“I don’t have to see her.” I tapped my nose. “My magic will let me sense hers.”
“But you don’t even know what she is,” Paloma pointed out. “She could be a magier or a master or a morph. Or she might just be a mutt like you are. It might not even be a woman. Maybe it’s a man.”
I shrugged. “Magic is magic. I can always smell it, no matter what kind or who it belongs to. Besides, if there’s even the smallest bit of truth to the rumor . . .”
My voice trailed off, and a hard knot of emotion suddenly clogged my throat. That damn hope was rising up in me again, trying to trap me with its warm, honeyed sweetness, but I pushed it back down.
“Then that means at least one of the Blairs, one of your cousins, is still alive.” Paloma gave me a sympathetic look, then shook her head, dismissing the promising thought just like I had. “But you still need to be careful. It wouldn’t surprise me if Maeven started this rumor to lure you out of the palace so she and the rest of the Bastard Brigade can try to kill you again.”
Maeven was the bastard sister of the Mortan king and the one who had orchestrated the Seven Spire massacre. She was also the leader of the Bastard Brigade, a group of bastard relatives of the king and the other legitimate Mortan royals. Over the past several months, Maeven and her Bastard Brigade had tried to kill me numerous times, although I had managed to thwart most of their schemes and stay alive—so far.
“You might be right,” I admitted. “Maeven is certainly clever and devious enough to float a rumor about another Blair to get me here, but I have to learn for myself whether it’s true. And if it is a plot on her part, then we’ll kill her assassins, just like we have before.”
“And if it’s not another Mortan plot?” Paloma asked.
“Then we’ll find out exactly who this person is, where they’ve been, and how they’ve managed to stay alive. And especially why they didn’t come to Seven Spire after I took the throne and decreed that Blair survivors should return to the palace.”
Part of me was happy that one of my cousins had potentially survived the slaughter, but part of me was also dreading the family reunion. I was only queen because all the other Blairs were dead. What if this mysterious cousin had been higher in line for the throne? What if they had a better claim on the crown? What if they had more magic than I did?
And if any of that were true, then came the biggest question of all—should I step aside?
That was what protocol and tradition would dictate I do. But what was best for Bellona? Because I couldn’t imagine anyone out there—Blair or otherwise—who wanted to protect my kingdom and her people more than I did.
I hadn’t wanted to be queen, but now that I had finally secured my position, I didn’t want to give it up just because someone else had had the good fortune to survive the massacre. If I was being brutally honest, I also didn’t want to give up all the power and privileges that came with being the queen of Bellona. It was heady and thrilling to be respected and even feared, especially since I had spent all those long years being the royal stand-in, the royal puppet, at Seven Spire. Perhaps that made me petty and selfish, just like Vasilia had been.
But most of all, I didn’t want to give up the throne because of how it would impact my chances of finally taking my revenge on Maeven and the Mortan king. I wanted to make them suffer for what they’d done to the Blairs, to my family, to me, and I had a far better chance of getting that revenge as queen, rather than going back to just being Lady Everleigh.
“Well, I hope this person shows up soon,” Paloma grumbled, breaking into my turbulent thoughts. “I don’t want to stand around in the cold all night.”
She stamped her feet and pulled her forest-green cloak a little tighter around her body. Autumn had already come and gone, and winter was quickly taking hold in the Spire Mountains. In addition to the impending snow tonight, the wind had a bitter chill that promised that even colder, harsher weather was on its way.
“Don’t worry. Xenia and her spies said to meet at this fountain at six o’clock, and it’s that time now. Someone should show up soon.”
Paloma sighed and stamped her feet again, but the two of us held our position in the alley, and Serilda, Cho, and Sullivan remained vigilant in their spots around and above the plaza.
The sun might be setting, but fluorestones were flaring to life inside the surrounding buildings, as well as the streetlamps that dotted the walkways lining the plaza. The soft, golden lights must have made the goods look even more attractive because the merchants were still doing a brisk business, and it was hard to pick out anyone suspicious, much less a familiar face.
Ever since Xenia had told me that one of my cousins might be alive, I had been racking my mind, trying to figure out who it could be, but I hadn’t come up with any possibilities. So I stared out into the plaza, peering at everyone who walked by.
I was so busy studying the faces of the adults that I almost missed the girl.
