That’s what she’d been clinging to in the seeing chamber.
“Do you feel anything from it?” Tolek asked.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Yeah, it feels like all the others. Warm and…a bit alive.”
Unhooking her necklace, Ophelia strode across the room and held it out to me. “This, too?”
I grabbed Damien’s emblem, and that familiar, faint beat pulsed through it. “Yes, but I never felt it in the spear before. When it was mine.”
“How is that possible?” Mila asked me, then turned to Tolek. “You don’t feel anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Interesting,” Mila mused.
“Very interesting.” Ophelia reclasped her necklace. “You said they feel alive?” I nodded. “I have a theory.”
Tolek’s eyes were trained on her as she strode toward the fire. “Enlighten us, Alabath.”
Ophelia watched the flames flicker. “What if the Angels’ spirits are in the emblems, and that’s what we feel pulsing in there?”
“Bant’s was in the queen, though?” Mila asked.
“We know he shed it. Perhaps he somehow found a way to get it from the ring—which was already in her possession—into her body.” Ophelia rubbed at the dark webbing on her wrist, her original Curse mark.
I shifted on the bed, the wrap around my wounds itching. “You think this whole thing—the hunt for the emblems—could be to set their spirits free?”
“It’s not a bad theory,” Tolek said, crossing an ankle over his knee. “But it still doesn’t answer how or why.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Ophelia answered, shoulders slumping, and Tolek rose to mutter something to her.
“You really feel something in there?” Mila whispered to me.
I nodded, evaluating Valyrie’s heart in my palm. A stone carved to vaguely resemble two entwined figures. “Not sure why.”
When Mila said nothing, I lifted my gaze to find her eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It makes me uneasy. All of this.”
“Me, too,” I admitted on a groan. “A part of me wishes we could forget it. That I didn’t drag you into this.”
“If you’re part of it, I want to be, too, Warrior Prince.”
At the name, I kissed her wrist then turned back to Ophelia and Tolek. “When are we getting the final emblem?”
Tolek laughed as I tossed the heart back. “Someone’s eager.”
The words he wasn’t saying were abundantly clear: He’d missed this ambitious side of me. I did, too. And a big reason it returned was the woman sitting beside me.
At the thought, I wrapped an arm around Mila’s waist.
Ophelia rolled her eyes at Tolek’s comment. “The storm looks like it’s clearing. We’ll leave tomorrow, Angels willing. Cyren went to Titus’s manor and is going to work with Harlen to cover for everything that happened here.”
For explaining the dead chancellor and the instatement of a new one.
“All right,” I said, tightening my arm around Mila. She squirmed. “Is there anything you two need from us before we go?”
Tolek fought a smile at my question and ushered Ophelia toward the door. “Not a thing. We’re taking care of all the plans and correspondence.”
