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Today is the cover reveal for the second and final book in the Dark Depths duology--CROWNS OF BLOOD & SALT. I finished edits just a few days ago, and what better timing for the cover reveal! This book took a lot out of me, but I am so proud of the result, and can't wait to share it later this year!
So, without further ado, here is the absolutely stunning cover!
cover design by Keylin Rivers
The texture! The crowns! The blood!
*chef's kiss*
And, a special treat--you get to read chapter one RIGHT NOW!
Kalei Maristela was dying.
She stood in the shadow of the shrouded portrait of my parents outside the throne room, small shoulders hunched under a wool shawl. Everything in the cliff-side castle was cold—from the freezing stone walls soaking up the salt-spray chill to the low-guttering torches casting meagre pools of wan light against the carpets—but none so cold as her frail frame. Shivers wracked her body despite the layers of clothes, visible even as I approached from the connecting corridor, though she tried to hide them by shifting beneath the thick shawl as my feet shuffled over the carpet towards her.
Her neck had been craned back to take in the full height of the portrait, its edge skimming the high ceiling, but she dropped her haunted eyes to me as a corner of the shroud flitted in the stale air. A shudder tapped my spine at the movement, bringing to mind the image of ghosts and death.
Silent, she slipped her freezing fingers into mine, and we stood like that for a long moment. My skin burned with feverish intensity, while hers seemed to crack like ice beneath my touch. I rubbed a hand along her arm, desperate to ease some semblance of warmth, of life, back into her veins, but nothing I did seemed to work. She had lost more than just her power that day three months ago on the beach—she lost her family, her connection to the moon, and nearly lost her life as well—and every day I feared she wouldn’t wake, succumbing to the monster that chased her.
The sirens had told me she would always been dying—that was the price for exchanging one life with another—but I had hoped she was strong enough to survive. She took up space wherever she went, commanded it as grandly as one commands armies, planting roots to sprout like weeds in her absence. Always leaving an earthy scent in her wake, as if she was made from clod and dirt and rain-soaked graves. Cold things. Dead things. A tickle on my tongue that reminded me of the change in seasons. A constant.
Now, she didn’t know how to exist in this world. She was haunted and hollow, frail and feeble, about to crack with the slightest sea breeze. I didn’t know how to fix it, and it terrified me to think she might not see the new year in a few weeks. It was supposed to be a celebration of new beginnings, of life, but Kalei was losing hers.
“How are you feeling today?” I asked, the latest note from her father burning in my pocket. A sizable stack of them were hidden in a drawer in my room, each of them with their own demands that I had spent the last three months fulfilling, unable to refuse out of the fear that he would hurt my brother. I swallowed hard, conflicting thoughts of Alekey swimming through my mind, and turned my full attention on the girl next to me.
Bone-dusted hair brushed her shoulders as she shrugged. The strands were dull and dry, not longer gleaming white like freshly fallen snow. She didn’t seem to mind the chips of bone anymore, though there had been a time when they moved and writhed, in her hair and hands where they had embedded themselves during our times in the catacombs beneath Xesta. A jewel of a city brought low by her frightening power. Magic that no longer thrummed in her veins, no longer made her the Princess of Death. She didn’t hold sway over the dead anymore, and the beads of bone in her hair didn’t rattle anymore.
“Cold,” she answered, pulling her hand free to curl it beneath the folds of her shawl. That was her usual answer these days. Some days she felt sick or tired, but most days she was cold and unable to get warm. Still, I wrapped my arms around her neck, ignoring the way her shoulder dug into my throat, skin pulled taut over the sharp bones, and turned my head away from the pieces of bone in her hair that tickled my cheek. She stiffened for a moment, then leaned against my chest with a shuddering breath, eyelashes stark against her cheekbones as they fluttered shut.
In the silence that followed, my heart beating a steady rhythm against her back, I gazed up at the portrait of my parents. Kalei had offered once to bring them back from the depths, but I had refused to allow life to be planted in their mangled bodies. Chests carved open. Heads bashed in. Limbs twisted at odd angles, like spiders, reaching for me in the blood-stained throne room. Their screams echoed even now, carried on the phantom breezes that cut through the chilly corridors, their ghosts hovering at the peripheries of my sight. All fluttering death shrouds, skeletal fingers, hollow eyes. I closed mine with an uneasy sigh, but that didn’t stop their ghosts from finding me in the confines of my own mind. Painted across the black in angry strokes of red and blue. Blood and water. Even if she had caught their souls and brought them back, they’d look like that forever.
