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Or perhaps she’d gone mad. Why are you allowing the king to lock me in? I’m the queen.
It was a stretch, and she could sense the magic threads of the walls as they pulsed in defiance. Was it aggravated by her questioning the king? Or at her referring to herself as the queen when she wasn’t quite yet? But the tree was alive, and that had to count for something.
This was her only way out of there and to Arkimedes. Every fiber of her body told her as much. The glass of the door vibrated faster, ringing as if a storm were shaking it.
At any moment now, it would shatter.
“Madam?” Eris called from outside. He’d probably heard the tremble of the doors and felt the walls vibrate. The doorknob rattled as he tried to enter. The door cracked open an inch, and Eris’s mane of blond locks came into view.
“Don’t let him in,” Nava said. “I need to go to my soulmate, castle. Let me out.”
The door slammed shut in front of Eris’s face, and his panicked gasp filtered through the door, making her smile.
“Won’t you leave us if it lets you out, queen?” A voice, sweet and strange, rang inside Nava’s ears. “Won’t you leave us and take the prince with you if it lets you out?”
Nava’s throat constricted, and she took sharp breaths at the intrusion in her head.
This didn’t feel like it did when Arkimedes or Aristaeus spoke with their thoughts. That felt natural, like breathing. This, however, felt like an intrusion in her mind. Like the castle shouldn’t be speaking to her so directly yet.
“You aren’t the queen yet,” the castle said with a touch more menace in its tone, and Nava’s ears rang painfully. Like she shouldn’t listen to its words, even if its energy felt warm and inviting.
“Let me out of this room so I can heal my mate, your future king, before the emissary gets to us.”
“Madam, let me in at once. I don’t want to call the others,” Eris called, trying the doorknob again, but the door remained shut.
“Then don’t,” she responded, closing her eyes to fend off the pain that filled her skull. Gods, it hurt. “Are you going to take me to Orion?”
Eris grunted in frustration. “I… I can’t.”
Wrong answer.
Nava looked at the door. Her bees pressed on the balcony door, and a hairline crack crawled up the glass. Inside it, a fragment broke loose. The hole was so small she could barely see it, but it was there.
“Will the future queen leave if it helps her?” the castle asked.
“I won’t leave the kingdom,” Nava promised. And for the first time, those words didn’t feel like a betrayal of herself.
“Then…it’s time. The princeling of darkness is alone.”
This didn’t feel like home yet, but the kingdom was something she could learn to love. She wanted to help the citizens who were barely scraping by. She wanted to prevent people like those children in the bakery from ever having to suffer like that again.
Arkimedes had been right. Together, they had the power to make changes. To address the issues that others ignored.
The weblike black spell retreated around the hole. It was tiny but big enough for Nava to escape.
She reached for her bond with Arkimedes, but it remained empty. Panic seared through her, her body tensing as she looked over her shoulder.
“I don’t want any guards in his bedroom, only the healer and the nurse,” she said out loud to the room. Her ears were still ringing with a continuous high pitch from listening to its words.
Hopefully, this time, it wouldn’t talk back.
No one stopped her as Nava moved through the humid air of the early afternoon toward her soulmate’s room. His door was unlocked, and like the castle had told her, the room was empty.
Here, she didn’t hear Eris’s frantic knocks on the door anymore, and that alone brought her a semblance of peace. As soon as she’d crept past the balcony doors and into the darkness of Arkimedes’s chambers, the weight of a thousand stones dropped from her shoulders.
She ran toward him across the expanse of the room, grinding to a halt beside the bed.
Arkimedes was fast asleep, clean and out of his bloody clothes. His bandaged wings lay beneath him in an awkward position that didn’t look comfortable. His eyes were closed, his long dark lashes kissing the top of his cheekbones.
