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Graeson, however, knew time could not heal all wounds. Time would lessen the pain. It would allow Dani to forget some of the heartache. But it was the forgetting, Graeson had learned, that hurt the worst. The moment when you couldn’t remember their voice anymore or when you couldn’t remember the exact shade of their irises or the lilt in their laughter.
Graeson had lived with loss his entire life, but his familiarity did not make this loss any easier. The only thing that helped, he found, was shutting down, letting the flame inside of him fade to nothing but an ember.
Dani, however, couldn’t turn it off. She was not him. She was too human.
As Dani took a shaky breath, the canoe sailed away further into the Black Lake, into the thick fog that crawled over the water’s surface. If Dani waited too long, she wouldn’t be able to hit it, and Fynn’s canoe wouldn’t light up. His soul wouldn’t leave his body and travel to the Beneath. Instead, it would be lost in the Between.
Still, Dani didn’t release the bow.
The hairs on the back of Graeson’s neck stood. She was running out of time, yet Graeson didn’t move. He couldn’t.
Then, Dani exhaled.
She dipped the oil-soaked bundle tied to the end of the arrow into the blazing torch perched at the end of the deck. She placed the arrow on the string of her bow and raised her arms. The tips of her fingers grazed her cheek as she pulled the arrow back.
Still, the canoe kept floating further and further away.
Still, time ticked by.
The tension in the air grew taut as the arrow remained between Dani’s slim fingers and the bowstring remained stretched.
Dani closed her eyes and took a second breath. This time, however, there was no shake in her body or tremble in her hands. Her eyelids fluttered open, her chin tilted higher, and her back straightened.
Then, Dani released the bow, and Fynn’s canoe went up in flames in an instant.
Chapter3
KALLIE
With the doorshut behind her and her new Frenzian handmaiden along with it, Kallie slipped down the length of the old oak door. The wood scratched and tugged on the fabric of her dress as she fell to the ground.
In the privacy of the queen’s quarters and without the paper-thin walls of the cabin, the mask Kallie had carefully crafted disintegrated. The heaviness of the past week fell upon her, sinking into her body and forcing her to crumble onto the ground. The crash unsupported and unrelenting.
While Phaia led Kallie through the halls of the dark, foreign castle, Kallie kept her mask tight to her face as she mentally connected the path to the maps she had studied. Over the past several decades, Domitius had only been able to gather a few maps of Frenzia’s castle. The maps were not all-inclusive. Corridors and sections of the castle were unlabeled on the maps, strange juts in the infrastructure depicted in the blueprints that were not normal. So Kallie took note of every side hall, every door they passed. Anything to distract herself.
By the time they had ascended several flights of stairs of one of the palace’s five high towers, Kallie’s legs ached. Days of being sedentary on the ship had done her no favors. Soon, she would need to return to a regular training routine. Although she did not believe she would be fighting masked assailants, she couldn’t be found slacking.
Today, however, gravity pulled her down.
Beneath her, the bare wood floor stole any warmth left in her body as she sat against the queen’s bedroom door. Before Phaia had left, Kallie had requested water to be delivered in the morning for a bath to scrub off the thick layer of salt and sweat sticking to her skin. Tonight, she had no strength to wash the sea away.
Reaching into the front of her corset, Kallie pulled out the folded-up painting with shaky hands. After folding and unfolding the stolen portrait a hundred times over the past week, permanent creases marked the fine parchment and started cracking. The subjects’ faces, thankfully, were unmarked.
As she stared at the family portrait, her father’s questions from that first night on the ship rang in her head.
Who has cared for you all this time, Kalisandre?
Who has trained you all of these years?
Who has promised you power, the power you otherwise would not have access to?
Has your time here softened you?
There was no doubt in her mind that he had heard her screams as Fynn died, no doubt that he had seen her crumble to the ground.
Had she grown sympathetic for the Pontian prince? Of course. How could she not? Fynn was her brother. But more than that, Fynn had a way of infiltrating someone’s heart and making them care for the boyish, cocky prince.
A part of her would always care for the family Kallie had longed to have. She had spent years searching the Ardentolian castle for a painting of her mother, so she could put a face to the woman she did not remember. When asked, the staff would say that the king had requested all paintings of her mother destroyed. Now, Kallie knew that they had never existed at all. He had tricked an entire castle and made them all believe a lie. She once thought a portrait of her mother would give her the answers she sought, but holding the portrait in her hand now provided no clarity.
