EMMALINE
The words still ring in my ears.
You’re hereby sentenced to banishment. Effective immediately.
I can’t move. I can’t breathe. My legs feel as though they’ve been carved from stone, heavy and useless, and yet the ground tilts beneath me.
The crowd reacts all at once. Gasps, murmurs, shouts. The noise grows into a storm around me, a storm I stand at the center of with no shelter, no escape. Faces blur together, mouths moving, eyes sharp and hungry. Some glare with satisfaction, some with pity, some with the kind of curiosity one reserves for an accident too grotesque to look away from.
But the only face I see is his.
Alexander sits still on his throne, his back straight, his jaw firm, his eyes fixed forward. His features are carved into perfect indifference, unflinching and co
