Page 37 of City of Snakes
Knowing who she was changed everything. Her safety was no longer just about a political arrangement.
With a skeptical expression, she nodded and her posture softened.
The way her wet lashes stuck together as she looked up through them added fuel to my fury.
“No one lays a finger on you unless you want them to—not me, not your cousins, not that Constable. And I will teach you how to stop any who try. Because what you just did, what you are—with training—is a weapon worth protecting.”
“How do I know it wasn’t you who sent those men?” she rasped.
I scoffed. “If I wanted you dead, I’d have never made a blood oath that binds me to keeping you safe. Plus, what good would a dead Queen of a realm I need a foothold in be to me?”
Keeping her safe wasn’t a matter of a silly blood oath. It was a matter of life and Death for the realms.
To let her fully into my head would’ve been unwise, but as she stared up at me, I realized she needed to know that my words were true. I focused on my emotions—the swelling sense of protection, the desire to see her unharmed, to see her power outgrow mine.
When I opened those emotions to her, she wrapped a hand around her bruised throat and stared at me with a furrowed brow. I stepped out of her personal space. I hadn’t touched her, but the warmth of her breath had heated, and left condensation on, the silk shoulder of my tunic.
I pushed her back out of my thoughts before she could unravel the truth. I wasn’t ready to lay that bare to her—not yet.
“Why a cot?” she asked. The roughness in her tone made me want to follow El and Ryn down to the dungeons and get rid of those men. But that wasn’tmypain to deal.
“Because you’re no longer under Ryn’s watch. You’re under mine. You’ll be staying with me for the rest of your time here.”
She opened her mouth like she might try to disagree, but the words died on her tongue as her gaze caught on her own blood mixed with the green liquid from the shattered vials. Curious vials. Had she intended to poison me? I wouldn’t put it past her.
“Let’s get you cleaned up, yeah?”
She nodded.
A breeze blew through the curtains from the open balcony as I held my bedchamber door open for Sybilla. She stepped inside, glancing around, stiffly clutching her dark-blue robe closed. Her bare feet planted on the terrazzo tile at the entry, not moving further into the room.
“The balcony is warded. This is the safest place in the realm you could be,” I assured her.
The maids had already brought a cot in. Atop the footboard bench were healing salves and a bucket of warm, clean water. Sybilla sat and wet a rag, not speaking, for once.
There was something odd about seeing someone so exquisitely feminine in this space—all dark leather and crimson. The bedsheets were a deep brick color, and the ceilings were made of dark wood.
She bristled. “Repeat it.”
It seemed she’d come to the conclusion of whatever thoughts had been wracking her.
I felt that conclusion would inevitably be bad news for me.
“Repeat what?”
“Repeat what you said in our blood oath. I need to hear it again.”
My teeth ground, but I remembered every oath I’d ever made. Every word. To forget one was to leave yourself vulnerable to loopholes. Blood oaths were fickle magic if not ironclad. Outside forces could break them rather easily with no consequence if both oaths were broken at once.
I repeated my oath to her: “‘No harm will come to the Central Queen, or her Corridor, so long as she is an ally to Sahlmsara in all negotiations with the rulers of the Corridors.’”
Her distrust was misplaced.
Yet, her eyes narrowed on me.
“‘I will go willingly to the Sahlms so long as no harm shall befall me or my Corridor until the trials end,’” she said, repeating the terms she had agreed to. Her shoulders were still stiff as she looked around at the contents of my room—the dark wood vanity, the shelf of my favorite volumes and the standing globe that still reflected the Old World.
My face paled as she touched her cheek with one hand and her throat with the other.
