Page 72 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

I called the next staircase to me.

Then three remained.

Then two.

King Raise’s body shook with each crawling effort. I swooped down and lifted the large monster in my arms, holding tight to counter the slippery oil of him.

“We will get there, sir,” I told him.

The last staircase. I connected it. I walked us up to the top. And though the situation was very dire, I did pause to peer all the way down to the distant bottom. Then, I set King Raise on his feet again.

He was no longer a broken king and monster.

As to a princess who was somewhat a king, and a warped union, I could not yet be sure. But a king was no longer a mess of unconnected stairways. He was whole, and he was a foot soldier who had won.

And his kingdom wasmine.

I unlocked my power from inside and around his, then pulled myself from the deepest parts of the king.

I jolted back into my body, and the sludginess in my arms and legs spoke of the duration of our inner battle. “How long?” I asked on the breeze. The stairway kingdom shook with my voice, and the whole world must have vibrated with all I was.

“Four nights, my queen,” answered an exhausted Sign.

Four nights, and now mere seconds might lose us everything. “Hellebores, Sign. Grave.Hurry.”

With that, the walls of me collapsed inward.

ChapterSixteen

Thirty-seven disappointments

One Weakness

Abarren land. Grayscale and empty.

“I am here,” I whispered to the bland, lifeless sky. The sky was stuck in time and unchanging, I had learned. No cloud interrupted the gray, and the gray did not denote night nor day, but nothingness.

My mother answered, “You are here. Just and barely.”

I rubbed my face, feeling the roll and bump of my stitches. “They got me to the grave.”

“He did, yes.’

I was near the tower, but I turned my head to look at her across the gray dirt. “See?”

“King Raise. He then shackled himself.”

A king conquered had delivered me to hellebores, then placed himself in shackle. Goodness, how great the stroke to queenly ego. I could not fathom any conquering stroking my ego more. “Am I well?”

Cassandra said, “You were insane for a number of nights. Three of them, and four days.”

Ah.

“She threatens everything,” snapped Molly, tugging at her stitches as though intending to launch at me.

Madison, her daughter, said in undertones, “Mother, that hurts.”

Molly stopped, of course, because her daughter was the cure to her bitterness about life and death.

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