Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I shivered in the dank cavern where I’d been left to rot since I was heaved away from the body of the man who had ruled over this land for the last thousand years, his blood still staining my clothes and skin, the sound of his pleas still ringing in my ears.
I had thought it would feel better than this.
I had thought that gaining this vengeance would have earned me at least a little solace.
But it hadn’t brought her back. It didn’t change what he had done.
My sister was still lost to this world, her children still left to cry themselves to sleep night after night, her husband left to raise them alone. And me? Well, I was just…left.
I thought of the man she had been mated to and focused on him and the two beautiful little creations they had made together.
A Fae child was a blessing. Twins were a gift from all the gods combined.
Not to mention the fact that they had been born with powerful Affinities which could be seen from the very moment of their birth.
Such obvious signs of power were rare in new born Fae, and I had no doubt they would grow up to be powerful beyond my wildest dreams, more than capable of forging their own places in this beautiful, cruel world.
Of course they’d had to run when I told him what I planned to do.
Killing an emperor was treason after all and the punishment for that went beyond the death of the Fae who had carried it out.
It was a death sentence for every member of their family too.
Which meant my actions equalled the deaths of him and the twins if they were caught in this kingdom.
It had been the only thing which had given me pause in this plan, but when I’d spoken to Aren, it had been clear that he was also sick with the need for vengeance.
If I hadn’t been the one to take the emperor’s life, then he would have done it himself.
It had been hard to convince him to allow me to be the one to carry out the task.
But in the end, he’d had to admit that there were too many reasons for it to be me instead.
I would be able to get close under the guise of wanting to be a new concubine.
I would be seen as no threat, especially in the sheer dress I wore to seduce him and with such harmless Affinities as mine.
No one would suspect anything of me until after it was done.
Besides, Aren was the only parent the twins had left.
They couldn’t lose him too. So we had bought them passage on a boat to the distant kingdom of Souvion where the guards of our city held no jurisdiction and the queen who sat upon the throne there would be all too welcoming of someone who’d had a hand in the emperor’s death.
Not that he planned on announcing his connection to me unless he absolutely had to.
I had stolen more than enough coin and jewels to keep him and the children provided for, for the next two hundred years.
Plenty of time for him to establish himself and start earning honest money again.
For them to grow into their powers and become as formidable as I knew they could be.
All I had to do was keep the secret of their destination safe if I was interrogated, and I would embrace any and all forms of torture willingly before I ever spoke of their location and allowed them to face this fate with me.
The sick feeling which pressed at the base of my throat had become normal after days of being shackled in iron and left to starve down here in the dark.
I’d slept twice when exhaustion had forced me to keel over, the manacles cutting into my flesh as I hung from them, and even the bite of the cold, damp stone which surrounded me did nothing to keep me awake any longer.
Not that I had gained anything in sleep.
All I’d been gifted were the memories of my sister’s cold hand in mine, of the discoloured bruises around her neck and the story that she had been found that way in an alley on the outskirts of the city.
I knew the guard who had brought her home to us in that state had been telling the truth so far as he believed it, because our kind could not speak a lie.
But I also knew that she had not been killed in that alley despite the work of some devious Fae who had tried to make it appear that way.
The guard had even suggested she could have been visiting someone nefarious on the outskirts of the city, though he had no evidence to support that, and I hated him for the suggestion which besmirched her name.
The implication that she might have been unfaithful was an insult to her memory and the love she had held for her family. She had done no such thing.
I had lost myself to my grief before even hearing out his murmured condolences and empty promises to hunt for the killer.
I’d wept as I’d tried and tried to use my healing Affinity to heal away the marks left on the flesh of her neck by the print of hands far bigger than hers.
The hands of a man who refused to hear the word no.
But no matter how much power I had managed to summon, it hadn’t been enough to return her from where she’d gone.
I knew full well who had stolen her from us.
Our so-called monarch who had a taste for pretty things which did not belong to him.
He had been trailing my sister’s movements whenever we were duty bound to attend court, coveting her beauty and making his interest known no matter how hard she worked to avoid his attention.
Emperor Farish had ruled for so long and been given so much that he had forgotten what it was like to be denied. He thought he was entitled to take her, even when she refused him out of love for the family she had chosen for herself, out of devotion to her mate. But he’d thought wrong.
A twisted smile lifted my lips as I remembered how hot his blood had felt when it spilled over my hands, how easily his flesh had parted beneath my blade.
My arms had grown tired with how many times I’d swung it.
The ache from the force I’d used lingering in them even now.
But I’d had to be certain. I wasn’t going to risk a healer being able to fix him, nor any prayer to Luciet, the goddess of healing, to grant him a miracle he was undeserving of.
Instead, I’d prayed to the most feared deity of all and begged her for the strength and power I needed to fulfil my task. And Herdat had answered my request, accepting my offering to her in the blood of an immortal emperor and guiding my hand so that I struck true.
Water dripped in an endlessly changing rhythm somewhere close by, a small pool just out of sight around the bend.
My feet were still damp from when they dragged me through it when they brought me down here days ago, the cold, wetness of this place making certain they couldn’t dry.
No doubt the skin within my silk shoes was suffering for it, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to try and remove them.
I hadn’t even tried to remove the iron shackles which were secured around my wrists.
The thin, once pale blue silk of the gown I’d worn when I’d snuck into the emperor’s bed clung to my flesh and did nothing to help banish the cold from my limbs, the fabric near translucent now and stained with so much blood that you could hardly even tell what colour it had once been.
The sound of heavy footsteps approaching made me crack my eyes open, my head raising from where it had fallen to hang against my chest in the most comfortable position I could maintain while my arms were stretched out towards the walls either side of me.
“Has the heir decided what to do with her then?” a guard inquired, his voice familiar to me after days of hearing him and the others exchange words. They maintained a position guarding me out of sight, nearer the exit of the cavern beneath the palace where I was being held.
“Savinia has decided to allow me the honour of doling out punishment,” a cold voice replied, letting me know what the emperor’s daughter had decided should be done with me, the sound of his words seeming to slither across my ears, forcing a trickle of fear into me which I hadn’t even realised I was capable of feeling anymore.
I knew who approached me. Kalir, the emperor’s former advisor and royal Prophet.
He took the magic of the gods and wielded it like it was his own.
Many spoke out against the things he and his kind practiced, but the emperor had always been too selfish to care for the fears of his people.
He wasn’t worried about angering the gods when he believed he had been blessed and favoured by them since his birth so very long ago.
I wondered if he still believed himself blessed now that he was lingering in the after. Who knew if he had found paradise or eternal torment, but I hoped with all that was left of me that it was the latter.
“Come to execute me?” I asked impassively, my voice a brittle thing as Kalir and the guard rounded the corner, the light of the torch the guard carried making my eyes prickle and sting after days left to linger in the dark.
“That would be all too simple an end for the Fae who killed our great emperor, would it not?” Kalir asked, the eerie brightness in his eyes making my skin pepper with goosebumps.
It wasn’t natural what he was or what he took from the gods.
I didn’t care what justification his kind used; we shouldn’t have wielded the power of the gods the way he did.
Sorcery went far beyond the use of our Affinities.