She was young, sixteen or so, and dressed in several layers of thin, grubby rags. Her clothes might have been dark blue at one time but were now almost black with grime. Her face wasn’t much better. Dirt streaked across her cheeks, and her nose was red from the cold. A pale gray winter hat covered her head, although her dark brown hair stuck up at crazy angles through the gaping holes in the knit fabric.
The girl stopped about twenty feet away from us, standing in the shadows next to a bakery cart. Her head snapped back and forth, as though she was looking for someone, although she seemed to be focusing on the area around the fountain. She tapped her hand on her thigh in a nervous rhythm, even as she shifted back and forth on her feet, like she was ready to run away at any moment. A few red-hot sparks flashed on her fingertips, flickering in time to her uneasy motions, although she quickly curled her hand into a fist, snuffing out the telltale signs of magic.
I drew in a breath, letting the air roll in over my tongue and tasting all the scents in it again. The breads, the cookies, the bloody cuts of meat, the fluorestone dust. I pushed aside all those scents and concentrated on the girl. My nose twitched, and I finally got a whiff of her scent—the hot, caustic stench of magic mixed with a sweet, rosy note.
“There,” I whispered, discreetly pointing the girl out to Paloma. “I think it might be her.”
Paloma peered in that direction. “Who is she? Do you recognize her?”
I shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen that girl before, but I can smell her magic. She’s definitely a fire magier, and a fairly strong one at that.” I hesitated, trying to push down my treacherous hope yet again. “She could be a Summer queen. Lots of them had fire magic.”
“Then what is she waiting for?” Paloma asked. “Serilda is still throwing pennies into the fountain. That’s the signal.”
It had been Xenia’s idea to say that any Blair seeking asylum at Seven Spire should approach the blond woman tossing pennies into the fountain. The girl had come to the right plaza at the right time, so she must have heard the information, but she still didn’t approach Serilda.
Instead, she stared at Serilda a moment longer, then turned around and ran away.
For a moment, I stood there, stunned. My friends and I had been plotting this for days, and everything had been going according to plan. But now, instead of talking to Serilda like she was supposed to, the girl was heading deeper into the crowd and getting farther away with each passing second.
Desperation rushed through me, propelling me forward, and I charged out of the alley.
“Evie!” Paloma hissed. “Evie, wait for me!”
But I couldn’t wait, not without losing sight of the girl. So I plunged into the crowd and chased after her.
* * *
The girl must have had some practice picking her way through crowds because she slipped through the throngs of people as easily as one of the Black Swan acrobats could tumble across the arena floor.
Several times, I lost sight of her, only to push past someone and see her gray hat bobbing along
in the distance. I felt like a fisherman trying to reel in a particularly difficult catch. Every time I almost got close enough to latch onto her shoulder, she sped up and put three more people in between us. She never looked back, but I wasn’t exactly being subtle with all my shoving and pushing, and she must have realized that someone was following her, given the annoyed shouts that sprang up in my wake.
“Evie!” Paloma hissed again from somewhere behind me. “Slow down! You’re going to get your fool self killed!”
She was probably right, but I couldn’t slow down. Not until I knew whether this girl was actually a Blair. The burning need to know—and the rising hope that I wasn’t the only one left—drove me onward.
The girl broke free of the plaza and darted onto one of the side streets. I glanced back over my shoulder. Paloma was still pushing through the crowd behind me, but Serilda, Cho, and Sullivan were nowhere in sight. Not surprising, given how much farther across the plaza they’d been. Well, my friends would just have to catch up. I wasn’t losing the girl. Not now.
I rushed down the side street, racing around the people ambling along and window-shopping. My boots clattered on the cobblestones, my hood slipped off my head, and my cloak streamed out behind me like a dark blue ribbon, but I hurried on.
I reached the end of the street. Just when I thought I’d lost her completely, I spotted her gray hat disappearing into an alley. I hurried up to the entrance and stopped, peering down the dark corridor.
The alley ran for about thirty feet before opening up into another, much smaller plaza, but no carts and merchants were set up here, and no pretty stone fountain bubbled in the center. Instead, cracked wooden boards, broken bottles, busted bricks, and other trash littered this area.
Buildings ringed the plaza, with another alley leading out the far side, and debris was piled in heaps along the walls, as though the people living and working in the rooms above simply opened their windows and tossed their garbage outside, not caring where it landed below. The stench of sour milk, rotten meat, and other spoiled food almost knocked me down, and I had to pinch the bridge of my nose to hold back a sneeze.
