Page 118 of A Vow of Embers

“What mission?”

“The savior of Ilion.” She said it like I was being silly. Then she leaned in and hugged me. “Be safe. I’ll come back to check on you.”

She left, and when I went back over to my bed, I realized that she had returned Luna to me, as her box was on my little table. She made a soft chittering sound and I picked her up. I felt like she had missed me, which was ridiculous, but I was going to take comfort where I could find it.

I placed her on my chest and she curled up there and fell asleep. She seemed bigger to me than she had yesterday. Not by much, but it was noticeable. I softly stroked her head and then sighed. I was stuck in my room, waiting for my strangely acting husband to return, petting a lizard.

I didn’t feel like much of a savior.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

A servant came in to bring me breakfast, and I offered some of my fruit to Luna but she wasn’t interested. I was still waiting for Xander’s return when another servant arrived with my lunch and removed my breakfast tray. A team of masons and carpenters showed up at the same time, with guards. The carpenters fixed the two broken doors while the masons went into the washroom. I was so bored that I followed them to watch.

“Where did this passageway go?” I asked as they bricked up the entrance. The door had been so cleverly hidden in the wall that I wouldn’t have found it even if I had known to look for it.

Fortunately for me, one of the younger apprentices was very talkative. “It leads to the room of the king’s mistress.”

His back was to me, so he didn’t see the shock on my face. Was he saying that Xander had a mistress?

“There hasn’t been an official mistress in a long time,” the apprentice continued. “King Philippos never had one, but he was the first king who didn’t.”

That was Io and Xander’s father. I wondered why he was the first king to not have an official mistress and why he had sealed up the passageways. I tried to reassure myself that Xander had no intention of using the passageways for that purpose. I’d heard him say last night that he had thought they were sealed off.

It didn’t stop the seeds of doubt from forming in my mind, though. Because he had said a lot of things last night that were turning out not to be true.

Like how he wouldn’t leave me.

The masons finished and I continued to wait for Xander’s return. When he had told me to stay here, I had assumed that meant he would be back in a couple of hours. I hadn’t imagined that I would waste my entire day just waiting for him to decide to pay attention to me again.

Sometime that afternoon Zalira and Ahyana stopped by.

“Suri and Io are down in the infirmary and we decided that we’re going to go train,” Ahyana said. “Do you want to come with us?”

“I told Xander I would wait for him here,” I said. Then I asked Zalira, “How was seeing Stephanos last night?”

Zalira collapsed onto my bed. “He found us in the kitchen and brought us back. Everything was happening so fast that there wasn’t a chance for us to talk, but being that close to him ... my heart was racing so quickly. I miss him. All I want to do is go find him and be with him.”

I nodded, understanding her situation completely. “That must be so hard.”

She gulped hard and closed her eyes briefly. “I know that he and I are going to have to have some kind of conversation soon but I’m scared.”

“You are one of the bravest people I know,” I said. Ahyana nodded.

“I don’t feel very brave,” Zalira admitted.

“Maybe that’s the secret,” Ahyana said. “Being afraid but doing it anyway.”

“My battle master used to tell me that there was no honor in fighting a battle if you weren’t afraid to die,” I added.

“It does feel that way a bit. Like I’m dying. Drowning. I hate it.” Rain started to fall outside, like the tears on Zalira’s cheeks.

I squeezed her hand. They stayed and talked to me for a little while longer but then left to go and spar. I wished I were going with them. Inpart because I wondered whether Xander was there with his phratry so that I might see him again, but also because I wanted to work out some of this tension I was feeling.

Because the longer he stayed away, the angrier I got. I decided to go look for Io to see what she was doing. But when I opened the door, a guard stepped out in front of me. “I’m sorry, Princess Thalia, but I can’t let you out of your room.”

“By whose command?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. I had thought I was doing what Xander had requested of me, but it turned out that I’d had no choice. He had ordered me to stay put.

He had told me once that I wasn’t a prisoner but now he’d locked me up.

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