The night had given way to a navy blue twilight by the time Estes’s carriage trudged its way into the hunting town of Frierfeld. The first pale rays of sunlight peeking over the horizon brought a new gleam to Franco’s eyes, and he perked up for the first time of the ride, a dashing smile spreading across his lips. His smile was almost as pretty as Rowan’s, Nariah thought, and she wondered for a moment if the lord of Life had recovered from his collapse in the hallway yet.
Trailing her fingers across her smooth skin, Nariah’s face warmed as she thought of his words. He knew her birthright, her blood, before Truett did. Did the other lords know, too? She wanted to thank him, but bit her lip as Death’s threat echoed in her mind. One lord had already been lost to the goddesses, voluntarily or not. And Raiyer had mentioned that the mountain would be destroyed…
Nariah’s blood turned to ice in her veins. Were the goddesses going to attack the mountain? Irony mentioned nothing of it in her threat. That was before Destiny’s apology, though. Nariah’s eyes dropped to the rolled-up scroll in tucked into her satchel. She’d returned its red ribbon to it, and throughout the ride her fingers toyed with its frayed edges. Too many emotions lingered in that scroll, but she wasn’t sure which ones were sent from her father, and which were her own. Fear, pain, regret, and doom all sat unspoken in a single page.
A bump over rough stones pulled her attention back to the window. She wasn’t sure what to expect when she thought of riding in Dark’s carriage all the way there, but after Rowan’s flying panda, the carriage barely compared. It was a luxurious carriage by mortal standards, though, made of hand-carved truthian oak from the highest peaks of the mountains the temple resided within. Each seat was upholstered in black velvet, and black velvet drapes with a gray demask pattern could be drawn over the windows at any time. Only the fact that the horses could guide it driverless to its destination without getting lost and without wrecking made the vehicle magical. In every other way, it was a fairly standard carriage ride.
The ride had been quiet, with Truett and Franco sleeping for much of it while Nariah sat in still silence. When he did wake, though, Franco told Nariah of the hours his brother had poured into personally crafting each aspect of the vehicle, without an ounce of help from servants or monks, and his whole face lit up. Even though the lords of Light and Dark had apparently been feuding on near non-communicative terms for three centuries, Franco said, he was proud of his brother’s accomplishment.
Stirring at last, Truett stretched his arms and legs out, almost kicking Nariah, who sat across from him, in the shins. He flashed her a sleepy grin, which was far too innocent on his ferocious face. Looking away, Nariah tried not to think about the uncomfortable, form-fitting clothing the maids had forced her into under the argument of ‘practicality.’ They had yet to mend her simpler rough-spun clothing for her, so she was forced into what they told her was spare training attire for Franco’s warrior knights.
A white, lambskin jumpsuit clung to every curve she had a bit too restrictively, riding up in a monstrous way during the bumpy carriage ride. She couldn’t even adjust it, as she’d been strapped into full boiled leather body armor on top of it. The armor was light enough, considering what it was, but she was told to avoid being struck, if at all possible, since it would be little help against a direct blow.
With no time to find her proper boots, she was given back the sandals she’d worn for so long in the desert. Her hair hung tied in its blue silk scarf, unable to be combed out until she returned to the temple.
“You’re sure about this, Franco?” Truett asked, his knee bouncing and fingers drumming inside the carriage windowsill. The grin was gone, replaced by a furrowed brow as War took in the sparse village in the distance. Keet, the falcon, bobbed up and down on his perch atop his master’s knee, his head tucked down into his feathers and one eye closed as though he were somehow soothed by War’s distress. “Frierfeld doesn’t seem like a kingly place to have a vacation home, if I’m being blunt.”
With no wall or fortification except for the nearby fort, it stood as a mere overnight stop along the side of the road. Only a single inn, a general trader, a cabin or two, and a bunkhouse for other hunters sat in the village itself. Beyond it, a smelter and smithy sat a bit off the road, along with a run-down stable and a smokehouse for any meat brought back. On the furthest edge of all, a piddling graveyard marked the few corpses that had been buried there since the King established the village the year of Nariah’s birth.
