Tale of the Heart Queen (Artefacts of Ouranos #4)

Chapter 54

C HAPTER 54

T he next day, Nadir flies me to the Keep, landing us on the balcony outside his father’s library. Mael and Amya have returned the more conventional way and are busy blocking off the King’s apartments from visitors under the guise of investigating his disappearance.

It’s not a complete lie. We are looking for him, but we have ulterior motives.

The door has already been unlocked before we enter the room and survey the disaster of our surroundings. It looks even worse than Mael and Amya described. Broken glass and furniture lie everywhere, and it smells like we’re in a distillery.

“What do you think happened?” I ask.

Nadir stands with his hands on his hips and shakes his head .

“I don’t know. My father has always been in control of his emotions.” He pauses and I see some long-buried memory pass over his expression. “Mostly, I guess. The only time I’ve ever seen him lose it was when he was drunk.”

He runs a hand down his face.

“If you’re feeling conflicted about going to hunt down your father to kill him, that would be understandable,” I say, and he looks at me as his shoulders slump.

Then he takes a few steps into the room, slowly surveying our surroundings. “It’s not that I feel conflicted, it’s just that . . . I’ve never really known a single thing about him.”

He spins around to face me, his arms spread out.

“What if there was a reason for all of it? I don’t want to make excuses—nothing can justify so many of the things he’s done—but what if, in his mind, he thought he was doing it for a reason? I’ve always assumed he just enjoys causing pain, but . . . all of this seems like a man who’s in pain.”

I say nothing, giving him a moment to gather his thoughts. He looks around the room as if weighing and cataloging every piece. I witness the storm clouds that pass behind his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says firmly. “I’ll probably never know, and it doesn’t matter. Nothing makes up for the things he’s done.”

With his jaw set, he stalks to the end of the room and starts sorting through the papers on his father’s desk. I let him work through whatever he needs to as I start on the papers strewn about the divan in front of the darkened fireplace, lying everywhere like giant snowflakes.

I understand Nadir’s conflict. No matter his faults, Rion is still his father, and I imagine that he always hoped that someday he’d turn out not to be the demon he thought. I watch him as he focuses intently on a journal, his eyes scanning the page.

A knock comes at the door, and Amya lets herself in.

“We’ve managed to move everyone out of this wing for now,” she says. “Father’s guards weren’t happy about it, but Mael suggested that maybe they should be out looking for him instead of waiting around with their thumbs up their bums.”

“I said ‘assholes!’ ” he calls from the hallway, where he’s standing watch.

She sits down next to me as she rolls her eyes.

“So he sent them into the Void to search.”

“What if they find him?” I ask.

“Then they’d kind of be doing us a favor.”

“Do you still think this might be a trap?” I ask.

“The more I learn, the less I think so. His attendants have reported that he’s been drinking heavily, and they’ve been replacing several empty bottles a day. He won’t let anyone touch this mess and has been holing himself in this room whenever he’s in the Keep.”

I exchange a glance with Nadir, who’s listening as Amya’s explanation confirms what he just said.

“But he seemed fine when we were here for Frostfire,” I say.

She nods. “Apparently, he’s been hiding it well.”

She swivels around to look at Nadir, who stands at the desk with a fistful of paper.

“Do you have any idea what could have him acting like this? It doesn’t seem like him, does it?”

“It doesn’t,” he agrees. “And none at all. ”

Amya nods and then stands up.

“Here are the journals I mentioned,” she says. “We gathered all the ones we could find.”

She opens a trunk at the end of the table. Inside are dozens of leather-bound notebooks. Nadir crosses the room and picks up the top one, flipping it open.

He scans the page for a few seconds.

“Herric,” he says. “If these are real . . .”

“Whether they’re real or not, it seems Father believes they are.”

“So I guess we have some reading to do,” I say.

I dig into the trunk and pass the books between us as we settle into our respective corners. Herric was thorough about his life, starting from an early age, but it’s not until the jewels start to fade and the northern lights disappear that things start to get interesting.

Herric recounts his discovery of virulence and the detailed ways in which he manipulated Zerra. How he offered himself to her for years, trying to figure out how to take her down.

A sliver of sympathy swells in my chest for the queen forced to become a god. She could have lived out her days in Aphelion as a High Fae queen, perhaps not a very good one, but at least she would have been home. And then Herric betrayed her. Based on his accounts, their relationship was only about sex, but clearly, she felt differently about all of it.

Circumstance twisted her into the thing she is now too.

I continue reading and then find a passage that makes my blood run cold.

