The Betrayer’s Serpent #2
“I don’t even know what should go on here,” Isobel said in mock helplessness. “Is there any more injustice in the world than this? Whatever fresh pain Valos might lay on my poor body, I simply cannot take it!”
Urias took the lamenting as an opening.
“I do have something for you, Your Highness.” He rose slowly and approached Isobel, flexing his talent for groveling.
He saddened his eyes and hunched his shoulders, unloading the gravel from his voice.
“I think it is a will, written by the Great King for his son. I think you should be the one to read it, to share it with his favored people.”
“What?” Isobel asked, bristling in her seat. “My husband’s will is…” Her mouth moved silently, knowing she could not publicly admit both to knowing where the will was and to not having retrieved it yet.
“This will was in His Majesty’s room. You may check the seals if you doubt me.
They prove its authorship.” Urias practically forced the will into Isobel’s quaking fingers.
She checked the seals, slipping a hand over her mouth when she recognized that third red one.
Bitter fury pricked at her mask of grief, but she had no other choice than to open it.
The audience watched Isobel with such rapt attention that they didn’t even notice they were being set up. At the back of the room, a braid of sage and white magic bundled at Tagas’s feet. It was all so close. Esme’s heart thundered so hard it might beat down the cage of her ribs.
Isobel ripped the scroll open like she was setting a broken bone. Her eyes thinned and she looked up to the court, then at Urias, and then back down at the paper.
“Something wrong, my queen?” Urias asked.
“I can’t read this,” she said. “It’s not in Micrean. It’s not in any civilized language.”
Esme’s throat knotted.
She told herself that the page was in some language no one could read. There was some other set of ancient words Omniel somehow knew.
Urias took the paper again. He didn’t need to squint.
“Esme?”
Fuck.
Urias nodded her up to the throne and let her take a look at that paper. Omniel’s ice-cold fingers practically slid down her spine.
“Can you read it?” Urias asked.
Of course she could. Esme hadn’t seen her birth language in decades, but no stretch of time could ever separate her from these words.
She traced the small, tightly drawn symbols.
Omniel’s handwriting had always been impeccable.
He would put excellent detail on the pictograms even when he didn’t have to.
Esme’s throat clamped shut. The first time she’d gotten even this tiny piece of herself back, and he was using it to re-enslave her.
She couldn’t even write in this language anymore; Omniel had ordered her not to after catching her trying to teach it to Urias.
She’d barely gotten to show him how to write his name before the king had snatched it from her.
“Give me a second to translate,” she said, then turned her back to the room and counted to ten.
All she needed to do was get through this now, and then she could cry in her room like she needed to.
Forcing a breath out through her nose and tightening her jaw, she turned back to the crowd.
A Scary Wraith again, she found the first pictogram—a pair of clasped hands.
“I, Omniel Asterou, Great King of Micrea and Unifier of the Civilized World, do write this will for my first and only son, Turiel Asterou, to be read and abided by upon his death,” she read aloud.
“Should my son die heirless, an Heir of Iron and an Heir of Blood shall be named.
“I hereby name Balthazar Joh’el, General of the Scourge, as the Heir of Iron.
“I hereby name Janos Rivel, Prince of the Lake, as the Heir of Blood.
“These heirs shall be brought to Amaris and compete in a series of three trials, one of Virya, one of Valos, and one of Muhnir, each designed by her regent, Isobel Asterou. The winner of the first trial is to be decided by the mistress’s favor.
The second shall be decided by the master’s skill.
The third shall be decided by the Wraiths, Muhnir’s abominable agents.
“The winner of two or all three trials shall be crowned King of Micrea, and his house and family be given great wealth and honor.
“Such is the will of Turiel Asterou, King of Roses.”
The content of the will sent murmurs through the room, but Esme didn’t care. She was just thankful she hadn’t wept.
Urias raised an eyebrow, obviously unimpressed with Omniel’s dramatic twist. Fine, it was interesting that Omniel had named the men thirty years early, but he could have bargained for some kind of future-revealing ability from Magic.
