“We’ll be fine.” Merrick pressed the flat of his hand against her back, guiding her toward the palace. “Onika owes me a favor.”
She batted his hand away and glared at him. “You better explain yourself before we get there. I hate mysteries.”
Despite the situation and what he had lost, Merrick couldn’t help but laugh. By the time they reached the palace, he just knew she would be convinced of his madness.
Raed felt the world claim him again, and it was not a pretty thing. His muscles ached right down to his bones, so he knew that the Rossin had taken a lot from his body. The taste of blood in his mouth confirmed it.
His eyes were glued shut, and he wasn’t sure for a moment if he had enough strength to lever them open. So the Young Pretender lay still, trying to take in his surroundings.
As the aching subsided, he was able to perceive that he wa lying on something that was swaying, so it had to be a carriage or cart. No, a carriage, because under his left cheek he could feel the softness of some kind of brocade.
Outside, wheels were turning, but it did not sound as though it were on gravel or cobblestones. Instead, he could hear the hiss of something far softer than any of those surfaces. His mind made the connection only slowly; the wheels were running over compacted sand.
And if they were doing that, then they were no longer in the Hive City. Raed struggled to control his breathing as he flicked through the images of what had happened before the Rossin took him.
Something had attacked them in the library. He’d been standing next to Sorcha and had felt the geist only for a second before the Rossin inside had reacted as he always did.
The Young Pretender inhaled sharply though his nose, because there was another familiar sensation he suddenly recognized: the pull of blood dried onto his skin. Was it Sorcha’s? Had he killed the one woman he had dared to have feelings for just as he had his own mother?
“You did take life, Raed Syndar Rossin.” The voice was just across from him, low, accented and somehow familiar—he just had to sort through memories to get to it. But everything was too sluggish, just as it always was after awaking from possession by the Rossin.
So he yanked his eyelids apart, and Grand Duchess Zofiya looked back at him. If Raed could have picked anyone to be sitting opposite him in the fine carriage, it would never have been her. His one and only contact with the sister of the Emperor had been back in Vermillion when he had taken a bullet for her.
In that split second she had looked grateful—even if her brother had later thrown Raed into prison. Now her beautiful dark eyes were leveled on him with far less grace, and more than that. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought she was growing cataracts. Yet she didn’t appear to have any trouble seeing him.
In the impossible heat she was wearing a sheer white garment that only barely concealed her admirable curves. Again, the last time he had seen the Grand Duchess she had been wearing the Imperial Guard red uniform—and from what he had heard, that was all she ever wore—even to state events. Another strangeness.
Raed pushed with his hands, levering himself off the carriage seat, but quickly found that they were bound, and it was not with anything he had ever encountered before, but he knew what they were immediately.
“Weirstones.” He held up his hands before him, swaying slightly and still a little muzzy. The string of tiny stones gleamed like diamonds in front of his slowly focusing eyes. “Really—you shouldn’t have.”
Zofiya laughed, but it was a short sound with no real amusement behind it. “But if I did not, then your passenger would become very troublesome.”
Raed twisted so that he was sitting a little more comfortably on the seat, though it still felt precarious. His feet were bound in the same fashion. “It takes very little to restrain the Rossin.” He measured how far it was across to the Grand Duchess, but at this moment he remained curious rather than angry.
She leaned back, some of the baking Chiomese sun filtering in through the curtains and outlining her form even more in the thin white dress. Raed was aware, if not entirely immune, to her tactics. Zofiya was a beautiful woman, and the dress not only showed off her womanly curves but also the lines of honed muscles years of military training had given her. He began to reconsider how great his chances of overcoming her physically really were.
“It is not merely the weirstones that restrain the Rossin,” Zofiya replied, “but the fact that he was soundly beaten.”
Raed had dreamed most of his life of hearing someone saying that to him—telling him they had a way to defeat the great geistlord that haunted his life. Sorcha, Merrick and the Bond had given him some comfort, but he had never thought that there could be any more.
Raed was not comforted—not when her smile did not reach her strange eyes. Raed knew about possession better than most, and there were many small signs of it on Grand Duchess Zofiya: a tiny twitch under her right eye, unusual fashion choices, and a complete lack of sweat on her body.
“What are you,” he asked through dry lips, “to sit there talking so calmly about beating the Rossin, when most people don’t even want to say his name?”
She gestured down her body. “I dare because I am protected.” When she shifted, Raed saw something that his blurry eyes had not noticed before. Sitting on the seat next to her was a mahogany box, large enough to hold a man’s head. He wondered if that was what was in it. “My goddess Hatipai has cast her cloak over me, and even your passenger carries no dread for me.”
“A goddess?” Raed couldn’t help letting out a little snort of disbelief. “You are relying on the protection of a little god against the Rossin?”
She moved so fast that all he felt on his skin was the sting of her slap. She had enough strength behind her attack to rock him back in the seat, and something else—a brush of power that tasted familiar. It was gone too quickly for him to identify, but the Young Pretender was left staring at the Grand Duchess with a new appreciation.
“Don’t you dare talk about things you have no idea of,” she whispered to him over bared teeth. “You may call them little—but Hatipai is a living goddess—my living goddess!”
Raed rubbed his cheek somewhat awkwardly and smiled in what he planned on being a charming manner. “A gentleman doesn’t like to bring up debts in front of a lady, but this seems hardly fair, considering I saved your life only a season ago.”
She tilted her head, her luminous dark eyes full of regal pride. “And a Grand Duchess does not acknowledge what is hers by right. Every citizen of Arkaym does his duty when he protects the royal family.”
Now, that pinched his pride. “I have never sworn an oath to you or your upstart brother—I owe you nothing!” Raed hoped to enrage her to the point where he might be able to overcome her—perhaps get the tight length of weirstones around her fine neck.
Idly Zofiya drew her long knife and began to clean her nails with its shining length. “Perhaps you do not . . .” The way she said it so archly implied something that chilled Raed.
The Rossin. It always came down to the Rossin. If it was not enough trouble to be the Pretender to a throne with a bounty on his head, he also carried a geistlord inside him that apparently had even more enemies.
“What do you want with him?”
Now Zofiya leaned back in her seat, a beautiful woman with something dark lodged in her. The Young Pretender knew a lot about that. He also knew this was not the Duchess he had taken a bullet for back in Vermillion.
Her smile was devastating and knowing. “She wants him. She must have her revenge.”
Raed let his head drop back on the seat with a slight groan. “Hatipai, you mean. This is what it is all about?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” And that was all she was going to say.