Page 152 of Children of Fallen Gods

The three of us exchanged a look, all clearly thinking the same thing. Without another word, we went to the stairs.

* * *

I had beento the king’s wing in the Palace several times during the Ryvenai War. It was a beautiful place, in the same stuffy sort of way that everything in the Palace was beautiful. The wing was large enough that it was more than the size of a house all on its own, and certainly much larger than Zeryth’s apartment in the Towers. The central room had a hammered glass ceiling that cast fragmented sunlight across the black marble tile of the floor. It was sparsely decorated, and what furniturewashere was haphazardly placed around the room, as if Zeryth had ordered Sesri’s things taken away and still had not replaced them.

He did not acknowledge us when we arrived. He stood at the window, looking out over his party guests scattered across the patio, his back to us.

The door closed, and the three of us stood there awkwardly, while Zeryth did not turn.

Nura cleared her throat.

“What was so important?”

“I’ve never thought of myself as naive.”

Zeryth’s voice was oddly quiet — his typical charming drawl replaced with a raw rasp that made the hairs stand on the back of my neck.

“Seems like it would be impossible, to be naive, coming from the world that made me,” he went on. “How could you ever benaivewhen you watched people starve to death at six years old? But at least survival was transactional. That was my mistake. I thought all ofthiswas transactional. I thought it would be fucking simple. If I made the right moves. If I fucked the right people. If I wore the right clothing, the right title, the right woman on my arm. That would make mepowerful.”

And then, at last, he turned to us.

I almost cursed.

He looked like a walking corpse. Dark shadows smeared his eyes, little black veins expanding like spiderwebs clinging to pallid Valtain skin. He was gaunt, like somehow he’d managed to lose another ten pounds since I’d last seen him. His hair hung in limp, white tendrils around his face, unbrushed and untamed, looking as if it hadn’t been washed in a little too long.

Zeryth had never seemed to carry the crown well, as if he didn’t quite like the way it felt on his head. But now it looked comically out of place, like an image sliced from a grand painting and slapped onto a death portrait.

His eyes landed on Tisaanah.

“But it isn’t transactional, is it, Tisaanah? It doesn’t matter what you trade away. And I did trade it all away. All of it, just to get that prized apple with the world carved into its flesh.” His smile soured, and he glanced over his shoulder, at the partygoers. “Only to find that it’s fuckingrotteninside.”

“Zeryth,” Tisaanah said, quietly, “perhaps you aren’t feeling well.”

He let out a sound that barely qualified as a laugh. “Of course I’m not. I’m surrounded by traitors.”

He looked to Nura. Then me. Then to the partygoers outside. And then, at last, back to Tisaanah.

“I have a gift for you, Tisaanah.”

I had a terrible, terrible feeling about this.

Zeryth motioned to the guard at one of the doors. The doors opened, and two figures were dragged into the room and pushed to their knees before us.

One was a finely dressed woman, golden hair escaping a once-neat binding and spilling over her face.

The other was a wiry young man with copper hair. When he lifted his head, I saw that he was disfigured — a split across his lip, and two triangular holes where his nose should be.

Tisaanah drew in a sharp breath.

“Vos,” she whispered.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Tisaanah

My hands clenched at my sides, my heart racing. Vos looked up at me through tendrils of his messy red hair, a sneer at his lip.

Zeryth dismissed the guards, sending them out of the apartment. Then he smiled at me. Every time I met his eyes, something noxious slithered beneath my skin. Reshaye recoiled in distaste.

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