Armand listened, his heart quickening as he heard the words he had hoped would one day be spoken. And yet he couldn’t enjoy them, the bitter taste of betrayal weighing heavy on his heart.
“You as the Lord of the East while my father remains Lord of the West until the day he dies. And then, I will take my throne and rule over all of Sives with you as my chancellor.”
Armand didn’t respond. Not to this. But his gaze fell on Joshua’s necklace once more.
Chapter Forty-One
When Gandrett awoke, she was tangled in blankets, and where her stomach was supposed to be, a gaping pit of hunger demanded bothenia crust. By the candlelight, she could tell that it was past sunset even if the lack of daylight triggered alarm in her system. The last time she had woken, she had found herself in a pitch-black cell somewhere under the last Dragon King’s residence in the north tower by the future king of Sives. She was still trying to wrap her head around it—that her mission, the big mission she had been sent on had been only half a mission because the truth was Joshua belonged to Ackwood as much as he belonged to Eedwood. And if he was the cruel type of person she had gotten to know him as, then either there was something very wrong with him now, or his family had a very mistaken image of him.
Gandrett rolled over to glance at the secret door and found it open, but there were no sounds other than the rumbling of her stomach and the crackle of the hearth fire. She would have remained in bed just to enjoy that she hadn’t been cleaved apart by Joshua’s sword, hadn’t it been for the pressure in her bladder that couldn’t wait. She padded across the room and hurried to the bathing chamber,
When she returned, a clicking sound from the window made her hand twitch to where her sword normally hung on her belt. Another click. Gandrett couldn’t spot anything from her position by the door, so she inched forward until outside the window she made out the fat, feathery shape of Riho, the crow.
She loosed a breath and stumbled toward the window, catching herself on the windowsill.
Riho clicked his beak at the glass once more, impatience in the gesture as far as that was something one could see in a bird’s behavior.
So Gandrett unhooked the window and opened it just enough for the crow to hop inside.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him, and as he held out his leg for her to retrieve the small scroll of parchment, Gandrett dove for it and untied it with surprisingly healed hands.
She remembered the Dragon Water, and a shudder ran down her back. What else was going on in this castle that no one had warned her about?
Riho cawed lowly and waited for her to read Nehelon’s message.
She stared at its contents, hoping she had misread, but when she read it for the third time, it still said, If I don’t hear from you by tomorrow, I’ll turn the castle upside down until I find you.
Somehow, it sounded like a threat.
So Gandrett lowered her head to Riho’s and whispered. “Tell Nehelon I found Joshua and that I am no longer sure Joshua wants to return. Tell him I will try to get out as soon as I I’ve eaten.”
She kept everything else to herself. The magic she potentially had performed, the days she had been locked in a dungeon under the last Dragon King’s tower. It was nothing to put into a brief message delivered by a bird. Especially if she was still trying to make herself believe the magic hadn’t happened.
Riho took off with another caw and what Gandrett could swear was relief in his circular, black eyes, leaving Gandrett to deal with her hunger for answers as much as the hole in her stomach.
She hadn’t lied when she had told Riho she’d get out of there soon. But first, she had to find Armand and Addie to figure out what had happened to Joshua.
With quiet footsteps, she made it back to the bed where she picked up her water glass and drained it before she pulled Nehelon’s knife from under the pillow. Then she got her old dress—the one with the secret compartment in the bodice—from the wardrobe where Deelah had hung it after she’d fixed it, and quickly changed.
As she sheathed the knife in her bodice, the memory of Nehelon’s tug on the fabric shook her for a moment, closely followed by the memory of his lips on hers. A memory, or a hallucination?
So she made her way to the secret door and slipped into the passageway.
Armand had slept better. He would have preferred not to sleep at all, but the fact that he had ridden out for one of his many fake-missions the evening before rescuing Gandrett caught up with him. Fake-missions where he didn’t silence anyone who spoke against Denderlain but spent his time promising the people of central-Sives a better future, a peaceful future, if they endured just a little longer, and returned with the blood of one of his father’s loyal men on his hands instead. One of those men who were willing to torture to get people to turn on Brenheran.
The conundrum of Gandrett’s magic and her necklace might have something to do with it too, or the fact that he was sleeping on the rug before his bed, where he had fallen asleep after a long discussion with Addie and Joshua.
They had decided that until they were absolutely certain where the spell that had bound Joshua originated from, the latter should remain hidden in Armand’s chambers.
Addie, however, had taken off in the early afternoon to return to Linniue so his aunt wouldn’t suspect anything. His guards had retrieved her bucket and he had filled it with regular water before she’d left, to prevent anything from happening in case their suspicion about her was true—that it was Linniue who controlled Joshua and it had something to do with the magic in the Dragon Water.
On the sofa, Joshua’s regular breathing was a comforting layer of sound. At least his cousin was sleeping well, unplagued by a second mind overpowering his. Hours and hours they had spent trying to understand the limits of the spell’s power. And Joshua had patiently explained in detail whatever Armand had asked—and Addie, who seemed to put a lot of effort into helping Joshua, given she had denied him help once. Armand’s mind was still spinning at the thought of having a second presence locked in his head with his own mind that sometimes was already too much to bear.
How did Joshua stand it, having his own wishes, his own opinions smothered for years and not break?
Joshua had laid out how the second presence in his head prevented him from ever bringing up that he wished to return to Ackwood or that he was even exposed to that constant internal struggle of not being able to speak his own mind. What a relief it must be for his cousin to finally say the words—that someone had been guiding him through Eedwood and potentially even picking through his brain to gather information.
He had spoken about the nights and days he had spent wishing for them; those moments when the spell got weaker—over time, it seemed—and how he still always ended up back in those shackles of his mind. Linniue’s men must have been keeping their eyes open for his movements through the castle, or he would have managed to escape that one time he had broken the spell—or that it hadn’t been renewed.
Armand’s head threatened to burst from trying to understand how it worked. And from the horror his cousin had endured for such a long time without as much as a word of understanding.
“What got me through those years,” Joshua had said, and it warmed Armand’s heart, “were those hours spent planning with you.” That though he had been under a spell that had prevented him from even attempting to leave, there had been someone—who hoped for a better future for Sives. And that Linniue had been wanting him on the throne as well, only there seemed to be something more she desired. Something bigger she had been working toward.