Nariah’s face warmed under the scrutinizing gaze of the lord of War. She had nothing to say that would quell his worries. The fear-induced image of Irony in her father’s hunting lodge was still fresh in her mind. She hadn’t gone with him to the lodge since her younger sister, Deborah, was born; her mother had kept both daughters at home after that.
“There will be no more heirs,” Queen Storm told her oldest daughter the day after Deborah was born. “We must keep safe the ones we have.”
The queen hadn’t elaborated beyond that, and Nariah had been too young to understand why she had to stay locked within the castle walls. Too young to know what the buckets of blood the midwives hauled away from the room could have meant. Or why bedrest claimed her ashen-faced mother for nearly three months after Deborah’s birth. Whatever the reason, Storm was right—there never were any more heirs.
Loneliness swept over Nariah as she recalled the happiest days of her life. Warm and free and full of life, she’d had the only thing she ever truly needed with her—her family. A low sigh escaped her as she peered out over the barren field lands covered in dying whisps of yellowed grass and dotted with an occasional bramble or leafless copse of trees. Even in her youth, Irony tormented her, by holding back the awareness that the best days of life flew too quickly to realize what was slipping through her fingers.
Instead of cherishing her moments with her father, mother, and baby sister, memories of her father’s numerous departures, always rushed and always alone on only a single horse, took center focus in her young mind.
How she’d longed to fly like a bird and follow him back then. The kingdom was vast, but she’d known so little. A shudder ran up her spine. Horned desert worms with jagged, rotating vortexes of teeth had awaited her the first time she was cast into the desert. The nomad who took her in assured her that only worse creatures waited on the other side of the dry sea. Without the King or his armies to shield her, the untrained former princess dare not leave the shadow of her former home.
“It’s not kingly, but it’s where he is,” Light finally said with a shrug. “We told the carriage to take us to King Kelton, and it’s led us to Frierfeld, just as the scroll said. Trap or not, we’re in this together now.”
Exhaustion knocked at the back of Nariah’s mind at last. At the worst possible time. Swaying in her seat, she fought to keep her eyes open, but invisible weights tugged at her eyelids. As time went on, her whole head drooped forward.
Just in time to tumble out of her seat at the carriage’s sudden stop.
Without knocking, a guard flung open the carriage door and poked his head inside.
“State your name and business!” the guard snapped, his eyes bloodshot and wild. He was missing his chest armor, wearing only a soiled white undershirt and plated kote armored sleeves.
“We are escorts to the estranged Princess Nariah Alcon,” Franco said without hesitation, slipping Nariah’s scroll from her pack and presenting it to the guard in one fluid motion. “Summoned by His Majesty the King with utmost haste.”
Nariah blinked at Franco, shocked at the simplicity of his introduction. She was not worthy of being announced before two living, breathing lords, much less escorted by them. Truett shot her a wink.
The guard snatched the scroll and held it outside in the light, inspecting the sigil on the end of the ribbon. Wary eyes narrowed in Nariah’s direction, followed by a sneer as he tossed the scroll back at her chest. Dismissal. A King’s summons was being dismissed by a mere guard. Rage boiled in Nariah’s chest.
“Our King is head-sick with fever, and knows not who he summons, nor why,” the guard snapped. Jerking his chin at Nariah, he added, “No Doomsayer’s setting foot in his Grace’s presence—not in his final hours.”
“How dare you—” Nariah started, but the guard slapped her so hard that spittle speckled the seat cushion as she landed against the side.
A strangled yelp drew her eyes to the doorway, where Franco held the guard dangling in the air with one hand.
“How dare you,” Light seethed, his eyes literally aflame, “raise a hand against a mortal in service of a lord?”
The guard stuttered something unintelligible, his feet kicking desperately as his fingers clawed at Light’s hand.
