The Heart of Betrayal

  I heard a noise and whirled around.

  A woman stood at the other end of the passage.

  I was so shocked I didn’t have the sense to be afraid at first. Her face was hazy in the shadows, and her long hair fell in twisted strands all the way to the floor.

  And then I knew. Deep in my gut, I knew who she was, though all the rules of reason told me it was impossible. This was the woman I had seen in the shadows of Sanctum Hall. The woman who had watched me from the ledge. The very same woman who had sung my name from a wall thousands of years ago. The one pushed to her death, and the namesake of a kingdom determined to crush mine.

  This was Venda.

  I had warned Venda not to wander too far from the tribe.

  A hundred times, I had warned her.

  I was more her mother than her sister.

  She came years after the storm.

  She never felt the ground shake,

  Never saw the sun turn red.

  Never saw the sky go black.

  Never saw fire burst on the horizon and choke the air.

  She never even saw our mother. This was all she had ever known.

  The scavengers lay in wait for her, and I saw Harik steal her away on his horse.

  She never looked back, even when I called after her.

  Don’t believe his lies, I cried, but it was too late. She was gone.

  —The Last Testaments of Gaudrel

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  She looked at me, her head angled to the side, her expression unreadable—sadness, anger, relief? I wasn’t sure—and then she nodded. Ice crept through my veins. She recognized me. Her lips moved silently, mouthing my name, and then she turned away and the shadows swallowed her.

  “Wait!” I called and ran after her. I searched, turning in all directions, but the stairwell and landing were empty. She was gone.

  The wind, time, it circles, repeats, some swaths cutting deeper than others.

  I braced myself against the wall, my head pounding, my palms damp, trying to explain her away, searching the rules of reason, but it settled into me as true and real as the chorus of cries I’d heard in the heavens the day I buried my brother. The centuries and tears had swirled with voices that couldn’t be erased, not even by death, and Venda’s was a song that couldn’t be silenced, even by being pushed from a wall. It was all as true and real as a Komizar who clutched my neck and promised to take everything.

  “The rules of reason,” I whispered, a mindless chant that still tumbled from my lips. I didn’t even know what it meant anymore.

  I took a shaky step forward in the dark, and my boot knocked something exactly where she had disappeared. It made a strange hollow sound. My fingers slid along the wall, and instead of more stone, I found a low wood panel. With a gentle push, I slid it open and found myself under a dark sweep of stairs in the middle of the Sanctum. Bright light splashed the hall in front of me, and I was grateful for a world of hard edges, heavy footsteps, and warm flesh. All things solid. I looked back at the wood panel behind me, questioning my brief descent down the hidden stairway, and wondered what I had really seen. Was it real and true or only terror at being trapped? But the name she had mouthed, Jezelia, still juddered through me. Guards walked by, and I slunk back, hiding in the shadows. I had escaped one trap and fallen into another.

  This was the busy hallway that led to the tower where the Komizar said he had a secure room for Rafe. I was about to step out when three governors approached and I had to duck back down. All I needed was a free moment to dart out and run up the stairs, and I was certain I could find Rafe’s room, but the hall seemed to be a main thoroughfare. The governors passed, then several servants carrying baskets, and finally the quiet held. I pulled my hood over my head and stepped out—just as two guards rounded the corner.

  They stopped short in surprise when they saw me.

  “There you are!” I snapped. “Are you the ones who were ordered to leave firewood outside the Assassin’s room?” I shot them both an accusatory eye.

  The tallest of the two glared back. “Do we look like barrow runners?”

  “We aren’t filthy patty clappers,” the other one snarled.

  “Really?” I said. “Not even for the Assassin?” I put my hand to my chin as if I were memorizing their faces.

  One looked at the other, then back at me. “We’ll send a boy.”

  “See that you do! The weather’s turned cold, and the Assassin wanted a roaring fire by the time he returned.” I turned and walked away in a huff, climbing the stairs. My temples pounded as I expected them to come to their senses, but all I heard behind me was their grousing and shouting at a poor hapless servant down the hall.

