Except that it couldn’t have been after, could it? Because Aeslinn hadn’t been at his capitol when it was attacked. That was one of the reasons we’d won: the king had not been there to lead his troops. It had been a hard fight, but if the Svarestri had had aerial support, or if their king had been on hand to rally his fey…

Things might have been far worse.

So, why hadn’t he been?

The more I thought about it, the weirder it got. Jonathan had even warned Aeslinn about what was going to happen. Or what had already happened, because we’d fought that battle twice—the first time when we won easily, taking the fey by surprise, and the do-over when we’d barely pulled it off, because they knew we were coming. The necro had used Jo’s time travel abilities to go back after the first battle, and give Aeslinn a head’s up, so that he was expecting us.

Yet, he still ran? He still didn’t use all of his advantages? He still lost?

It didn’t make sense. It might have if Aeslinn was a coward, but I hadn’t gotten that impression on the Thames. He’d run then, too, but only when he was out of options, and badly injured. It was a retreat that anyone would have made, not a cowardly refusal to do battle.

He’d battled just fine, as long as he thought he had a chance to win, and with no one else there to absorb punishment except himself. And Zeus hadn’t said that Aeslinn was cowering in a corner somewhere afterwards; he’d said that he was furious. That didn’t sound like a coward to me.

Yet he let his capitol burn?

Because he’d fled before the battle started, before we even got there, almost like he didn’t care. Like whether his capitol survived or not was irrelevant as long as it bought him time. But to do what?

I didn’t know, and it made me want to chew my fingernails off, only I couldn’t because they were currently covered by a gauntlet. One that the fey was resting on a rail as he ran up a curving staircase made of that same buttery marble, scaling flight after flight without so much as getting winded. And then emerging at the top on a long, wide corridor that changed dramatically as we walked down it.

Unlike some things around here, it didn’t actually move, but the thick bands of different types of stone that covered the walls, ceiling, and floor, that gave the illusion.