Page 6 of City of Snakes
“Not exactly.” While Emmerick hadn’t attended the meeting last night, I knew he would support this plan.
“The North King,” he guessed.
I trained my face to not react but nodded. “King Mattock has notyetagreed. But only because he needs time to rest after the attack on Luz. He will accept his crown and my support.”
“If open borders are not what is proposed, then to make this alliance worth my while, Queen Wymark, I’ll need more from you than ‘Mattock will come around.’ The North Corridor borders my lands, and we need the cooperation of our neighbor’s ruler.”
“What exactly do you suggest I do?”
It was now evident that this insufferable man saw right through the professional ties between me and my former Constable. He’d made snide remarks in the bailey during the battle.“A Queen warming her bed with those on her payroll.Leash your dog. If I wanted to kill you, I would have done so already.”
“Get your affairs in order,” he said coldly. “Keep him close. Marry him if you must. Two birds with one stone, as they say.” Then he stood and walked out of the room without so much as a farewell.
Fucking prick.
Chapter 2
Emmerick
She’d lied to me.
She was leaving with a King of a land we knew so little about. My Queen, my lover, was now oath bound to an unknown evil.
I should be kneeling, thanking Krait Darvanda—it would’ve been the noble thing to do. He’d saved my city, after all.
But he intended to take Sybilla away, and regardless of whether his men fought alongside mine, regardless of the debt we owed him, I despised him. I’d never felt so raw and bitter down to my core. It was so unlike me.
Her betrayal seemed to have broken the good-natured man within me. I wanted to shake her—to force her to stay. But her fate was set in blood. She would leave, while I’d be left to love her and hate her for breaking the trust I’d put in us.
“Emmerick,” a warm, feminine voice soothed from the door. I hadn’t realized Amara, my birth mother, had been let into my chambers.
The guards had been keeping watch over me since my outburst toward their Queen. I hadn’t left my chambers since she’d agreed to go.
No part of me had wanted to be in the dining hall last night. I hadn’t cared to wear a crown or talk politics with a bunch of silver-spoon-fed royals around a table like I belonged there.
You do belong there. You’re a King.That is what Sybilla would have said to me, had I not been avoiding her like the plague since realizing how long she’d withheld the truth of my identity from me. She’d known for a decade; she’d known what fate lay before me and saidnothing.
I sat on the foot of my bed, elbows on my knees, hands cradling my head.
“If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take deep breaths and count backward from ten, my love.”
A mother’s love knew no bounds—it was something that the mother I’d grown up knowing, Angeline, had taught me. Amara might be my mother by blood, but I barely knew her, and I’d never met my birth father, King Corric Mattock, before he died. The revelation of my lineage was still so fresh.
“I don’t want to fucking count,” I snapped back. I winced at how unfamiliar my surly tone sounded.
Amara sighed and said, “Sybilla is not in danger with Darvanda, Emmerick.”
“How do you know?”
When I looked up at her, her posture slackened. The shape of her nose and her almond-shaped eyes were so familiar to me. I’d taken the warm tones of her dark skin, and our curls were the very same pattern. Nature had molded me as her duplicate but in a heaping male form. It surprised me that it had taken Asterie, my friend and Amara’s former ward, so long to notice our similarities. It surprised me more that I hadn’t immediately seen them myself.
“Because I know Krait. We were friends—once, maybe more than that—before Corric. Krait is not the monster he puts forth to the world, and he will keep his word not to harm her. I don’t know what he came here for, but I am confident in that much.”
Something between a strangled gurgle and a growl left my throat upon hearing her speak kindly about Darvanda.
Sybilla’s agreement had replayed in my head a million times.I agree to your demands. I will go willingly to the Sahlms so long as no harm shall befall me or my Corridor until the trials end.
“How could she do this?” I pulled at the hair at my temples.
