Page 157 of A Game of Veils

Surprise jolts through my body. My face twitches, but I catch any larger response that might have been noticed by our audience.

I walk on, my eyes fixed on the lines of floats but my innards tensed with anticipation.

Lorenzo’s conjured voice reaches me again, more urgently. “Do everything exactly as I say. We have a way to get you out.”

The words repeat in my head like an echo, not quite sinking in. My pulse stutters.

What can he possibly mean?

His instructions come faster, with the same air of urgency. “Take the route the farthest to your right. Move quickly so it looks like you’re still completely invested in the trial.”

As I jog toward the path he indicated, the one the farthest along the river’s current, he keeps speaking. “We can take care of almost everything. You see the square raft about halfway across? When you get to that one, make yourself slip and fall into the water on the side away from the other floats. I’ll conjure an illusion that will make everyone watching think you’re struggling and then swept under. While I’m doing that, swim to the shore, aiming for the spot where the two pines stand behind the boulder. Bastien will direct the wind to help push the current that way. We’re waiting for you there.”

They’re waiting for me. They didn’t leave after all.

They just rushed ahead of the main crowd to get themselves in place for this plan. To not just protect me from my rival but rescue me from every bit of my fate.

As I reach the start of my path, a lump fills my throat. I thought they were afraid to risk very much on my behalf, but they’re committed so much more than I could ever have imagined.

Questions ricochet through my scattered mind. After I reach them, then what? How could this gambit possibly succeed? If they vanish from the palace at the same time as my supposed death, won’t Emperor Tarquin realize the two events are connected?

Lorenzo knows me well enough to guess at my worries. As I leap onto the first float, a triangle of wood that bobs unnervingly under my weight, his voice returns in a more reassuring tone. “We’ve already set the stage here. By the time anyone notices we’re gone and checks the area where we were last seen, they’ll find signs of a struggle and a note indicating that we’ve been kidnapped by a coalition of rebel forces who are upset by our compliance. The distraction of the trial would make strategic sense. Then we simply disappear.”

A giddy laugh tickles at the base of my throat. They’ve set it all up so there’ll be no backlash on our countries.

Tarquin can’t blame my parents if he thinks I died in his own trials. No one knows about Lorenzo’s gift with illusions, so why would they think a drowning they witnessed was anything but real?

It is believable that anti-imperial dissenters would hate and want to punish his foster sons, just like the princes hated me when I first arrived. The emperor has no idea how well they could defend themselves if they needed to either—no reason to question why they didn’t overpower their attackers.

We’ve barely interacted in front of the court. No one would think we’d want to run off together, let alone had a chance to plan it.

Hope flares inside me like a candle wick that’s just caught flame. They care about me—about being with me—so much that they’d risk everything.

Lorenzo said he loved me, but I didn’t quite accept it until this moment. I don’t even know what to call this level of devotion from them.

What we forged together was real after all.

As I sway on the buoy, I suppress the smile that’s tugging at my lips. Steadying myself, I leap to the next with my newfound elation lightening my feet.

This float is made of fabric. It billows around me, my feet sinking into the water. With a hitch of my pulse, I shove through the bulges of airy cloth and fling myself toward the next wooden platform.

Almost there. So close to them.

“It would be a simple life,” Lorenzo says, as if keeping me company through my trek. “But we have our gifts to help us get by and stay unnoticed. And we’d be together, supporting each other… Our families threw us away to appease the empire. We can take our lives back and build a new family that’s our choice. I know we can look after you the way you deserve, no matter where we are.”

As his words sink in, my heart starts to sink too. The flame inside me wavers.

I know why he believes all that—why he believes I’ll want to hear those sentiments. I’ve fed into the idea that I’m here as nothing but a pawn, that I’d want a life of my own.

But my family didn’t throw me away. I came here for so much more than to simply appease the men who hold this half of the continent in their brutal fists.

As I approach a wheel of spinning blades that slice through the water, my chest wrenches. What am I supposed to do?

The viciously gleaming spokes smack the river’s surface. Around and around, from the start through to the end and repeating again.

Like chair legs smashed into puddles of creekvine wine on the tavern floors in Accasy’s cities and towns. Like the breamwood logs tossed into our northern rivers, over and over with more Accasian lives following them.

Like the bloody corpses of our compelled soldiers tumbling into the Seafell Channel in yet another vain battle against the western continent.

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