Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(11)
How had she escaped the Messiers, anyway?
The good Valerio part of him said to get the guards and call it a day, but his feet remained rooted to the spot.
“Oh, let you go?” Erik went on. “Or what? Where’d you get that uniform, sweets?”
“From your mother’s corpse, you pig.”
His brother laughed. “Aren’t you spunky—”
Turning toward the voices, Robb inhaled a little bit of courage and rounded a particularly dense rosebush to find Erik with a hand clamped tight around the girl’s wrist, his knuckle rings glinting. He never went anywhere without them.
She tried to twist against him, but his brother was stronger, thicker. Struggling was useless—Robb had sported enough black eyes in his lifetime to find that out.
Erik glanced over at him and grinned. “Oh, look who finally arrived. How’s it, brother? Do you know who this little ferret is?”
“She’s with me,” Robb lied easily, and the girl shot him a sharp glare.
“You?” his brother scoffed.
“Come now, is it that hard to believe?”
Erik’s lips curled into a sneer. He gave the girl another once-over, lingering on her scar that stretched from eyebrow to chin, and released her. “Of course not. You always made poor friends.”
It was a stab Robb tried not to flinch at. Everyone knew about the Umbal boy at the Academy—or they thought they did. But no one knew, not really, how deep that wound ran. How Robb had tried to talk him out of the window, laying their entire relationship bare to all the nosy, shitty people who watched from below. How the words didn’t matter.
And how, after, Robb himself felt like he had fractured on the ground, too.
With one last sneer to the girl, Erik Valerio snapped his fingers and left with his cronies, off to flirt with some unassuming Ironblooded girl. Erik was good at wearing masks—he’d tricked the entire Ironblood society with an amiable smile and a few choice words, so that even the knuckle rings he wore looked polite. They didn’t see what they didn’t want to, the real person underneath.
Once Erik and his escorts were gone, the girl turned to him with a scowl. “I didn’t need your help, Ironblood.”
He pulled his fingers through his curly hair. “You shouldn’t have followed me.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re that Iron—”
The orchestra struck up the royal march—the Grand Duchess’s entrance cue. His ears prickled. Already? If his brother could see through this outlaw’s disguise, he didn’t want to chance the Royal Guard getting a look at her.
He’d opened his mouth to tell her to leave when she grabbed him by the forearm and pulled him into the shrubbery after her.
Ana
Through the gates, half a dozen royal guardsmen proceeded into the garden, white-gloved hands resting on the hilts of their ornate lightswords. In the middle of them, her gait slow like the moon rising over the sky, was the Grand Duchess.
The threads of her gray gown shimmered with the colors of Nevaeh’s dusk in a beautiful array of oranges and pinks, like the surface of an opal.
Ana drank the woman in, from the delicate wrinkles across her face to her silvery-white hair pulled back into a simple bun, making her cheekbones look sharp enough to cut. Her skin was the color of soft earth and speckled with age, her hands bony knobs. She looked old, but in a terrifying and timeless way, the way mountains looked old but immovable.
The Grand Duchess wasn’t a true Armorov. She was an Aragon by blood. All the royal women had married into the family, because the crown had sired only boys for the last thousand years.
Until a daughter was born seventeen years ago. The Goddess returned, everyone said. But then she died with the rest of her family in the Rebellion.
Blood or not, the Grand Duchess was the last Armorov of an era that would die with her. And to Ana, that sounded a little sad.
And lonely.
One by one, the Ironbloods knelt. She’d never seen an Ironblood so much as nod before—it was always the galaxy bending to them.
Ana and the Ironblooded boy were trapped in the shrubbery, surrounded on all sides by men and women in billowy dresses and too-bright suits. She caught the boy’s elbow when he tried to sneak away, pinning him with a dangerous look.
If they moved—or so much as snapped a twig—the silence would tell on them.
“My friends, my court,” the Grand Duchess began, extending her hands. “Please rise.”
And like a tide, the Ironbloods swelled to their feet again.
“There is a story we tell our children. Once, I told this story to my beloved granddaughter. So in honor of her memory, I will tell you the story today.”
Even though her voice was small, Ana felt herself drawn toward it, hanging on her words in a strange, intoxicating way.
“Far above the crown of stars, there lay a kingdom cast in shadows. . . .”
Ana knew the story—everyone did. It was the beginning of The Cantos of Light. Of a kingdom in darkness and a girl of light. The Ironbloods mouthed the words they knew by heart, as far below citizens knelt in creaky pews of old shrines, praising the Goddess who had birthed the Iron Kingdom. It was said that after a thousand years the Goddess would return to defeat the Great Dark again. Ana quite liked the story. The thousand-year anniversary was a week away, during the alignment of the Holy Conjunction, but there was no sign of a Great Darkness, whatever that meant.