Draka expected it to take longer to clean up the mess from Adrian’s scuffle with Nina. It was only a matter of moving the table and chairs back into place and putting a few things back where they were.

  One of the chairs had a broken leg, but Draka never really liked that chair anyway. He chucked it out the door into the shed across the road. With a rock under it, it’ll be perfect for sitting on for his breaks between skinning or polishing his equipment. Draka was impressed—and a little sad—that the desk had survived without so much as a shift of the papers stacked on it. He’d have preferred that was broken instead of the chair. At least then, he would have an excuse to give Valmond and Pierre for why he hadn’t gone through the stacks they kept adding to it.

  Once he had finished remaking his bed and organizing his things, Adrian sat on it glumly. He ran a hand through his hair a few times, a sign that he was thinking deeply about something. Draka brought him a cup of ale before setting his own on the table where he had placed ink and quill. The boy had something on his mind.

  ‘Why aren’t you at University?’ Draka wrote and held it up for him.

  Adrian’s lips were pouty, his face was reddening before Draka’s eyes, and his eyes glistened. He turned from Draka’s gaze with a loud sigh.

  Draka echoed the sigh and wrote, ‘What happened?’

  Adrian stood with his cup and sat a little too hard in the only other chair. He took a sip, then set it down. He let silence linger, staring at his hands grasping the cup on the table in front of him. Draka waited.

  A tear dropped on the edge of the table.

  Adrian didn’t look away from the cup in front of him. He tucked his hands on his lap, his face drooping. Light glistened in his eyes. Draka was out of his seat, his arms reaching, and Adrian leaned to meet his embrace.

  Over Draka’s shoulder, Adrian said with a trembling voice, “Draka, they killed father. We didn’t even get to see before they buried him. They—mutilated him! And it was inside…inside…they came for him while he was in prayer.”

  Draka firmed his embrace. He could feel Adrian shaking in his arms, the way he once did when he was a small boy, when he wasn’t half a world away from his home. He raised a hand behind Adrian’s head and let him tuck his chin as tears soaked Draka’s shoulder.

  Philip is dead. That blundering, smiling, mischievous, idiot who caused Draka as much trouble as he did the greatest of moments for so many years…was gone.

  “I barely escaped,” Adrian said between gasps for air, gripping him as if he were gripping the smallest and last edge of a cliff before plummeting. “They came for me. Imps. I don’t know how they were able to get into our palace.”

  Draka felt a chill run up his spine. In the palace.

  “I ran,” Adrian began jerking to his sobs, “I left them behind and I ran! I didn’t know what else to do. They tore him apart and I fled like a coward! I’m sorry, Draka, I’m sorry I’m not good enough of a man to save my own father.”

  Draka tightened his hold even more, shaking his head. No, he wanted to say, you’re no coward. You did what you were supposed to. You survived.

  After a moment, Adrian leaned back on his chair from Draka and rubbed his eyes. “I hid in the cellar. It was Beaumont who found me, took me to mother and the others at Hagia Sophia.”

  Draka was crouched in front of him, hovering over Adrian’s puffy red face.

  Adrian knew what he wondered, “They’re alright. Twins, Theresa, Paul, mother. All of them are still fine. But I had to go.” His face twisted, pouring again, “I heard their voices in my head, Draka! I heard those evil little voices speaking, calling my name, taunting me. ‘Not blood,’ they said, ‘But all heart.’ Something about taking me to a ‘her.’ They kept saying this name.”

  Draka put a hand to his face, trying to show him with a shaking nod that he didn’t have to go any further if he didn’t want to. Adrian didn’t seem to understand.

  “Said she was looking for you. ‘Blinded from the Seven-Pointed Prince.’ I remember the name, I just—I can’t think of it,” he wiped at his face and nose in a single swipe of his wrist.

  Draka let himself sit where he crouched. He bit the side of his lower lip, watching as Adrian drowned his shame with a long swig of his ale.

  “Mother won’t be far behind, maybe a month at most. I moved fast. The way you showed me. I had to get here and warn you. The Holy Sepulcher in the Holy Lands—they’re decimated, you know. That’s why father was back in The City, he needed to recruit from the Hagia and send word out to the other Cathedrals. Without you, without Heblem, it all fell apart. Even the Mohammedans are losing ground. Damascus was sacked.”

  Draka stood, forcing a warm grin for the boy to see. He put a firm, comforting hand on Adrian’s shoulder.

  “We’re losing. Something changed when you were named King. Father said the air felt strange. It must have been a day—maybe two?—before it happened. SOPHIA!” Adrian snapped his fingers and twisted to look up at Draka.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Draka couldn’t move. He wanted to move his gaze, move his hand, but his feet were planted. He could see her in the glow of a fire that wasn’t there, touching his face, saying those three words that have haunted him for so long.

