But what choice did I have?
I stepped closer and placed my hands on either side of his face.
“You don’t have to fight this fight,” I whispered. “You have already given so much.”
Max’s forehead pressed against mine, his body so close I could feel its warmth surrounding me. And when he spoke again, all that anger was gone, replaced only with weary resignation.
“That was never an option, Tisaanah,” he murmured, and pulled me into an embrace.
It felt like falling. One moment, I was clinging to my plans and composure, and the next, I was lost in him. His scent of lilacs and ash surrounded me. I buried my face against his neck, inhaling it. I could feel the slight shudder in his breathing as he struggled to keep from unraveling.
I pulled away just enough to turn my face, lips parted even though I didn’t know what would come out. But before I could speak, he kissed me — gave me the kind of kiss that communicated everything that we couldn’t put into words. For precious seconds, nothing mattered except for this, the cadence of our shared breath, the movement of his lips, the brush of his tongue.
Nothing mattered except that we were alive, and here, and together.
We parted but stayed close, his forehead against mine.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m just…being here is…”
He sounded as if he could barely get out those fractured words. My chest ached. It had been impossible to miss the change in him the minute we stepped through those doors — a raw, tangible pain, like he was walking over razor blades.
“We will not let it be like last time,” I whispered. “We will find a way.”
I told myself I could make it true. I was grateful that he didn’t call out my uncertainty, even though I know he heard it.
Instead, he pressed a kiss to my jaw and said, quietly, “I want to believe you.”
Chapter Seven
Aefe
“What he says cannot be true,” the king said.
“All the survivors say the same thing, my Lord,” Siobhan said. She knelt at my father’s feet, at the bottom of glassy black steps that rose up to his place upon the dais, sleek and dark beneath an arch of polished stone.
He, my mother, and my sister all stood there, crowns adorning each of their brows. My father’s was Nightglass upon a head of long, ashen brown hair. My mother’s, spires of twisted silver against pale skin and sleek locks of red-black — near identical to my own. Actually, it was uncanny, the extent to which I resembled my mother. A less beautiful version of her, to be fair. My skin was a little ruddier, my mouth a little broader, my eyes bigger and curved down in a way that my mother used to always joke made me look as if I was perpetually sad.
Used to joke. It had been a long time since my mother had joked about anything. Now she sat upon her throne, gazing off into the middle distance, that lovely face offering no sign that she had heard anything that we had told her.
There was a time — a time I barely remembered — when my mother was intelligent and humorous and talkative. Now she was only beautiful, and whatever lay beneath had been eaten away like moth-bitten silk. And yet, she was captivating, so graceful in a way I never would be.
My sister, though, embodied that grace impeccably. She had my mother’s bearing, even if her appearance was much more my father’s, richer skin and fairer hair, and those dark eyes like pools of night. Orscheid sat beside my mother, hands delicately folded over her velvet-adorned lap, a twist of silver across her forehead.
She had given me a faint smile when I strode into the room with Siobhan, though now her gaze was lowered with concern.
My father frowned, still visibly skeptical.
“I don’t see how humans could have done this,” he said.
Siobhan bowed her head.
“We sent six Blades to the House of Stone. They found many bodies, Teirna. They counted sixty before they stopped trying to account for the dead, but understand that was only a small fraction of the full loss of life. There may be other survivors, but our scouts found none in Atecco.”
“None in Atecco?” Orscheid whispered. It was easy to tell that she was scared — she had the same look that she did when we were children, and I, ever the obnoxious older sister, would terrify her with some ghost story or monster tale. “The entire city, and… none?”
“None that we could find.”
That sentence hung in the air for several long seconds.
“And how many survivors do we now have in our infirmaries?” my father asked.
“Nineteen,” I said.
His gaze slipped to me.
“Are any of them able to speak to us?” he asked.
Stupid, how I still found myself shriveling under my father’s stare. “Not currently,” I said. “None of them are conscious right now. The one that I rode with was the one who told us it was the humans. But he didn’t manage to say much more.”
“So I heard,” my father said, grimly.
Surely everyone had, by now. My companion had been only barely aware enough to garble some frantic, meaningless words at the cluster of Sidnee who met us at the entrance to the Pales, clutch at one shocked woman’s shoulder, and then keel over.
I glanced down at my sleeve. A smear of his purple blood still stained it.
“There was one other thing,” I said. “He told me that he was thirteenth in line for the Stone Crown. If Atecco has fallen and there are no other survivors, then that would mean…”
A choked, wordless sound echoed through the room. My mother’s fingertips were pressed to her lips, dismay wrought over her face. It was the sort of innocent dismay that looked like it belonged to a small child.
“All alone…” she whispered, so quietly that it seemed as