  After one dead end, two close calls with the wrong rooms, and a quick exit through a hall window, I walked along a ledge that was sufficiently hidden from the view of those below. Peeking through windows rather than opening doors proved to be a safer way to explore, and only a few windows later, I found him.

  His stillness struck me first. His profile. He slouched in a chair, looking out an opposite window. The smoldering, calculated stare that had made me uneasy the first time I saw him made me apprehensive again. It breathed menace and frightening reserve, a bow stretched, loaded, aimed, waiting. It was the stare that had made platters in my hand tremble as I set them down before him in the tavern. Even with my slight side view, the ice of his blue eyes cut like a sword. Neither farmer nor prince. They were the eyes of a warrior. Eyes bred with power. And yet last night he’d made them warm for Calantha when she sat close and whispered to him, made them spark with intrigue when the Komizar asked questions … made them hooded with disinterest when I kissed Kaden.

  I thought of the first time I’d made him laugh as we picked blackberries in Devil’s Canyon, how fearful I had been, but then how his laugh had transformed his face. How it had transformed me. I wanted to make him laugh now, but here I had nothing to give him that was the least bit amusing or joyful.

  I should have revealed myself immediately, but once I knew he was alive and that he had food and water, I was struck with the need for something else—a few seconds to watch him unseen, to view him with the new eyes I had only just gained. What other sides did this very clever prince have?

  His fingers tapped a strained beat on the arm of the chair, slow and steady, like he was counting something out—hours, days, or maybe the people who would pay. Maybe he was even thinking about me. Yes! You were a challenge and an embarrassment. I thought about all the times we had kissed back in Terravin. Every single time, he had known I was the one who had broken a contract between two kingdoms. And before we had kissed, there were all the times I had looked at him with moon eyes, hoping he would kiss me. Had he felt smug justice watching me leaning on brooms hanging on his every word? Melons. He told me he grew melons. The stories he fabricated—just like the ones he’d created last night for the Komizar—flowed out far too smoothly.

  I know your feelings about me may have changed.

  My feelings had changed, without a doubt, but I wasn’t sure how. I wasn’t even sure what to call him anymore. The name Rafe was so tightly woven with the young man I thought was a farmer. What should I call him now? Rafferty? Jaxon? Your Highness?

  But then he turned. That was all it took. He was Rafe again, and my heart jumped. I saw his bloody lip, and I squeezed through the narrow opening, careless of sound. He leapt to his feet when he heard me, startled and ready for battle, not expecting someone to enter his room through a window and even more surprised that it was me.

  “What did they do?” I asked.

  He brushed away my hand and questions, and hurried past me to the window. He peered out to check whether anyone had seen me, then turned back, crushing me in his arms, holding me like he’d never let me go, until suddenly he stepped back as if unsure his embrace was still welcome.

  Whether it was prudent or not, I didn’t care—I burned with his touch. “I suppose if we’re going to fall in love all over a
gain, kissing will be part of it.” I gently brought his face to mine again, avoiding his split lip, and my mouth fluttered across his skin, kissing the crest of his cheekbone, down to his jaw, across to the corner of his mouth. Every taste of him suddenly new. His hands tightened around my waist, pulling me closer, and rivers of heat spread through my chest.

  “Are you frothing mad?” he asked between heavy breaths. “How did you get here?”

  I had known this was coming. This was not part of our plan. I stepped away, pouring myself some water from the flask on a table. “It wasn’t hard,” I lied. “An easy walk.”

  “Through a window?” He shook his head, his eyelids briefly squeezing shut. “Lia, you can’t go dancing on ledges like a—”

  “I’m hardly dancing. I’m sneaking, and I have plenty of practice at it. Some might call me accomplished.”

  His jaw twitched. “I appreciate your skills, but I’d prefer that you sit tight,” he argued. “I don’t want to be peeling you off the cobblestones. My men will come. There are military strategies for this kind of situation when the odds aren’t in your favor—and then we’ll all get out of here together.”

