The phone rang and rang and rang.
No one answered.
As it connected to voice mail, Eno snatched the phone from Caelan’s hand and ended the call.
“What are you doing?” Caelan snapped.
“If they are dead, we don’t know who has their phones now. Right now, the Empire is reporting you dead. I’m assuming it’s your body double they have. If you start calling their phones now and your name appears—” Eno said, and Caelan nodded his head.
“They’ll know that I’m not dead,” Caelan finished irritably. “But we’ve got to know what the hell is going on!”
Eno tossed Caelan’s phone to him and pulled out his own. “Let me make some calls. It will throw up fewer red flags if my name is showing up in places.”
While Eno proceeded to make call after call, Caelan paced the field, his arms crossed tightly over his chest as if that alone could hold all the pain inside of him. His mind kept getting stuck on one point. Queen Amara was dead. His mother was dead.
He knew he should be thinking about all the people of Erya. Was his country now in the hands of the Empire? What had happened to all the armed guards and their army? What would happen to all the world if the Empire truly did have possession of the Godstone?
But he couldn’t get himself to care about those questions. To him, it wasn’t that the queen had been killed. No, it was his mother. His mother had been killed.
He felt like he was drowning in pain. Dragging in each breath felt like too much work. Every thump of his heart was a shaft of pain through his chest.
His brain strayed to the memories of their last meetings. The look of worry in her eyes, the way she’d held his shoulders, so close to an actual embrace. She’d even called him Cael, an echo of an old memory from when he’d been so very young. Had she been trying to tell him something? To warn him? To say good-bye?
Caelan continued to pace because moving meant that he wasn’t completely falling apart. How was this even possible? He wasn’t ready for this. He would never argue they had been close. His mother was the queen of Erya. She was a strong, independent, stubborn woman who’d refused to marry anyone so that she could guide the kingdom as she saw fit.
She’d always been close to the Godstone, and for some reason, Caelan had thought that meant she was impervious to attack. The Godstone, or at the very least, the power of the dead gods would keep her safe.
Caelan stopped and rubbed the sore spot on his chest where he felt like he’d been hit while they were walking through the Ordas. Ever since then, his connection to the Godstone had been frayed and wild.
“She’s dead,” he said softly. Just saying the words with a new certainty threatened to knock his knees out and send him to the dirt. It was as if he were hearing the announcement on the radio all over again.
“You can’t be sure of that,” Eno snapped. His expression was harsh and ugly. Desperate for Caelan to be wrong, but he wasn’t.
“No, I felt it.”
“What?” Drayce asked. His voice was barely more than a whisper. His childhood friend sounded so utterly lost, a ship tossed into a dark sea. Caelan recognized it because he felt the same.
“That pain I felt, in the Ordas. That was when she died. Her connection to the Godstone was broken with her death. It ended her bond. I’ve never officially bonded with the stone. Only one member of the royal family can be bonded to the stone at a time. My connection to the stone was filtered through her.”
“What does that mean? Can you still pull power from the stone?”
Caelan shook his head. “I don’t know. The arrangement has always been that if she died suddenly, I would be bonded to the stone within the first twenty-four hours.”
“And what happens if you’re not bonded to the stone?” Drayce pressed.
Again, he could only shake his head. He didn’t know. A member of the Talos family had been bonded to the Godstone since its discovery after the god wars that raged through the Ordas and made the area inhabitable to people. What would happen to the Godstone? Could the Empire actually steal it away and have one of their own people bond with it?
Amara hadn’t prepared him for this. There was no plan for if she was killed and he wasn’t there to immediately take her place. She hadn’t ever explained what he had to do to bond with the stone in the first place. How was he supposed to fight the Empire, to protect his people, if he didn’t have full access to the power of the Godstone?