“Now, now,” Truett chuckled, rising to his full height inside the tall carriage and glaring down at the guard, a wicked grin crossing his lips as his own blue eyes sparked. “Franco my dear, your chivalry runs away with you. This here is a soldier. Surely a soldier should grapple with War, not Light, yes?”
Franco released the guard without protest, who crumpled into a wheezing, gasping heap at the bottom of the carriage steps. Two strides carried Truett out into the daylight, where he circled the guard once before shaking his head and waving a dismissive hand at the man.
“If that’s all you’ve left me, I don’t want him,” Truett told Franco.
Light ignored the comment, offering Nariah a steady hand up off the floor. Her cheek stung, throbbing from the impact, but her pride was wounded more than her body. She bit her tongue hard, the pain grounding her and stilling her quavering chin. She was not new at being mistreated, at being an outcast. She should have expected nothing better than the people’s last vicious response to her presence. Franco raised an eyebrow at her, as though waiting for confirmation that she could hold her own.
“Why are you helping me?” she whispered, careful not to let her trembling voice carry to the guard just outside the door.
Light forced a strained smile.
“In honesty, it is to deal with the trap the goddesses have left for you, of which this is but one part.” Raising his voice and glaring out at the guard, he added, “However… mortals who do not know their place—and strike those who are both unarmed and weaker than themselves—are a particularly poignant irritant to my sensibilities.”
Taking a deep breath, and managing a grateful but brief smile, Nariah nodded, steeling herself for more abuse at the hand of her father’s royal guard. She stepped out into the sun with her head held high and her shoulders back.
The Heiress of Ellonai had come for her father, at his request, and none were going to stop her. The lords would see to that.
Only a flicker of hesitation ran through her as Franco climbed down after her.
He’d told the guard she was in service to him. What would these lords expect in exchange for their protection?
“Please lord, please!” The guard on the ground lay prostrate in the dirt, his hands raised pathetically above his head. “I beg you to spare me. Take what you will from me, but spare my life!”
Two more guards came running from the lodge, each fully armored and brandishing spears.
“State your names and business!” a guard in a shining gold breastplate commanded, stepping forward from the middle of the group. Recognition dawned on his face, though, when his eyes met Nariah’s.
“Let them see the king!” the guard on the ground yelled. “These are lords—the divine themselves!”
“Heresy!” one of the guards flanking the golden-armored one cried. “He’s possessed!”
“It’s the Doomsayer!” the golden-armored knight said. Weapons raised immediately. “Tsi, fall back to the king! Bar the door! Let no one enter, not even me, until the king passes!”
“Oh, you’ll be waiting a bit for that, I think,” Truett said, cracking his knuckles and then his neck. “Since we’ve asked Death to grant us the privilege of speaking with the king before his soul leaves his mortal shell.”
Shaking out both shoulders, Truett stooped as though to tie his shoe, then vanished, reappearing just inside the open lodge door.
“Do you often greet lords and your royalty this way?” Franco asked, walking straight up to the guard, who, to his credit, held his spear steady between them.
“I fear no demon,” the golden-armored knight said. He glared at Nariah over Franco’s shoulder as they slowly began circling each other, each man’s boot placed carefully in the sand. “We cast out the witch proclaiming to be a false goddess. We shall not suffer you any kinder a fate.”
“False goddess?” Nariah asked, the guard wincing at her voice. “What are you talking about?”
“This is your final chance to return to your homeland,” Franco warned. “I do not relish mortal blood on my unblemished hands, but I will happily make an exception for one who closes his eyes to the light.”
True fights were nothing like the ones in the storybooks she read as a child once told her. Grand boasting and long tirades turned out to be no more than one statement from each party. There was no parrying of blows, no metal on metal.
Instead, the golden guard’s feet shuffled in the dirt as he pivoted to face her instead of Franco. Sidestepping his blow was a lucky result of her gut instinct, but she had nothing to follow through with. The spear slammed into her chest, deflecting off a single metal clip in the center. It came again, missing as she ducked and nicking her shoulder on the way down. There was an initial sting in the shallow wound, but no aching pain. A third strike hit home in her right thigh, but not deeply, as the guard went barreling away from her, taking his spear with him.