Not how they were painted here, happy and proud and so very alive.
I wanted to remember them as they were. Before war. Before death. But too much had happened in the last few months, that any memories associated with them had been tainted with blood and salt. It was too hard to think of any happier memory, so I had stopped trying. The people in this portrait weren’t my parents, because my parents were dead.
At the hands of Kalei’s father. My muscles tightened, an involuntary reaction at the memory of that vile man. He had stolen the vibrant life from Kalei’s veins, had ruined countless others, all in pursuit of a legend that turned out to be true. Immortality. The amount of pain and suffering he could continue to do with that power caused my stomach to sour.
Kalei twisted to face me, sunken eyes half-lidded. “Ev?” she whispered, concern creeping into her voice.
I heard her as if from a distance, painful memories crashing into the front of my mind to drown out everything else. The painting, the hall, the girl beside me all vanished into the rioting turmoil. A wash of dark waters, frigid and filled with death, loomed over my head, bearing down like the waves that took my life.
Cold arms wrapped around my middle. The shawl slipped, revealing Kalei’s ashen skin as she held tight. Bones brushed my cheek, the sensation rippling through me. I drew in a shuddering breath and blinked away the tidal wave until the hall came back into focus. My mother and father looked down at me from the portrait, their painted eyes shining with love and understanding. They had always wanted me to be happy, but they had also wanted me to be a ruler. To lead our people, follow in their footsteps. Sit on a throne that was designed for a much greater person. With this fear closing my throat and stealing my breath, I couldn’t be that person.
Cheeks burning with shame, I glanced away. Kalei’s head was nestled in the crook of my neck, and I gave her a lingering kiss on the top of her head between chips of bone in her hair. The quiet moment gave me time to breathe, to calm my racing heart.
She had done something similar once, long ago on a mountainside when I thought the world was crumbling around me. Anxiety had eaten away my rationality, created monsters of snow and shadow and smoke in that cave, and Kalei had healed my fear the same way she had healed my shoulder, her magic wrapping around me until I felt safe again. She didn’t have her magic now, but I felt her power all the same, strong and solid.
Kalei craned her neck back to gaze up at me. There was a glimmer in her eyes, a haunted glaze that shone in the torchlight. It reminded me of the things I saw on that cold, dark beach after the waters pulled me to their depths. Black sands shimmering with lost souls. Creatures of shadow and smoke swooping out of the grey sky. It reminded me of the siren’s baleful gazes, hate and rage in slitted pupils, beings not of this world. She was losing herself, and it terrified me every time I looked at her.
The shine in her eyes faded with a slow, tired blink.
“Where did you go this time?” she asked, a breathy whisper in the cold corridor.
When I answered, my voice shook. “You know where.”
Icy water, the kiss of death, the abrupt loss of air in my straining lungs. A knife between my ribs. A wave crashing over my head, a constant struggle to break the surface, water filling, filling, filling my lungs until all I knew was cold. Those waters swept through my sleep at night. I moved as if through a nightmare, unable to scream out, unable to run away, unable to do anything to stop the torment that scraped at my bones. I had spent three months gasping for air, expected to hold my head high even though I felt like I was drowning, and no one was there to keep me above the crashing waves of agony. My brother was gone, Kalei was dying, and the kingdom needed a queen who was as strong and solid as its foundation. I tried to be that queen for them, to keep them safe, but I was running short on time, and they needed someone who wasn’t trapped in a single moment in the past.
“You don’t sleep anymore,” Kalei observed. She tugged the shawl back onto her shoulders, frail frame disappearing beneath the cloth.
“Neither do you,” I pointed out. I’d heard her screams, almost every night since that blood-red day beneath a blood-red moon. There was nothing I could do to stop the screams, but hold her until she fell asleep, exhausted and torn. It was a nightly routine, and it kept my own nightmares at bay because I was forced to keep watch over her. To make sure she survived the night. To monitor each laboured breath until morning arrived, and she was still alive, though a little closer to death, a little bit more like a ghost.
“You’ve alive, Ev,” she replied, the same refrain she’d been saying since my nightmares started. It wasn’t bitter or angry, but it cut me all the same. I couldn’t be happy with my life while she was losing hers. I owed her mine, and I would do whatever it took to give hers back. Even if it meant obeying the demands of an immortal tyrant across the sea.
I pressed another kiss to the top of her head in an attempt to hide the shame burning my cheeks. “So are you,” I said with more conviction than I felt. I was going to find a cure, if such a thing could be cured. I was going to find a way to save her, as she had saved me.
