The Essence

Brook was still mad about having to share my sleeping quarters, about not being housed in the gatehouse just outside of the palace with her soldiers. It was where all the visiting queens’ soldiers were bunking.

Soldiers, especially off-duty ones, could be loud and raucous

and lewd, and Brooklynn worried she was missing out on the party they were surely having without her. I think she was even more upset that Aron had been allowed to stay with them, bunking with her men, while she was stuck here. With me.

Still, I hadn’t changed my mind. I didn’t want to be alone, and Zafir wasn’t exactly the kind of company I had in mind.

Besides, there were things we needed to discuss.

Things I couldn’t keep putting off, despite her irascible mood.

I stilled at the thought, my breath gathering in the base of my throat. “Brook,” I whispered. “We need to figure this thing out. We need to find out who was responsible for killing your soldier, because whoever he is . . .” My voice drifted away as the rest of my words got caught. I couldn’t say them: Whoever he is also wants to kill me.

Zafir glanced up then, too, momentarily forgetting the food in front of him. “She’s right. Until we know who the traitor is, Queen Charlaina’s not safe. No one is.”

Brook swallowed what was left in her mouth, and her expression changed. She no longer glared at me across the table. Now she looked determined. “I know,” she answered gravely. “And when I find him, we won’t need the gallows. I’ll kill him myself.”

I didn’t recognize the language right away—it was one I hadn’t heard in ages. But I knew, even from the depths of my dream, it was long dead.

Just like the girl I saw reflected back at me from the looking glass.

Now she was gone.

Not that I’d minded her body, I realized, gazing into her shining green eyes, so unlike the ones I’d been born with. Even if the copper-haired beauty hadn’t been next in line for the throne, men would’ve fallen at her feet.

At my feet, I corrected, a small smile tracing my lips.

But there was only one man I cared about. Only one who made my heart race and my skin tingle.

I turned my attention to the girls who attended me, their voices buzzing all around me as they fussed and fastened and pinned and smoothed, preparing me for the feast.

“Out!” I insisted in that strange foreign tongue, and felt a twinge of satisfaction at their skittishness as they jumped away from me, scattering like a flock of startled birds. When I saw their gazes flitting nervously to one another as if to question my command, I raised my voice. “Now!” I barked the thick, guttural word, making certain they knew I was serious.

I waited until the door clicked behind every last one of them, until I was sure I was alone at last, and then I turned back to the mirror once more.

I was flawless. Right down to the fresh flowers woven into my long, copper tresses. I would make the perfect attendant to my eldest sister on her wedding day, the day she’d take a king to rule at her side. The day she’d start trying for an heir to take her place upon the throne.

To displace me in line.

If only she’d been the one to say the words instead of the girl in whose body I now resided. If only I’d been able to trick the new queen into taking my Essence instead of her younger sister.

Then I wouldn’t be in this predicament.

Then the queen wouldn’t have to die today.

I took a breath and turned toward my bedchamber, not even the second-best quarters in the palace. Definitely not fit for a princess who was second in line.

But I’d requested these rooms for a reason.

I moved aside a heavy table, and beneath that, a thick, cumbersome rug. When I finished, I was winded, but I was staring down at the small, planked door cut into the very floor itself.

I lifted the iron rung and pulled, and then vanished down into the black stairwell.

When I reached the chamber door at the other end of the passageway—my destination—I tapped softy, a sound so faint it could easily have been made by rats scratching against the floorboards.

When I heard the answering knock, I smiled to myself. All was clear.

I slid the door open and stepped out from the shadows into a corridor. Yet even before I was out from behind the heavy door, I heard his voice—just as rough and grating as my own had been. “You look beautiful,” he said in that same long-dead dialect, and even though I’d just thought that very thing while looking at myself in the mirror, I almost couldn’t breathe when he told me so.

Shyly, I stepped forward, just as he held out the gleaming silver blade to me.

It was heavier than I’d expected, and sharper, too. I turned it over in my hand, watching as light reflected from the edge, glinting back at me. “I won’t need it,” I said.

“Take it anyway,” he insisted, his fingers reaching up to caress my cheek, making fire lick through my veins. “Just in case.”

And then I lifted my eyes to his . . .

. . . and gasped.

For too long, I couldn’t find my breath. The air was trapped somewhere between my lungs and my throat, stuck on a lump I couldn’t manage to swallow. I blinked hard in the darkness, my skin barely lit at all, and I guessed that was the reason Sabara’s hold on me had grown.

And now I was too far away from Angelina to ask for her help.

Instead I waited, my fist clutched against my chest, wondering why this was happening, wondering if Sabara knew what I’d just witnessed.