“He figured out how to manipulate the Torch,” I say. “Look at this. ”

Amya and Nadir crowd around me, reading about how Herric made the Torch bend to his will.

“This is . . .” Amya shakes her head.

“Grandfather was right. If people knew this is possible, it would upset the entire order of things,” Nadir says.

“I mean, would that be so bad?” I ask. “Isn’t it a bit weird that we let some random objects tell us who is supposed to be in charge? They made a terrible choice with your father, and I’m sure that’s not the only time. They have sentience, but it’s obvious their sight is also very limited. Look what happened with Atlas.”

“That was supposed to be Zerra’s job,” Nadir says as he takes the book from me and flips to the next page. “He forced our grandfather to descend, and when that still wasn’t enough, he sought more power. That’s what he wants from the mines and why he’s gone so deep. It was never about jewels or protecting our trade exports.”

“He wanted the power of the stone,” Amya says.

“So your grandfather descended, and Rion got his crown,” I say. “What does he need the ark of Heart for?”

Nadir stands up and starts pacing as he continues reading.

“The ark of Heart is incredibly powerful, as your mother said,” he answers. “Only someone with the magic of Heart can use it, which is why he needs you.”

He stops and looks at me.

“So the ark must be the key to something else,” Amya says. “Something Father wants.”

“Cloris mentioned that he wanted to conquer Heart the first time,” I say. “But that doesn’t feel like what this is. ”

Nadir nods. “I agree. Something changed.”

We all fall silent, stewing in our thoughts.

“Keep searching,” he says. “There has to be something else here.”

We abandon the journals and start digging through Rion’s things, all of us silent as we scan through papers, opening drawers and cabinets. Rion seems to have kept everything he’s ever signed. Probably some kind of paranoid evil villain thing.

I see a crumpled ball of paper on the floor and reach for it. I pull it open and am smoothing it out when Nadir cries out, “Here!”

He’s holding another piece of paper. It looks like an official document, but scrawled in the corner is a block of handwriting. “Look at this.” He shows us the scribbled ramblings. The writing is shaky, like he’d been drinking when he wrote it, further evidenced by the dried wet marks on one corner.

Herric. Herric . . . Has her. Has her. Has . . .

The lines are written over and over, tipping at an angle like a descent into madness, becoming more and more illegible.

And then something clicks.

“What if Herric still wants to become a god?” I ask.

The words send a shiver over my skin as our gazes meet.

“Can we be sure he’s still alive?” Amya asks.

Nadir rubs his chin. “What if Father was communicating with the Lord through the Torch?”

“Do you think he went . . . to the Underworld?” Amya asks. “Is that even possible?”

“Maybe if you know where to look,” I say, holding out the crumpled piece of paper in my hand .

Nadir reaches for it. “Is that a map ?”

“It appears so.”

He studies the page before looking up and pointing to a spot. “He went under the mountains. Is this a door of some kind?”

“A door to the Underworld?” Amya asks, her eyes wide.

I retrieve the map from Nadir. “What if Herric asked him to get the ark?”

“But what good would the ark do him?” Nadir asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “If he’s still planning to kill Zerra, he’ll need all of them, right?”

Neither Nadir nor Amya answers as I continue, “Or rather, he’d need to destroy them, just like we’ve been doing. What if we’ve been . . . helping him all this time?”

Cold dread spreads through my chest, trickling down my limbs.

“That . . . can’t be,” Nadir says, but the words sound uncertain.

“Herric must have promised him something,” I say. “Who is the ‘her’ in those notes?”

Nadir and Amya share a look.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But something tells me we need to get the ark back immediately.”

“At least we finally know where we might be looking,” I say. “And we can assume he can’t do anything with it until he has me.”

“So we get the Torch, we perform the bonding, and then use the map to . . . travel to the Underworld,” Nadir says, swallowing hard, like he can’t believe he’s just uttered those words.

“I don’t like any of this,” Amya says .

My gaze wanders to the window where the northern lights ripple across the sky.

I think about all the lonely nights I looked upon them, wishing for another life, wishing for freedom. I remember shivering in my bed, cold and hungry. I remember the hopelessness and the certainty that I would never get out of Nostraza alive. I remember my icy rage and my vows of revenge that became the only things that kept me warm.

I remember everything.

“I don’t think we have a choice anymore,” I say.

I hold up the map and look back at Nadir and Amya.

At my mate. At my second sister.

This family I never expected to find.

This family I’ll do everything in my power to keep.

“We have to find him, and we have to get the ark. One of us will die, and I’m going to make damn sure it isn’t me, but I won’t live under his shadow anymore. This ends now. Once and for all.”