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Garath followed me as I descended three flights of stairs to the ground floor of the castle and made my way into the throne room. I crossed to the dais at the back, bypassing the behemoth black granite throne for the heavy steel door concealed behind an enormous tapestry of the Patron Tree. Garath held the tapestry away from the wall as I unlocked the door and pulled it open, revealing a stairway. The stone steps descended into absolute darkness, and he handed me a lighter. I lit two lanterns hanging on hooks on the wall inside the dark stairwell and returned the lighter to Garath before passing him one of the lit lanterns.
It had been ages since I last visited the catacombs beneath the castle. I had forgotten how quiet it was down here. How still the air was.
Garath’s footsteps shushed on the stone behind me as we started down the stairs. The descent always brought the illusion that the arched ceiling was closing in, and I hurried my steps to reach the bottom where the ceiling leveled out a little higher.
The catacombs had been carved out of the bedrock during the early stages of the castle’s construction and consisted of a single tunnel, which spiraled outward from the bottom of the stairs. On alternating sides, dozens of burial chambers had been carved to house the bodies of the Corvo queens and their children—at least, the ones who didn’t become a queen in their own right.
All Corvo queens who had come before me, save for the first queen and my namesake, Queen Delphinia, rested here. Queen Delphinia had been interred in a mausoleum located in the cemetery on the outer grounds, across the moat, where citizens were more welcome and could visit her.
Mother’s burial chamber was the sixth on the left. I paused in the arched doorway.
Her body lay atop the undecorated lid of the sarcophagus. The black granite lid that would cover the sarcophagus once her body was interred was still being finished by the sculptors. She was dressed in a long, black gown decorated with feathers that had been saved from her first companion raven, Morigan, after the bird’s death, long before I was born. Her silver hair had been fashioned in an elaborate braid that coiled around her head like a crown and was adorned with gleaming silver feathers.
Holding up the lantern, I stepped into the burial chamber and slowly approached Mother’s body. The rich, slightly spicy smell of the incense and oils used during embalming scented the air.
I tilted my head to the side, studying Mother’s face. Despite the extensive time and attention the embalmers had spent preparing her for her funeral, it didn’t look quite right. Her mouth appeared stretched, her lips thinner and wider than they should have been, and her jowls were smoothed out. The effect of gravity on aged, anelastic skin, I supposed.
I shifted my attention down from her face to her neck and the high, feathered collar of her dress. A few inches of silver chain was barely visible over her collarbone. Setting the lantern on the corner of the sarcophagus, I reached for the chain to pull the pendant free from its concealment.
My fingertips brushed her cold flesh, and I jerked my hand back, sucking in a sharp breath. I glanced at Garath, who stood in the main passageway, keeping watch.
I made a fist, then stretched out my fingers and shook out my hand before trying again. This time, I didn’t flinch when I touched her. I pulled the necklace out from under the collar of her dress, and the pendant clinked against the granite. I inched the chain around her neck until I found the clasp, and then I unfastened it and lifted the necklace.
Holding the necklace up by the chain, I studied the dangling silver pendant in the dim, golden light of the lantern. Mother had held the pendant concealed within her tight fist for so long that I had forgotten the finer details of the piece. The silver pendant of the nobly resting raven was tarnished in the creases, but the black diamond in the place of its eye sparkled in the lantern light.
My heart beat faster as I lowered the pendant toward my open, waiting palm. Grief poured into me the instant the silver raven made contact with my skin.
Memories from Mother’s life flashed through my mind’s eye. Through my heart.
Countless failed pregnancies. Three living children, none of which wasme. One didn’t live beyond infancy. One was male and must not have lived beyond the age of four or five because that was where Mother’s memories of him stopped. The last, I recognized from portraits as my older sister, Calla, who had suffered from the wasting sickness but lived well into her teenage years, thanks to Mother force-feeding her the healing elixir. But Calla had figured out how it was made and ended up dying of the wasting sickness before she could be officially blessed as the Corvo heir.
I saw Mother speaking with Maylar in her study, discussing the infants born to other purebred Empath families throughout the kingdom and plotting to import strix to cover up the spread of the wasting sickness among the lowborn masses. Repeatedly, I watched her take bundled infants from their weeping mothers. I watched the fathers accept heavy coin purses in exchange for their babies. I heard Maylar’s warning to the parents that telling a soul about the exchange would mean not onlytheirdeaths but also the deaths of their children.
I felt Mother’s hope, which waned with each successive child. I felt her heartbreak as the adopted children fell to the wasting sickness, one by one. Each death was covered up as either an accident or an assassination. Mother raised a dozen adopted children to near adulthood, but none survived.
Until me.
Inever got sick because I wasn’t highborn. My family line wasn’t pure and noble. She bought me from a poor family with too many children who lived in a village in the southern region of the kingdom. Three of their older children had been classified as Empaths, despite the parents having muddled gifts. There was a good chance that their newborn would express strong empathic Abilities as well. And none of their children showed any signs of the wasting sickness, which mattered because, even then, she had been aware that the disease impacted everyone in our kingdom, not only the purebred nobles.
Mother had been desperate for an heir. She had already been taking the healing elixir for long enough that the people of our kingdom were murmuring about her unnaturally long lifespan. She had stopped leaving the castle, so only those within the safety of the inner walls ever saw her too-young face.
If she wanted the Corvo Dynasty to survive, she had to find an heir.
My parents hadn’t wanted to give me up, but they had needed the money. They had already been having difficulty feeding the seven children they already had. Seven children. Seven brothers or sisters could still be out there, somewhere. Probably in that same village.
The memories faded, the resonance ending with a whisper of Mother’s voice.
I’m sorry . . .
I dragged in a breath as the resonance released me.
“Del!”
My knees gave out, and powerful arms caught me before I hit the stone floor.
Garath scooped me up, cradling me like I weighed nothing, and carried me out of the catacombs and back up to the royal living quarters while I quietly wept against his shoulder.
“Open the door,” he ordered, and I raised my head enough to see that we had reached the door to my private rooms.
