In slightly better news, your parents are fine—they’re making do with your father’s pension, which the kingdom is apparently still paying. For now. Tilda is holding up okay. Or as well as one would expect given the circumstances.

Oh! I do have good news for you!

Tilda and I were walking through the town square this morning to get breakfast. (I try to get her out of her apartment at least once a day.) I saw Ridley on the other side of the square, walking through a crowd.

He didn’t look well, I’ll be honest with you, but he was free. He was walking without guards. I called his name and waved to him, but he never looked my way. I wanted to run over to him, but Tilda stopped me.

“He heard you, Ember. I don’t think he wants to be noticed right now,” she said.

But she promised me that she would stop by his place tonight.

I just can’t wait for this all to be over.

The snow has been melting, and it’s been doing this weird cold drizzle thing all day. All the posters they’d had up were getting destroyed by the elements, so the Högdragen were out replacing them. The good news is that they took down the WANTED posters of you.

The bad news is that they replaced them with a reward being offered for anyone who knows anything in connection to the King’s death. With the King being dead, he can’t always be watching us anymore, so they replaced those with black and white posters of Queen Mina, looking twice as severe as Evert ever did.

The only thing it says is I AM ALWAYS WATCHING YOU, but somehow I believe it more than I did the King.

Your friend (no matter what),

Ember

SIXTEEN

duplicity

For a moment, there was only the shock of hearing that the King was dead.

To someone outside of the troll community, it would be hard to explain what it felt like to learn that the King was dead. The best I can come up with is to find out that the President and your favorite pop star had been killed at the same time, along with the Pope and the Queen of England.

It’s this mixture of impossibility—even though Kings die all the time, they still have this bizarre sense of immortality to them. Then there’s the reverence and loyalty. Despite our differences, Evert was my King, and I had sworn to protect him.

The wind felt like it had been knocked out of me, and I actually had to hold on to the dresser for support.

“Bryn?” Konstantin asked, moving closer to catch me if I needed it. “Are you okay?”

And that was enough to snap me out of it. I glared up at him, and there must’ve been something harsh in my eyes because Konstantin took a step back.

“Why is Viktor still calling you?” I asked, my voice a low hiss. “Why did he think you’d want to know that the King was dead?”

“I told you that I’d defected, and that’s true.” He hesitated. “But they don’t know it yet.”

“You lying asshole!” I shouted at him. “How could I have been stupid enough to trust you?”

“Bryn, it’s not like that.”

I turned away from him to start packing my bag. “Don’t try to sell me your shit anymore, Konstantin. I’m not buying it.”

“I did it to protect you!” he insisted.

I looked back at him in disbelief. “Fuck you.” And then I couldn’t control my rage anymore, so I lunged at him.

He grabbed my wrist before I could hit, and when I tried to kick him, he grabbed my other wrist and pushed me back, slamming me into the wall harder than he needed to. He held me there like that, pinning my wrists beside my head, and his body pressed against me, still wet from the shower.

“Let go of me,” I growled, too angry to think properly about how to get out of the hold. I just wanted to hit something, preferably his handsome face.

“No! You have to calm down and listen to me!”

“I don’t have to do anything you tell me!” I shot back.

“Bryn!” Konstantin yelled in exasperation. “Just listen to me for five minutes, and I’ll let you go, and then you can do whatever the hell you want.”

I grimaced and fought against his grip. His legs were pressed against mine in a way that made it impossible for me to kick. So I finally relented, since I didn’t have a choice.

“Viktor sent me to find you and kill you,” Konstantin explained. “He thinks you know too much about what’s going on, and if you find someone that might believe you, he and Mina are screwed.”

“So when are you planning on killing me?” I asked.

“I already told you—if I was going to kill you, I would’ve done it by now,” he said, meeting my gaze evenly. “I went after you to keep you safe and because I didn’t want to keep doing what they were doing. I’m done with Viktor and his men, but if I tell them that, he’ll send people after us both and kill us. You can’t just quit Viktor’s army.”

I pursed my lips, hating that his reasoning sounded plausible. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me. Was I wrong?”

I looked away from him, considering everything he’d said. “I listened. Now will you let me go?”

“Fine.” He sighed, then let go of me and stepped back. He stood with his hands on his hips, watching and waiting to see what I’d do.

“Who killed the King?” I asked, rubbing my wrists.

“Viktor didn’t say, but I would assume that Mina did.”

“How?”

“He didn’t say that either, but when they’d spoken of it before, poison had been their top choice.”

“Why did Viktor think you wanted to know?”

“I’ve kind of been his right-hand man. He’s kept me apprised of everything.”

I arched an eyebrow. “So when everything big is about to go down, he sent you out on an errand?”

“It was supposed to be quick. He thought I’d be back by now.”

I walked closer to him, stopping so I was nearly touching him, and I looked up at him. “What does he think you’re doing now?”

“Tracking you. I told him that you’ve been very elusive.”

“And he believes you?” I asked.

“For now.” He paused. “But he won’t for much longer.”

“What happens then?”

“He’ll send men to kill us.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“We?” A soft smile touched his lips. “Does that mean you trust me?”

I sighed. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” I moved away from him and sat back down on the bed. “So what is our plan? Where do we go from here?”

“We keep moving. We can’t sit still.” He motioned to the bathroom. “You should shower, and then we should get out of here.”

SEVENTEEN

summoned

From the window of our room, I could see the mountains behind us. Since Konstantin had gotten the phone call, we’d been driving nearly nonstop for over twenty-four hours until we finally stopped at a bed-and-breakfast in Wyoming.

Konstantin had insisted on driving most of the way, so he crashed as soon as we’d checked in—sprawled out on top of the covers on the bed. It was a small room with a kitschy western feel, but it wasn’t bad. Besides, we didn’t need a credit card to check in, and the less of a paper trail we had, the better.

Between using a card at the Holiday Inn and our interlude with the Omte, Konstantin felt especially paranoid that Viktor would be able to find us if he wanted to.

On the long drive, I’d tried to talk about what to do next, but Konstantin seemed unable to think of anything beyond “get away right away.”

And truthfully, I didn’t know what to do or where to go from here. With Konstantin sound asleep, I decided to go outside to get some fresh air and think.

The bed-and-breakfast held eight rooms, and it was a quiet place. There was a wraparound porch with a few rocking chairs facing a magnificent view of the mountains. It was a bit chilly out—only in the fifties and breezy—so I had it all to myself, and I sat on one of the chairs, crossing my legs underneath me.

I still wasn’t sure if I should trust Konstantin, but without him, I was completely alone and isolated with Viktor’s men and Kanin scouts after me. With Konstantin, I wasn’t much better off, but he knew a few more things than I did, and at least he was here.

One thing I did know for sure was that I couldn’t stay on the run like this, not for much longer. Running wasn’t accomplishing anything. Konstantin would argue that it was keeping us alive, and he was right, but to what end? What was the point of doing this if it meant constantly moving and looking over our shoulders everywhere we went?

Beyond that, I knew that with the King dead, things in Doldastam had to be descending into chaos. That was just what Mina wanted so she could be the one to save them. But only after she got rid of anyone who stood in her way. Things were only going to get worse before they got better—if they got better.

If Mina was willing to do all these awful things to those who loved her, like Konstantin and Evert, then what kind of monarch could she possibly be? She was vindictive, greedy, and remorseless. The kingdom could only suffer under her rule.