  “That’s what they called her. I remember now. ‘SOPHIA is blinded from the Seven-Pointed Prince.’ They had another name for her, too. Something with an ‘L' but that one I’ll never remember for the life of me. But, Sophia, I remember.”

  Draka’s knees felt like they were going to buckle. His chest felt clutched, tight, twisting. Like a sledgehammer was pounding on it. His teeth ground themselves as if grasping for something, anything. He felt only air. Everything spun around him. Her face was there, still yearning for a kiss.

  No anger, only a hint of betrayal, but not fury that he had…he had…

  Draka’s knees buckled from beneath him.

  His arm—the very arm that had been nearly ripped from his shoulder by Christophe—felt like a spiked club had forcibly replaced his bones.

  There was a numbness.

  There was pain in his chest beyond anything he had ever felt. Squeezing, wrenching.

  A darkness around him.

  Nothingness but for her voice, whispering up at him.

  His wife, the mother of his infant son. Sophia. ‘I love you.’

  “Draka!” Their voices were through water. He knew there were more voices, layered together as his back pressed over the boards, speaking, shouting.

  His name.

  Her voice. Sophia’s voice in his ear.

  He wanted to shake it away. It was hammers through his body, thirstily sucking from his heart. Numbness. Pain. Ache. Voices. Screams. Her face. Her sweet, beautiful, horrifying, blood smeared face. His fingers weren’t listening. His feet weren’t there. His legs were drums. His arms were vices. His neck was a splintered board. His ears were filling with noise, with air, with water, and tones, music, the hum of Sophia’s lullaby the night before she murdered their son.

  Hands were reaching all around him. He felt the weight of the baby in his arms. Fingers wrapped his arms and legs. Arms tightened across him.

  Pulling…

  Pulling…

  Tearing…

  He could smell Lasse’s breath. He felt it on his chest. Warm and soft.

  Screeches from all around. Screams from the yellow and red eyed shadows.

  Pulling…

  Pulling…

  Lasse tucked his plump baby cheek on Draka’s chest. In the darkness, he could see his tiny head, still misshapen from childbirth.

  Light engulfed Draka and the weight of Lasse dissipated as the room around him came into focus. Nina, hunched over him, wrapped him in her arms. Enya caught herself from falling over, reeling.

  Lasse was in his arms. He had his son in his arms. He could feel him. This room…this house…but he was being…

  Draka didn’t feel Nina’s body curling into his. He didn’t hear her say, “I was scared I lost you, my King.”

  He didn’t feel her kiss on his cheek. All he saw was his son’s face, just the way he remembered it, with that warm sour-milk breath that he felt on him.

  “Alright,” Enya pulled Nina from him, blinking away her dizziness.

  Nina didn’t let go of Draka’s arm. The look she gave Enya was one that received a wide eyed reply.

  Draka felt the air press through his lungs. Blood inflated his heart. The ache in his arm receded. But his head, his body as a whole, was tired. As if he had been fighting a thousand days. He let himself roll back onto the floor, the beams above him suddenly less satisfying than the bowed branches of that hut long ago.

  “That’s enough of that,” Enya swatted Nina back from him. Adrian helped her onto a chair. She nodded warmly to him. Then pointed for him to pull Nina back from Draka. Adrian laughed and went the opposite way. “That was supposed to be a healing not a resurrection.”

  “He…died?” Nina whipped her head around.

  Draka felt her grip on his arm. He felt his legs. She leaned over him, her red hair falling over his face, but he looked through her.

  “Who the Plowing Rivers are YOU?” Aurie growled from somewhere. “Get off of him. Now.” Nina was suddenly gone from over him. It was Aurie who took her place.

  “He’s alive. But, I’ve…never…I think I’m…” Enya’s voice trailed off.

  “Pally?” Nina shrieked. “Two in one day is never…”

  “She’s okay,” Adrian said. “She fainted, that’s all. Still breathing.”

  “Draka? Draka. Look at me, if you can hear me,” Aurie was the one over him. Her hair was a blur of yellow across the shadows of those beams. Her lavender and lily stems, a hint of sweat, began to overtake his nose. “Draka? Blink or something. If Maud sees you like this…please, Draka. I can’t heal that kind of wound. You need to want to live.”

  Draka blinked. His eyes met hers, nodding. Shaky, rapid, and shallow, but nodding. His body still didn’t want to move. He still ached from head to every toe, every finger, every muscle. And his heart. It still felt like it was being squeezed within his chest, but it was also pumping.

  A whisperous roar drifted through his ringing ears.

  “There you are…”