Chapter One
KADEESHA AND HER SQUADRON SISTERS RODE ATOPtheir kongamatos, circling above the enemy’s campsite. Their presence in the sky was concealed by the zalika bracelets on their wrists; the glamour the bespelled beads cast made Kadeesha, the eleven women she flew alongside, and the great half-avian, half-draconic serpents they’d bonded with invisible. On the forest grounds below were two dozen deliciously oblivious Apollyon fae soldiers squatting on her territory. As archprincess of the Aether Kingdom, Kadeesha would always be testy when bastards sullied her home. And these particular bastards were about to learn that their little scouting parties hadn’t been as stealthy as they’d thought while lurking around the perimeter of the palace and tracking the royal guards’ patrol shifts over the last three days. They’d pay with their trifling lives for the infringement soon.
Zahzah, Kadeesha’s kongamato that shared her trait of impatience, emitted a quiet chirrup while thwacking Kadeesha’s right knee with a leathery wing. Zahzah’s velvety voice poured into Kadeesha’s mind:Yumm. Tasty prey. Give order. I will feast on fae flesh and marrow this morning!
Seeing as how Kadeesha was the same species as those fae the kongamato was gleeful about devouring, she supposed she should’ve been properly petrified—or at least sickened by the decree. But Zahzah was one of the most precious souls in all the realm to her, and Kadeesha herself was eager to spill Apollyon fae blood today. Anybody that presented a threat to her kingdom needed to die. Period. But first, Kadeesha wanted to figure out—
Less thinking. Let’s eat, Zahzah sniped.The others in volery are ravenous too.
Kadeesha patted Zahzah’s head, which was covered with red-and-gold scales shimmering under the bright morning sun. “Give me a few more moments, then you all can eat, sweet girl. Can you pass that message along?” Among the thunder of twelve young kongamatos that formed a V in the sky with Kadeesha and Zahzah at the vertex, Zahzah was the flock’s leader. No matter how antsy to feast the others were, they wouldn’t swoop down on the campsite until Zahzah gave permission. Zahzah huffed at Kadeesha’s request—the sound as close to gracious assent as you’d get from a kongamato. “Keep behaving and I’ll make it up to you with a barrel of candied cherries when we get back to the aerie. Deal?” Kadeesha added for insurance.
Three barrels, Zahzah bartered. She had a sweet tooth and would eagerly sink her fangs into anything sugary with as much fervor as she used to rend apart flesh and gnaw on bones.
“Done,” Kadeesha promised; she wasn’t above bribing the mercurial beast to keep them all following orders. She gripped the sides of Zahzah’s neck, more firmly centering herself on the war serpent’s back, and leaned forward. She continued as she’d been formerly doing, intently listening to the traces of the Apollyon Court soldiers’ chatter she caught. A solid chunk ofadditional minutes drifted by and nothing remarkable was expressed. Some of the males clad in nondescript black fighting leathers complained about the sweltering temperatures of the Aether lands during the dry season, while others swapped stories about family or lovers back home with the occasional jesting between them. Their talk never once turned to the subject Kadeesha desired to come up: the precise reason their despicable king had sent them to keep eyes on the palace. Kadeesha had guessed why, and she was damn near certain about it. However, she wanted confirmation before commencing a bloodbath.
Two Kongamato Flyers flew up beside Kadeesha. Leisha, her second-in-command, hovered at her left side on a winged serpent with luminescent black scales and a wingspan nearly as gargantuan as Zahzah’s. Samira, her third-in-command, filled the space on Kadeesha’s right. She’d bonded with and now rode a kongamato with slimmer wings and scales that were the rose-gold hue of a new dawn.
“What are we waiting for, Your Highness?” asked Leisha. Her complexion was a fraction lighter than Kadeesha’s and the same deep bronze as the bark of the ancient, broad-leafed koppa trees below. Leisha was the same twenty and five years as Kadeesha; the two of them had grown up together, becoming close friends in the palace’s nursery, seeing as how Leisha’s parents had lived at court the whole of their lives. Leisha’s mother was a nursery caregiver and her father had been Kadeesha’s primary tutor when she was younger.
“Peace, sister,” Samira threw at Leisha before Kadeesha could answer. Samira was also twenty and five, the daughter of the palace’s head cook and another of Kadeesha’s childhood playmates. “I’m sure our princess has a good reason.”
