Page 117 of The Hunted

“It doesn’t have one.”

Eryx laughed. “They all have titles.”

“Not this one.”

“Let me see it, then.”

Arelle flashed him with a brilliant smile when she turned away from the bookshelves with the book in her already outstretched hand. When she was close enough, he took the leather-bound book, ready to find the title that he was sure had to be there. Perhaps it had faded where it was once embossed on the cover, or even the title page had been ripped out.

Eryx soon figured out Arelle wasn’t wrong.

There was no title page.

That was a lie.

There was a title page.

Anthia, Queen of the Blu Sea.

Eryx lost his ability to breathe for a second, his gaze darting up to see Arelle had turned around to let her fingers dance over the flame of a flickering candle nearby. She wasn’t looking at him when he flipped the first page, and he took the risk of looking back down again, though he knew it would be a stab in the heart.

Queen, he read again.

The word kept jumping from the page.

He knew her writing.

Those soft curves when she twisted the letters with ink on a quill. His mother was one of the first slaves to learn to write, and because of her favor with his father, made it seem like a norm for others when she learned to read and write their language alongside him.

Yes, he knew his mother’s handwriting.

That pain in his chest came.

Why had she never told him her true title?

Mattue’s words in the House of Miller about the things his mother wanted to hide roared into his mind with a vengeance. He knew the implications; he understood perfectly well what that meant for him and yet, he couldn’t linger on that for long when on the next page he found his mother’s words in the form of a journal entry.

He swore he could hear her voice.

Eryx read the first page. The way she’d quickly scribbled a few paragraphs to fill up the page and all at once, explained the journal’s placement in the estate’s library and its purpose.

Once a summer, they bring him here. I’m leaving this journal here because despite how Mattue claims to be worldly, he does not seem to spend much time learning the words of the world, regardless of what he leads others to believe.

It’s the only shame about spending any days here because the rest of it is almost perfect. Eryx spends a spread of time with Mattue at his father’s demand … Misael intends for the man to be his advisor. He’s only a spare, the man says, but he should be an educated spare, nonetheless.

I hate him—Misael.

My son, I love more than the moons and stars and seas that call for me. But who else will?

Back to the problem, however. Mattue, that is. Misael adores him—brothers are brothers, he says. The court believes he’s loyal.

Eryx … well, sometimes it’s hard to tell what he thinks at all about any of them.

Then again, between the father who would only spoil and ruin him; the court who sees the halfling princes as a twisted, amusing show; the advisor who manipulates him; and the mother who always asks him if he can smell the sea? I imagine it’s a lot for a boy of only four.

I suppose we’re all giving Eryx one thing—an ability to think for himself. May that save him when I cannot.

A couple of scribbles marked up the bottom of the page, as though the quill stayed to the paper, but she glanced up. Right below it, the last few lines of the page were clear as day when she’d come back to her writing: