The Shadow Queen (Ravenspire, #1)(7)
She repeated the words over and over while Leo stumbled away from her, his face pale and stricken. Gabril wrapped his arms around the prince, but his gaze was on the woman.
“How can we help you?” he asked, but the woman didn’t hear him. She was crawling from child to child, repeating her chant, smoothing their hair and kissing their faces.
When she reached the oldest girl, Lorelai crouched beside her. Keeping her bloodstained gloves behind her back, she said softly, “I’m sorry. Will you let us help you?”
The woman looked at Lorelai as if suddenly remembering that she wasn’t alone with her children and said, “There is no help left in Ravenspire. Not for the likes of us.”
Lorelai opened her mouth to reply, but if words existed that would ease the mother’s pain and offer hope, Lorelai couldn’t find them.
How many of their people were facing the terrible choice between watching their children starve to death or killing them quickly as an act of mercy? The twelve bags of food she’d taken from the treasury wagon yesterday weren’t enough for a need this big. They were a bandage on a wound that needed a tourniquet.
The woman made an awful, keening noise and then turned the weapon toward her own chest. Sun glinted sharply against the blade as it plunged toward the woman’s heart. Lorelai lunged for her, but she was too late. With a soft groan, the woman slumped over the body of her daughter. Lorelai snatched her shoulders and pulled at the weapon as if she could someone save her, but the woman had buried the knife deep beneath her sternum, and blood was a river that poured into the parched soil beneath her. It wasn’t long until the desperate pain on the woman’s face eased into stillness.
Lorelai’s eyes stung, and her throat closed on the rusty-sweet smell of blood in the air. Wiping her gloves clean on a tuft of grass, she gently closed the woman’s eyes and prayed that in death, she’d found the peace she couldn’t find in Ravenspire.
Leo and Gabril joined her as she closed the children’s eyes, tears streaming down her face. When she reached the baby, she sank to her knees and pressed her gloved hands to the dying ground. Leo knelt beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders while Gabril stood behind them, a hand on each of their shoulders.
“We have to do more.” Lorelai’s voice broke, and she looked at Leo. “We have to help them. We can’t wait another eighteen months like I’d planned, or there will be no one left to rule even if I do take the throne. We have to do something now.”
His eyes burned with determination as he nodded.
“They need food. They need hope. We have to do something that makes a statement—something that will grow beyond rumors and into the kind of story that becomes a legend. Something that will give people like this mother a reason to turn away from . . .”
“From this,” Leo finished for her. “I’m with you.”
Gabril’s hands tightened on her shoulder. “As am I.”
“What’s the plan?” Leo asked quietly.
The knowledge that she would have to face Irina earlier than she’d anticipated was a stone in Lorelai’s stomach as she lifted her gaze from the baby’s silent body, over the field of dying grass, past the dusty cobblestoned road, and looked east toward the carpet of evergreens that covered the mountain and the treasure they hid from her view.
“We’re going to rob the queen’s garrison.”
THREE
KOLVANISMIR ARSENYEVNEK, SECOND born prince in the kingdom of Eldr and recent expellee from Eiler’s Military Academy (for what would surely go down in the record books as the single greatest prank to ever have been pulled by a senior cadet) was trying to have the time of his life.
“More mead!” he roared over the deafening noise of a party that had been in full swing in an unused storeroom within the castle’s basement for over an hour.
Servants scurried to the far corner of the room, where an ever-shrinking stack of barrels waited for their turn to be emptied into the mugs of Kol’s friends, acquaintances, and—he squinted in the flickering light of the torchlit chandelier, his stomach sinking—his younger sister.
His parents were already going to be furious that he’d been expelled (for the third time, though the first was for such a minor infraction, Kol figured it hardly counted) and that he’d chosen to celebrate this accomplishment by depleting the castle’s supply of spiced mead. If he added “got his little sister drunk” to the long list of things-Kol-does-that-disappoint, he’d probably be sent to the front lines of the ogre war before he could get the words “I’m sorry” out of his mouth.
As he moved across the dusty storeroom floor, dodging raised mugs and bodies writhing in time to the thunderous beat of the drummers Kol had hired with the last of his monthly spending stipend, two of his best friends flanked him. Raum was still dressed in his cadet’s uniform, bronze epaulets and all, but Mik had changed into a dress with dainty flowers and enough ribbons to make the royal seamstress jealous.
“Is that Brig?” Mik pointed toward the short girl with auburn hair who had her back turned to them. “Kol, I think that’s Brig.”
“I know.” Kol muscled his way past a fellow senior and quickened his pace as Brig held out her mug to a passing servant.
“When your parents get back, they are going to kill you for this,” Raum said.