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I had another name here. My true name.
The door lock snicked over, and Razak entered.
Nerves clenched my gut. I schooled my expression and stayed at the window. He clicked the door closed, flicked the lock, and stood with his back to me, measuring what to say. Razak’s moods turned like the lash of a whip. He might be furious or jubilant. He might praise or punish, and sometimes his praisewaspunishment.
I swallowed what felt like glass in my throat and waited.
“Lark…” He finally turned and approached, stroking his thumb along his bottom lip. Intelligence sparkled in his eyes. Amusement too. He wore purple, the dark kind that turned black in soft lighting. No crown, no lace, nothing to detract from the man. “Interesting name. However did you think of it?”
You sing like a lark, my sweet boy. We’ll escape one day, just you and I…“It came to me.”
He huffed and stopped in the center of the room. The bed was little more than a collection of blankets on the floor, and the fireplace gaped, cold and empty. Love’s dungeon had been more comfortable.
After he’d appraised my living conditions, he deigned to see me. “Are you proud of what you’ve done?” His smile was the slash of a blade, sharp, fleeting.
One wrong answer, a single wrong step, and I’d pay. Before I’d left—before he’d sent me to the Court of Love—I’d have asked him for forgiveness for whatever I’d done to displease him. I’d been nineteen then, a boy on the cusp of maturity. I stared back at him now, four years later, a man. We were almost of the same age, he and I. But he wore a crown of obsidian, while I flipped my cap for coin.
He’d hurt me soon. Oh, how I wanted to deny him that pleasure.
But like the fall of the Court of Love, his victory was inevitable.
I knelt, bowed my head, and closed my eyes, remembering my place. His fingers settled on my hair, then skimmed down my face and hooked under my chin, tilting my head up. “You did not tell me all you knew of Prince Arin. You kept secrets.”
Fear parted my lips in a silent gasp. “Forgive me.”
“Forgiveness is not for the likes of you.” He grabbed my right hand, separated my fingers. A blade flashed. Pain danced up my arm. I knew not to scream; it would satisfy him. The sound choked me instead. What was another finger lost anyway?
“Welcome home, Zayan.” He smiled. “Brother.”
CHAPTER17
Arin
“You should have cutthe fool’s throat,” Ogden, the king of War, grumbled.
“What I do in my court is of no concern of yours.” I stood in the center of a vast, horseshoe-shaped table, flanked by two guards. War’s council of advisors sat around me, along with several faces I recognized from my fleeting visits to Justice, many years ago. This felt like a trial. Perhaps it was. After my spectacular failure, I deserved to be judged.
“Your court?” The king chuckled, making his thick braids bounce. “There is nothing left of your court, young prince.” Only the king of War would laugh at a massacre. His large, shirtless chest and shoulders heaved beneath a heavy, decorative gorget.
I kept my chin up, even as shame and disgrace tried to bow my head. A few days had passed since my court had fallen. Days that were a blur of hot pain and maddening dreams. I barely had the strength to stand on ceremony here, but this display was necessary.
Ogden eyed me now, his face full of disappointment.
My father had always respected him. I could never understand why. The brute of a man considered violence the answer to everything. Nothing could defy the swing of Ogden’s axe.
Weapons hung on the walls of this great hall, all kinds of curved swords and jagged spears crossed behind spiked shields. Red and black banners draped from the high ceilings. Occasionally, a blast of hot desert air rippled over them, bringing some respite from the cloying heat, but it soon gasped out again.
Sweat dripped down my neck and glued my shirt to my back. Sickness churned in my belly and the wound in my side throbbed. The council chambers were vast but the air stifling. I’d remembered War’s palace as a furnace as a boy. Little had changed.
“Justice, here, want to see you tried for treason against Dallin’s accord.” Ogden gestured blindly toward the three blue-robed visitors. “But you assaulted a lord of this court, which means the decision is—”
“If Draven’s tongue hadn’t been so loose—”
Ogden slammed his great fist down, rattling numerous cups. “Silence! A prince you may be, but here, now, you are in my debt, and the debt of Warlord Draven.”
I clasped my hands behind my back and clenched my jaw. It was true, I owed the Court of War much, even my life. Draven had found me outside the palace’s smoldering remains, delirious, bleeding to death. I remembered little of the next day and night, just that he’d found help, patched me up, and brought me here. To War. Considering what I’d done to the lord, it was a surprise he hadn’t left me for dead among the flowers.
Ogden’s gaze narrowed. “I didn’t think you were stupid, quite the opposite. But why you allowed that vicious little serpent, Razak, through your doors is beyond me.”
