The whispers spoke of destruction and urged me to fight.
I have no doubt I’ll need to. I’m certain I’m about to face the terrible power, subjugation, and domination the whispers spoke of. I’m determined to fight for my survival with everything I can, but the rage I sensed in the whispers, the fury beating at me from the blade…
It isn’t my own.
It doesn’t belong to me.
My choices must remain mine.
Iwill decide when it’s time to fight.
I risk a glance at my father. The first lesson he ever taught me was that I’m a danger to anyone who loves me.
He loved me. Now he’s dead. The kings may not have killed him, but we’re here in this village because of them. Exposed to whatever villager stabbed my fatherbecause of them.
I’ve run from the three kings my entire life, and I was preparing to hand myself over to their warriors, but now I know I must do more than that.
New resolve settles within my heart as I face the oncoming fae and raise my voice again. “Summon your kings!”
The highborn freeze at my cry, all of them glancing at each other. The tension between them is overwhelming. Each kingdom is an enemy of the other two. If they want to capture or kill me, they will also have to fight each other.
It’s clear they’re willing to do whatever it takes when they resume stalking towards me from all three sides, but none of them does what I asked.
I suppose they think I’m weak.
After all, I appear as nothing more than a lowborn to them, my clothing dripping from the ocean’s water, my hairbedraggled, and, as much as I hate to admit it, shivers now wracking me. I’m cold, exhausted, and riddled with grief.
But I’m determined to make them listen.
I hold the Dragonstone Blade aloft, its cloth covering clamped between my palm and its hilt.
Lowering my voice, I speak quietly this time, soft with deadly intent. “Summon your kings. Or I will kill you with the Dragonstone Blade and summon them myself.”
Each of the warriors stops, stiffens, and then, startlingly, they obey me, stepping back into the shadows, their outlines disappearing into the shroud.
I’m surprised by their immediate retreat, but too soon, I realize it had nothing to do with me.
Three new figures move within the smoke.
“There’s no need to summon us,” comes a deep rumble from the first figure, an intimidating masculine voice, as he steps through the haze directly ahead of me. He brings darkness and the scent of burning iron with him, stopping before he would emerge into the light.
The second man, who approaches on my left, is even taller than the first, his presence sending a wash of icy air across my bare arms. I catch only the unforgiving press of his lips in a beam of sunlight before he, too, stops in the shadows.
His cold whisper reaches me across the suddenly frozen air, ice mingling with iron. “We’re already here.”
The third figure prowls toward me from my right, cloaked in smoke. His features are concealed while heat radiates from him—heat that warms my skin, turning the icy air to summer. The dry scent of desert dunes mingles with burning iron and frozen snow.
“Your screams of pain called us,” this man says, his voice an alluring baritone, as seductive and hypnotic as a deadly serpent before it strikes. “It seems we’veall answered.”
Each man stops, right at the edge of the thickest smoke, half in shadow and half in light, the friction between them seething with hatred and malice.
The three kings.
Each of them, dark and cruel.
Each of them slowly rips me apart with their shadowed eyes.
Chapter Six
