This may have been an elaborate ruse, but I couldn’t help thinking what would happen if I did go to Vellana to speak with the king. Not that my position was recognized by the royals, but they wouldn’t be able to deny my power. Could I convince them to work with us instead of against us so that all peoples in Airren were treated justly? Father had tried before, but previous monarchs wouldn’t concede so much as a morsel.
“You could,” the Queen said after a moment.
We spoke about the merits of renegotiating, of offering to host the king in Tearmann—which we realized he would never agree too—and the possibility of meeting in Airren at a neutral location. All of it boiled down to the same thing: Why would the humans give even an inch when they had everything they wanted?
The Queen started listing scenarios where the king may consider renegotiating, but all of them involved significant loss of life.Humanlives. It wasn’t that I was particularly fond of humans in general, but I was quite fond of one specific human. And I had a feeling she would object to razing villages and murdering innocent people in order to be taken seriously.
I threw my serviette onto the table next to my empty goblet. “If you’ll excuse me. I could do with some fresh air.”
Tadhg waved me off, and the Queen seemed to barely notice.
So far, so good.
I passed the shadow guards waiting on either side of the door and continued to the empty courtyard. Once I cleared the wards, I evanesced to the Queen’s castle.
It was time to retrieve my heart.
* * *
A chill settled into my bones the moment I set foot in the Queen’s chambers. I’d only been in her rooms a handful of times, and none of them had ever ended well for me. I found Aveen inside a long, narrow closet filled with ghostly shadows of children’s toys.
She must’ve heard me, because I saw her shoulders stiffen and her hand fall to the dagger in her pocket. Wouldn’t it be poetic if she accidentally stabbed me with the thing when we were so close to the end?
“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” she gasped, her chest heaving.
I recognized my old toys from when I was a boy. Why had the Queen kept them? She should’ve just thrown the things out instead of letting them collect dust. I picked up an old teddy I vaguely remembered from my fourth birthday. The hand-painted soldiers next to it had been a gift from my father one Yule. The rolling hoop, that had been from Eava. I’d stolen the set of quoits from Tadhg.
And here they were, all confiscated like contraband.
“Are all these toys yours?” Aveen asked.
All mine. All pristine. All pointless. “She never let me play with one for more than a week. When I’d get attached, she’d take it away.” I’d have something just long enough to start thinking maybe she’d let me keep it, only for her to snatch away that hope again and again.
All these years later, the Queen was still stealing that hope. First with Leesha, and now with Aveen.
I set the bear down on my little white rocking horse. That’s when I heard it. A lowthump thumplike the march of an army on the move. “Do you hear that?” I mouthed, stepping over a deflated leather ball to press my good ear to the wall. The sound, though muffled, grew louder. “There’s something in there.”
I tried to think of a spell to open the door, but if I chose the wrong one, it could trigger an alarm, bringing the Queen down on our heads.
Aveen’s fingers skimmed the wall. I was about to tell her not to bother, that the Queen was far too smart to leave a key anywhere near this place, when the panel slid aside with a heavy groan. The air on the other side held the unmistakable perfume of blood.
Silver bird cages lined the shelves on either side of the long hallway as far back as I could see. Cages that held beating hearts. How would I find mine among them? I knew for a fact the spell wouldn’t work if I didn’t get the right one, and there wasn’t time to try every single heart.
“Whose hearts are these?” Aveen asked.
“I haven’t a clue.” They must’ve belonged to her victims. But I’d seen her turn hearts to ash. Melt them in fire. Whose had she kept like sadistic trophies?
Aveen swiped a finger across the bottom of one cage, revealing a small label engraved with numbers. “Do you remember when she took your heart?”
Dates. The Queen had dated each kill. “Not exactly the kind of thing a man forgets.”
The farther we walked, the further back the dates climbed, until finally we came to one day I would remember forever. November twenty-seventh. My nineteenth birthday.
Shit.
The heat from Aveen’s chest warmed my back when she tried to lift onto her toes and see what I’d found. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“There are two from the same day.” Which of the other poor souls I’d killed that day had she kept?