Ash Princess (Ash Princess Trilogy #1)(105)

Despite myself, I flinch. “I’m a queen,” I correct her softly, even as I wonder if I’m both. Maybe all rulers have to be at least part monster in order to survive.

But my mother wasn’t, a small voice whispers in my head. I silence it. My mother wasn’t a monster, it’s true, but the Kaiser was right: she ended up with a slit throat and a lost country. Blaise was right, too. My mother was a soft queen because she lived in a soft world. I don’t have that luxury.

“Why did you come here, Cress?” I ask quietly. Her eyes narrow at the causal use of her old nickname, and I wish I could take it back. We are not friends; I need to remember that. It’s not something she will forget so easily.

“I wanted to see your face one last time before you died, Ash Princess,” she says, taking a step closer, until her face is pressed into the space between two iron bars, gray hands clenching the bar below her chin. “And I wanted you to know that I’ll be there tomorrow, watching. When your blood spills and you hear the crowd cheer, I wanted you to know that my voice will be the one cheering the loudest. And one day, when I am the Kaiserin, I will have your country and all the people in it burned to the ground.”

The viciousness in her voice scares me more than I’d like to admit. I don’t doubt she means every word of it. So I say the only thing I can to fight back.

“Even if S?ren does marry you, you’ll always know,” I tell her.

She freezes.

“Know what?” she asks.

“That he’s wishing you were me,” I say, twisting my mouth into a cruel smile. “You’ll end up like the Kaiserin, a lonely, mad old woman surrounded by ghosts.”

Her mouth tightens and she mirrors my mockery of a smile. “I think I’ll ask the Kaiser if I can keep your head,” she says, before turning and leaving me alone again in the dark.

When she’s gone, I bring a hand to the metal bar she’d been touching and jump back. The bar is scalding hot.





IT TAKES BLAISE LONGER THAN I expect to find his way to me, though my sense of time is heavily skewed. I can’t honestly say whether moments are passing or hours. For all I know, he isn’t coming at all. I have to believe that Heron escaped after he couldn’t get Elpis out of the palace; otherwise, the Kaiser would have killed him in front of me as well. It’s a small comfort, but it’s a comfort all the same.

He and Artemisia might be far away by now. I hope they are. But I know Blaise well enough to know that he would have come back, and it wouldn’t have taken long for him to have gotten word of the Kaiser’s announcement.

Still, it feels like half an eternity before I hear footsteps again, heavier this time. He doesn’t risk carrying a candle with him, so I don’t see his face until it’s mere inches from mine, separated only by the bars of the cell.

He looks more haggard than usual. There are dark circles beneath his eyes, his jaw is covered in stubble, and his clothes are dirty and damp.

“You took your time,” I say, getting to my feet.

“I had to wait for a change in the guard.” He rakes a hand through his messy hair, eyes roving anxiously. “There are two of them posted at the entrance to the cells. We have twenty minutes before they’ll do rounds.”

“You used the entrance to the cells when there’s a perfectly good tunnel hidden down here?”

He shakes his head. “That’s the escape route—no need to risk exposing it before then. I was going to come earlier, but your friend messed up that plan.”

I don’t have to ask who he’s talking about. “She’s not my friend,” I tell him. It isn’t the first time I’ve said that to him, but it’s the first time the words have been true.

“What happened?” he asks. His attention is on my dress, which is now more red than violet.

“I’m fine,” I tell him, but he doesn’t believe me. I can’t meet his eyes when I tell him about Elpis.

I wait for the blame to come. He didn’t want me to give her that responsibility and I insisted. Her blood is on my hands and he has every right to remind me of that. I deserve to hear it, though it might break me.

He’s quiet for a moment, and though I still can’t meet his gaze, I feel him looking at me. He reaches a hand between the bars to take mine. It’s a comfort I don’t deserve.

“You are not allowed to fall apart, Theo,” he tells me. “Not now. Or else she died for nothing.”

I press my lips together to keep my protest down. I know he’s right, but I don’t want him to be. I want to wrap my guilt around me like a cloak, but that doesn’t help anyone but me. It certainly doesn’t help Elpis.

“Her family?” I say after a moment. To my relief, I manage to sound like a queen again instead of the mess of a girl I know I really am.

“Safe. Already with Dragonsbane,” he says.

“And Artemisia and Heron?”

“They’re staying nearby, waiting for a plan.”

“Do you have one?” I ask.

He lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “I can get you out of here easily enough,” he says, placing his hands on the bars. With Glaidi’s strength on his side, how easy will it be for him to pry them apart? The muscles of his arms flex and the steel begins to arc without him shedding a bead of sweat. “The tunnel out of the dungeons leads to the coves on the western shore.”