“Please, I have to get out,” she implored her ghostly escort.

She cried out as the floor fell away, and she was lifted by invisible hands. They carried her to the doors and outside, setting her down gently. Imogen barely choked out a “Thank you” before collapsing on the palace steps. Tears followed; great, wrenching sobs that grew in strength until she screamed her anguish into her skirts.

Her screams turned to moans. She had bedded a monster. Called him beautiful and taken his seed into her body. The thought made her stomach heave, and she hunched over her knees, dry-retching until her ribs ached and her throat burned.

The sculptor who’d carved the effigy had known The Undying King far more than the woman who now shared his bed. Imogen wiped her cheeks on her sleeve. He hadn’t told her anything she shouldn’t have already guessed. He’d been named The Butcher. Only her willful blindness had made her shy away from delving too deeply into how he’d inherited such a title.

The quiet, reserved man who skillfully and lovingly introduced her to the intimacy between man and woman and who generously offered a means by which she might live a fruitful life didn’t seem the type who’d spend three days slaughtering innocents. An image of the marble effigy on the catafalque flashed in her mind’s eye. The cruelty, the calculating malice—etched deep in frozen marble. That man, however, oh yes. That man would commit such atrocities and laugh as he did so.

Her tears slowed and finally dried, leaving her eyes nearly swollen shut. A dry breeze fluttered her skirts and stirred the overgrown weeds that spilled over the steps on which she sat. Behind her, the eroded hulk of one of Tineroth’s many nameless buildings cast its long shadow over her and the cracked street. The memory of Niamh’s words sounded in her mind like a dirge.

“His people once called him Cededa the Fair, then Cededa the Butcher, and then they called him no more.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Still seated as she left him, Cededa shoved the Senet board off the bed. “Yielded and conquered.” Like all things in this interminable existence, it was a hollow triumph.

The mist that had carried Imogen outside the palace seeped into the chamber and stopped in front of Cededa. He watched as it converged and thickened, melding into the spectral form of a woman dressed in the gown of a Mir aristocrat.

Her voice was a zephyr’s breeze through trees, a shifting of many voices that spoke as one. “What did you tell the girl?”

He rose from his place at the table. “I told her of Mir.”

The wraith’s shape changed, twisting in on itself in an agitated spiral. “She will hate you now, and she will leave.”

Cededa’s short huff of laughter held no humor. “She’s free to go if she wishes. She has no interest in the Waters and none who’ll believe her if she tells their tale. My debt to her mother will be repaid if she leaves of her own choosing.”