  “Strategies? Are your soldiers here, Rafe?” I asked, looking around the room. “It wouldn’t seem so. But we are. You have to accept that they may not come. This is a dangerous land, and they might have—”

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t lead my most trusted friends into something I thought they couldn’t survive. I told you it might be a few days.” But I saw the doubt in his eyes. The reality was setting in. Four men in a foreign land. Four men among thousands of enemies. There was a good possibility they were dead already if they had stumbled into a regiment as Walther and his company had. I didn’t even bring up the dangers of the lower river that Kaden had warned me about, and the deadly creatures that inhabited it. There was a good reason that Venda had always been so isolated.

  “The guards again?” I asked, returning to the subject of his lip.

  He nodded, but his thoughts were still elsewhere. His gaze traveled over my new attire.

  “Someone brought me my cloak. It had been wrapped in my bedroll,” I explained.

  He reached out, pulling the tie at my throat loose, and slowly pushed the cloak back from my shoulders. It fell to the floor. “And … these?”

  “They’re Kaden’s.”

  His chest rose in a deep measured breath, and he walked away, raking his fingers through his hair. “Better his clothes than that dress, I suppose.”

  No doubt the guards had wasted little time in spreading their sordid tales.

  “Yes, Rafe,” I sighed. “I earned them. In a sword fight, and that is all. Kaden has a blue goose egg on his shin to prove it.”

  He turned back to me, relief visible on his face. “And the kiss last night?”

  My anger flared. Why wouldn’t he let it go? But I realized so much still bubbled near the surface. All the hurts and the deceptions that we hadn’t had time to address were still there.

  “I didn’t come here to be interrogated,” I snapped. “What of all your attentions toward Calantha?”

  His shoulders pulled back. “I suppose we’re both putting on the performances of our lives.”

  His accusatory tone made my anger spark into a fire. “Performance? Is that what you call it? You lied to me. Your life’s complicated. That’s what you told me. Complicated?”

  “What are you dredging up? Last night or Terravin?”

  “You act as if it happened ten years ago! You have such an interesting way with words. Your life isn’t complicated. You’re the blazing crown prince of Dalbreck! You call that a complication? But you went on and on about growing melons and tending horses and how your parents were dead. You shamelessly told me you were a farmer!”

  “You claimed you were a tavern maid!”

  “I was! I served tables and washed dishes! Have you ever grown a melon in your life? Yet you piled on lie after lie, and it never occurred to you to tell me the truth.”

  “What choice did I have? I heard you call me a princely papa’s boy behind my back! One you could never respect!”

  My mouth fell open. “You spied on me?” I whirled around, shaking my head in disbelief, crossing the room, then whipping back to face him. “You spied? Your duplicities never end, do they?”

  He took an intimidating step closer. “Maybe if a certain tavern maid had bothered to tell me the truth first, I wouldn’t have felt that I had to hide who I was!”

  I matched him step for angry step. “Maybe if a self-important prince had bothered to come see me before the wedding as I had asked, we wouldn’t be here now at all!”

  “Is that so? Well, maybe if someone had asked with an ounce of diplomacy instead of commanding like a spoiled royal bitch, I would have come!”

  I shook with rage. “Maybe someone was too scared out of her wits to properly choose her words for His Royal Pompous Ass!”

  We both stood there, our chests heaving with fury, becoming something neither of us had been with the other before. The royal son and the royal daughter of two kingdoms that had only warily trusted each other.

  I was suddenly sick with my words. I hated every one and wanted to take them back. I felt my blood pool at my feet. “I was afraid, Rafe,” I whispered. “I asked you to come because I was never so afraid in my life.”

