The Conquering, page 102:

  I buried her myself and fell to my knees when I finished, black earth fisted in my hands and caked in my nails. Laid to rest—what a monstrous lie. The view of the ocean beyond the cliffs would never be enough. She should have reigned over this place. She should have woken to this view every day, not been buried at its edge. She should have lived on, even if she wasn’t mine. I could have been content to watch her joy from afar, to watch her raise children and grow old.

  But the very man I guided, trained, devoted myself to in order to save her… had killed her so quickly, so viciously. I hadn’t been able to stop him, even as his creator, his mentor.

  I will never forgive him for that.

  I will never forgive myself for that.

  The very best part of my new bedroom—high up in the royal family’s wing of the palace’s east tower—is my balcony. I can be tucked away within my private chambers and still be outside. It’s like having a door to the roof, though not quite as good of a view.

  My room sits flush against the mountain spire, such that the sheer cliff wall makes up the left, northern edge of my balcony, and the railing curves around the east and southern edges. I can spread my arms against the rough black stone and lay my cheek upon its strange warmth. Its surface is slightly ridged, almost as if it’s the bark of a massive tree, once struck and burned by lightning and petrified with time.

  Over the rail of the balcony and far below, the palace gardens stretch from the base of the spire to the palace grounds’ outer wall. From here I can see every twist and turn of the maze the Prince and I once walked in—where I first saw Abel’s handiwork: a fountain turned red by the corpse hung over it. Where the King had once been shocked to find my father’s name painted on a stone there.

  I’d like to one day discover who actually killed him. Who my stepmother told, who put that knife in his back. One day.

  I lay my head back on the chaise lounge I had moved out onto the balcony. The staff raised their eyebrows a bit—apparently they expected me to request far more changes than just this one bizarre one. But this is all I care about.

  Now I lay beneath the stars and stare up into the endless night sky. Too many bright palace windows and lanterns limit the stars I can see, but I enjoy it all the same. The wind still blows in my hair and tosses the curtains of my quiet, empty room.

  Here, with the scent of dry grass awaiting fall’s first rains to begin, I almost find peace.

  This soft quiet is a sharp contrast to the chaos that ensues beneath me and beyond the palace at the Founder Estates. Fear grips the kingdom after last week’s assassination. The King is dead. The Wyvernmail is fallible.

  They have good reason to be afraid.

  There’s a rightness to my decision. A strange peacefulness. I am exactly where I need to be. It won’t be painless. It won’t be easy. But for the first time in my life, I know I’m doing the right thing. I know it with every fiber of my being. Even with the heavy weight of the gold chain at my neck.

  Not a breakable leather cord. My chain has no clasp at all. I’m never to remove it.

  A strange scraping sound jerks me upright. Almost as if something claws the side of the palace.

  A black-clad figure vaults over the balcony railing and I leap to my feet.

  The figure straightens, his hair whipping wildly around his shoulders. He looks ever the rogue. Powerful, mysterious, wild.

  “Abel,” I breathe. I’d been expecting him, and still I long to run to him, to throw myself into his arms.

  I crush that urge.

  Instead, I lift my chin, straighten my spine, pin my shoulders back, and see him as he really is: a warrior. One dedicated to his people, never to me. I take in the subtler changes, too; dark shadows under his eyes, a scabbed-over abrasion at his brow, and something off about his posture, uncomfortable, maybe painful.

  “I…” He clears his throat. His voice is hoarse, tired. “I had to be sure you were alright.”

  I’m not sure what ‘alright’ means anymore. “I’m alive.” That’s enough. “And you?”

  He nods.

  Silence stretches between us. Again, the urge to throw myself into his arms tugs at my gut. Always that pull towards him. I want to breathe in his pine and earth and warmth and really cherish it one last time.

  But my spine will not bend and my feet will not move.

  “Farnell,” I ask, though I know already. I’ve seen him, so gloriously alive.

  “Alive. Safe.”

  Safe. What a magical word. What a ridiculous thing to promise.

  “He’s with us.” Abel takes a tentative step closer.

  I nod and take a small step back, away. I glance around at the balcony, into my bedroom. All these things I’d once been so sure I wanted. Then this man came into my life and I’d dare to dream of so much more. “This was the plan all along. Me, on the throne.”

  His throat bobs. “Yes.”

  “No more lies, Abel. How far back did your plan for me go?”

  He grinds his jaw. “It was always a possibility, one we hoped for, but couldn’t be certain of. Your stepmother kept you under tight wraps for years.”

  “When I saw you that first time in the forest?”

  “I’d been spending time there for the past few weeks, hoping to catch a glimmer of your character. To see if you were like Will, or if you’d been too corrupted by Clara.”

  “The attack on our carriage?”

