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Though she knew she shouldn’t care, Elarian leaned in closer, eager to hear all that Lord Ataen might spill about Lucan.
“He laughed.” The words came quietly. “He laughed so often, the palace servants stopped flinching when they heard footsteps. He collected musicians from across the known world, granting them immortality so that they might never stop improving at their craft. Oh, and the flowers…so many flowers one might think we lived in a greenhouse and not a castle.”
“Flowers?”
“Oh, don’t tell him I said that.” Ataen smiled, his melancholy lifting. “He used to keep moon lilies outside his chambers.”
Moon lilies.
That knife twisted again, more cruelly this time until she gasped for air.
“What happened?”
Ataen’s smile disappeared. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “He came back from the Evermist nearly three centuries ago and never truly laughed again.”
Elarian’s pulse quickened. Three centuries. The Evermist. It couldn’t…Surely it was a coincidence. The godless wasteland was vast.
“But,” Ataen continued, oblivious to Elarian’s panic, “sometimes it lasts. Like you and Luc. He’s been obsessed with you for centuries. Even when he loved me, there was always a part of him I could never reach.”
Elarian’s fingers tightened unconsciously around the moonstone at her throat. Something beneath her ribs pulled taut, as though a thread she had spent centuries trying to sever had just been drawn tighter.
thirty-seven
Scar Tissue
The Blooded Palace had always understood death.
It lingered within the polished obsidian walls like incense trapped inside an ancient cathedral, settling into every velvet curtain and crystal goblet until even silence carried the scent of old graves. Today, that silence pleased Lucan.
One traitor already lay beneath the earth.
Another would join him before the sun rose the next morn.
He stood alone before the towering windows overlooking his mother’s once beloved Singing Garden, one hand folded behind his back while the other lazily turned a signet ring around his finger. Outside, the sun-blessed creatures of the world scurried through the overgrown paths. Envy no longer stirred within Lucan as he watched them. Now, he only took solace in the knowledge that life continued outside this gilded prison. Somewhere deeper within the palace, bells announced another meaningless council meeting.
He would not be attending.
Quiet footsteps pricked his ears. Turning, Lucan watched the captain of his household guard drop immediately to one knee.
“My prince.” Captain Moryn stood. “They are all accounted for.”
“The servants.” He rarely asked questions of his inferiors.
“Eleven of them.”
Lucan nodded. “No children?”
“None. She insisted her household remain childless.”
“Good.”
Captain Moryn waited, hair black as midnight pulled taut into a braided bun atop his head. The shaved sides of his head shone bright in the witchlights.
“They served Anileta faithfully,” Lucan continued. “See to it they follow her accordingly.”
“It will be done.”
Moryn bowed with a deep smile. Lucan dismissed him with the smallest movement of his hand; only after the quiet clicking of his heeled boots over the marble disappeared did Lucan allow himself a quiet breath.
