“I fucked him,” she hisses. “He slept with me more often than he fucked you.Me. I warmed his bed.”
“Thank you,” I reply.Smile wider. There, she believes you.
My happiness is a trick, a rainbow. Just a reflection. Not real and concrete like the sun, like my inner feelings, which are the furthest from a smirking glow.
The angry vibrations in her chest cause mine to solidify. Did she think I’d snap and attack her? Give Galen a reason to lock me in my room and allow his court to gossip that I’ve gone feral?
Reaching up, I cup her cheek. “Did you think I would cry, Sable?” I playfully tap her nose, making her feel smaller.
She jerks back. Her hand reaches for her dagger.
I arch a brow. “Do it. Come on, you know you want to, and now you know how much I want it all to end. Grant me the mercy of not having to see your face again,” I snicker. I’ve trapped her. She knows it. If she kills me, I win. If she doesn’t, I still win.
She looks at all the people watching and tries to compose herself by pretending to adjust her belt.
“You have always wanted what I had. It’s not the first time you’ve had my scraps. What was his name…” I pretend to forget for a moment.“Oh yes, Claude. You slept with him after I did. He told you it was over; he wanted me back. You killed him, but his family was rather influential.”I raise my hand to rub my jaw.
She flinches, but I’m nowhere near finished.
“They tried to start an uprising. Father killed them all; well, he orderedyouto. He wanted to train your death magic. Father had hoped you could kill them within minutes, but you failed. It took you five days because you were weak. Five days of rotting, decaying flesh. That dungeon smelled so dreadful that Father didn’t venture down there to see your final masterpiece. How does it feel to know you were commissioned to make art, but then it was never gazed upon, never hung on the wall to be praised? That’s got to be worse than never selling a piece of art at all.” I let my attack sink in before I continue.
“You know what I learned from your failures? You think your magic is death. Death doesn’t slumber like your magic needs to. You’re just rot.”
She shakes her head, lost in a red-faced fury. “Death comes in many shapes and forms. I am death!”
“No,” I reply calmly. “You’re just rot, and that doesn’t sound so scary.” I continue, “Did Father tell you he forced me to try to bring them back, but it didn’t work?”
Suspicion marks her brow. She’s wondering why I’m admitting my failure.
I remember that night. I tried so hard to bring them back.I almost killed myself in the process. Everett stormed in and pulled me away. He and my father fought. Everett walked away with a physical scar and I with a mental one.
The truth is, my twinisstronger than I am. Death and rot are more powerful than life. Life is wind. It wrestles, roars, and tries to erode what stands in its way. Eventually, it must bow down to the other elements.
Death, oh that terrible, unstoppable beast, is water; it can rise up and rip through towns like a plague. It can seduce men, who are lost in the hot sands; it can also be calm and content as it waits to claim you—to rot you.
I’ve been as angry as a howling wind at times, knowing that Sable could kill another with her magic. She just needed to make contact with them long enough.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t bring someone back from death.
I heal. Those seeds weren’t dead; they were sleeping, so it was easy to shake them awake again.
My magic has limits.
Sable’s does not.
Sable slinks back, a snake ready to strike. The ground under her feet turns shades of sickly green as she pours her savage rot into the soil. “I’m going to take everything from you.”
“You said I had nothing,” I rebuttal. “Looks like you need to make new goals.” Chills run up my spine. Wind dances over the sweat on my brow, trying to cool me.
“You have no idea what goals I have. Everett was always a step ahead, halting me.” Sable brushes invisible dirt off her shoulder. “Now I’m free, and there is nothing you can do to stop me.” She aims her nose, like the tip of an arrow at my heart. “I will watch you take your last breath with a smile on my lips, Selene. The world you love, the people you adore, our home, these stupid kingdoms—those are what I will take from you. From everyone who doubted me.”
“You’d need an army to take so much,” I reply.
“And I shall have one.”
“Your loins will be very chafed with the amount of fucking you’re going to have to do, Sable. Even then, you will fail because there is no army big enough to take every kingdom.”
“You’re right.” She turns her back to me, then she looks over her shoulder and whispers, “That’s why I will make one.”