Truett flexed his bulging biceps, cracking his head once more as he summoned blue flames to one hand, and red to the other. Light was nowhere to be seen. A knife of betrayal twisted in Nariah’s stomach. Franco had planned on fighting the guard. Why had he left her?
“What’ll it be, shiny boy? Want to freeze while you burn? Or burn oh so very slowly?”
Burning…
Flames crossed Nariah’s mind, bringing with it the black edges of her warning vision. The screams of her people filled her ears, and she covered them with both hands. In the distance, her watering eyes saw burning figures tearing out across the fields, setting the dying grass ablaze. This was no vision. These screams were real. These flames were real. Her people were burning, and it was truly because of her.
“Stop!” Nariah cried, jumping to her feet only to tumble forward on hands and knees as her wounded leg gave way beneath her.
Truett paused to stare back at her, but offered her no assistance.
Clenching her teeth, Nariah sucked in a sharp breath through the pain as she stood once again. One step at a time, she limped to stand between the fallen golden guard, who lay stunned by a tree, and the lord of War.
“Stop!” she said again, throwing her arms out to either side. “I will not see another one of my people burned!”
Hot tears of pain and anger pooled in her eyes. One trickled down the side of her face, but she let it fall, boring her daring glare into Truett as he stared back in amused contemplation.
“Based on the welcome you just received,” he said at last, “I believe you can safely say these are no longer your people.”
His words cut her to the core. They were not said with the same disgust, the same venom, that Raiyer had spewed in his Void, but they were no less true. More tears fell, but Nariah refused to be broken. It didn’t matter which lord stood against her, nor which goddess. Not even Ellonai itself could choose its own destruction as long as she had breath in her body. What else did she have to live for, if not the world that would have been hers? Humanity itself?
A grunt behind her broke her resolve, but when she turned to face the golden guard, she was met by a growing wall of flames in the distance.
“See, Doomsayer?” the golden guard grunted, clasping a sizeable dent in his breastplate. Each breath he took whistled, and blood trickled from his mouth. “Whomever you think you serve… whatever aim you think they have… just know… you’re bringing them… to end us all.”
Nariah stumbled backwards, her mind racing. The village needed to evacuate. They were too far from the ocean to quell the rising flames. The well was too small, the hands too few, to quench the destruction War had loosed upon them.
“Truett!” she begged, turning to implore him face-to-face. “Lord! Please, spare my people! My city! Do not sentence them to this fate!”
Truett’s amusement vanished. His eyes saw straight through, into her very soul, and he sighed. The flames on both hands vanished. A snap of a finger brought thick gray clouds overhead, and in seconds, the largest raindrops she’d ever felt fell upon them in sheets.
Taking Nariah by the arm, the lord of War dragged her into the hunting lodge, leaving the golden guard outside and barring the door behind them. The log walls and roof were so thick that even the rain was muted to near silence once they were inside.
“Franco!” Truett yelled, wringing his sopping shirt out on the front mat. “How’s Melliana?”
“Fading,” Light called back from upstairs.
“Come,” Truett said, rushing up the wide stairs in the center of the lower hall two at a time.
Warmth wrapped around Nariah like an overdue embrace as she padded forward in soggy sandals. The bottom floor, a wide-open communal hall, held a roaring fire in a quaint stone fireplace against the far wall. Comfy arm chairs and a sofa upholstered in the softest orange finta cat fur basked in the fire’s glow. They beckoned her to rest. To forget for a moment the death and destruction waiting ahead of each step she took.
“Come!” Truett called again, and Nariah sighed.
Leaving behind the bookshelves on either side of the fireplace and the fifteen-foot table laid out with a spread of all her favorite hearty dishes from home, the former princess made her way up the stairs for what she knew deep down would be the last time.
Polished wooden railings cooled and soothed her aching fingers as she grasped onto them on the way up. Throbbing pain spiked with each step she took on her bad leg. She hadn’t spared a moment to look at it before she started up the stairs, but the blood smearing onto her clothes stood out in sharp contrast to her light-colored armor and the lambskin beneath.