  “Planned, to force Clara into accepting Foundress Privett’s offer. So you’d be in the city. So I could show you our country’s problems.”

  I suck in a breath. Of course. Who else would’ve been traveling that road that night, other than the Venons? Why hadn’t I wondered at that? It’s easy to tell carriages apart, he’d chosen mine. “The rooftop?”

  “I’d been attempting to spy on you, but you climbed up before I got the chance. Resting was a bluff.”

  “And the Foundress Privett, she was in on all of this? Inviting us to live with her?”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He hesitates, then slowly nods. “Yes, from the beginning. The Privetts have always been loyal to your father.”

  “And the boy? Did you set up having a child beaten too?”

  His eyes harden. “A convenient and effective, unplanned coincidence.”

  “My training?” My heart twists sharply.

  His lips press together, as if he wants to stop himself. He speaks anyway. “That’s where the plan started to go awry. I never should have agreed to it.”

  “The Moon festival?”

  “Aubrey.” He steps towards me.

  I hold up a hand. “And killing the King, why couldn’t you have told me about that?”

  His jaw flexes. “By then, I honestly didn’t know if it’d be you or Nicoletta. There was a chance it wouldn’t work. And too great a risk that you might give it away with some kind of tell.”

  A bitter laugh rips from my throat.

  “Aubrey, you have to understand what kind of danger you were in. If you’d given any indication that you knew, even a flick of your eyes, or the tiniest disappointment had it failed—there’s no way the High Guard would have missed it. You could be dead right now if I hadn’t—”

  “So you staged it so that I would get trapped by the Prince’s proposal and be your golden queen after all?” My chin quivers and I claw for every ounce of strength within me to still it, to stamp down the emotion rising inside.

  “Yes.” It sounds like it nearly kills him to say it.

  It nearly kills me to hear it. “How could you send all those prisoners to the slaughter?”

  His face contorts. “Damn it all, Aubrey. King Giraldus had to die. I couldn’t let him take us to war. Not this broken country. We’d lose everything, then. We’d all become Pachuate slaves. We did what we had to. I offered those men a choice. Sacrifice their lives for the King’s death and the opportunity to maybe take a few nobles with them, or join our camps. I made sure Farnell went with the group to escape. These were dead men in the Pits already, Aubrey. They died seeking their vengeance. It was an honorable way to die. More honorable than the monarchy ever would have offered them.”

  “Freeing people to die isn’t a choice, Abel.”

  “At least they died free. The monarchy burns people alive, Aubrey. Or have you forgotten?”

  I flinch. I’ll never forget. “And now you’ve tied me in a nice, neat little bow, haven’t you?”

  His brows twitch into a frown.

  I smile and hope it looks cruel. “If I were to dare try to betray you, I’d be confessing to treason. And, with a position so close to the Prince, if they even thought for a moment I was a sympathizer or traitor they’d just dispose of me.”

  “It’s not like that.” He reaches out a hand.

  “But that’s exactly what it’s like, though, isn’t it?” My chest squeezes up into my throat, but I can’t stop. “Was bedding me part of the master plan?”

  He flinches as if I’ve slapped him. “No, of course not. Aubrey, I never meant to feel anything for you.”

  My gut contracts and the air whisks from my lungs. “You’ve made that abundantly clear.”

  He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. He turns his hands over and inspects his palms.

  I wonder how much blood he sees there.

  “I just… at first, the plan was to assess your character, to bring you to sympathize with us and our people. I never expected you to get so involved. And then, for a moment there, it seemed as if the monarchy wasn’t at all in your future and I allowed myself to consider the possibility that I—” His voice cracks as he meets my eyes with raw ferocity. He thrusts a thumb viciously at his chest. “That I could be your future. And then the tides changed again and well, here we are. I never meant you any harm Aubrey and I certainly never expected us to get so… entangled and then…”

  “And then you abandoned me. With them.” The image of him flashes before my eyes, his expression at the back of the ballroom, the moment I understood.

  “I shouldn’t have. I see that now. I hadn’t... this past week has been torture, Aubrey. I came as quickly as I could. I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten. I’ve been sick over it. I lo—”

  “Stop.” My heart slams against my ribs. “Don’t you dare tell me how dreadful it’s been for you.” He wasn’t left helpless in the clutches of his enemy. He wasn’t stuck in the trap everyone conspired to put me in. The one he promised to save me from.

  I storm into my bedroom and snatch the remaining stack of papers from my dressing table drawer. My knuckles brush the small worn book beside it. The little book that nearly cost me everything. That ended up being Farnell’s savior.

  In the mirror over the dressing table, I hardly recognize myself. That skinny, hopeful girl disappeared somewhere along the way. Now I have defined curves of muscles in my arms and shoulders from training with Abel. A sharpened angle to my jaw. A posture of power. Only a hint of hollowness to my eyes.

