“We failed, though.” Vaness withdrew from the window. Her eyes fastened onto Vivia’s.
“Did you, though?” Vivia stared right back. “Look at this cove, Empress. Dead birds, dead fish, no trees for miles. People can’t live here, so they live in Lovats, which…” She swiveled her head to rest it against the frame. “Lovats cannot sustain. Because after you’d ensured we could not live on our lands, you impoverished us through trade.”
A soft sigh. “We did, and I cannot even pretend otherwise.”
“Is that an apology?”
“Would you accept if it were?”
“No,” Vivia admitted. She had spent her whole life hating the empires. Hating Vaness and every leader like her. A hate nurtured by the constant death, constant hunger, constant need surrounding her. That she and Vaness were allies now—that there were even aspects of the Empress she liked—couldn’t erase what waited outside the window.
She shoved the cheese into her mouth. Hard, strong. Then she chewed and chewed, her gaze shifting to the barren shore.
Vaness also returned her attention to the window, and for several moments, the only sound to interrupt this graveyard was the high tide whispering and lapping against the hull. And Vivia’s smacking mouth. She should have grabbed the water.
“I am sick, you know,” Vaness said eventually. “It is a disease of the blood. One I have always had. In Marstok, I had healers attend me, and I regularly bathed in the Fire Well. But it has been a month now since I was able to heal.”
Vivia swallowed her cheese. Then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because no one but my healers and my Adders have ever known. It was a weakness I could not let free. A weakness I’ve hidden since childhood.”
“Yet now you’ve shared.”
Vaness opened her hands. “Now I’ve shared. Which places my future—once again—squarely in your hands.”
It did, and Vivia of a year ago would have reveled in that. Vivia of two months ago too. She would have rushed to tell her father, and they would have schemed how best to use such information.
But Vivia of two months ago also would never have allied with the Empress to get back their crowns, because Vivia of two months ago was still the Queen-in-Waiting, catering to her father’s every whim. Certain he only ever held Nubrevna’s interests in his heart.
She had been miserable. Broken. Mind-controlled by a man who had only ever loved himself.
“I have … attacks,” Vivia said eventually. Then, before Vaness could see the flush rising to her cheeks, she fled from the window to the table. “They sit in my chest, like storm clouds through which I cannot breathe. Sometimes, they are mild and I gasp my way through. Sometimes, they are so bad, I cannot move. No one knows about them, though, because like you, I have hidden them since I was a child.” Even from myself.
It was the first time Vivia had ever looked this truth in the face or given it a name. Attacks. She had thought such a confession would be more freeing. She had thought such acknowledgment would be more soothing. Instead, she wished she’d kept her mouth shut and never looked inside. She and Vaness were bitches in the alley again, but this time, Vivia had left her neck fully exposed. All Vaness had to do was bite.
Vivia felt eyes boring into her.
She was pleased her hand didn’t shake as she poured a glass of water. “Now you have my secret.” Don’t bite, don’t bite. “And I have yours. Our futures are once more shared and equal, just as they have been for this past month.”
“And just as,” Vaness murmured, “they always have been.”
She spoke so softly, Vivia almost thought she’d misheard, and when she frowned at the Empress, Vaness did not repeat. Instead she motioned to the door and said, “I will be in my quarters if you need me.”
Vivia didn’t watch her go.
* * *
Vivia breathed in the sea air, savoring the way it filled her lungs. Savoring the way the coast looked alive, healthy. Moonlight glared on the dark waves, calm now with the tide out. For all she knew, so long as she kept staring in this direction, there was no poison. No dead, barren land.
“I don’t see anyone,” Cam murmured. He had a spyglass to his eye—a fine bronze thing Sotar had given him and that he polished daily. “I think they’re gone.”
“Hye,” Vivia agreed. Like Cam, she was sprawled on her belly. The pale earth scraped against her white clothes. The Lonely Bastard loomed to the west. The cove waited half a mile behind.
Vivia pushed to her knees, then sank to her haunches. There was no one on the ocean. No one to see her or Cam. It should have been a relief, but instead, Vivia’s nerves twanged higher by the breath. Why hunt her ship across a sea only to abandon chase once the Iris vanished? And why hunt her at all? No Voicewitch messages had come in. No threats or explanations.
Cam clanked shut his spyglass and shoved into his own seated position, cross-legged beside Vivia, hands over his knees. He had a floppiness to his movements that was both graceful and puppy like. “I found Merik near here, you know.”
Vivia stiffened.
“I tended him back to health in a hut nearby, then we went to the capital. He hated you.”
“Ah,” she breathed, and for some reason, her stomach hollowed out. She wished Cam hadn’t said that. She wished she hadn’t heard the words so directly: He hated you. It didn’t matter that she had always hated him right back, and it didn’t matter that the last time she’d seen Merik they had parted on solid terms. Not loving, not even good, but solid.
What mattered was that he had hated her, and she’d deserved it.
She picked up a rock, palm-size and dry as sun-bleached bone. It was rough against her fingertips. “Why are you telling me this, Cam?”
“Because he was wrong.”
Vivia dug her thumb into the rock. A corner crumbled.
“Merik wanted to lead Nubrevna, and I think he will make a good king. One day. But you make a good queen now, and wherever you lead us, I’ll stand beside you.”
Vivia crushed the rock in her hand. It fractured to sand and she watched it fall from her palm. A moonlit trickle of earth that had once held life.
After several moments with only wind and sea to fill the silence, Cam clambered to his feet and offered Vivia a hand.
She didn’t take it. “Head back to the Iris,” she told him. “I’ll join you there soon.”
His hand dropped. He bowed. “Hye, Majesty.” And soon, his footsteps sifted into the night. He returned shortly, though, a soft crunch upon the earth. Vivia assumed he’d lost his bearings. And after rising and dusting off her breeches, she turned to face the boy.
But it was not Cam who came prowling out of the white trees before her. It was a lean man with a scar across his face and skin weathered to dark, seamed brown. “Hello, Princess.” Master Huntsman Yoris waved, revealing only three fingers upon his left hand. “It has been a long time.”
Four more people emerged from the ghost forest: two women and two men, each dressed in the same yellowish-white shade as the land. And each with a crossbow aimed at Vivia’s head.