In just a few streets, I had gone from one of the most affluent parts of Svalin to the beginning of the slums. Sadness filled me, the way it always did at the thought that people—my people—lived like this, but I shoved the emotion aside. I could be sad later, after I’d found the girl.
I held my position at the alley entrance, looking and listening, but I didn’t see the girl running out the far side, and I didn’t hear any footsteps. She must still be in the plaza somewhere. Maybe she thought I was a threat. Maybe she was hiding until I left. Or maybe this was her home.
I peered at the piles of debris lining the walls, but there didn’t seem to be a pattern to them, and I didn’t see any makeshift shacks made of scraps of wood, metal, and stone. Still, as nimbly as the girl had slipped through the crowd, she could easily slither behind a stack of boards or hunker down behind one of the overflowing trash bins.
I glanced back over my shoulder, but I didn’t see Paloma. Despite her dire warning that I was going to get myself killed, I wasn’t a complete reckless idiot, and I realized that this would be the perfect place for assassins to ambush me. But I also couldn’t afford to lose the girl, so I drew my sword and cautiously crept down the alley, peering into the shadows. I also tasted the air again, trying to pick up the scent of the girl’s magic, although all the rotting garbage made it difficult.
Something rustled behind a trash bin, and I froze, tightening my grip on my sword.
A black rat roughly the size of a small dog ambled out from behind the bin. It paused in the middle of the alley for a moment, staring at me with its bright black eyes before scurrying away and disappearing into a pile of trash on the opposite side.
I let out a tense breath and crept forward again. I stopped in the open space in the center of the plaza and slowly turned around, studying the piles of debris.
The sun had finally set, and the murky gray twilight was quickly being swallowed up by the oncoming night. A few lights burned in the buildings that ringed the plaza, but they did little to drive back the encroaching darkness. If the girl was hiding here, I couldn’t see her, so I drew in breath after breath, tasting all the scents in the air again. It took me a few seconds to push past the garbage, but I finally got a whiff of hot, caustic magic.
For a moment, I thought it was the girl’s magic, and my heart lifted with fresh hope. Then I drew in another breath, and I realized that this magic had much more of an electric sizzle than the girl’s fire power—and that it was far too strong to be just one person’s magic.
As soon as the realization filled my mind, the shadows around me started moving, shifting, and rising, as people slithered out of piles of trash all around the plaza and climbed to their feet.
One second, I was alone. The next, I was surrounded by roughly a dozen magiers. Paloma had been right.
It was a trap.
About the Author
JENNIFER ESTEP is a New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author who prowls the streets of her imagination in search of her next fantasy idea.
In addition to her Crown of Shards series, Jennifer is also the author of the Elemental Assassin, Mythos Academy, Bigtime, and Black Blade series. She has written more than thirty books, along with numerous novellas and stories.
In her spare time, Jennifer enjoys hanging out with friends and family, doing yoga, and reading fantasy and romance books. She also watches way too much TV and loves all things related to superheroes.
For more information on Jennifer and her books, visit her website at www.jenniferestep.com or follow her online on Facebook, Goodreads, BookBub, and Twitter—@Jennifer_Estep. You can also sign up for her newsletter at www.jenniferestep.com/contact-jennifer/newsletter.
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Also by Jennifer Estep
The Crown of Shards Series
Kill the Queen
Protect the Prince
The Elemental Assassin Series
Spider’s Bite
Web of Lies
Venom
Tangled Threads
Spider’s Revenge
By a Thread
Widow’s Web
Deadly Sting
Heart of Venom
The Spider
Poison Promise
Black Widow
Spider’s Trap
Bitter Bite
Unraveled
Snared
Venom in the Veins
The Mythos Academy Series
Touch of Frost
Kiss of Frost
Dark Frost
Crimson Frost
Midnight Frost
Killer Frost
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
protect the prince. Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Estep. Excerpt from crush the king copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Estep. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Harper Voyager and design are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers LLC.
first edition
Map designed by Virginia Norey
Cover design by Yeon Kim
Cover photographs © Neostock (woman’s face); © Neostock (outfit)
; © Elisanth/Dreamstime.com (corset); © Mircea Bezergheanu/Dreamstime.com (cloak); © Mikeaubry/Dreamstime.com (sword); © Gaspard Walter/Dreamstime.com (palace and throne)
Title page art © Kaissa/Shutterstock (sword); © ksanask.art/Shutterstock (rays around sword)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JULY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-279765-0
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279764-3
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