Soldiers, especially off-duty ones, could be loud and raucous
and lewd, and Brooklynn worried she was missing out on the party they were surely having without her. I think she was even more upset that Aron had been allowed to stay with them, bunking with her men, while she was stuck here. With me.
Still, I hadn’t changed my mind. I didn’t want to be alone, and Zafir wasn’t exactly the kind of company I had in mind.
Besides, there were things we needed to discuss.
Things I couldn’t keep putting off, despite her irascible mood.
I stilled at the thought, my breath gathering in the base of my throat. “Brook,” I whispered. “We need to figure this thing out. We need to find out who was responsible for killing your soldier, because whoever he is . . .” My voice drifted away as the rest of my words got caught. I couldn’t say them: Whoever he is also wants to kill me.
Zafir glanced up then, too, momentarily forgetting the food in front of him. “She’s right. Until we know who the traitor is, Queen Charlaina’s not safe. No one is.”
Brook swallowed what was left in her mouth, and her expression changed. She no longer glared at me across the table. Now she looked determined. “I know,” she answered gravely. “And when I find him, we won’t need the gallows. I’ll kill him myself.”
I didn’t recognize the language right away—it was one I hadn’t heard in ages. But I knew, even from the depths of my dream, it was long dead.
Just like the girl I saw reflected back at me from the looking glass.
Now she was gone.
Not that I’d minded her body, I realized, gazing into her shining green eyes, so unlike the ones I’d been born with. Even if the copper-haired beauty hadn’t been next in line for the throne, men would’ve fallen at her feet.
At my feet, I corrected, a small smile tracing my lips.
But there was only one man I cared about. Only one who made my heart race and my skin tingle.
I turned my attention to the girls who attended me, their voices buzzing all around me as they fussed and fastened and pinned and smoothed, preparing me for the feast.
“Out!” I insisted in that strange foreign tongue, and felt a twinge of satisfaction at their skittishness as they jumped away from me, scattering like a flock of startled birds. When I saw their gazes flitting nervously to one another as if to question my command, I raised my voice. “Now!” I barked the thick, guttural word, making certain they knew I was serious.
I waited until the door clicked behind every last one of them, until I was sure I was alone at last, and then I turned back to the mirror once more.
I was flawless. Right down to the fresh flowers woven into my long, copper tresses. I would make the perfect attendant to my eldest sister on her wedding day, the day she’d take a king to rule at her side. The day she’d start trying for an heir to take her place upon the throne.
To displace me in line.
If only she’d been the one to say the words instead of the girl in whose body I now resided. If only I’d been able to trick the new queen into taking my Essence instead of her younger sister.
Then I wouldn’t be in this predicament.
Then the queen wouldn’t have to die today.
I took a breath and turned toward my bedchamber, not even the second-best quarters in the palace. Definitely not fit for a princess who was second in line.
But I’d requested these rooms for a reason.
I moved aside a heavy table, and beneath that, a thick, cumbersome rug. When I finished, I was winded, but I was staring down at the small, planked door cut into the very floor itself.
I lifted the iron rung and pulled, and then vanished down into the black stairwell.
When I reached the chamber door at the other end of the passageway—my destination—I tapped softy, a sound so faint it could easily have been made by rats scratching against the floorboards.
When I heard the answering knock, I smiled to myself. All was clear.
I slid the door open and stepped out from the shadows into a corridor. Yet even before I was out from behind the heavy door, I heard his voice—just as rough and grating as my own had been. “You look beautiful,” he said in that same long-dead dialect, and even though I’d just thought that very thing while looking at myself in the mirror, I almost couldn’t breathe when he told me so.
Shyly, I stepped forward, just as he held out the gleaming silver blade to me.
It was heavier than I’d expected, and sharper, too. I turned it over in my hand, watching as light reflected from the edge, glinting back at me. “I won’t need it,” I said.
“Take it anyway,” he insisted, his fingers reaching up to caress my cheek, making fire lick through my veins. “Just in case.”
And then I lifted my eyes to his . . .
. . . and gasped.
For too long, I couldn’t find my breath. The air was trapped somewhere between my lungs and my throat, stuck on a lump I couldn’t manage to swallow. I blinked hard in the darkness, my skin barely lit at all, and I guessed that was the reason Sabara’s hold on me had grown.
And now I was too far away from Angelina to ask for her help.
Instead I waited, my fist clutched against my chest, wondering why this was happening, wondering if Sabara knew what I’d just witnessed.
I wondered, too, if any of it was real at all.
When, finally, I inhaled sharply, my gaze shot over to Brooklynn. I was relieved to find she was still asleep beside me, her breathing even. She, at least, wasn’t gasping or suffocating within the confines of her own body.
She wasn’t terrorized by dreams that didn’t belong to her.
I wished I could sleep half as soundly.
I sat up slowly, carefully, quietly. It was strange to be in this room now, knowing what I knew. Seeing what I’d seen.
It was definitely the same place, the same room from my dream. And unless Sabara was playing some sort of trick on me, she’d unwittingly revealed a part of her past she’d probably hoped would have remained long dead and buried.
