Page 87

A thread worn down to a single fraying fiber, trembling, guttering, like a candle flame in a draught. This consuming fear of not knowing if she was safe without me assaulted me yet again. When we were apart, I had obsessed with thoughts of her, wondering if she were safe. Whether there would be an attack Aster wasn’t strong enough to protect her from. Or if she somehow injured herself or came down with an illness. A million scenarios had played out in my mind as I was fighting my way across the kingdom.

The fear was my constant companion, but even then, it had not frightened me the way this did. This thin and failing thing, this sense of her not far away at all but somehow slipping away. As if fading out of the world by inches even as I groped after her in the dark.

The irritation died, replaced by bile rising hot in my throat, and I was dragging on the first clothes my hand found before I had decided to move at all, my own pulse roaring in my ears.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I told myself I was being a fool. I told myself the pull was due to exhaustion on her side, perhaps. That distance played tricks on it, that I would find her in the yard laughing at my brother and feel foolish for the panic. I told myself all of it, and yet…

I did not believe a single word.

I moved faster anyway, throwing the chamber door wide and striding out into the corridor, still pulling my shirt down over my head.

A servant flattened herself against the wall, eyes politely averted as her half-dressed king tore past her. A habit I’d picked up in Alexandra’s world, caring nothing for who saw what. I’d picked up a great many habits in that world. It was the one place I had ever felt I could simply be, not the King of Theïkós but a man. A soldier, a creature with a heart that wanted things.

A General who hunted the girl he loved.

I had planned to give her this day. The thought came to me uselessly, even now. Even as I half-ran toward the gardens. A plan to ride out to the great lake at the edge of the woods. A picnic in the long grass. The whole of an afternoon with no crown, no court, and no castle watching us. Because neither of us had ever quite trusted these walls, as though something in them still lay waiting for its moment to strike.

I had a gift for her. A horse of her own, glossy, bright and bad-tempered, much like its new owner. Acelin was healed, too; the healers had done well by him, and I had wanted to be the one to tell her, to watch the worry fade from her face.

A perfect day. I had wanted to give her just one perfect, ordinary day.

And then I came through the archway into the gardens, and the clash of steel rang out to meet me. Two voices rising over it, trading insults too fond to be meant, and my heart leaped up into my throat with relief, there, she’s there, she’s safe…

Both of the voices were male.

Aster and Lazaros, each circling each other on the dew-wet grass, blades flashing in the low red sun. My brother grinning as he goaded the Minotaur into earning a victory they both knew was already his. On any other morning, I would have leaned against the wall and watched, perhaps stripped off my shirt, put on my armor and joined them.

However, there was no red hair among them. No quick, clever shape ducking out of the way of their swords. My little warrior was missing.

The relief I’d first felt curdled into something far colder.

“Lazaros.” My voice came out wrong, scraped raw. They didn’t hear me over the ring of steel. “Lazaros!”

A parry sent the sound singing away across the gardens, swallowing my voice whole, and the last of my patience went with it. I crossed the grass and stepped clean between them, Aster’s blade hissing past my shoulder by a finger’s breadth. Lazaros’s already swinging too fast to call back. I dropped, rolled, came up behind my brother and swept his legs from under him, caught his sword arm as he fell and slammed the guard down against the earth. The blade leaped from his fingers to bounce across the grass.

“Brother! What the fuck!” Lazaros gasped, more startled than hurt, as I hauled him up by the collar.

“Where is she?!” I barely recognized my own voice. There was nothing of the king in it, nothing of the man who teased and bantered. Only the animal underneath, and the fear.

“What, Alex is missing?” My brother’s brow furrowed, the answer already dawning across his face. “Shit, I haven’t seen her, Atlas. I swear it!” And then, more quietly, the worry catching, “She should be with you.”

“She wasn’t with you?” I rounded on Aster, who had lowered his sword and gone very still. “Either of you? You haven’t seen her this morning at all?!”

“Not a glimpse,” Aster said carefully. “As far as any of us knew, she was exactly where you left her. Curled up warm in your bed.”

The ground seemed to tilt beneath me.

Because if she was not with Lazaros, and not with Aster, and not in our bed, and that thread between us was guttering like a dying flame, then she was somewhere in this castle. Or at least in its grounds, alone, fading, and I had wasted these last precious minutes being annoyed with her.

“Then where…” The words came out of me cracked and useless. “…Where in all the realms is she?”

I bent without thinking to retrieve my brother’s fallen sword, some part of me needing my hands to do something while my mind came apart, and Lazaros bent for it in the same instant.

My hand grazed his.

And the world dropped out from under me.