Next came the cavalry. Trainers rode alongside, faces that Sonara recognized from her past. Ones that had not tried to stand up for her the day she died.
She’d deserved it.
A part of her knew she always had.
Banishment, a hundred lashings, a full day locked in the stocks that accepted the tides, that turned from dry ground to a neck-deep crashing sea… she could have endured them all.
Her mother had demanded the Leaping instead.
Duran lifted his head from a bucket and whinnied a greeting as his kin passed, their hoofbeats like the steady roll of thunder.
“Traitor,” Sonara murmured to him.
The steeds were loyal and strong and sturdy, so beautiful it made Sonara’s heart ache. In her mind, she was cast back to Soreia again, polishing their armor in the royal barn, lulled by the smell of sweet grain and fresh hay and fowl chirping in the rafters.
The steeds were wrapped with custom-fitted armor, sharp twin horns spiraling from their masked foreheads. The warriors on their backs were just as fierce, men and women wearing matching breastplates of blue, their helmets painted with the Soreian sigil.
Again, Duran whinnied, and Sonara didn’t have the heart to silence him.
She knew he longed for home, had only left it because his heart was intertwined with hers.
The conch blew again, three short blasts.
People began to bow, dropping to a knee as the procession closed in towards Sonara. Others began to toss desert roses into the line of steeds.
Sonara’s lip curled. From her place at the back of the crowd, she did not bow.
She would never bow again.
A mare she’d known well came into view. It had once been Soahm’s favorite. With lethal grace, the pale beast carried Queen Iridis to the front of the pack. Cheers sounded out, more roses tossed at her feet.
Queen Iridis’ hair was such a deep, beautiful cerulean it rivaled the sea, flowing down her back like ocean waves. She wore fitted blue armor, and atop it, a colorful braided sash, each colored strand signifying how many she had slain in her efforts to become queen as a much younger, fiercer candidate for the crown. It was perched atop her curls, gold with bits of opal on each of its glittering spires.
Let me go,Sonara’s curse begged her.Let me sense the soul of the wicked queen.
It hammered against the cage.
It bashed and caused Sonara to grit her teeth with the effort to hold it in. But as the queen rode past, her curse won, shoving the cage door wide.
Pride, sweet but rotten. Fallen petals crushed by a storm.
Beneath it, the oily metallic tang of someone who had spilled blood.
“Easy, Sonara,” Jaxon murmured gently, as if he could sense the hatred coming off her in waves. “Remember who you are. What power she no longer holds over you.”
Sweat began to bead on Sonara’s brow. She rooted herself to the spot, gripping Lazaris like a vice as Queen Iridis turned her gaze to the left.
She looked right at Sonara with a glare that could stop a heart.
Looked rightthroughher, the bastard child she’d once sentenced to death.
“Sonara?”
Jaxon’s voice drew her back to the present, where she stood with Lazaris still gripped in her fist as the sound seemed to snap back into place. Cheers and laughter and light all around her, but inside…
The Devil of the Deadlands snarled.
Soahm’s name for her future had stuck. It had fueled her and given her a reason to become stubborn and deadly andstrong.Her heart beat faster, whispering the promise it had held for years as she glared at her mother’s retreating form, remembering the day she and Duran died and came back to life.
