Page 49 of Between Fear and Favor

“I didn’t even mean to think of Lucia when I created her,” she admitted. “She was Dewalt’s dragon, so I thought of him. And, well, you know where my mind went.” She stood, tilting her neck back and forth, before placing her hands on her lower back and stretching. After she stretched, she leaned over me. She draped her arms around my neck and nuzzled against my skin, and the golden bond between us seemed to purr.

“You should sleep while you can,” I said. “Cethina won’t hesitate, come first light.”

“Did you mean it? About Lux?” she whispered.

I placed my hands over hers and closed my eyes. The very thought scared the fuck out of me, but I didn’t know how much longer Em would tolerate waiting. The knowledge that innocents were dying grated on her, and eventually, she’d throw caution to the wind. But with the Accursed unknown, her efforts could be disastrous.

“Yes. Tomorrow,” I promised.

Down the bond, far stronger now than it had been in weeks, relief and fear tumbled toward me as one.

“What if you get hurt?” she asked. “What if Lux gets hit, and you die?”

“Dear heart, every day I go beyond those walls, I could die. At least with Lux, her divine fire will make a dent in their numbers.” With triple the soldiers attacking as we had defending, anything would help.

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” she said, before nipping my ear.

“Come here.”

Guiding her to sit in my lap, I pulled Cyran’s letter from my father’s desk. I’d folded it and unfolded it a few dozen times while I’d been thinking of its contents, and her fingertip traced the worn parchment.

“Cyran has encountered a puzzle he is unable to solve,” I said. “I was hoping there might be something here, in my father’s things, that might give me clarity.”

She opened the letter, taking a few moments to read over the prince’s words. Feeling her confusion and exasperation through the bond loosened something in my chest. Em and I were in this together, and if anyone could understand, it was her. But when she spoke, it wasn’t about the gods forsaken prophecy at all.

“‘Elora sends her regards to Your Majesties,’” she murmured, quoting the closing of Cyran’s letter. “I suppose I’ll have to count that towards her speaking to me.”

“Give her time,” I said, but Em shook herself free from my embrace. Leaning over my father’s desk, she perused the items I’d pulled out.

“Well, I suppose first, we must decide which god we will appeal to, because that could change their insufferable riddle,” she mused.

“Aonara?”

“I thought her—or perhaps Ciarden.”

“Not Hanwen?”

She tilted her head to the side, thoughtful. “We could ask Ciarden to withdraw his blessing from Nereza or the Supreme or whoever the hell the Accursed is. I think we are more likely to win with cleverness than force, don’t you?”

She picked up the letter from Larke Umbroth, my father’s first wife, preserved for centuries with reverent handling.

“Would you ask Aonara to do the same?”

“No,” she said, turning to face me. Leaning against the desk, she held Larke’s letter up to the candlelight. “I don’t know why, but I think Aonara’s gifts, when wielded properly, are stronger than the shadows. Besides, I’ve met the gods, and she...I don’t know. She was the only one who didn’t scare me or anger me.”

“I think Aonara, then,” I said. “Ciarden doesn’t...I don’t like that idea either.”

“Aonara’s bane and my bane, then. Or Vesta’s bane?” she asked, smirking at me over the letter from Larke. “I think Vesta and mine might be the same, though.”

“Oh?”

“Look at the date on this letter,” she said, shoving it toward me. “She mentions how eager she is for him to return from Lamera, because she’s worried about something. I think it was the last one she wrote your father.”

Holding the parchment far closer to my face than I would have liked, I checked the date. “What’s the significance?”

She rolled her eyes. “The governess was right when she called you insufferable.”

Grinning, I grabbed for her hips and pulled her close. “You were only around her for a few weeks at a time. Do you know how cruel it was to make us have lessons in the summer?”

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