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So, do it. Get up,I thought.Get the fuck up. Live your life as Lady Lyriana Batavia, Heir to the Arkasva, High Lord of Bamaria. Put on a pretty dress and a pretty smile, and let your boyfriend escort you through the city like a proper noble.It was what I’d been sleepwalking through the past month—wearing the mask of a brave face and then falling apart the moment I was alone.
But it was getting harder to put myself back together again, to prevent my emotions from consuming me. And as much as I tried to logic my way through this, I remained frozen to the bedsheets.
Morgana rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’ll tell Tristan you’re on your cycle bleeding, and your stomach hurts too much for you to get out of bed.”
I blinked. When was the last time I’d bled? A month? Two? Not that it mattered. But I couldn’t remember, like I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, or bathed, or smiled, or felt Jules wrap her arms around me, or listened to the infectious sound of her laugh. Most memories since the Revelation were foggy in my mind. There were clusters of me crying, throwing every piece of clothing on the floor after trying each one on in an attempt to look normal and happy, and then feeling doubly miserable and hating how everything looked and felt on my body. I’d meet up with Tristan, a smile plastered on my face as we pranced around the city and rode in litters, and when I returned home to Cresthaven, I’d lose it the moment I was past the fortress walls. I’d taken to running straight for the ocean, wading in in my clothes and shoes deep enough to scream and cry into the crashing waves without fear of anyone hearing me.
Morgana inched closer to my side of the bed, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “Give me your arm.”
“No!”
Morgana grabbed my elbow, trying to expose my wrist.
Immediately, I snatched it back from her fingers, hugging my arm to my chest. “Don’t touch it.”
The blood oath still felt raw on my wrist, the skin burning where Father had cut me as I’d sworn to keep our secrets—that Meera was like Jules and had one of the three vorakh, visions, and that Father had overstepped in the ceremony to save her. The oath bound me to keep the secret with an ancient magic. I could feel its power hissing under my skin, watching, waiting, ready to strike me down the moment I broke the vow.
We four keep this secret. We four die by this secret.
"I don’t want to touch it,” Morgana snapped. “But I need to make sure it’s healing properly. Stop fighting me.” She grabbed my wrist and wrenched it into her lap, her sharp nails digging into my skin. In the temple when Jules’s vorakh had been revealed, Morgana had held my hand so tightly, she’d cut tiny crescent moons into my skin with her nails. Now the cycles of the moon were tattooed over her wrist and up the length of her arm.
“I am going to throw up,” she said dramatically, peeling back the white bandage on my inner arm. The bandage may have smelled, but the tattoo underneath was pristine.
A seven-pointed star, the Valalumir, had been inked across my skin in perfect detail. Inside the Valalumir, the sigil of Ka Batavia—seraphim wings beneath a full moon—stood proud. The tattoo was there to conceal the blood oath, to obscure the slightly mutilated skin. A blood oath left no visible mark or scar, but it could be felt. As a noble lady, an Heir to the Arkasva, my skin had never been harmed. And if Tristan noticed the slightest imperfection, then the tattoo artist was my defense to sweep away his suspicions.
“At least you don’t have an infection.” Morgana released me.
“Are we done here?” I asked, already rolling back to bury my face against the pillow.
“With this,” she said. “I assume you’re not going to attend your other obligation. I’ll send word you’re sick, and you can lie here and waste away. But if you think I’m going to let the stench of your room seep through the walls and into mine, you’re wrong.”
“Clean it up then. I don’t fucking care.”
Morgana laughed. “Like I know how to clean. You either get the fuck up, wash your Godsdamned clothes, take a bath, and get your shit together, or I will come back in here tonight and throw every single gown you own out the window before I light them on fire.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time. That’s just a reason to go shopping,” I said dully and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Well, luckily, you have a boyfriend with a purse full of silver.”
I grabbed another pillow and placed it on top of my head.
“That is, if you ever get up to see him again,” she said.
A black hole was settling over my heart and stomach. I was just so…empty. And hopeless.
And scared.
Silence washed over us, before Meera screamed from her bedroom. A blood-curdling, animalistic scream.
I recognized the sound at once. At last, one month after her Revelation, one month since Father had controlled her body and magic to make it appear as if she were some mediocre mage—not a powerful Heir to the Arkasva equipped with forbidden magic—Meera’s vorakh was making its second appearance. This was the power, the secret, the curse that had left me with a scarred wrist, a tattooed arm, and a promise that weighed more than my life. This was the same illegal power that had taken Jules and left me a mere shadow.
Meera’s vorakh had come to collect its price. She was having a vision.
Morgana was already moving, no longer trying to work her way around my depression-built mountains of dirty clothes but leaping over them. “Meera!”
There was another scream—louder and weaker all at once, as if she was too terrified of what she’d seen in her mind to even express the fear flooding through her.
I remembered seeing that fear in Jules’s eyes when she’d looked out across the temple once her magic was revealed. She had been searching for me, for her family, for support. She had needed us—neededme—and I…I’d sat there, pinned to the chair, schooling my face to a neutral, noble expression, and holding the hand of the very man who’d have hunted her down in seconds if the Imperator hadn’t gotten to her first.
