Page 87 of A Dark and Drowning Tide

ADELHEID SEIZED HIS ELBOW, and with fury steeling her voice, she said, “That’s quite enough, don’t you think?”

The effect was immediate. Johann shuddered violently, then jerked a step back from Lorelei as though he’d only just noticed her there. “She saw me in Ludwig’s room. It’ll pose too many problems if she’s allowed to live.”

“What were you doing in his room?” she asked sharply. “I told you towait.”

Johann looked chastised. “If hetalked—”

Adelheid held up a hand. “We’ll do this without more senseless bloodshed. Go. I will deal with Lorelei.”

He did not answer her, but Lorelei could feel his shadow pass over her as he left.

Once they were alone, Adelheid knelt on the ground beside her. There was something darkly tender in the way Adelheid looked at her now. With a wave of her hand, the ice pinning Lorelei to the floor melted. It dribbled cold into her wounds and chilled the exposed skin of her wrists. Adelheid touched the hems of her gloves and tugged as if she meant to remove them.

“Don’t,” Lorelei bit out.

“Don’t be a fool. If you don’t remove them, your wounds will get infected.”

As if that mattered now. Lorelei sprang, knocking her to the ground. With the adrenaline coursing through her, it was a simple thing to pin her to the floor. The pain was excruciating when she locked her mangled hands around Adelheid’s throat, but she refused to back down.

“You killed Ziegler.”

It wasn’t wise to take your eyes off a dying thing. Johann had told her that once. She finally understood what he meant. When you had nothing left to lose, you could afford to be recklessly, violently unpredictable.

Squeezing the life out of Adelheid would perhaps be the most satisfying thing she’d ever done. But having the target of her rage before her made her feel horribly alive, more focused and clear-eyed than she’d felt in weeks. She couldn’t kill her without learning why exactly she’d done it.

Adelheid looked remarkably calm. She hardly even struggled, save for the barest application of pressure on Lorelei’s wrist. A polite reminder that she was indeed suffocating. Her lips parted wordlessly once or twice before Lorelei finally let up.

She wheezed out a breath. “You want to know why.”

Lorelei sneered. “Not more than I want to see you dead.”

Adelheid’s gaze was flatly disappointed. “Sylvia is injured from your journey up the mountain. You’re effectively alone on thisship—andin the capital. You may have her support, but you know as well as I do that Wilhelm isn’t interested in the truth of what happened here. When presented with a Yeva, the daughter of his father’s greatest enemy, and the woman he loves, who do you suppose he will believe?”

There was no smugness in her voice, no victory. Her matter-of-factness made it all the more painful. Lorelei’s wounds pounded in time with the thrumming of her heart. For a moment, she could do nothing but gaze hopelessly at her own blood staining Adelheid’s throat. Her eyes fluttered shut. “So what, then? Why have you spared me?”

“I wanted to talk plainly with you,” she said. “Viper to viper.”

Lorelei’s eyes opened wearily. The image of Adelheid’s face wavered in front of her as though she lay at the bottom of a pond. “I’m listening.”

“Like you, I have done what I must to survive. Like you, I know what true desperation feels like. That is why I killed her. Wilhelm can never be allowed to have the power of the Ursprung.”

Lorelei wanted to see it as pure manipulation. Itwaspure manipulation. And yet, the cold determination in Adelheid’s voice compelled her. “Why? You toldme—”

“I lied to you.” She clenched her jaw. “Wilhelm is unfit to rule. Maybe once, I believed he had a vision, but I’ve come to see it for what it is. Nothing but a fantasy. He is willing to sacrifice many for his own selfish gain. Continuing his father’s pointless wars is testament enough to that.”

“Once the kingdom isstabilized—”

“There will always be another war.” Adelheid spoke with the world-weariness of a woman who’d been burned many times before. “Once he stabilizes his reign, others in the region will see him as athreat—andEbul is a convenient weak point to target, just as it always has been. He will conscript our people to fight his battles, and then what little harvests we have will rot in the fields with no one left to tend them. And when the dust settles, he will send no aid.

“That,” she said flatly, “is what awaits us in a unified Brunnestaad.” Horror unfurled through Lorelei slowly. “Then what do you plan to do?”

Adelheid canted her chin. “I will claim the power of the Ursprung. I will return to Ruhigburg. I will deliver him his murderer: Sylvia. I will marry him. And then, while he sleeps, I will drive my lance through his heart.”

It was a scheme befitting a fairy-tale heroine. Lorelei could think only of the tale of the Dragon Prince.

Back in the days when wishes still held power, the queen gave birth to a dragon. When it came time to find a wife for the Dragon Prince, no woman in all the kingdom’s vast lands would consider his suit. They were terrified of him, for he washideous—andthe rumors of his cruelty and hunger preceded him. Only one girl, the daughter of a shepherd, was brave enough to offer her hand. Not only was she brave but clever, too,and knew hunger like an old friend. On the day of her wedding, she dressed in every gown sheowned—andwore a knife against her breast. When the Dragon Prince took the girl to their marriage bed, he asked her to bare herself to him.

A layer for a layer, my love, she told him. With every gown she shed, he shed his scales. Beneath them all was a beautiful young man.