Despite the pain, she managed to make it to the top without calling for help. The sight that met her at the top of the stairs, though, left her sure that the lords would not have helped her anyway.
Cradled in Franco’s arms on the floor, a woman with short-cropped black curly hair and lavender skin reached her hand up to the sky. The woman’s tears turned to purple gems as they fell, but neither lord moved them away or collected them. Truett paced back and forth by a large bay window overlooking the front door.
“Karma,” the woman whispered, blinking tears from her pitch-black eyes. “Why?”
“Melliana,” Franco whispered, “you need each breath you can keep. Don’t call for him.”
“How long ago did you call him?” Truett asked.
“Not long ago enough.”
Truett cursed under his breath, then knelt at Melliana’s side. Nariah wrung her hands, unsure what she could do. Scrolling golden runes lined the woman’s arms and hands. Appearances gave Melliana the appearance of a goddess, but this woman was too close to death to be an immortal. Perhaps she was a direct descendant of one?
“Nariah, you should go see your father,” Franco whispered softly, not taking his eyes off Melliana.
Fear froze her to the top of the stairs. See her father? What if the guard was right, and it was only a fever that made the dying king reach out to his disowned firstborn child to begin with?
“Now, Nariah.” Franco raised urgent eyes to her. “When Death enters this house, I fear all untethered souls will flock to him. Don’t let your father’s be one of them before you’ve heard his last words.”
With limp, heavy legs, Nariah trudged past the fallen woman and both lords to a massive oak door covered in carvings of her father’s favorite animals. Her fingers traced over the sheir bird, and a large finta cat perched atop a barren tree limb, its long tail dangling without a care.
A rough, unpolished stump of wood was the only handle to the lockless room. Since only the king, his family, and his royal guard ever set foot inside the lodge, he said he was free to be a normal man there—one who did not need to lock the world out.
The room inside was dark, the curtains drawn over the plate glass windows. The only light in the room came from a fireplace so small it could barely hold a tea kettle over its flame. He hadn’t wanted his children to burn themselves in the fire, she remembered him telling her when she asked about its unusually small size. Heat would rise from the fire on the lower floor anyway; this was more of a light fixture than a functional fire.
As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she made out her father’s grand four-poster bed with each of the curtains closed. Incense, sage, and honey drifted heavily through the air—Herbs of Passage, said to bring peace to Death when he came for one’s soul. Somehow, Nariah doubted that Raiyer cared one bit about the smell in the room when he killed someone.
“You’d be wrong about that, you know.”
Nariah’s skin crawled as Karma stepped from the shadows, arms crossed and a grin plastered onto his face. In the hall, Melliana had mentioned Karma. Had she been calling for him, as Franco thought? Or warning them of the teal-haired lord’s presence?
“Both,” Karma answered, and Nariah immediately threw a wall between her thoughts and the errant lord.
“You should really ask permission before reading someone’s mind,” she whispered, not wanting to disturb her father, who was snoring loudly.
Karma drew back the curtain at the side of the bed and motioned for Nariah to join him at her father’s bedside.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “Reading minds is as close as I’ll get to a mortal. I have never raised a finger against one, at least not physically.”
“Odd choice of wording,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. Still, there was an unsettling honesty to his statement. She shuddered to think about what he actually did to mortals, without laying a finger on them, but this was not the time to ask.
Walking past the end of the bed, she drew back the curtains on the opposite side of her father’s bed. Her heart fell.
Flecks of white, dead skin covered most of his body. His once full and vibrant black beard had thinned into more of a salt-and-pepper goatee. The matching hair on his head had thinned to balding in most places. All of his bones stuck out, the skin stretched so thin it could barely contain the soul within it. Nariah turned her head away, fighting back shuddering sobs that threatened to spill out and wake him.
The king’s breath hitched, and bony fingers clasped her hand.
“Nariah?” he asked, blinking hard at her. “Is it really you?”