Chapter 51

I'd never believed in fate.

Never believed the godsdamned universe had some grand plan for me or for anyone else.

Any faith I had in this world was ripped from me the day the king took my family, my innocence, my future and crushed everything to dust beneath his booted heel.

But lately…I wondered if all these years…I'd been wrong.

It was hard not to believe in destiny when I looked at Anaria. So full of hopes and dreams and promise. So unafraid of the future. Our princess—because somewhere along the line she'd become mine—was a clever, sure knife, forged to cleave this world apart. To separate the light from the darkness then cast everything that was evil and corrupt into the Pit.

I leaned back against the old crumbling fountain, covered in moss and lichens, the water that had ones flowed so prettily gone for centuries. But this was where my mother used to read to us, and even after all these years, the courtyard was the only spot at Windhaven that brought me peace.

Sometimes I wondered what this place would have been like if there was no Shadow King.

Filled with family, including my aging parents if they'd been blessed with the unusually long lives of our kind. Children. Grandchildren racing through the gardens and woods like hooligans. Flying, perhaps, from tree to tree as they found their wings.

Now there was only consuming silence.

But for the first time, this silence wasn't a death knell. Not a countdown until I took my last breath or that bastard came back to finish the job for good.

No, now the silence seemed more of a deep inhalation, as if the world was waiting for what came next.

Filled not with dread but anticipation.

Tomorrow…anything could happen tomorrow. It could bring the dawn of a new world, or my last day on this one. Odd to think that way, given I'd lived for so long, but this plan of Anaria's was dangerous, and…and it would have been nice for someone to know who I really was if things went badly.

But I'd kept my secrets for so long, I didn't know how to put my deepest scars into words. How to explain the pure evil that was Serpens Centaria. But, I decided, if I did tell anyone my secrets, I would tell Anaria.

My pulse settled into a steady beat at the idea, at the thought of finally untethering myself from six hundred years of survivor's guilt and hatred for the king who took everything away, and almost like when her soft, warm body was curled so protectively around me, I felt safer.

I sank back into the shadows as voices—low and secretive and rushed—floated through the darkness, feet brushing lightly over the drifted leaves covering the walkways. The seer and the astrologer appeared, out for a midnight stroll.

"That was a mistake," Torin said, her voice like ragged paper. "You don't know this girl like I do. She'll never give up now. She's too stubborn. She'll go to the end of the earth to find how to kill Corvus and Gelvira. You should have told her you couldn't read the language."

"I couldn't lie to her, Tor. Not about that."

"Well, you should have."

They emerged in front of me, the moonlight picking out the silver strands in Torin's white hair, her eyes glowing. The astrologer…was like no astrologer I'd ever seen.

Cosimo was dangerous.

In so many ways, he was dangerous.

He was a wild card added to our already volatile mix of personalities, and while Simon and Zephryn were growing on me…something about Cosimo rubbed me wrong.

He saw too much.

Barely an hour out of his centuries-long imprisonment and he saw too much.

He was cunning and clever in ways I couldn't comprehend, and when he'd burned that dog-eared, well-worn piece of paper and put those tears into Anaria's eyes, I'd hated him, too, because he'd taken away that little piece of hope she'd been hanging on to so fiercely.

And hope was such a scarcity these days.

They stopped at the end of the cracked, broken flagstones, never letting each other go, fingers intertwined, heads bowed together, and the longer I watched them, something in my heart gave way, a wrenching of muscle and blood and something even deeper.

And as my heart came undone, only one word came to mind.

Anaria.