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“It’s Prince Malyr…” The whisper threaded through the crowd before it morphed into an enthusiastic chant. “The prince himself is taking on the course!”
Faces turned, eyes alight with anticipation, cheers knitting together into a fabric of palpable excitement. I couldn’t help but get swept up in the moment, a thrill tingling my belly.
Sebian stretched his arms before he swung them in wide circles. “Just try to keep up. I know thoseprincelyduties have you a bit rusty. Wouldn’t want you to break one of your royal wings.”
“If we judged the race by the size of your mouth, you’d win every time,” Malyr said with a grin, all tension of the last weeks between the two evaporated, revealing the long-standing friendship between them. I liked that, very much so. “Let’s see if your wings are as fast as your tongue.”
At the woman’s call, Malyr and Sebian shifted. Malyr’s unkindness dashed into the air, slicing through the first set of hoops at a rapid speed. Sebian’s birds turned, swooped, and somersaulted, their acrobatic shortcuts closing any gap between them to the excited claps of the crowd.
“Galantia.”
I flinched at the sound of that voice and turned toward Cici. Of course, the carriages that had arrived that day… I should have known.
“Why are you here?”
“I thought Prince Malyr might have told you,” she said, her green dress framed by a golden cloak, her hair, for once, open copper ringlets. “He will make my father the new lord of Tidestone, along with all its holdings.”
To make up for the marriage agreement that Malyr had broken. Something I could hardly hold against him, how it would cost me my home. It made my success at Valtaris all the more crucial.
“What do you want?”
“To apologize. I know that you feel betrayed, and—”
“I don’t care to hear your apology. I thought I’d found a sort of friend in you, or at least a confidante, yet you schemed against me behind my back.”
“How could I not have?” She clasped my arm, pushing herself in front of me, her glistening emerald eyes finding mine. “You tell me, Galantia, what choices you had in the past when your lord father bid you to marry Prince Domren, Prince Malyr… any man, truly, not of our choosing.”
My throat narrowed at the truth in her words, but the betrayal ran too deep to be so easily forgiven. “Not of your choosing? Sebian told me of your disheveled state when you came out of Malyr’s private rooms that morning.”
Cici’s gaze remained a visceral thing that bore into my side. “I know you had love for Prince Malyr. I saw it in the way you looked at him.”
I flinched but said nothing.
“For what it is worth, he never touched me,” she said. “Unless, of course, one counts the way he grabbed my hair that day, held my face to his hearth, and threatened to melt my skin off should I breathe a word to you about our secret betrothal. How you managed to tolerate his attention has my respect. I never wanted it beyond my family’s need to find our place in this new world.”
The cacophony of cheering muted to a hum as she walked away. Two sensations warred at my core: the sinking of my stomach at Malyr’s viciousness toward her, and the lifting of my chest at the fact that he hadn’t touched her, not intimately. My jealousy had been… misplaced.
At least with Cici.
And Lorn? Well, she was currently sizzling on a pyre. How likely was it that Malyr had fucked her one night and killed her a week later? How likely was it that she’d lied to weaken me that day? And how likely was it that Malyr had gotten injured because I’d fallen for it?
But most of all, how likely was it that I’d misjudged Malyr and the heart he carried beneath the shadows? Marla had told me it was up to the both of us to nurture love. Maybe it was time for me to stop fighting it.
But first, Valtaris.
ChapterThirty-Four
Galantia
Present Day, Valtaris
My hips shifted with the slow beats of Liual’s hooves clanking on the stone, my body aching with a bone-deep fatigue that had settled in my very marrow, turning my limbs to lead. Still, I held my hand up at those shadows undulating ahead of us, absorbing them into my void as we ventured deeper into Valtaris.
The Tarred Road wound its way through the city with its black flagstones cut from obsidian, flanked by buildings that loomed in graveyard’s silence. No tiny claws scrabbled along the sills of barricaded windows, no sharp teeth gnawed at the carcasses of ravens.
No, the city’s rats were as dead as everything else, lying scattered here and there between blackened corpses and bony, withered trees. Soldiers, their faces etched with an exhaustion that matched my own, lifted the dead onto waiting carts, the stench of decay barely masked by the scarf I’d wrapped around my mouth and nose.
I should have felt proud, perhaps happy even. For three whole days, I’d been at this, clearing the city one plateau or main road at a time. But happiness seemed like a twisted emotion to feel when it was steeped in death…
