Page 133 of Sharpest Court

The instructions reminded me of Keil’s, after I’d smelled the roses on Banarrat. So Keil’s words were the ones that carried me through the panic now, keeping me from breaking apart.

As my ragged breathing slowed and my throat tightened with unshed tears, I realized that Erik and I were at eye level with one another. I glanced down to see a small stone block under my chained ankles, propping me a foot off the floor.

It felt like mockery—that even in chaining me, he had put us on equal ground.

“Try not to move too much.” He took a long step back, his palest strands of hair shining near-white under stark lanterns. “You’ll only be hurting yourself.”

A whistle resounded through my ears—either an aftereffect of the explosion, or a product of my own rushing blood—as I truly looked him over.

Though I couldn’t pinpoint this location, we must have docked here soon after the battle on Banarrat, because fresh bruises still blotched his face. Despite the injuries, he appeared as radiant as ever in a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up—his arms crossed, his spine rod-straight with a power he’d always possessed. A power I’d assumed had stemmed from his upbringing, honed over the years into a sharp thorn beneath the bloom of his beauty. Now I knew: That power had always stemmed from someplace deeper.

Because His Majesty King Erik Vard of Daradon was a Wielder.

And his specter had ripped through mine with the ease of a blade tearing through parchment.

For the first time, it truly struck me: that I had never been close to escaping Erik on Banarrat. The only reason I’d managed to escape from the palace all those weeks ago was the nightmilk oozing into his system, rendering him unconscious before he could use his power to stop me. Because that power had always been his backup plan; with the element of surprise, he could win any battle between us.

The fact that he’d finally shown his hand tonight frightened me more than anything. If the pretense was over, he didn’t anticipate having to fight me again.

He believed I had already lost.

My breathing quickened, the movement pulling painfully on my stitches.

“Don’t be afraid,” Erik said, more of an order than a consolation. Gone was the air of easy charm he’d adopted on Banarrat—the joviality of someone basking in triumph. Now he appeared as cold and hard as I’d ever seen him, and I couldn’t understand why. He’d left the island with everything he’d wanted: the compass, the Unbreakable Blade, and me.

So what had gone wrong in the interim?

I swallowed, the words clinging like tar in my throat. “I’m not afraid of you,” I breathed, voice wavering. It was the second time tonight that I’d said those words, and again, he gave me a challenging look. He must have known, as well as I did, that I meant the sentiment even less now.

His features softened slightly. “I never wanted you to find out like this.”

“That you’re a hypocrite?” I rasped. “By your own laws, you should have been executed at birth.”

“Not my laws,” he said, firmer. “Laws created by my Wholeborn ancestors and enforced by yours. You and I are rare specimens, both of us possessing the blood of those who forged the chains as well as those bound by them. I would’ve fallen victim to a blade myself if my mother had ever discovered that she’d bedded a Wielder. The palace tunnels were designed to conceal affairs, remember? My mother had plenty. Though royal by birth, she had to produce legitimate heirs, so she took a contraceptive tonic with every man except her husband.” His eyes darkened. “But it seems the dose wasn’t quite strong enough.”

A shiver ran through me. That long-ago night in the royal gallery, Erik had shown me portraits of monarchs and their consorts. His mother’s husband had not been on those walls; Erik must have taken that portrait down himself, I realized now. So that as he grew into adulthood, nobody would notice the lack of resemblance between him and the man who should have been his father.

He uncrossed his arms, and I flinched. But he only undid his shirt buttons, the muscled contours of his torso peeking through the fabric. “My mother’s neglect was my salvation. My nurse was the first to discover my power, and she took pity on me. She bribed every person responsible for my care to forget what they saw. To forget that I should never have been allowed to exist.”

He parted his shirt, and a soft gasp caught in my throat.

Angry black welts webbed out across his stomach, forming the densest dullroot scar I’d ever seen—their ends burrowing deep beneath the surface like veins.

“I spent the first ten years of my life in the grip of poison,” Erik said quietly, “never knowing anything different. I was told that the medicine in the dispenser was keeping me alive. I suppose it was, in a way.”

I remained wide-eyed, frozen in horror, another memory slotting into place.

Does dullroot produce the sensation of having your hands tied behind your back? he’d asked once. Or does it feel more akin to suffocation?

He’d been unreasonably spiteful then, his hand tugging my hair. Because he’d already known the answer, had already suffered through that suffocation for nearly half his life.

My gaze rose slowly up the planes of his body. And I saw in his expression a chilling anger. Not at the nurse who, in trying to protect him, had unwittingly dosed him into a state of permanent agony, but at the fact that those doses had been necessary at all.

A spectral touch grazed my cheek then, and I jerked, still too stunned at the presence of the power to fully comprehend that it belonged to Erik.

But as the tendril of his specter molded around the curve of my face, settling there like an embrace, the initial strangeness faded enough that I could absorb the sensation of his power. The uniqueness of it. Where Keil’s specter would have pulsed against my skin in full, rhythmic ripples, Erik’s seemed to thrum in patches, inconsistent with itself; while the power near my temple rolled out bold and full-bodied, a lower portion lapped against my jaw with a strange dullness, resembling the faint, sluggish heartbeat of a dying bird.

Because Erik’s specter was streaked with scars.