For the Throne by Hannah Whitten

Author:Hannah Whitten [WHITTEN, HANNAH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Eammon’s back heaved, rippling beneath his dark shirt as he hung over the side of the ship. Usually, the work of his shoulders was something Red enjoyed watching, but today her nose wrinkled and her hand on his neck was tentative.

“I take it back.” He pushed up, scraping his wrist over his mouth. The green around his face wasn’t due only to the Wilderwood in him. “I hate the ocean.”

The trip to the Florish coast, while exceedingly strange, was uneventful. The carriage pulled up to the end of the road before the Wilderwood, Kayu grinning at them from the driver’s seat, wearing a tunic and trousers, with a cap pulled down over the waterfall of her hair.

Red had arched a brow. “So you drive, too?”

“I’m a woman of many talents.”

“Debatable.” Raffe’s voice, somewhat shaky from his seat next to Kayu, his head tipped back against the carriage. “Reckless doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“Hush,” Kayu said. “I might be slightly out of practice, but we got here with no injury to beast or man, so I count that a success.”

“Maybe wait to tally the injuries until we get there,” Raffe muttered.

The nerves of passing the Wilderwood’s border wore off slowly, replaced by nerves of a different kind. Red twitched at her dark cloak—her scarlet bridal one was packed into her bag, since she and Eammon had decided the more nondescript they could look, the better. “And the crew you hired? They’ll be… discreet?”

“I told them you and Eammon were cousins of mine stricken with an odd strain of gangrene,” Kayu replied. “I don’t think they’ll want to get close enough to see the veins or the eyes, but if they do, that will be our explanation.”

“Delightful,” Eammon muttered.

Kayu flicked the reins. “Come on, we want to make sure we get to the harbor before it gets busy.”

Two hours’ hard traveling after that, the four of them packed into the back of Kayu’s coach like fruit in a market box. Lyra just watched the window, but Eammon gripped Red’s hand, and Fife kept his eyes tightly closed.

“I didn’t miss this,” he said weakly, scrubbing a hand through his sandy-red curls. “I’d much rather travel on my own two feet.”

But then they stopped. And then there was the sea.

When they first disembarked, they’d just stood there, blinking in the early-morning light. Kayu and Raffe went to the dock, where a small ship listed back and forth in the tide, a handful of rough-looking figures preparing it for departure. Lyra followed after a moment, Fife trailing behind her, though his eyes kept sweeping over the ocean like he couldn’t quite fathom its size.

Red had never seen Eammon’s eyes so wide. He stared out over the water as if he was looking for its end, trying to trace it all the way to the horizon line. “It’s… huge,” he murmured. “I mean, I knew it was, but… I’ve never seen anything…”

He didn’t have to finish. Even in the brief years when he could leave it,

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