse or swinging a saber with fire in her eyes. Something dark twisted within me at seeing her like this.

I had run from the impossible weight of ruling Kelvadan in my youth. Now, my actions had inadvertently shifted that burden to Keera. She faced the task more bravely than I had, but my skin prickled with anger at the way it already appeared to wear her down.

Reaching out, I gently placed one hand between her shoulder blades. She took a deep breath, her ribs expanding and contracting under my fingers.

“Kelvadan is supposed to welcome everybody, but trying to uphold that is only dividing the people more,” Keera said into her hands.

The peace of Kelvadan is a lie.

I had said the words many times in the past, but I bit my tongue, knowing they would not be useful now. And Keera was always so brimming with hope that things could be better, it felt sacrilegious to take away her belief in what this city could be. That hope drew me to her like a moth to a flame.

“I spent hours trying to figure out how to feed the refugees from the desert, and we still haven’t come to a solution,” Keera continued. “We need the riders’ strength to move the fallen rocks and fix the irrigation system for the grain fields. But now that clansmen are living within the walls, the archons are concerned about taking the riders away from the city’s defense. They’re worried the new clansmen are spies and would exploit the lower defenses.”

I chewed my lips, weighing her words.

“I can’t—” She took a shuddering breath, the tremor palpable beneath my fingers. “I can’t let the people starve.”

Her muscles were strong under my touch, a healthy layer of flesh between her skin and bones. But I remembered viscerally a time that it had not been so—a time when she was a wraith in my arms, barely weighing more than a child as I tossed her across Alza’s back.

Bile rose in my throat. I could not make her face the demon of hunger again.