Reign Shadowfell's Arc

Chapter 18 of 29

Reign folded his grandfather's letter and set it back on the desk. He looked at Vixen across the study. "I guess I get to meet my grandfather face to face." Lux, perched on the arm of the leather chair, trembled at the words. The little imp's ears flattened and his tail curled tight around his ankle. Reign crossed the room and touched the amulet at his chest. The red stone was warm against his palm. "Pack what you need," he told the room. "We leave in the morning." Lux found his voice in a small squeak. "The demon king eats messengers who bore him. I have seen it." Lyla stopped pouring coffee. Vixen laughed once, low. "Then be interesting," she said. Reign crouched to the imp's level. "You are coming because you knew my mother. You are the only one left who did. When I stand in that court, I need someone beside me who can tell me if the man on the throne is lying about her." Lux swallowed. He nodded once, quick. Johan brought a carriage from the coach house at dawn. Black lacquer, the raven and ouroboros stamped in silver on each door. Four horses. Reign helped Lyla up first, then Vixen. Lux climbed in last and burrowed under a blanket on the bench. Johan closed the door. "Three days to Portlandia, my lord," he said through the window. "After that, the border. Send word when you cross." Reign nodded. The carriage rolled forward. The road bent through wet fields and thin pine. On the first day Reign said little. On the second, he asked Lux for a story. The imp sat up in his blanket. He talked about a girl who sang to the kitchen cats at the demon court when she was small. He talked about the color of her eyes, which were the color of Reign's. He talked about the night she carried a baby out of a burning house with the inquisitor's men still in the yard. Reign listened without moving. Vixen watched his face. Lyla wrote nothing down; she only listened too. By the end of the day the portrait in his father's study was not a stranger anymore. It was a person who had run, and sung, and bled. On the third afternoon the road climbed a low ridge and Portlandia opened below them. Stone walls. Slate roofs. Smoke from a hundred chimneys. A line of wagons waited at a gate where clerks checked papers. Beyond the gate, the sign of the demon court hung over a customs house: three points around a burning eye. Lux pressed his face to the window and made a small, unhappy sound. "Inn first," Reign said. "Then the gate tomorrow." Vixen nodded. Reign put his hand on the amulet and did not take it off until the carriage stopped in the yard of the first tavern inside the walls.