I waited for the explosion my taunts would cause, but my words didn’t have quite the effect I’d hoped on Sabara, who remained silent.

Niko, on the hand, had plenty to say. “It’s all for the greater good, Charlaina,” he explained. “Queen Elena is exactly who I’m talking about. She’s the solution I mean.”

“Solution? What possible solution could you expect me to accept?” I bristled. “Is that the ‘cure’ Elena wrote to me about?” But I already knew the answer. “That’s no cure.”

Enemy or not, I wasn’t sure I could do that. In fact, I was certain I could not. How could I live with myself if I were to force Sabara’s Essence onto—into—Elena? Besides, even if I were willing to allow it, there was nothing to stop Sabara from killing me the moment she had a new host. She would have control of her powers once more, and she could easily turn them against me.

I wouldn’t, she insisted, her words echoing hollowly inside my head.

I didn’t believe her, and she knew as much.

“I won’t do it. How can you expect me to just . . . to . . .” I lowered my voice, not even able to say these words aloud as my eyes searched Niko’s. “To . . . ask her to die?” I finally breathed into the darkness between us.

Niko’s hands captured mine, which were still bound in front of me. He lifted them to his lips. “That’s what I’m telling you. That’s what I’m saying. You don’t have to ask her. She wants this. She wants to say the words. She wants to become part of the Essence and live forever. She wants immortality.” He said the last words in the ancient tongue that only he and Sabara understood, the language they’d spoken when they’d first met, all those many, many years ago. When they’d forged their eternal bond.

If only I hadn’t understood it too. Because I knew the truth. Elena wouldn’t survive the way I had.

“She won’t be immortal,” I hissed. “You’re lying to her. She’ll die just like the rest of them. Fade into . . . nothing. Vanish. Then it’ll be just you and Sabara, or Layla, or whatever it is that you call her, together again until people start asking questions about you, wanting to know why you don’t age the way she does. The way they all do. And then what, Niko?” I jerked my hands from his, unable to stand the feel of his skin on mine. “Then you’ll kill another queen, and another?”

“Or a princess,” he answered dispassionately. “Makes no difference to me, as long as she has royal blood in her veins, and as long as she’s willing to say the words.”

“You’re as evil as she is,” I asserted, not caring that I was insulting Sabara, the one person I could never escape. “What did you think you were coming for? Did you really believe Elena would perform some sort of . . . exorcism? That there would be no consequences?”

I couldn’t admit the truth, that I had hoped more than anything for that.

The silence was long and raw. I couldn’t let them get away with this—their plan to murder Elena to satisfy their own selfish desires. I detested the queen for what she she’d done to Xander and for what she was doing to my country, yes. But I couldn’t stand by and let them just . . . eliminate her.

I closed my eyes, refusing to speak of it any longer. Refusing to listen to Niko’s assurances that this was the key to all our troubles. Refusing to give in to his promises that once the transfer was complete, he and Sabara would have what they wanted—each other—and would leave me, and Ludania, in peace.

But I couldn’t shut out that other voice, the one that continued to haunt me far into my sleep. Sabara, who refused to let it go. Who begged and pleaded and cajoled, trying everything in her arsenal to persuade me to give her Essence over to Elena.

sage

The whispers were maddening. They intruded on her dreams . . . out-of-place and fragmented snippets of a conversation she was never meant to hear. They didn’t belong in the hazy depths of her sleep, and seemed to come from somewhere else, somewhere intangible and far away. Like clouds or raindrops, or birds that skittered first in and then out of range again, making them hard to distinguish from one another. Hard to catch and hold on to.

They came from somewhere outside of her. But the jab—the sharp poke that stabbed her cheek—was real. Tangible enough to wake her.

She came up sputtering, her hand reflexively reaching for the knife she always kept hidden in her boot. She never made it that far. The spear—crude as it was, and fashioned from nothing more than a stick that had been whittled to a fine yet lethal point—stabbed her even harder in the face. Jerking back from it, she reached up to feel the faint prick of blood.

Her eyes focused and traveled the length of the makeshift spear, following the smooth bark that covered it, all the way to the unusual creature who wielded it.

She’d never seen anyone—or anything—quite like it. Small, like a child. Yet armed and smeared from head to toe in the very earth itself. Beyond her diminutive abductor Sage saw twenty more of them just like him or her, all equally undersize. And all similarly coated in mud.

She glanced sideways to Xander, who still slept.

Dropping a hand to his shoulder, she attempted to rouse him with a quick shake while she asked the stranger holding her hostage, “Who are you?” When there was no response, she tried again, this time in Astonian. She couldn’t help wondering if, somehow, she and Xander had wandered back over to the wrong side of the border. If they’d somehow slipped back onto her country’s soil. “What do you want from us?”