An aether bomb flew past his head. It would’ve smashed into his face if he hadn’t reacted with frighteningly quick reflexes. Her mind had already put the pieces together. She was livid and wanted to gutthisking where he stood too. “It was you who made sure our affairs last night traveled back to Rishaud. You wanted him infuriated and unfocused enough during the ceremony that he didn’t see past your glamours, or even think to look too closely at the unfamiliar kinsfolk among the attendees.” It was a solid strategy, an exceptional one she might’ve admired if she hadn’t been a part—and victim—of it.
Malachizrien didn’t deny anything. He dipped his head in silent confirmation, a wicked shine in his brown eyes.
“You knew who I was the moment you walked into Oleander House!” Kadeesha fumed. “You used me and concealed who you were,Malachi!” She threw another aether bomb. This time, he didn’t dodge it. He did what he had with Rishaud’s magic andengulfed it in a cloud of blackness, smothering her purple flames with his void magic.
“You were quite up-front about wanting to use me too. Although, you were not up-front about the reason, were you?” he parried. “What if I really was some unfortunate sap you’d seduced and then shoved in front of the Hyperion king as a target for his jealousy?”
Kadeesha pushed her shoulders back. He did not get to turn things around on her. “You wanted to incite his temper. You’re as much at fault for this massacre as he is,” she spat.
A dark scowl marred Malachizrien’s maddeningly beautiful face. “Do not compare me to himever.”
Kadeesha grunted, waving her hand at the death around them. “If the crown fits …”
The look he gave her silenced the rest of her retort. If she were a lesser individual, it would’ve cleaved her in two. Even still, it took a lot of strength to ask, “What happens now?” shifting the useless conversation to the most prudent matter. “Do you kill me as well, the Aether archprincess and would-be high queen of enemy lands, to make a point?”
“On my life, that’s not happening, Your Highness,” Leisha said through clenched teeth. She gripped her sword and tried to step in front of Kadeesha.
But Kadeesha stubbornly wouldn’t allow it. Leisha wasn’t about to place herself in the line of death to protect Kadeesha from what she’d helped, at least in part, bring about. The rapidly falling adrenaline was being replaced with renewed gnawing guilt.
Later.She’d wrestle with it later.
Malachizrien’s assessing gaze turned to Leisha. It didn’t linger on her like it did with Kadeesha. He completed a perfunctoryappraisal and then simply warned her sister, “Don’t do anything foolish.”
The raven-haired woman among the Apollyons flashed to her liege’s side. She held a void scythe at the ready. “This may be the sole time I publicly go against you,” she told Malachizrien. But her smile—all bared teeth—was for Leisha. “Do proceed with whatever you were thinking in that pretty head of yours. You’re a newly minted noble, but I’d enjoy killing you where you stand anyway, southerner.”
Leisha chortled. “You don’t know me if that’s your advice,” she tossed at Malachizrien. “And it’s amusing you think I’d be an easy kill,” she informed the black-haired beauty who glowered at her.
The air around them plunged to the bitterly cold, year-round temperature of the lands that lay in the shadow of the Yunnas. Kadeesha eyed the Apollyon woman whose honey-colored eyes were now ringed in a frosty blue and concluded she was the cause of the shift. She filed the knowledge away, quickly assessing ways the woman might leverage the magic in a fight and how it might be exploited against her.
“If you haven’t attempted to kill the princess yet, then it means you have a reason,” Samira ground out. “What is it?” Her voice was hoarse, her brown skin was ashen, and she continued to hold her chest with one hand, blood pouring through her slick fingers. She needed a healer.
“Yes. Let’s hear what you want then if she is right,” Kadeesha demanded of Malachizrien to get on with things and get her sister help. He visibly bristled at the command. She snorted, but couldn’t quite curtail the heat that rushed to her core at the reminder of the power struggle the two of them had engaged in the prior night.
