Chapter 26

CHAPTER 26

The enormous garden hummed around Reid as councilor after councilor filed in. Each candidate sat upon a raised platform at the front of the rectangular space, the white marble statue of Una peering over their shoulders. This main quad built between the building’s six cathedrals was the highlight of the High Temple of Dihrah, the smell of gardenias floating through the air and the blooms seeming to shake with excitement. Each sodality had a main quad, and it was there that a new headman was chosen. Headman Kier had been elected in the quad of the High Temple of Sigguth, and now Reid was waiting to make history here in Dihrah. To rule for the next decade. To move the capital to Mireh, where his successor would gaze upon their stones and flowers and make history too.

Headman Kier sat at the front of the platform, brown beard trimmed perfectly and wearing his Icrurian formal wear in the gold, silver, and black of the entire nation. There was no purple, no green, no blue, no yellow, no orange or red—he was a man of all the people. These were the garments Reid hoped to wear when the new term arrived and the exchange of power occurred.

But he couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t focus on anything but his mother and her coven, who were still scouring the streets to find their two youngest members.

One of whom was his wife.

She had not returned the next morning, though she had in his sleep. It made opening his eyes much worse—morning had always been home to his grief; it was when he felt it most acutely and needed to launch himself into work. It was why he rose with the sun each day and worked tirelessly through it.

As the rays of late-morning light bathed the quad’s marble pathways in gold, Reid forced his eyes away from the streams. Every councilor watched him, as they had all morning. Marc’s expression showed pity, but not those of the others. They had never grown to truly know Vaasa, had only met her days ago and spent all of those days behind doors debating her loyalty to him and to Icruria.

He hated himself, but there was a small part of him that debated her loyalty, too. Perhaps he couldn’t envision a world in which she stayed. In which he got everything he’d ever wanted. All his life he’d been made to choose.

As the music slowed and the councilors took their seats, the gardenias seemed to glare at him, and he struggled to keep his chin up. Kier opened the ceremony with a speech reviewing the progress of Icruria over the years and celebrating the successes of the nation. Reid had imagined himself listening to this speech with Vaasa at his side, considering the one he would give someday. Days ago, he’d pictured her standing there with him ten years from now—the way Elijah now stood with Kier, ready to depart from this phase of their lives. He had clung to the hope that he could convince her in the coming years to make her home and her life with him. That freedom could still be found here. And trust.

Now he couldn’t listen to more than three or four sentences. He pictured nothing beyond his grief.

The choir burst into hymns that didn’t matter any longer, with music that didn’t stir a thing in his soul. Not the way music usually did. He shut it out as he waited for them to end.

As the first councilor rose to speak, a strange murmur filled the crowd. People turned to look, and Reid tensed as someone scurried to Ton, something white folded in their hands. Ton opened it and skimmed it, shook his head, and looked to Reid directly.

“It appears to be a letter my men intercepted. Signed by your wife.”

Reid immediately shot up, not a care for decorum, and crossed the platform in a few steps. Ton handed him the letter. Reid instantly recognized Asteryan, recognized Vaasa’s script, though it seemed a bit shaken or hurried. But he couldn’t read it.

He turned to Mathjin, who sat with the same neutral expression he always wore, and gestured for his advisor to come forward. It took moments for the advisor to arrive, and Reid handed him the letter, pointing. “Can you translate this?”

Mathjin read it carefully, then looked pityingly to Reid and nodded.

“Faithfully,” Ton said. “We will have others read it, too.”

Reid almost snarled at the foreman, but he reined in his anger. His fear. Instead, he focused on Mathjin. As the advisor spoke, Reid closed his eyes. His stomach dropped. The world seemed to stop turning.

Mathjin read the exact location Reid and Ton had agreed upon less than two days prior. It was a detailed account of where the soldiers would move, which rivers they would take, and the timing they had plotted. It was exactly the plan Mathjin and Vaasa had brought to Reid only weeks ago. It was addressed to her brother. To Dominik.

Anger and betrayal and fear pounded through him as his vision seemed to tunnel and the world shifted beneath his feet with each new word. This would do worse than lose Reid an election; it would spark no less than a civil war.

She’d betrayed them. She’d fled and she’d betrayed—

“Wait,” Reid said. “Read that last line again.”

Mathjin read the last line in a perfect translation to Icrurian.

“?‘I told you I would play for you, and I have,’?” the advisor said.

The world whirled back on a perfect axis, and Reid straightened his spine. “ Liars ,” he snarled, looking to Ton and drawing his onyx blade. His father’s blade. “Where is my wife?”

Ton went wide-eyed and drew his own blade, confusion and misunderstanding barreling across the man’s features. More swords were drawn, iron slipped from their sheaths, and Kier stood.

And then the crowd began to scream.

Reid spun and looked, and there, at the edge of the garden, stood his mother shrouded in mist. Beside her was Amalie.

And Vaasa.

Reid tried to move, but Mathjin gripped his arm, sword drawn. Like some angel of death, his wife strode forward in the clothing he’d last seen her in, skirts torn and bodice smeared with blood. Black mist trailed around her arms and legs with tendrils of it brushing the ground wherever she stepped. Blood dragged behind her like a wedding veil.

And there at her side, a swirl of glittering darkness, was a wolf.

The edges licked the air and blurred with the swarming of Veragi mist. Sparks of the cosmos—blues and purples and greens—coasted along the edges in veins of constellations. Eyes of pure moonlight glowed even in the sun.

Crimson dripped from Vaasa’s fingers. It stained her hands, which gripped something black. All the breath left him when she got close enough for them to see clearly what she held: raven hair. Lifeless blue eyes. Dominik’s head was clenched in her hands.

She threw it to the ground at the platform’s base. It rolled until it hit the stone. The world was silent.

His wife looked clearly to Reid’s left, directly at Mathjin, and said, “You’re next.”