Yet here we were, the two of us, under the roof of the palace where she’d taken the body of one girl, and violently killed another.
All in an effort to remain on a throne—any throne—forever.
I moved to the place I’d seen in my dream, to where the opening in the floor should be. Unlike in the dream, where a table blocked the way, there was only the rug there now.
I reached for a corner and tugged.
It barely moved, and I tugged it again, this time harder.
The rug scraped across the floor, and I cringed, looking again at Brooklynn. She was still asleep. I pulled again and again, and it moved in increments. It was heavier than it looked, and I made slow progress. My heart was pounding when the corner of the trapdoor finally came into view.
I collapsed onto my knees, peeling back the corner of the rug to reveal the rest of the opening.
I reached for it.
My chest ached with hope as I lifted the recessed rung. It squeaked, and I wondered how long it had been since someone had used this passage.
But despite the rusty handle, the door pulled open with a sigh.
Cold air rushed up from the duct below, hostile and unwelcoming. I shivered but took a step inside anyway.
The first few steps were easy; I found my footing by the light coming from the bedchamber behind me. But as I left the stairs and entered the tunnel beyond, my steps grew more hesitant.
The only light remaining came from me, and it was barely enough to see in. There was only the cold, and a vague recollection that I’d been there before. . . . A memory that wasn’t my own.
I counted my steps, not knowing how far it was, but finding that focusing on such a mundane task made the notion of being down here—alone—less unnerving. When I stopped, it was almost on instinct. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, but I felt like this was the place. That I’d gone as far as I needed to go.
I reached out blin
dly and felt the walls around me.
It was there: the door.
My chest wall could barely contain my beating heart as I pressed my ear up against it. There wasn’t a single noise coming from the other side as I reached for the handle. My breath caught in my chest for an entirely different reason now.
Nothing happened. The door was locked.
I wasn’t sure what to do next, so I did what Sabara had done, I tapped on it and waited.
After a moment, I started to feel foolish, realizing that I was chasing ghosts. That what I’d seen couldn’t have been possible, despite finding the hatch. Despite navigating through the passageway.
It had been yet another illusion, something Sabara had meant for me to see.
I wrapped my arms around myself, wondering if I should simply go back.
That was when I heard it, the whisper-soft knocking that came from the other side. Just like in the dream. Only this time, I wasn’t the one opening the door.
Inside of me, Sabara awakened, and I could feel that this was what she’d wanted all along. I was a pawn in a children’s game, manipulated by a master.
But when I saw him, the reaction was my own. I gasped for the second time.
It was him.
He wore the same face he had in my dream.
The same face he wore in this very moment—decades, maybe centuries later—as if nothing had changed.
Niko Bartolo.
We stood there for moment, and then several more, just staring at each other. I panted, the cold air making my chest ache. His eyes conquered me.
I wanted to say something, to tell him that I knew who he was . . . and what he’d done. What they’d done.
But when I opened my mouth, there was nothing. Just silent longing that I couldn’t explain.
“It’s you,” he said, finally breaking the spell. “Isn’t it?”
I knew what he meant.
Sabara. He meant that I was Sabara.
“No.” But I was nodding my head, my actions at odds with my denial. “I mean, sort of.” I fumbled over an explanation, but there was no time.
He closed the distance between us, and in the light that came from behind him, I could see that his eyes glittered from something other than the cold and his hands closed around mine as he fell to his knees before me. His voice, when it found its way out, was barely a breath. “I knew you were in there.”
My heart nearly broke. This time I was shaking my head. “She’s here,” I tried again, even as my hands clutched his harder than they should have. “But I’m not her.”
His head fell forward, over our shared grip, as if he was praying. To whom, I had no idea. And then his shoulders started to shake, and my stomach fell, plummeting in a way that made me feel choked.
I tried to untangle my hands from his, to pull away so I could breathe again. His pain was almost more than I could bear.
He threw his head back then and laughed, so loud I swore the ground beneath me rumbled. Or maybe it was my own heart. “I knew you were in there. I knew you weren’t dead!”
“Shh!” I admonished, glancing around to make certain we were still alone. Being discovered in my nightgown would probably be frowned upon in any land, but I’d have an even harder time explaining my knowledge of a hidden passage. “That kind of talk will get us both in trouble. Besides, even though she’s in here, doesn’t mean I’m not still me.”
He rose, then, lifting my icy fingers to his lips. His golden eyes held mine. “It doesn’t matter, it means she’s not gone either. Not really.”
I frowned, pulling my hands away. “Who are you? I saw you in my . . . in her dreams. But who are you really?”
A chill ran through me, colder than any warning, and I realized that chill was Sabara. He’s no one, she argued, even though I recognized her lie. You were confused. You saw nothing.
Her denials only made me more certain. “Tell me how you’ve known her for so long.” My eyes narrowed as I watched him. I could see that he was trying to decide how much I knew, and how much to reveal to me. And then I said the name I’d heard when I’d been sleeping, the name Sabara had called him. “Thaddeus.”
