I pull my attention from this face that is mine and yet also a stranger’s, and inspect the two puncture wounds over my jugular. They’re no more than small dots, so contradictory to the lethal fangs that sank into me. What did Wendeline mean when she said she healed them? Even as I ask myself this question, the answer is there, lingering at the recesses of my mind. Is she talking about … magic?
“What about her arm?” Zander asks.
Wendeline nods and shifts her focus to my shoulder, pushing aside the loose cotton material. It’s then I realize someone has changed me out of my sullied and torn wedding dress. It’s an unpleasant feeling knowing I was undressed while I was unconscious, but I push it from my thoughts because it’s in the past and something else worries me more.
Sofie’s ring.
Relief washes over me when I feel the band against the soft pad of my thumb. They didn’t remove it. Could it have been the ring that somehow protected me against the beast? Is that what Sofie meant by protection? Did she know I would be attacked?
Zander watches where my fingers fidget, missing nothing. His brow pinches with confusion before smoothing over once again. It’s a fleeting tell, and it reminds me that he tried to take this ring from me.
Wendeline peels away the gauzy bandages from my shoulder and holds up the mirror. “It was much worse to begin with.”
Four grisly streaks—each at least six inches long and an inch wide—mar my skin where the beast’s claws sank into my body. Oddly, there are no stitches. I would’ve expected dozens, and yet my flesh appears to have knitted together without the help of needle and thread. The scars will be ghastly, but it could have been much worse. I still have my eyes.
“Leave us,” Zander commands softly. It reminds me of how Korsakov’s voice used to go soft when he’d send people away. It meant he was going to exact revenge and didn’t want any witnesses.
“Your Highness.” Wendeline curtsies and darts out, her cloak swooshing with her hurried steps. Is that a sign of respect—are people expected to jump and run at his every word?—or is it that she’s afraid of him?
He’s a king, but what kind of man is he? All that power, people bowing and rushing around to do his bidding. Even as scary as Korsakov was, you’d never catch Tony or any of the other guys calling him anything remotely close to Highness.
Zander shifts closer to tower over my feeble body. “Feel free to speak your mind.”
And say what? This man condemned me to death. After he kissed me.
I meet his examining gaze. “I’m good.”
The corner of his mouth twitches as he watches me curiously. “Annika said you were different from before. I can’t say I didn’t notice it. I had the priestess search for signs of whatever elemental magic courses through your limbs. There is no other explanation for you surviving that which should have killed you twice now.”
“You think I’m using elemental magic.”
“I do not know, but I will get the truth out of you.” His cool fingers slip around my forearm, lifting it into the air. “In case you get any ideas, these will keep you in check.”
I frown at the cuff around my wrist. It’s plain and black and fitted as if molded especially for me. It reminds me vaguely of the black obsidian horn Sofie impaled me with. I can’t find a fastener or even a seam. A matching one graces my other wrist. “How?”
His responding smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Islor has a few secrets of its own, still.” He releases his grip of my forearm and wanders from my bedside.
My hand. The one he sliced with his dagger.
I study my palm. There is only the faintest line where the sizable gash existed. I open and close my fist several times, testing it. It’s as if it didn’t happen at all. “You cut me,” I hear myself say. He did, didn’t he?
“You did far worse to me.” He sighs. “What am I to do with you, Romeria?”
Now that I know half my neck isn’t missing, I grit through the sting and turn my head to follow. The bedroom they’ve put me in is a vast improvement to the tower cell. Here, patterned paper and painted portraits adorn the walls and furniture fills the corners. The ceilings arch twenty feet over my head and daylight streams in through three grand windows. A set of glass doors are propped open.
Zander stops in front of them. “Annika tells me the daaknar was intent on her until you drew its attention to you. Why did you do that?”
“Because it would have killed her.” I don’t have an explanation beyond that. I didn’t think; I acted.
“And you knew it would die if it attacked you?”
“I didn’t even know that thing existed before that night. So, no. I guess I figured my time was up.”
He peers over his shoulder to shoot me with a flat look. “You expect me to believe you didn’t know daaknars exist.”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe, because you’re not going to trust anything I say.”
His lips twist. “Finally, something out of your mouth I know to be genuine.”
I could speak all kinds of truths right now—that demons are hallucinations of my mad father, that magic only exists in the world of my mother’s cult—only I’m no longer sure they’d be truths. Everything I thought I knew has been flipped upside down by a red-haired woman with flames dancing along her fingertips and a desperate need to resurrect her dead husband.
My father believes in demons. He’s railed against those who told him they didn’t exist, and look where that has gotten him? He’s been cast aside, an unfortunate case left in society’s gutter. Now here I am, in a place where everyone seems to believe demons and magic exist. I’m wearing scars to prove the former. Am I to hold fast to my denial and become an inverse reflection of my father?
The only certainty I see before me is that there are too many things I can’t explain with what I thought I knew. But Sofie warned me of that too.
The rules of the world to which you are accustomed are about to change.
And in the world that I’m currently trapped in, there are kingdoms to kill for, beasts who feed off people, and magic I’m sure I can’t fathom.
God only knows what else there is.
Zander’s attention veers back to his view outside. “How did you destroy it?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t understand what’s happening to me.” Sofie was adamant that these people not discover my true identity, but what does that mean? That I’m not Princess Romeria of Ybaris but a doppelganger she has somehow planted at the worst possible time? That I’m not from Islor or Ybaris and had never heard of either place until a few days ago? Where even is the real princess? What did Sofie do with her body?
Is this somehow her body?
A shiver of panic courses through my limbs.
Regardless, I can’t imagine how knowing who I really am could be more dangerous to me, but I have to believe Sofie was speaking the truth. She thinks my success will bring Elijah back to her, and she wouldn’t risk that.
Still, how am I to survive in this place as the woman who murdered a king and queen?
With a version of my reality, I guess.
I take a deep breath, not sure how this will be received, other than—likely—not well. “I don’t remember anything before waking up in the garden, the night I pulled Annika from the river.”