“Your Majesty,” a voice interrupted at the end of the hall.
I turned to see Talen, my trusted advisor and first mate, striding past the lit sconces. The plush carpet muffled his heavy footfalls until he came to a stop before us, eyes skimming over Kalei to land on mine. He appeared taller, muscles stretching over his shoulders to ripple down his arms in thick cords beneath a light coloured tunic. A belt fitted with a regal sword wrapped around his slim waist. The jewel in his ear glittered faintly, visible now that he had shorn his hair. With the crest of Vodaeard emblazoned on his tunic, he looked more like a prince than a pirate, though he was neither. Talen had been my father’s advisor, and now he aided me.
The corners of my mouth lifted, briefly, in a smile, until I saw the creases between Talen’s brows. I disentangled myself from Kalei, hand slipping into my pocket where the note from her father grazed my fingertips.
“Your ship is ready,” Talen announced without looking down at Kalei. He had never liked the princess, seeing her as an extension of her father’s cruelty, someone to blame for the chief’s sins. And after that moment in the dungeons, a time that seemed so long ago and yet so recent, he had closed himself off from her completely. He didn’t trust the girl turned wraith in the palace, in the kingdom, in my life. The way his eyes skimmed over her like she was already a ghost made my skin prickle with unease, but he was unerringly loyal to me, and I needed someone I could trust. Talen was that person, so I could tolerate his distrust of the princess. Kalei didn’t even seem to notice. And if she did, she didn’t care.
She did, however, look up at me with a slight furrow of her brow. “Your…ship,” she echoed, flat as the glassy surface of a calm sea.
My stomach lurched. There was pain deep in her chest, the barest tremor in her voice only I could notice. Whatever was passing through her mind, she was scared of it, and trying not to show it.
I withdrew my hand from my pocket. A bone-coloured piece of parchment hung between my fingertips, as though the letters scrawled on its surface were poisonous vipers waiting to strike.
Her sapphire eyes darted to the broken seal, the full moon and crossbones insignia that had waved over her father’s army when they invaded my home. A hand flew to her chest, where the ugly scar of the moonstone spread over her heart. When she had woken up on the rocks, she had torn pieces of that necklace out of skin and bone, and it was still a source of constant pain for her. Fingers curled into the fabric of her shirt, face twisting.
“He…sent a message?” she whispered, tearing her eyes away from the note to look at me. Fear shone in their depths, and I ached for the girl she had been, before that man stole the life from her veins and replaced it with this decaying husk. She had been brave and determined to stop him, and now the mere sight of his sigil filled her with horror.
Guilt swept through me. It didn’t seem fair, how scared she was of the man I felt nothing but burning hatred for. The fact that I had been compliant to his demands for months only stoked the anger in my soul. I couldn’t let fear dictate my life anymore, and I wouldn’t let it dictate Kalei’s either.
“I know where my brother is,” I told her. There was more to the note, but I tucked it back into my pocket before Kalei could look closer. A trade, the chief had written. Alekey for me, in the land of assassins across the sea. I wasn’t meant to come back, and I couldn’t bring myself to add that grief to Kalei’s shoulders right now.
Her mouth twitched at the mention of Alekey, fear twisting into disgust. She had never forgiven him for the decisions that led to that fateful moment on the beach. Even though Talen and Icana had both advocated for him, had reiterated that his choices were to protect them, Kalei had let her heart grow cold against my brother.
I didn’t give her a chance to protest. “I’m taking an army to find my brother and bring him home.” Half of that was a lie, but I had been practicing how to tell her all day, and my voice didn’t shake. I wasn’t going to bring him home. My makeshift army was, without me.
They weren’t a real army. Centuries ago, invaders from Wystan to the north had nearly pushed us into the sea, and the treaty that let us keep our land had abolished our military. Any form of dissent was seen as an act of rebellion, so this army had to be discreet. Men and women plucked from the streets and handed weapons they didn’t know how to wield. They weren’t soldiers anymore than I was a queen. I didn’t know how to kill an immortal man, but I did know that reckless impulsivity was in my nature as much as the sea was in my blood. Some plans were meant to be made up as they unfolded.
But I had already planned to stay. No one else knew, not even Talen. The army was a lie, a show of force. I didn’t have any fight left in me.
I could only hope the chief kept his word and let them leave with Alekey.
CROWNS OF BLOOD & SALT releases later this year.
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