  I watched his angry flush drain away too. He swallowed and gently drew me into his arms, then tenderly, his lips grazed my forehead. “I’m sorry, Lia,” he whispered against it. “I’m so sorry.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was sorry for his angry words or that he hadn’t come to me all those months ago when he received my note. Maybe both. His thumb strummed the ridges of my spine. All I wanted was to memorize the feel of his body pressed to mine and erase every word we had just said.

  He took my hand and slowly kissed my knuckles one at a time, just as he’d done back in Terravin, but now I thought, This is Prince Jaxon Tyrus Rafferty kissing my hand, and I realized it mattered not one whit to me. He was still the person I had fallen in love with, crown prince or farmer. He was Rafe, and I was Lia, and everything else that we were to other people didn’t matter to us. I didn’t need to fall in love with him again. I had never fallen out.

  I slid my hands beneath his vest, feeling the muscles of his back. “They’ll come,” I whispered against his chest. “Your soldiers will come, and we’ll get out of this. Together, just like you said.” I remembered that he’d said two of them spoke the language.

  I leaned back so I could see his face. “Do you speak Vendan too?” I asked. “I forgot to find out last night.”

  “Only a few words, but I’m catching on to certain ones quickly. Fikatande idaro, tabanych, dakachan wrukash.”

  I nodded. “The choice words always come first.”

  He chuckled, and his smile transformed his face. My eyes stung. I wanted that smile to stay there forever, but I had to move on to more urgent but bleaker details I needed to share. I told him there were things I had learned that he and his men would need to know.

  We sat down opposite each other at the table that held the basin, and I told him everything, from the Komizar’s threats to me after everyone else had left the room, to the stolen cargo down in Council Wing Square, to my conversation with Aster and my suspicion that the patrols were being systematically slaughtered by the Vendan army. They were hiding something. Something important.

  Rafe shook his head. “We’ve always had skirmishes with bands of Vendans, but this does seem different. I’ve never seen organized troops like the ones we encountered, but even six hundred armed soldiers is something that can be easily quashed by either of our kingdoms once they know what they’re dealing with.”

  “What if there’s more than six hundred?”

  He leaned back in his chair and rubbed the bristle on his chin. “We haven’t seen any evidence of that, and it takes some level of prosperity to train and support a large army.”

  This was tr
ue. Supporting the Morrighese army was a constant drain on the treasury. But even though it brought me some relief to think the army we encountered could be dealt with, I still felt doubt roosting in my gut.

  I moved on, telling him about the jehendra, the man who put the talisman around my neck, and the women who measured me for clothes. “They were unusually attentive, Rafe. Kind, even. It was strange in comparison to everyone else. I wonder if maybe they—”

  “Like you?”

  “No. It’s more than that,” I said, shaking my head. “I think that maybe they wanted to help me. Maybe help us?” I chewed the corner of my lip. “Rafe, there’s something else I haven’t told you.”

  He leaned forward, his gaze fixed on me. It reminded me of all the times I swept the inn porches in Terravin and he listened so intently to what I had to say, no matter how large or small it was. “What is it?” he asked.

  “When I ran from Civica, I stole something. I was angry, and it was my way of getting back at some members of the cabinet who had pushed the marriage.”

  “Jewels? Gold? I don’t think anyone in Venda is going to arrest you for stealing something from their sworn enemy.”

  “I don’t think the value of it was monetary. I think it was something they just didn’t want anyone to see—especially me. I stole some documents from the Royal Scholar’s library. One of them was an ancient Vendan text called the Song of Venda.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Neither had I.” I told him Venda was the wife of the first ruler and the kingdom was named for her. I explained that she had told stories and sung songs from the walls of the Sanctum to the people below, but she was said to have gone mad. When her words turned to babble, the ruler had pushed her from the wall to her death below.

  “He killed his own wife? Sounds like they were as barbaric then as they are now, but how does this matter to us?”

  I hesitated, almost afraid to say the words out loud. “On my way here across the Cam Lanteux, I translated it. It said a dragon would rise, one that fed on the tears of mothers. But it also said someone else would come along to challenge him. Someone named Jezelia.”