Leisha sucked her teeth, an act that was likely directedequally at both Samira for advising her to cool it and Kadeesha for the extended wait. Leisha was as bloodthirsty as the kongamato she rode, and Kadeesha knew her sister had grown especially restless. The adrenaline Leisha buzzed with was clear in the fire that roared behind her bright green gaze and how her hand gripped the hilt of one of the two battle axes hanging at her sides, blades naked.
“Must you always be so crass?” Samira snapped, the bickering that went on between the women as old as their friendship of two-plus decades. Samira bore a medium golden-brown coloring akin to the runi coins with Emil’s, the Celestial god of trade and riches, cunning face emblazoned on one side. Her build was tall and narrow and imposing, like the lithe body of the golden stag, a symbol of prosperity stamped on the other side of a runi. Samira’s eyes were the beguiling color of honey, near the same shade as the golden stag’s pelt, and now they glanced at Leisha in annoyance.
“We wait because I first wanted to see if any among the camp would speak something that verified why they darken our lands,” Kadeesha told Leisha. “It’d be useful if I can carry proof back to my father that the Apollyon king schemes at regicide and if there’s anyone else he’s targeting.” She was certain that the presence of interlopers in Aether territory, aligning with tomorrow’s grand affair and the arrival of particular invitees, was not a coincidence. Especially given the prophecy linked to it all, which made her ill to even think about. But it was precisely said prophecy that led her to question whether the Apollyon king’s maneuverings were solely directed at Kadeesha and her father, or if the enemy was simultaneously targeting the Hyperion king. Her gut leaned toward the latter. It made little sense to only strike at one vassal kingdom and not launch an assault thatwould throw the whole of the Six Kingdoms into utter political upheaval.
A snort from Zahzah arced through Kadeesha’s mind.
“We’re running out of time before we need to return to the palace,” Leisha stated. “The hour we’ve been watching them hasn’t revealed your proof. There are other ways to obtain information, though, you know? If we attack now,” she crooned, “we can leave a few alive and torture the information out of the filth.”
“We do need to be getting back as swiftly as we can,” agreed Samira. It was a rare moment indeed that she aligned with Leisha on any topic. Kadeesha stiffened—she knew what Samira was going to say. “Your father will be expecting you soon for your betrothed’s arrival and the beginning of the wedding ceremonies, and the preparations for both will take time. Our king will want you to appear as arresting as an imminent wife should on the eve of her wedding to our liege lord.”
Kadeesha gnashed her teeth. “I’maware.” It was a hard-won fight not to snip at her friend; the predicament awaiting her at the palace wasn’t Samira’s fault.
Yet thinking of the Receiving of her betrothed and the subsequent signing of the dowry contract made Kadeesha, who usually landed somewhere in the middle between Leisha’s quick temper and Samira’s even-keeled one, yearn for immediate violence.
“You’re right,” she ground out to her sisters, abandoning her desire to gather what information she could before decimating the camp. She was running out of time, and torture was an effective method, exceedingly so when Leisha was behind the dance. “Choose three to keep alive,” she informed Leisha. “Select two to make examples of that will convince the third to give up everything about why his party was scouting my palace.”
“Your will is my pleasure, Princess.” Leisha grinned fiendishly and her upper canines sharpened to lethal, eager points. Perhaps too eager.
Kadeesha held her gaze, impressing the importance of the undertaking upon her, and Leisha sobered, nodding firmly. Kadeesha, Leisha, and Samira all knew the chief reason the Nkita, the all-female squadron of Kongamato Flyers that Kadeesha led, had taken this mission on. Yes, she and her sisters had pledged an unswerving vow to be protectors of their lands and their people. However, they had a crucial secondary reason—to thwart the damnable impending wedding that Kadeesha had been unable to convince her father to put off any longer. But Kadeesha had always been stubborn and a fighter, and she didn’t plan to give herself over to the confines of marriage without one final maneuver to escape it. Her father didn’t know about the Apollyon soldiers watching his palace. It was information that Kadeesha and her Nkita had gathered on their own. Not even her father’s great spymaster had discerned this latest threat yet. The way Kadeesha figured it, if she wiped the enemy camp out, brought her father their heads, and revealed the full plot behind their presence, then her father would finally see her value and decide, hopefully, that she was worth more to him as a squadron general than being married off to even their future high king.
