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“Avoiding all of you pricks,” I told the councillors. “Now, please be quiet.”
*
Chapter Seventeen
We were so used to danger hiding behind each corner that we’d instinctively equated Ren’s absence to something nefarious. But it wasn’t an enemy who’d snatched the king from his own palace, unseen. It wasn’t an enemy using secret passageways that none of the rest of us knew about. There had been no noise, no struggle, nothing that Ren had done to alert Aitor…because Ren hadn’twantedhis guard to know he’d disappeared.
I tried to let the buzz of surrounding chatter wash over me, but the individual demands and questions were too distracting.
“I really need you all to stop talking-”
There was a clang of metal on stone, and I glanced over my shoulder to find Jiron with a drawn knife and an irritated expression.
“His Highness said to be quiet,” Elías reminded everyone, taking advantage of the momentary silence Jiron had achieved. “Which means the next person to make a noise will be arrested. Understand?”
Wyatt, grinning, opened his mouth to confirm he understood. Jiron hastily slapped a hand over his mouth before he could utter a word, shooting El an innocent look when the Comandante’s head turned their way. The Lukian’s shoulders shook with silent laughter.
“Right,” I said. “Um, you might all have to be patient or find something more interesting to do. I’ve never been able to See properly on command before.”
None of them moved. Unsure if that was a show of faith in me or just fear that the Comandante might interpret footfalls as sufficient noise to cause their arrest, I didn’t know, but in the spirit of optimism, I was going to tell myself it was the former.
I shut my eyes, uncurled my clenched fingers to lay my palms flat on my thighs, and dropped my chin to my chest. The faint but familiar scent of citrus wafted up from my shirt, the memory of Ren dirtying up my clothes with his breakfast seeming an eon ago.
Contrary to how it worked in the ballads, magic rarely saved the day. Well, perhaps Starling’s Touch had averted our deaths once or twice, but the average Blessed healer couldn’t do half of what she could. And both my Sight and Dima’s Hearken had ultimately proven useless in getting Ren back on the Quarehian throne, despite how absurd it seemed that we’d discovered someone who could literallyreadminds,only for that same person to spend most of the journey south comatose, and when called upon, was unable to detect the pivotal lie we’d been hoping to unravel. My Sight had even acted contrary to our interests, turning me against my brother in fear of the betrayal that turned out to be nothing but a ruse.
But that was life; it never went quite the way you planned.
And all of those experiences told me not to look to my magic for an answer now, that it was a hopeless endeavour I shouldn’t even attempt.
But I was never very good at doing what I was told.
-
I don’t know how long I sat there in the draughty corridor, trying to achieve a peaceful, harmonic state or whatever the fuck Aksinia had called it when Ren and I had visited Delzerce, the Temarian capital city, last month. The royal seer had happily informed me what a shit student I was, but I’d accused her teaching ability of much the same, and we’d reached something of a begrudging compromise where I ignored the majority of what she said and she offered scathing praise when I finally managed to trigger a near useless half-vision.
I scowled as a shadow passed over my closed eyelids, the disruption once again yanking me back to the surface. I’d probably been in more of a sleepy doze than a harmonic state, but I wouldn’t be admitting it.
“I, uh, still can’t concentrate with you all looming over me,” I said sheepishly. “Perhaps you could…”
I’d been meaning to end that sentence withfuck off, and I mean it this time,but Luis promptly sat down next to me, adjusting his sword so the sheath didn’t smack against the stone tiles. Jiron joined him, pulling Wyatt down into his lap and wordlessly fussing to ensure his lover wasn’t touching any part of the cold floor that had already numbed my own ass.
Luis cleared his throat. The rest of our entourage swiftly lowered themselves down into kneeling or seated positions, Lilia and Zovisasha quick to copy Wyatt’s pose and drape themselves over other people’s laps. Parvan narrowed his eyes at Lilia as she clung obstinately to his neck, while Councillor del Olmo blinked in bemused delight at the way Zovisasha had shamelessly perched herself on her knee.
“You’ve got this, Mathias,” Elías breathed encouragingly from his own knees, clearly not inclined to arrest himself for breaking his no-speaking rule. I nodded once, swallowing down the lumpin my throat that told me this was a useless endeavour, and closed my eyes once more.
If there was ever a time to be stubborn, it was now. I gritted my teeth, attempting to corral my prescient magic and refusing to let it evade me.
Ren.
My king, my lover, my best friend.
The missing pieces of my heart.
Where the fuck are you?
I conjured his face in my mind’s eye. How I remembered him from this morning: laughing, his face stretched in that broad, amused grin of his, strands of dark hair tumbling down around his face.
But the image kept slipping away like oil between my fingers; not a vision but a mere conjuration of memory.
