Page 140 of Bound to the Shadow Prince

As if that’s much of a choice at all? “Why can’t I do both?”

“You can, if you’re feeling greedy.” His other hand steals up underneath my chemise, skimming up my thigh. “I won’t judge you.”

“You just want me on your knot,” I tease. “Lucky for you, I’m feeling good enough to ride you for hours.”

“Hours, you say?” He arches a brow at me, even as his fingers slide between my thighs. “You truly think you can last that long?”

“Is that a challenge, my mate?”

“It is.”

I do so love a challenge.

I confessthat we’re shamelessly wasteful with the day. I know we should be focused on finding a boat to take us to the Alabaster Citadel. I know I should be hunting for my sister and the survivors of the sacked city. But we’ve got a bit of horse meat left and our stomachs are full. We’ve got medicine for me, and for the first time in a long time, the pressing need for survival is not quite so pressing as it usually is.

Instead of focusing on survival, we spend the day in bed.

Well…the floor counts as a bed. Most of the bedding that’s left in the palace is soaked and moldy, but when I wake up from a delicious nap, Nemeth has found blankets for us. I don’t ask what room they’ve come from—I don’t want to know. We curl up in them, eat our horse jerky, and we spend the day together, touching and kissing and loving.

I adore every moment of it, and I refuse to feel guilt. That will return soon enough. For one day, it’s nothing but pleasure.

The next morning, we wake up early and head out to the deserted stable, where the sad, lone horse waits. He’s skinny, searching the stalls for grass or hay, even though there’s nothing to be found. The constant, incessant rain means that everything is muck, and any plants drowned out long ago.

Even so, I rub the poor horse’s nose and hug his neck. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I’m sorry that it has to be you or us, friend.” To think that I’m feeling guilty over the slaughter of a horse. It’s just that…he’s carried me when I was too tired to walk. He’s seen the destruction of Lios and carried me this far. He’s survived until now. It feels wrong to kill him.

“Remember that this is a mercy, Candra,” Nemeth reminds me when I hug the horse’s neck again. “We can’t take him on theship. Turning him loose here would just kill him slowly instead of quickly. There’s nothing for him to eat. Better to let his death nourish us.”

“I know.” I do. It’s just hard to watch. I bite my lip, hating that I’m so weak, but I’ve never been around death. It’s always been hidden from me, and I don’t think I can watch Nemeth slaughter the horse as it gazes on me. “Is it all right with you if I come back later? Once it’s done?”

Nemeth moves to my side. He presses a kiss to my damp forehead. “Why don’t you go search for mementos in the palace? Perhaps there will be something you can bring to your sister.”

He’s sending me away, but I’m so grateful I don’t even care. I give him a quick hug and then grab my skirts, hauling them clear of the calf-high muck at the entrance to the stable, and head back for the palace itself.

I spend most of the morning digging around in empty rooms, trying very hard to ignore all the destruction. I pointedly look away from tears in the tapestries, from dark stains on the rugs. I don’t find anything my sister would want, I think. Whatever treasures Lios had have been taken by the conquerors, and all that are left are scraps and memories. I head down to the library instead, determined to tuck away a few books for Nemeth. After all, if we’re going to be taking a boat, we can surely take a trunk full of books. I’m sure he’ll fight me on this, but I’m good at winning fights. I pick a few of the rarer-seeming books, the ones at the top of his pile that he can’t resist pawing every now and then. We don’t have the luxury of staying here long enough so he can read them all, and I’m desperately glad for that.

It feels as if I’m roosting in the graveyard of my people, and that if I remain here long enough, I’m going to be swallowed up by the dead.

Not that there have been a lot of dead. Other than a few scattered bodies, there’s been nothing. I’m relieved, of course,but I’m also confused. There was a battle clearly fought here. Someone would have been killed, and the dead would have had to go somewhere. Nemeth explained to me that the Fellians burn their dead so they can be returned to the skies as ash and smoke, but that doesn’t explain where the Liosian dead are.

Maybe they’ve all been taken captive and are currently at Darkfell. Maybe I’ll see a sea of familiar faces when we get there.

Maybe.

I stack the books I want Nemeth to have into an unwieldy pile, and then grimace at the mud I’ve tracked in. My shoes don’t protect my feet inasmuch as they simply seem to gather mud, and I’ve trailed a lot of it into the library. If it gets on the books, Nemeth will fuss, and while I find his fussing adorable, it does make sense to protect the books somehow. I think of a trunk my sister had in her quarters that was yet untouched. The lid’s jewels were pried off but it seemed otherwise intact, and the perfect size to hold a variety of tomes for my Nemeth.

I head upstairs for my sister’s quarters, and as I do, the sun comes out from behind the clouds and shines in through one of the broken windows. It’s such a rare occurrence that I pause in front of the windows, sighing with pleasure at the sunbeams…

…and that’s when I see them.

The graves.

There’s not many of them, but it’s the size of each one that makes me clench the windowsill. Shards of glass embed themselves into my hands, but I don’t pull away. I can’t, because I have to take in the sight below.

The palace had gardens once. I never cared for them much, because my medicine made me sensitive to heat and it always felt too warm to spend much time outside, but I remember my sister loved Lios’s gardens. She loved the flowers that filled the beds, the vines that crept along the walls and the scents of the herbs that flooded Nurse’s herb gardens. I remember there was amaze, and a sundial, and a statue of the goddess herself, holding the moon above one shoulder like she was carrying a pot of water.

The statue of the goddess remains, but everything else is gone. The maze is gone. The hedges gone. The herb garden, gone. What remains are five sunken pits in the muck, each one headed with the eye symbol of the Absent One, hastily carved out of wood. Each sunken pit is nightmarishly big, bigger than my sister’s entire suite of rooms, and I wonder just how many people were buried in each large grave.

Each one is far, far too big for just one body. Or even ten bodies.

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