She stole a brief moment to pray to Aiyah, the Celestial goddess of fortune and luck, that her plan wasn’t chock-full of misplaced optimism. Then Kadeesha raised her right fist in the air. She allowed it to glow with the incandescent purple of aether, the fifth element that bound the classical four—stone, wind, water, and fire—together, as well as everything else living and nonliving under the heavens. She formed the aether she’d manifested into a swiftly spinning ball that floated in front of her—then let it fly at the campsite. Upon impact with the ground, it washed everything visible in blinding purple light. When the light dimmed, violet fires blazed among the trees, swallowing up tents, engulfing the bodies of Apollyon soldiers. Upon her signal to attack, the rest of her Nkita emitted war shrieks, their kongamatos roared, and Kadeesha and her squadron descended upon the unfortunate survivors of her aether bomb. Her sisters enjoyed the rush of a battle easily won, and their kongamatos ate well.
SHE CHOSE TOwear lilac. Her father would’ve liked her to wear either violet, the symbolic color of the Aether Court, or gold, the color of her betrothed’s heraldry. Instead, Kadeesha clothed herself in a gown that was the hue of the leathers that the Nkita wore when they flew. She did, however, concede to unbraiding her hair and letting a dressmaid sweep her coils into an elegant updo befitting of formal ceremonies.
Father will have to live with getting his way on only one of the two matters, she mused as she strode through a pair of mammoth bronze doors made of prized koppa wood and into Sylas’s expansive throne room—just an hour ahead of when her future husband was due to arrive. Sylas Mercier, king of the Aether fae, in resplendent robes of violet, sat atop a bronze koppa throne with polished amethyst columns for legs. As a fae male who’d lived for 552 years and had grown in power each cycle around the sun, Sylas looked every inch a king who oozed power. As he should, since he’d enjoyed monarch status for over two-thirds of his life. Her father wasn’t a cruel king, per se. But he ruledtheir court firmly, swiftly dealt out punishment to those who displeased him, and aptly rewarded those who proved useful. It was that last trait that Kadeesha was banking on as she raised a severed Apollyon head in the air. Samira and six fellow Nkita did the same with the other heads of the slain enemy soldiers whose bodies hadn’t been incinerated completely by Kadeesha’s fire.
Sylas startled at the sight. When he recovered, curiosity twinkled in his dark amber eyes that were identical to Kadeesha’s. His lips curved with amusement. “Your betrothed is due to arrive in this very room before the hour is up. What is this here? Some grisly wedding present you’ve concocted?”
On a different day, Kadeesha would’ve chuckled. Her father knew his daughter well. And if she’d actually desired to wed the male who would supposedly become the first high king in many millennia, she might just be delivering the heads for the exact purpose Sylas guessed at. Instead, Kadeesha bowed low. When she straightened, she told her father, “These are Apollyon soldiers who’d made camp along the easternmost edges of Koppawald Forest. The entire party has been eliminated, except for three males Leisha presently has chained in the dungeons. She’s extracting the precise reason they were ordered by their king to scout our palace.” Kadeesha had fervently wanted to hand her father that information at the same time as the heads, but Leisha had sent word while Kadeesha had been dressing for the Receiving that her playthings were proving stubborn. It was a character flaw they’d regret soon.
Sylas swept a narrowed gaze along the severed heads, no longer in merry spirits. He raised a hand that was limned in purple fire moments before the eight heads that Kadeesha and her Nkita held were consumed by aether flame until there wasnothing left. That the aether flames never once singed Kadeesha nor the other women was a testament to his power and control over the element. When the heads were nonexistent, leaving not even ash behind, the purple flames vanished. Kadeesha looked around and noted Sylas had cleaned up the blood the heads had dripped on the ivory sunstone floors too. Perhaps she might’ve thought about carrying this gift to her father in a tidier way.
“My archnobles and chancellors will be arriving any moment,” Sylas commented. “I will not have them arrive to such a sight right before Rishaud is due. They’ll be beside themselves.” There was a censure to Sylas’s tone Kadeesha hadn’t predicted he’d display. Her father wasn’t a ruler who let capricious nobles dictate how he operated. The Hyperion liege’s approaching visit must’ve really had him on edge.
Kadeesha bowed low. “I am sorry, Father. Forgive me for the oversight.”
