Nariah didn’t trust her voice to hold, so she only nodded in response.
Tears fell from her father’s eyes, and he pulled her to him with far more force than she expected him to be capable of. Sobs wracked the dying man’s feeble body as he clutched her to his chest, whispering childhood nicknames and pulling back every so often to trace her face with his fingertips.
“My gem,” he whispered at last, “my baby… How I have missed you!”
“And I you,” she said, but her heart wrenched in knots with the words. She had missed him. Had missed being his favorite daughter. But anger and pain lie there too, waiting to rear their ugly heads even in this heartfelt moment of reunion.
Karma cleared his throat, drawing Nariah’s attention to the side of the bed. He nodded to the now-open window behind her back, through which Nariah could see Lily approaching. When had Karma opened the drapes? When she was hugging her father? She shuddered at the thought of leaving her back open to such an unpredictable lord, no matter that he had assured her of his innocence toward mortals.
“You got my letter?” the king asked, oblivious to the fallen lord standing nearby. Nariah nodded, trying to give her father as much of her attention as she dared in Karma’s presence.
Her father coughed and reached for a handkerchief on the nightstand, which Nariah handed to him. More coughing brought drops of blood to the stained white and gold cloth. Each breath the king took was just as much a battle as the one she’d had making it from the carriage to his bedside.
Suddenly, the king’s eyes flew to the window. Death floated just outside, arms crossed, red eyes glowing, and glaring.
“Death…” the king whispered, “he’s come for me.”
Hatred unlike any that Nariah had ever felt before boiled up from her belly. Apparently he was honoring Dark’s request to wait to harvest her father’s soul, as Raiyer stood obediently outside the window, waiting for Nariah to gather whatever information the lords thought they needed from him.
Her father’s death was not a spectacle to intrude upon, though. Marching to the window, Nariah raised her chin in defiance before drawing the curtains again and returning to her father’s side. Time was not on their side—they were literally borrowing it for every single word. She had to make each word count.
“Father,” she whispered, taking his hand once more and kneeling at his bedside. “I’m sorry… for the visions… for everything.”
“No,” he croaked, coughing so violently his entire body shook. “No, my child, I am sorry. As should we all be. For Destiny herself has visited me, and with her she brought Mercy.”
So… Destiny had been there. But that should have been before Karma joined her. Did she return?
“Listen well, child, for my voice is fading,” her father whispered, his voice indeed wavering. Clutching her by the shoulders, he drew his daughter close to him.
Karma leaned in as well, but the king didn’t seem to notice. Throwing her hand out to shove the lord away, Nariah caught Karma straight in the eye with her middle finger, and he withdrew with a howl of pain.
“You… were not… a heretic…” her father wheezed in her ear. “But the goddesses… you saw… are not… ours.”
“Not ours?” Nariah whispered. The words struck her with such clarity, it was as though a wall in her mind had shattered.
Different goddesses haunted Ellonai in her visions than the ones they served. Until she met the lords, she had not known which goddesses she prophesied of—three gracious goddesses lined the temples of Ellonai. Mercy, in her abundance of love, nurtured life into all things that walked the earth. Wisdom—the giver of knowledge, conscience, and economy—watched over the day-to-day dealings of mortals, keeping peace between them. And Glory, whose celebrations of all aspects of life, death, and the smallest things in between gave purpose to the world.
Now Irony and Destiny had appeared to Nariah, and Death had mentioned sisters, more than one, to Destiny when they spoke. Where did these goddesses come from? Why were they only now making their presence and wills known in Ellonai?
“Don’t… go… home. Sister… mother… lost. Not… people… Must… burn.”
Nariah’s hand tightened around her father’s frail fingers. His eyes were drifting, his vision once again returning to the window, where Karma was opening the drapes to allow Raiyer a clear view of the room. Raiyer’s hands lay atop the windowsill while the rest of his body hovered outside, waiting. Karma raised his hand to the lock keeping the glass in place.
The last trickling seconds of her borrowed time with her father were gone. Grasping his hand, she ignored Karma’s attempts to let Death into the room. She ignored Raiyer’s desire for her father’s soul. Instead, she leaned down until her forehead rested against her father’s, her eyes searching his distant ones.
“I swear to you,” Nariah whispered, passion cracking her voice, “I will not let our people crumble. As long as I have breath and blood to give them, they shall walk this earth at my side.”
The latch gave way. The window, rarely open, screeched on its tracks as Karma and Death worked to pry it up enough for Raiyer to enter the room. The king’s hand grasped Nariah’s arm, and he met her eyes one last time.
“No, Nariah,” he whispered, his breath refreshed by the freeze, if only for a fleeting moment. “Salvation does not wait for my people. It waits for yours. Do not let a single tainted one escape. Promise me.”
Nariah nodded numbly, and a smile flickered across her father’s lips. Death threw a leg over the windowsill.
“I love you, Nariah Alcon, my daughter,” her father said.
Before Nariah could reply, Raiyer’s foot touched the floorboards, and the king’s body fell limply upon the bed. Vacant eyes stared up at the ceiling. The remnants of his last smile, his forgiveness, his love, lingered on his lips. A cry of grief in the hall was followed by a dull thud. Karma’s fingers reached for her, but sparks of lightning snapped into life around her, driving him back.
