The water stung my bare skin as I plunged into the steaming bowels of the bathing pool. I couldn't bare the scent of the oils and lotions. The aroma of the roses, so much like Aphina's scent, turned stale on my tongue, choking me.
I could hardly breathe, hardly think as I recalled the conversation. The words that wrapped around me, tighter than the shackles in Cupraem, cutting deeper than my skin but to my very soul.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't kill an innocent man.
But, I had no other options. They'd evaporated as the steam of the bath did, rising in plumes I could brush my fingers against for all of a second before they vanished on the midday wind that coursed through the room.
The only man I'd ever killed had deserved it, the world had willed it to happen. Mother could scarcely sleep knowing he still roamed the world, he still shared the same air as the rest of us. The air was lighter after he'd died. The world safer.
But, if I killed her son. The Prince.
Perhaps he was a beacon of hope like Rowena Morwenna, a cloak on a winter night, a lantern in endless depths of darkness
And I was going to tear that cloak to shreds, douse that lantern with water. Because I had to. I couldn't sacrifice Aphina like that. I couldn't be responsible for her murder or her capture or whatever the Queen had in mind.
I sunk into the teeming water, letting it pool in my hair, my head going under where life could not get to me.
I wondered whether I should end it there, be the one to welcome Death rather than deliver it to the Prince's doorstep.
Maybe I would if she hadn't mentioned Aphina. I was selfish like that, I could have done it. Aphina and mother probably thought I was dead by now anyway.
I took that brimming sorrow, that burning rage, and turned it inwards, turned it into ice-cold numbness, brought myself to that place where reason and logic could not enter.
As I surfaced, I padded across the wooden floors, naked and bare and trailing water, I opened the dresser and pulled out the delicately wrapped book.
Without a thought, I tore the brown paper off and grazed my fingers on the cover, leaving a trail of water droplets in their wake.
Laying my palm flat on the front, I could almost feel the book humming with the current that buzzed around Rowena, that pulse of magic that seemed to flow into my veins and warm my exposed skin.
That familiar warmth surged up my right arm, curling and wrapping itself around it, snaking like the vines. The tattoo grew, elegant swirls and whorls coiling past my elbow and wreathing a circle, stopping at some invisible barrier as the boundaries of the circle finally formed.
In that circle, an eye formed, blood-red in colour. The shade of Rowena's eyes, an identical copy of the eye in the centre of the towering Orb. The same imprinted on the front cover of The Red Mother that lay stuffed under a loose floorboard under the armoire.
I loosed a long, shaky breath as the tingling heat faded and I noticed the icy temperature of my skin. I pulled out a blue cottony gown and took the green tome that shone like a diamond in the faded golden light over to the bed.
Crisp linen sheets, fresh and still slightly warm was the only sign that someone had been in my room.
Pulling back the front cover, I ran my fingers over the inky green vines that covered the first page. The vines were slightly raised as I trailed my fingers over them, gulping down my first proper breath since I'd entered this wretched Palace.
A silent prayer travelled on the wind to Rowena Morwenna, that this book could give me the first step to figuring this out.
But even that hope was shrouded in filmy darkness, veiled in mystery, so fragile.
YOU ARE READING
Threads of Emerald
FantasySeraphina Tellar was guaranteed a quiet existence in the Emerald Kingdom. She would live with her mother and father in Bluebell Cottage. She would marry Rupert, a rich, local boy. She would die a simple death. But, when her father is killed for tre...
