Page 100 of The Stolen Throne
She swallows, and I have a feeling what comes next is worse.
She looks directly at me. “I am Hylorae, like you. I am able to shapeshift into a tree.”
A tree. Seems pretty innocuous to me.
“Over the years,” she continues, “as my powers have grown, I have to become this tree for longer and longer each year. It’s how I feed. How I sustain myself.”
I share another glance with Reven. What does this have to do with the amulets?
“Trysolde—” Her voice breaks, and she takes a moment to collect herself. “One spring, he found me in that form, and he…” Istrella shudders, her mouth working as though she’s forming the words, but the sounds just won’t come out. “His power is over metal. He can form it into any shape he wants.”
Rejection crawls through me. Please tell me he didn’t—
“In what I swear to the mother goddess was a trance, he took an axe to me. I shifted back to human before he could kill me, and my guards eventually stopped him, but not before—” She holds her arms up and allows the long, billowy sleeves to slide back.
I feel myself blanch. Who wouldn’t?
Goddess above. Trysolde cut off his queen’s hands. His bondmate’s hands. She’s had her arms hidden in her long sleeves this entire time, so I didn’t see sooner.
Istrella lowers them—skin stretched across the ends like silk pulled too thin—into her lap. “When he realized what he had done, he was horrified. He begged me to forgive him, but I…” She presses her lips together like she’s stopping the words of anger and bone-deep disappointment. “I couldn’t trust him after that, so I built my tower.”
This is why she built the tower? To get away from her bondmate? That’s a lot bigger than the usual marital issues.
“What happened to his amulet?” Vos asks gently.
The queen addresses him directly. “I don’t know. He sent a missive saying he would bury it where he’d first found it, begging me to come back. And I considered his request. However, he’s continued to change since then, becoming nothing of the man I once knew. These days, he only shares his thoughts with Eidolon.”
I could see it. In Aryd, when I was trapped and pretending and they were there to celebrate my sister’s coronation and wedding. I could see then that something wasn’t right with the king.
I look directly at Reven, who is already staring back at me with resignation in his eyes, because he knows what this means. We have to get that amulet away from Trysolde if he still has it.
“Where is the king now?” Reven asks.
I know by the way Istrella lowers her gaze that it’s not good. “He is with Eidolon…” She glances at me. “In Aryd.”
Son of a bitch. We can’t go there. We’re not ready to face Eidolon. And what if he called for Trysolde because he learned of the amulet and now he has it?
“My king should return in two days,” she adds.
Two days. Two more days when we already spent so many in Tyndra. Although Cain needs time to heal, I hate waiting like this. The sands of time are moving faster through the hourglass than I can keep up with.
Reven takes the decision out of my hands. “You should stay here in your tower when we go to him,” he tells Istrella. “You shouldn’t suffer more because of us.”
She lowers her gaze to her lap, seeming to inspect her arms with their missing hands, but nods, and I can see the weight of what she’s doing—sending us to deal with her bondmate—might crush her, because she suddenly appears small and brittle when she’s anything but.
Something—the goddess in the amulet, I have to assume now—made Istrella’s lover do that to her. It turned him into something he’s not—poisoned his soul, or whatever is happening to him.
Exactly like my sister.
Oh, Tabra.
If the goddesses are as dangerous as all that, then the previous twin queens of Aryd had good reason to trap them. Except mine hasn’t changed me. If anything, she’s helped me. And Eidolon’s amulet did nothing to me when I wore that one.
At least, not that I could tell.
Or I’ve got this all wrong, and something else is at play here that we can’t see yet.
44
