It feels as if I’m roosting in the graveyard of my people, and that if I remain here long enough, I’m going to be swallowed up by the dead.

Not that there have been a lot of dead. Other than a few scattered bodies, there’s been nothing. I’m relieved, of course, but I’m also confused. There was a battle clearly fought here. Someone would have been killed, and the dead would have had to go somewhere. Nemeth explained to me that the Fellians burn their dead so they can be returned to the skies as ash and smoke, but that doesn’t explain where the Liosian dead are.

Maybe they’ve all been taken captive and are currently at Darkfell. Maybe I’ll see a sea of familiar faces when we get there.

Maybe.

I stack the books I want Nemeth to have into an unwieldy pile, and then grimace at the mud I’ve tracked in. My shoes don’t protect my feet inasmuch as they simply seem to gather mud, and I’ve trailed a lot of it into the library. If it gets on the books, Nemeth will fuss, and while I find his fussing adorable, it does make sense to protect the books somehow. I think of a trunk my sister had in her quarters that was yet untouched. The lid’s jewels were pried off but it seemed otherwise intact, and the perfect size to hold a variety of tomes for my Nemeth.

I head upstairs for my sister’s quarters, and as I do, the sun comes out from behind the clouds and shines in through one of the broken windows. It’s such a rare occurrence that I pause in front of the windows, sighing with pleasure at the sunbeams…

…and that’s when I see them.

The graves.

There’s not many of them, but it’s the size of each one that makes me clench the windowsill. Shards of glass embed themselves into my hands, but I don’t pull away. I can’t, because I have to take in the sight below.

The palace had gardens once. I never cared for them much, because my medicine made me sensitive to heat and it always felt too warm to spend much time outside, but I remember my sister loved Lios’s gardens. She loved the flowers that filled the beds, the vines that crept along the walls and the scents of the herbs that flooded Nurse’s herb gardens. I remember there was a maze, and a sundial, and a statue of the goddess herself, holding the moon above one shoulder like she was carrying a pot of water.

The statue of the goddess remains, but everything else is gone. The maze is gone. The hedges gone. The herb garden, gone. What remains are five sunken pits in the muck, each one headed with the eye symbol of the Absent One, hastily carved out of wood. Each sunken pit is nightmarishly big, bigger than my sister’s entire suite of rooms, and I wonder just how many people were buried in each large grave.

Each one is far, far too big for just one body. Or even ten bodies.

This is what has happened to Lios. Tears prick my eyes and I lean over the broken window, as if pushing my face out into the light will somehow enable me to see more. I stare with sick horror at the mass graves, praying that my sister and her children aren’t in any of them. That both Nurse and Riza are safe. That those I love somehow made it away from this place.

I want to leave. I need to leave.

Now.

Something flutters in the breeze. There’s a heap of rags at the feet of the goddess, with a pair of swords sticking upright, the ends shoved through the rags and into the ground below. I wonder why these particular rags…and then I see a leg bone. And the tiny bones that make up a hand, shattered and scattered in the mud. It takes me a moment longer to see the skull, and for me to realize one of the swords pierces it through the eye.

And resting upon that particular sword’s hilt is a tarnished crown.

I recognize that crown. Recognize the spot where a fat, garish ruby sat on Lionel’s brow like a giant red wart. It looked ridiculous against his pale skin and pale hair, and I’d spent many a night at court wishing the crown was upon any head but his.

That body…those remains must be his.

Gods. I cannot even celebrate this death. I hated Lionel, but his death fills me with fear for my sister and their children.

“Nemeth,” I cry out, turning away from the window and racing down the stairs. “Nemeth!” I fling myself down the hall, ignoring the skid of my feet on the perpetually damp floors. “Nemeth!”

The shadows coalesce in front of me, and then my mate is there, grabbing my arms and shaking me. There’s a look of fright in his gaze. “Candra? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Graves,” I choke. “I found the graves.”

And then I fall into his arms, weeping.

We don’t bury Lionel. After the initial horror fades, I’m left with a deep, burning anger in my gut.

This is his fault. These deaths are upon him. Lios and Darkfell have co-existed in an uneasy truce for ages. He was the one that pushed for the war. He was the one that insisted I go to the tower, and quickly, so he could set off to conquer the mountains of the Fellians.

These deaths are on him.

While the meat from the horse smokes on racks in the kitchen (we burn the broken frame of a once-elegant poster bed), we head down to the shore and look for a ship. There are several wrecked vessels, but we manage to find a small craft with a broken mast. It’s terrifyingly small for an ocean journey, perhaps the size of two horse-lengths, but Nemeth assures me we don’t need more than that.

We spend the rest of the day working on making her seaworthy. Nemeth replaces the mast with wreckage from another ship and I sew a large piece of fabric that will act as a sail. As if the goddess likes the idea of us fleeing this place, the sun remains out, the rains temporarily banished. We erect a small tent-like shelter at one end of the ship that we can rest under when the sun is high, and Nemeth will cast a spell in the morning to enchant the sail itself. As long as it’s on the ship, it will steer us toward the Alabaster Citadel.

And from there, to Darkfell itself.

I’m ready. I want answers, and all signs point that Darkfell will have them.

Chapter

Seventy-One

Six Weeks Later

The ship bobs on the water, the air disgustingly still and humid under the shelter at the far end of the ship. I’ve torn a few pages out of one of Nemeth’s books and fan myself with them, because sweating day and night makes me dehydrated and we’ve precious little extra water as it is. It rains often enough to fill the barrel we have on deck, but we keep that for drinking water.

I thought I loathed the tower, but it turns out I loathe the sea even more. Weeks of endless travel. Weeks of rolling waves and storms that shake our tiny craft. Weeks of everything tasting like saltwater. Weeks of raw fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Nemeth can spark fire with a spell, but without anything to burn, it’s not very useful.

“I can see the mountains,” Nemeth tells me as he lands on the front of our ship, making the entire thing sway in the water. “We should be there in a few hours.”

I sit up, lacing the top of my bodice in case some Fellian flies overhead. It gets so hot on the water that I try not to wear much, but if we’re going to land soon… “I never thought I’d be excited to see Darkfell’s borders, but after spending the last several weeks on a ship, I’m more than ready for land.” I glance over at my mate. “You don’t think they’ll treat us like the Alabaster Citadel, do you?”

Nemeth shakes his wings out, flicking away droplets of water, and then settles to a crouch next to me. “We’ll be welcomed. It’s different than with the citadel.”

Is it? I’m not so certain. We’d hoped the Alabaster Citadel would welcome us and give us food and supplies. Instead, they’d turned us away at the harbor, keeping the holy temple closed to us.