Page 158 of Thorn Season
“You were right about my father. He wasn’t like the Hunters, and they killed him for it. Just like they—” I hesitated. I’d trusted Perla blindly in the dungeons, too dazed to consider my choices. But it was with full consciousness that I ignored every instinct I’d honed for eighteen years and chose to trust the Wholeborn princess of Daradon. “Just like they killed my mother,” I finished.
“Why would they—?” Carmen stopped. Blinked. She’d answered her own question.
Why did the Hunters killanyone?
“Because she wasn’t allowed to exist,” I said.
Carmen’s realization was drawn out—eyes widening, face slackening—as if she were waking from a dream. I imagined the memories replaying in her mind: Erik flying across the ballroom, my horror when Keil had stepped between us. Carmen had seen it all. But like everyone else, she hadn’t really understood.
“It’s not possible,” she whispered, slowly shaking her head. “Prove it.”
Through these agonizing minutes, I hadn’t checked on my specter. With a jerk of surprise, I realized the dullroot felt less like a lead weight upon me and more like a burial of smaller stones—still heavy but capable of being shifted with the right movements. I tried to wriggle past the poison, but the more I twisted, the more those stones avalanched onto me.
“I can’t,” I gasped, winded. “You’ll have to trust me.”Like I’m trusting you, I added silently.
Carmen’s gaze skewered me, trying to root out a lie. I held her stare, my knife spanning the gap between us.
Finally, she took the handle and sailed toward her canopy bed. She slashed the side of her mattress and reached into the stuffing-clogged wound.
The shipping documents flapped in her hand.
I exhaled, reaching out, but she flicked them away.
“Who built those prisons under Vereen?” she asked, still wary.
“Erik,” I said, unflinching.
Carmen’s eyes narrowed, and I felt a current pass between us—a silent promise of alliance against a mutual enemy.
I left her suite with the knife at my hip and the shipping documents tucked inside my bodice.
46
The dullroot was thinning in my veins, and it was the worst possible development. It meant Erik should have administered my next dose by now.
It meant he knew my cell was empty.
I raced through the halls, swinging wide around every corner. My thighs protested; my breaths grew frantic; my specter squirmed painfully for release. But I wasn’t leaving without the compass.
My hair plastered my neck by the time I reached the candlelit gallery. I rushed to Queen Wilhelmina’s portrait and plunged my hand behind the arch. Aclick—then I heaved the arch open and stepped into the musty room.
The sight of my own royal portrait focused my scattered mind.
Gods cannot stand alone, Erik had said when he’d revealed this crowned rendering of me. Those words had formed his emblem, had cemented a truth in his bones.
So, I wrenched at the frame; like a window, the portrait squealed open on a hinge.
And behind my powerful likeness, within a velvet alcove and glinting under what little light poured from the gallery, sat the compass. As if, after years of preparing for his era of conquest, I wassomehow the final piece of Erik’s plan.
A piece he would never possess.
My heartbeat thrummed as I palmed the cool bronze case and unlatched the lid. The needle stirred, and I readied for its pull on my specter.
But the pull never came. The needle must have grounded itself in my hands because it whirred on in search of another.
I snapped the case shut before it found its target, then I stuffed the compass beside my mother’s coin. With one last gulp of stagnant air, I left the concave room and sighed as my boots hit the marble.
But my sigh hitched, choked with panic, as I saw Erik leaning against his own portrait. His eyes shone like blue flints in the dark.
