Lady Smoke (Ash Princess Trilogy #2)(32)

“I won’t let her do either,” I say.

Blaise shakes his head. “You just used the only piece of leverage you had to free the Prinkiti,” he points out. “The whole ship will be saying you’re in love with him by morning,” he says.

I turn away from him so I’m facing the bed, though I know he’s right. Agreeing to meet with suitors was the only card I had to use with Dragonsbane, and now I am fully at her mercy. I peel back the covers and slip beneath them before letting myself face him, careful to keep my face impassive. “I can’t control what people say.”

I hope he’ll leave it there, but I know Blaise too well for that. I’m not even surprised when he asks, “Are you?”

“No,” I say without missing a beat. “But I also don’t appreciate you treating me like a toy you’re carving your name into to keep it away from someone else.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did,” I interrupt. “You told him we were spending our nights together.”

“We are.”

“That’s not the way you said it, and you know it,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything for a moment, standing in the middle of my cabin looking wounded and angry. “You’re agreeing to marry a stranger to save him. Him. A Kalovaxian.”

My stomach churns again, though I keep my voice placid. “I’m agreeing to marry a stranger for Astrea—because it’s the best chance we have of matching the Kalovaxians in battle,” I say. “But I didn’t see why I shouldn’t get as much out of the arrangement as possible.”

Blaise shakes his head. “You just put your own wants above the wants of your people, and they’ll remember that.”

The words are a stab to my gut.

“It was the right thing to do,” I say, my voice barely louder than a whisper. “For S?ren, yes, but also for Astrea. It was the only way.”

He looks at me for a long moment, eyes bright and unflinching. “You keep telling yourself that, Your Majesty.”

Without another word, he turns and walks out my door, leaving me alone.



* * *



—

“You untied Mattin,” I say to S?ren the next morning when we eat breakfast in the cabin he’s sharing with Heron. The others are all on duty, but S?ren and I don’t have assignments, so instead I’m trying to teach him some Astrean before we arrive in Sta’Crivero tomorrow.

He looks up from the piece of parchment I’d given him, where I’d written down the sounds that make up our language, translated into Kalovaxian phonetics.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, but his nostrils flare again and he glances away, focusing again on the parchment.

“It was smart,” I say. “And it worked—you’re free, in a sense. Unchained, at least. Pavlos is dead, though, and so are all the other hostages we tried to turn into spies.”

He doesn’t respond at first, though his face pales at the mention of the other hostages. He shakes his head.

“If I had untied Mattin, it would have been a calculated risk,” he says finally, his eyes not leaving the parchment. “I would have chosen the worst swordsman out of the Pride’s crew, but one with a history of doing foolish things in the name of bravery. I would know that in untying him, I would be telling him I was on his side, and in shielding you, I ensured that protection would apply to you as well. I would have known he would take Pavlos’s weapon and attack him first, but poor a swordsman as Mattin is, I would have hoped it wouldn’t have been a fatal injury. I would have been certain that I could get your dagger and stop him before he killed Dragonsbane.”

Even though he clings to his hypotheticals, he knows I know that’s the truth of it.

“You killed one of Dragonsbane’s crew in order to prove that she could trust you,” I say slowly. “Do you realize how convoluted that is? Why am I supposed to care about what you hoped would happen? You were wrong and a man died because of a risk he never consented to take.”

He says nothing, only staring at the ground, shame turning his cheeks red.

“Sacrificing someone else to improve your own lot—it sounds like something your father would do,” I say.

“I know,” he admits, though each word costs him. “When I was standing on that deck, going over all of it in my mind, it was his voice I heard.”

The confession hangs in the air between us, neither of us knowing what to say.

“I hear it sometimes, too,” I say after what feels like an eternity. “Any time I confront Dragonsbane or use the word queen as a weapon to get what I want. I heard it when I convinced Spiros to let you out of the brig.”

S?ren lets out a mirthless chuckle. “The difference is, my father would have let me die in that brig without a second thought.”

I shake my head. “Not if getting you out gave him a tactical advantage, even as it hurt the people who were depending on him to help them,” I say. “Getting you out was the right thing to do, I know that, but it isn’t why I did it. That’s what scares me.”

S?ren hesitates. “A lot of awful things can be said about my father—we’ve said most of them. The idea of sharing anything with him is enough to make me want to tear my skin from my bones. But it can’t be denied that he wins his battles. He’s a monster, but maybe understanding him is the only way we can hope to beat him.”