The Apollyon king allowed a few seconds to drag on—to be an ass, obviously. “I had planned to kill you along with the rest of your people. Each monarch of the Six Kingdoms owes me a debt, and they are going to pay it with their lives, the lives of their royal lines, the lives of their loyal noblefolk, and the utter decimation of their courts. Fortunately for you, Princess, Rishaud slipping away means you’ve become more valuable to me alive. If you are in my possession, he’ll seek to gain you back as a matter of saving face alone. But the prophecy he thinks wedding you will help him fulfill should coax him all the more fervently. So what happens next, love, is you and I are going to play a little game with your betrothed, with you as the bait I use to draw him to me next time while weakening his infernal claim about what the Celestials desire. However, I’ll make you a deal, Kadeesha Mercier.”
“Why would you offer me a deal?”
“Because the trap I’ve got in mind erodes Rishaud’s gibberish about the gods’ will better if you play nicely. Come with me to my court and aid me willingly …” He paused and waved at Leisha and Samira. “If you agree to those terms, then I give my oath to heal your injured friend at once and let the pair of them walk free out of the temple without being attacked by me or any of the individuals here with me.”
As oaths among faekind went, it was thorough. Kadeesha couldn’t poke any gaps in it that revealed deceitful phrasing, and any oaths uttered between fae were magically binding. But this was the Apollyon king … a monarch who was sovereign to a population of fae often featured as the monsters in children’s folktales within the Six Kingdoms. Most adults on their side of the Yunna Mountains harbored a healthy fear and distrust of Apollyon fae as well. It was for good reason, given the bloodyhistory and centuries of wars between the Apollyons and southern faefolk. Even if Malachizrien could be made to keep to his word, internal alarm bells blared that she’d be taking a perilous risk. Perhaps her mind was too clouded with worry for Samira and despair over the dozens of corpses inside the temple and therewassome deceit sewn into the oath he offered up that she couldn’t discern. Further, he likely had some grisly death in store for her once she was no longer useful. If he knew about the prophecy, then he seemed like the type to be thorough and kill not only the monarch who sought to conquer his lands but the woman whose future offspring was prophesied to rule over them too. Yet what choice did Kadeesha have? Especially when there was no mistaking Malachizrien’s clear threat implicit in his offer:If you do not accept my terms, then your friends do not leave this temple alive.
And, perhaps, neither do you.
“Refuse him! Do not think of us!” Leisha hissed to Kadeesha, surmising the same thing she had.
“Yes … say.… no …” Samira crumpled to her knees after squeezing the words out. There was so much blood around her, streaking the floor along the path she’d taken as she rushed to Kadeesha’s side. There was too much of it. Kadeesha went numb when she looked back to her sister. Samira was sprawled on the altar, unmoving. Kadeesha couldn’t detect her chest rising and falling with her breaths.
“Okay. I accept the terms,” Kadeesha rushed out. “I’ll play whatever part you want, agree to whatever you want. Just help her!”
As soon as she cried the words, the air crackled with an ancient magic—the likes of which powered all oaths sworn between fae—that sealed their bargain.
Chapter Seven
VOID AND SOLAR MAGIC WERE ENTIRELY DIFFERENTfrom the elemental magics. The former were two of the primordial materials that the Celestials had used to weave together their world and everything in it eons ago. Which was why fae who potently wielded either could teleport between pockets of darkness or light, like Malachizrien and Rishaud had done while battling. Recalling the precise degree to which Malachizrien, the man she’d allowed to teleport her away to his court after striking their bargain, had matched Rishaud in savagery, terrifying speed, strength, and near-suffocating power, left a lingering chill clinging to Kadeesha as she gazed at the Apollyon palace that she was about to march into—and not as a conqueror. With the soaring Cascadians at its back, a chain that covered a smaller distance than the Yunnas but rivaled it in height, Kadeesha got the impression she wasn’t about to pass into a mere castle but a fortress … or a prison.
Either way, it might be a place I never emerge from, she thought with dread.
Yes, she and Malachizrien had made a bargain, he’d fulfilledhis oath of healing Samira, and she’d made the choice to come here. But now that she’d arrived in Zahare, the Apollyon Court’s seat of power, the decision she’d made in order to save Samira was fully setting in, as was the certainty that Malachizrien had no intention of allowing her to leave the city alive. He’d said he aimed to murder every remaining southern monarch and decimate their royal lines, which included herself among the lot.