He closed his eyes, inhaling sorrowfully as if I’d just said the sweetest word ever spoken. I was glad he could no longer see me, because just saying the name—his name—made my throat ache like it had been dragged from the very pit of my soul.
When he looked at me again, his gaze was clearer, his golden eyes—the same as ever as far as I could tell—were filled with resolve. “I shouldn’t have to tell you. You should know everything,” he said in a language that was even more ancient than the one I’d heard in my dream. Its mysterious cadence embraced me, filling every crevice of my being, making Sabara ease out of the shadows and strain toward the surface.
I struggled to keep her at bay.
“I-I only remember some of it.” I answered truthfully in Englaise, the only language—other than Parshon—that I could speak. “Only bits and parts.” I looked at him. “But I remember you. And what you meant to her. I saw what the two of you did, to her queen—her sister—in this very palace,” The words were bitter on my tongue. “So she could sit on the throne.” I closed my eyes against the images of the knife. Of Sabara trying to force the older girl to say the words: Take me instead.
But there’d been no blood. Sabara hadn’t needed the knife, even then. She’d simply lifted her fist, never even laying a finger on the other girl, and squeezed her windpipe closed using only her will.
Sabara hadn’t held that girl—that sister—as she’d lain dying. Not the way she had her real sister, the one by the river. She’d simply stepped over her limp form and slipped away, eager to take her place as queen.
Why? I’d silently asked Sabara just as I was awakening after the dream, just as I regained control of my thoughts once more. Why does it matter? Why couldn’t you let her live?
But she hadn’t answered me.
“Why?” I asked Niko now.
His fingertips lifted to stroke my cheek, a feather’s touch. Against my will, I leaned in closer, letting his hand cup my face. “You still don’t know?” he asked, again in that strange, swirling language. “You still don’t get it, do you? It was so we could be together. So I could be with you one more time.”
“Not me,” I said, and now I turned away from his touch. But even as I did, I could feel my body resisting. “Her.”
“One and the same, it seems.”
“No. Not true,” I corrected. “So, who are you? What,” I amended, “are you?”
His lips curved, but his smile was wistful. “Does it matter?”
I nodded. It did. Right now it was all that mattered.
“I’m like you. Like her.” He turned away from me, and the part of me that was Sabara followed him.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
When he turned back, we were face to face. “I know,” he said, and behind his back I saw flashes coming from the windows. The storm, I thought. It must be the storm the ferryman had warned us about.
“It’s strange to explain this. Again. To you. To her.” This time he corrected himself as he switched to Englaise. “There was a time when not all royal heirs were female. It was rare, but there was an occasional male born capable of taking the throne.”
“You mean they were born with magic?” I asked breathlessly, my eyes wide.
He nodded at my incredulous expression. “I was one of those anomalies, as was my twin brother, Tobias.” His gaze grew distant. “I haven’t thought of him in . . .” His voice trailed off. “Well, forever, really.”
I waited silently, but something sparked in me. A memory—like déjà vu. I remembered hearing this before. I knew these words and the cadence of this voice.
He’d told Sabara this same story, once upon a time.
“My brother’s gift was useless. He could move things just by concentrating on them.”
“Like the Canshai masters?” I asked.
A relucta
nt smile pulled at his lips. “Exactly like them. My guess is that they, too, were some sort of ancient descendants of a male line of royals who were once magic. Now . . .” He shrugged. “Now, they’re extinct. Like my brother.”
“What about you? What could . . . can you do?”
He faced me, his gaze direct and unwavering. “Me?” he asked, his brows raised sardonically. “Haven’t you figured it out? I’m immortal.”
It was impossible. Even with magic, it couldn’t be true. I wanted to say as much, but all I could manage was to shake my head. Yet even that was unconvincing.
Because I remembered him, the way I’d seen him in my dream. The same way he was now.
“Yes,” he asserted, stepping closer and scooping my hands up once again. “And you know it. Deep inside, you remember me, and you know it’s true. I was with you, not once . . . not twice . . . but we’ve shared lifetimes, again and again.” He moved so close I could feel heat coming off of his body and finding its way beneath my nightgown . . . infusing me with liquid pain.
“So why weren’t you with her all along? Why were you with Queen Vespaire?”
He shook his head. “I could never stay anywhere for too long. Look at me, I can’t do what you—she—can do. I can’t change identities. I have only this body, and it never changes. I don’t age. People notice that. People start to question why everyone else grows older while I remain youthful.
“Eventually I have to leave. To wait until”—he tipped his head, his brow furrowing as if he wasn’t sure how to continue—“until there’s a new host. Someone who can invite me back. And then we can be together again. For years, usually, before the questions start again. But this time . . .” His voice drifted off. “This time it was too long. There was no word of a new queen. No new host.” Pain filled his face as he looked at me with so much longing I wanted to reach out and hold him.
No, I insisted, not me. She wanted to reach out and hold him.
“We were apart for too long,” he finished sadly. “But now you’re here again. I knew I’d find you.”
The Essence Page 17