  I turn away from that strange new woman and return to the balcony. I thrust the papers at Abel. “The other half. Your payment.”

  He runs his hand through his tangled hair, and his gaze flicks between the papers and my face. Not at all like the calm, always collected Abel. He starts forward, hesitates, then crosses the space between us.

  The papers crinkle between us, but I do not yield the stiff extension of my arm to allow him closer.

  His fingers close over mine and the papers. The pain in his face makes my heart ache and my body twitches to go to him. “I want to fix this, Aubrey. I can’t just leave you here. Come with me. Run away with me. Tonight. I never should have let you out of that carriage the night before the ball. I—”

  I rip my hand from his touch, leaving the papers behind. “Don’t.”

  He stills, poorly masked horror etching his face as his gaze drops to the bejeweled chain at my throat. Or, perhaps, it’s disgust. “You choose the Prince?”

  Truth is, I can do this better than anyone. It has to be me. Someone has to stop them. Someone has to tear the monarchy apart, and I’m in the best position to try. I draw in a haggard breath and force my face neutral, force my lips to form the words. “No, Abel. I choose the throne.”

  His jaw muscle contracts and releases, contracts and releases. “Aubrey…”

  “Tell your council if they want my compliance, they’ll have to play by my rules. No lies. No secrets. My choices, my decisions.”

  “Aubrey, you can’t—”

  “Goodbye Abel.” I step back into my bedroom and close the balcony doors between us.

  He stares at me through the glass, as if he can’t quite believe his own eyes.

  He made me into a martyr. He won’t have me as a lover, too. Nor will I be one of his ‘men’—an unfortunate, but necessary expenditure.

  By any means necessary.

  Not anymore.

  I endured Clara’s torture for years—for what?

  For this.

  For the power I will have. The things I will change. The influence I will bestow. Abel taught me physical power, but this, this is mine. A power only I can wield. Only I can fake it so well. I’ve had so very much practice.

  Abel reaches for the handle.

  I turn the lock. “Don’t.” My voice cracks and I clear my throat. It’s incredible how much I can still hurt when it comes to this man. “Don’t make me call the guards on you.”

  Abel glances up at the sky. The prominence of his throat bobs with a swallow. When his gaze drops back to mine, his face is raw and darker than I’ve ever seen it. “I care more about you than I’ve ever cared for anyone,” he says, low, quiet, a whisper through the doors’ crack.

  I yield nothing, even as my inside rip and tear. I don’t know much about love, only that it shouldn’t hurt this badly.

  He nods at my silence. “I just… wanted you to know.” Then he turns away and vaults over the balcony’s railing into the black of the night.

  I let myself slump against the door. With the glass cool and solid against my cheek and bare arms, I let myself cry. Silent racking sobs that shake my empty body.

  Through the blur of burning tears, a glint in the sky catches my eye. For a heartbeat, I’m sure it’s a shooting star, mocking me with the tease of a wish.

  But, no, it glints and weaves, a shadow sparkling in the moonlight. Then an orange burst of flame illuminates the silhouette of a wyvern—long spiked neck, huge bat-like wings, two powerful legs, and a long spiked tail. I reach my fingers up towards it, so far away I can close my fist around that fly-sized shape.

  No, there’s two. I squint at their dimly glinting shapes as they swirl and twirl around one another. So much for wyverns not flying at night.

  I can almost feel them, almost feel that same plume of fire in my chest and the crooning call, so faint I might’ve imagined it. Or maybe it echoes in my head—just like those words spoken to me weeks ago: You belong with your mother’s people.

  The book with its depictions of dragons and their keepers… The women who lived with them… Had my mother been one of their Golds? Maybe I have family. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Except for Farnell, I don’t know what that’s like. I’m probably not cut out for it.

  Back when I was young, those dancing dragons would have thrilled and excited me. Then, even a few weeks ago, it would’ve terrified me. Now, it’s like a tiny dot of warmth in a cold, black sky.

  A spark of light in my dark world.

  You belong with your mother’s people.

  All my life I’ve been other. Half peasant. A gilded freak. A doll to be bent and sold. Perhaps there’s a place where I belong.

  I watch those little glints weave across the sky, little more than a shimmering flicker in the moonlight. Twice more one blooms with wyvernfire, almost as if it breathes that fire for me.

  Call to me when you’re ready.

  I’m not, yet. I have a monarchy to destroy.

  They believe me a pretty golden bird, a prize safely tucked in a gilded cage. But I’ve wyvernfire burned into my soul as much as the scars on my back. I’ll be the most glittering, golden trophy of all. With every smile, every lie, every kiss, they won’t know I breathe a wyvern’s fire of vengeance until it’s too late.

  I will burn this monarchy to ash.