The room gave way to darkness. To nothing. No lords with dual agendas or hidden motives. No goddesses shoving visions of death into her head, or prying through her thoughts like they were their own personal rubbage pail. Even the growing pain in her thigh faded away.
Her father was dead.
Her people were tainted.
She wanted to save them all…
But she didn’t know if she should.
Screaming, Nariah emerged from the darkness and found herself alone by her father’s side. Grabbing the closest object—a pitcher from the nightstand—she tossed it against the wall. Shards of blue and green glass fell to the floor like the last delicate remnants of her hope.
An easel stood nearby, a long unused trinket of her mother’s from when their family would visit the lodge before Deborah was born. Sweeping it up, Nariah didn’t even bother removing the half-painted portrait her mother had left upon it. Splinters dug into Nariah’s hands as she smashed the easel against the end of the bed over and over again. Tears flowed, splinters flew, screams echoed off the ceiling and walls. Years of pain, anger, and sorrow flowed through her with each swing, until a stewing bitterness was all that remained. Wood littered the floorboards like the fragments of what was once the simple beauty of her world.
She needed to stop, to respect her departed father’s space, but rational thought evaded her even as she grasped for control. Storming to the window, Nariah looked out at the yard and saw a handful of badly injured guards hunkered around the golden guard’s tree, all staring up at her.
“My father is dead!” she screamed, and every man rose with a cry of disbelief.
“Murderer!” one screamed.
“Traitor!” called another.
She slammed the window shut so hard that a crack splintered up through the glass.
Let them think she killed him; what difference would it make? If she was the one who brought the goddesses here, maybe it was even true. Her father was too young to die—he had not even been ill, or at least no rumors of illness had spread to the fieldhands from the maids during their trips to the masters’.
No, Death had wanted her father, and he took him. She paused, Karma’s comment on the balcony about the goddesses setting him up for years if he went with them rushing back to her. Was this her price for the lords’ protection? The souls of the ones she loved most? Or was Karma the one who wanted her father dead, but just preferred to not act, himself? Either way, the traitor had let Death into the room, let Raiyer take her father. Why?
“Raiyer!” Nariah shouted, jerking open the door and stumbling out onto a quiet group of lords all on their knees around Melliana’s still form.
Stop, Nariah’s rational thoughts pleaded with her, urging her to process what appeared to be a second death in the lodge, and this one of a member of the divine. She knew she should empathize with the devastation written across the face of each lord in the group—Light, War, Death, and Life. She should have wondered where the missing lord of Justice had vanished to. But her heart didn’t care about the lords’ sorrows or their feuds. Their dispute had brought all this debt upon her shoulders, and she would have no more of it.
“Why did you take him from me?!” she said, stopping behind Raiyer’s back.
Turning a tear-streaked face to her, Rowan whispered, “Raiyer does not take souls, Nariah. He collects them once they have left their mortal shell behind.”
“Their body. Shorn, all of you! They leave their bodies behind. This world. And all because he—” she jabbed a finger between Raiyer’s shoulder blades, “—wants more power! Well you know what? I’m done with you! All of you! You destroy just as much as the goddesses!”
Not waiting for a reply, and unable to stomach an argument from any of the so-called lords, Nariah stormed down the stairs to the front door. Ripping it open, she braced herself for an assault from the guards, and was not wrong. They burst into the room in such a flurry of arms and armor that she could barely see straight.
“Upstairs! Check the king!” someone shouted.
“What of the Doomsayer?” someone else asked.
“Don’t touch her!” another chipped in. “She’s already killed more than half the Guard!”
Taking advantage of their bickering, Nariah went straight to the empty carriage. The horses whinnied at her approach, pawing the ground and shying away from her. Lily was much happier to see her, padding up to her and shoving her snout under Nariah’s arm for a hug, but Nariah’s still-bleeding leg would make riding the panda nearly impossible.
She wished she had some kind of treat she could give the horses to sweeten the deal. What if they wouldn’t take her anywhere without their master’s direction? What if she had to be a lord for them to give her passage in the carriage?
“Look,” she said, hoping they could understand her simple mortal language, “I need to go home. To Ellonai. Can you take me there?”
“Not asking that way, they can’t,” Karma said, his teal smoke appearing before the rest of his body. “But they can if you ask this. Ellonai us traken shri repnat olum?”
Both horses bobbed their heads and stomped their feet, and the carriage door opened.
“You know,” Karma said as Nariah hoisted herself into the seat, ignoring her still-bleeding leg. “Stealing a horse is no small crime—even for lords. And you’re stealing two, plus a carriage.”
Nariah slammed the door, then offered Karma a sickly-sweet forced smile. “I gave them a king’s soul,” she whispered, refusing to be talked out of her duty. “I’d say that’s worth at least the horses, wouldn’t you? And the carriage is all just a heap of wood. The way you people operate, it would have just been ash by the end.”
With that, she drew the drapes and cut off whatever sassy reply Karma had planned to fire back. The horses moved forward, and Nariah drew the other curtain as well. Up the path the horses trotted, leaving the lodge, the lords, and her father’s body behind her. She never wanted to see Frierfeld again.