Page 9 of Ship of Shadows
“Can he chase me?” someone whispered from the crowd, and I was almost certain it was Driscoll.
Someone shushed him. My face flamed.
“Let me shut him up,” Leoni whispered. “Before he reveals too much.”
I nodded at her. I didn’t know what else to do. He’d already said too much, no doubt raised everyone’s suspicions about my connection to him. If he said much more, they’d know of our entire relationship.
“Why are you here?” I asked as Leoni moved toward him.
His chin dipped toward his chest, then back up, and he blinked a few times. “I need your help, and you need mine.”
“I don’t need anything from you.”
Leoni was almost to him.
“We both know that’s not true. You want your brothers back, and I know how to get them.”
I sucked in a sharp breath as Leoni stomped toward him, sword raised.
His eyes snapped to her. “Do your worst. It can’t hurt more than the auburn-haired princess who broke my heart.” He blatantly stared at me.
I tucked one of my loose curls behind my ear, self-conscious at the gazes burning into my back.
“Ended our relationship and told me she never wanted to see me again?—”
Leoni reached him and knocked him over the head with her sword. He slumped down onto the stairs, but it was too late.
The damage had been done.
I slowly turned to see everyone staring, some with open mouths, others whispering to each other. Driscoll stood in the front, his gaze sharp, assessing. I wondered if he’d known about this. I’d told his queen in confidence after she’d shared her own troubles. No. Liliath wouldn’t betray me like that. She’d kept my secret.
Bastian’s words echoed in my mind. No longer a secret.
Hatred filled the eyes of everyone, but I could only focus on my people. On the betrayal shining in their eyes.
At first, no one in the water court had known where all our boys had gone or who had taken them, but the seafolk helped us track them. By the time we found out where they were—and whose ship they were on—it was already too late.
I’d been devastated when the seafolk returned with the truth: it had been the pirate lord, and he’d taken them to the shadow court, whom we hadn’t heard from in over sixty years, not since they’d been banished to their island, exiled from Arathia for their own terrible crimes. No one knew how the pirate lord did it, including me. How in the span of a single night he’d managed to lure all our young boys to his ship and sail them away. Or why. Why the shadow court was once again at play and what they wanted. It had all been too much for my mother, my father, for me. My father and his men left shortly after that to rescue them—and never returned. We closed our borders, shut down the water court, and hid away. But we couldn’t hide anymore.
Especially not now that everyone knew the ugly truth: that the princess of the water court had a relationship with one of the most wanted men in Arathia.
They hated me. I didn’t blame them.
“Is it true?” a voice asked, and I closed my eyes as the crowd parted to reveal my mother standing there, crown still gleaming atop her head, her face pale, chin wobbling. “Is what he said true, Gabrielle?”
This could not get any worse. Leoni came to my side, her arm grazing mine, a reminder that I wasn’t completely alone.
I swallowed, thinking through my options. I could lie. I could tell them Bastian was out of his mind, clearly mistaking me for someone else. But I was tired of the secrets, of the guilt.
“Don’t,” Leoni whispered, reaching a hand toward my arm.
I shook her off and stepped forward. “What he said is true.”
My mother’s eyes widened in horror.
“I had... a relationship with Bastian Lore, and then he betrayed me and took everything from us. I’m the reason our boys are gone. I’m the reason they’re in the shadow court’s possession. I’m the reason they’re never coming home.”
Chapter Five