It would have cost more than what any normal man would have been willing to give, and the deal would have been riskier than any sane man would have agreed to, but Omniel Asterou was never known for being either normal or sane.
It was a neat trick, but it wouldn’t change a thing.
Tagas’s eyes glowed blue. His green-and-white braid of magic perked up like a snake hooked on a song, then unraveled into a mess of threads, strings slithering up mourners’ spines and tunneling into their ears.
The humans slumped forward into their poufy clothes, and even Isobel hunched in her throne, face empty.
Mak’kon flinched toward Hallel, lying collapsed by her mother’s feet, but Esme’s shadows swept his arms behind his back and tackled him to the floor.
He opened his mouth, and Esme shoved a shadow-bit between his teeth.
When their eyes met, his shone with panic.
Esme rolled hers. He’d thank them when it was over.
A deep groaning from inside the bowels of the castle stole Esme’s attention.
That was no trick of Tagas’s. Bricks chattered against each other, and the quaking floors jostled people from his hold.
The abrupt rip from the humans’ minds had blood spitting from the Wraith’s nose, and Samander grabbed him just as he tripped to his knees.
Dust drizzled from above, and then a shard of ceiling dropped right over Padrian’s head. Daphna tackled him out of death’s grip just in time for the piece to shatter on the floor.
Urias grabbed Esme as a chasm opened up before her, swallowing those too slow to escape its jaws.
Their plummeting screams ended in sticky-sounding thwacks a floor below.
The chandeliers swung on their straining, screaming chains.
With a great groan, one of the chains snapped, and the fiery glass cannonball suspended from it flew at the crowd.
Esme threw a ceiling of shadow over the courtiers to save them.
But she couldn’t stop the cinders dropping from the ceiling like hail, igniting their clothes.
Fire ripped through their dresses and frilly shirts until it sank its jaws into soft flesh.
She bit off her scream as she watched in helpless horror as those who could not so quickly shed their burning clothes collapsed in smoldering heaps.
Then, as if the castle realized the ignobility of its shaking, it stood itself up straight. The earthquake ceased.
Esme dropped the chandelier and looked up at the ceiling.
A massive crack ran from the front of the room all the way to the back, so wide that someone had fallen through from the floor above in the chaos and now sat in a burning clump atop the rug.
That crack coughed dust and bricks, begging to crash in on them.
Falling fires chewed the rug and the floor was half glass. An enormous fault line ruined one of Omniel’s stained-glass faces. The living courtiers wore thick coats of dust and dirt. The dead were blackened lumps.
One by one, Esme found her Wraiths. Urias crept to his feet to come to her side, and Tagas and Samander had been backed to a wall by a fallen chunk of bricks.
Daphna and Padrian pushed through the huddled crowds, stamping out the fires from which people were too panicked to save themselves.
Mak’kon shielded Isobel on the throne, Hallel balled up into her lap.
Fine. They were all fine.
Esme exhaled heavily. Except the air died in her lungs.
She tried to breathe in—nothing. Nothing in, nothing out.
That firestorm must have burrowed inside her, because her lungs felt like two piles of ash smoking up her chest. Esme slapped to the ground, strength stolen by the familiar agony of a branding iron coiling around her throat, line under line, before finishing off in the dip of her collarbone.
Esme knew immediately what she’d done. As her blood sizzled against her new command, she rolled onto her side and cursed Omniel and his son and this whole motherfucking country.
Everyone in the room now wore the will as a weeping wound. And a trap.
Because hidden inside the words was a Betrayer’s Serpent, a spell that would strangle its victims to death should they defy its order.
There would be no glamouring the humans, no narrow escape.
There would be no freedom.
Fury raged in Esme. Then, Omniel’s hand—the Bond and this will, his fleshless fingers—strangled her weak again. Fury was purpose, movement. Fury was fuel for the engine of change. Esme didn’t have that engine, though. All that fury gushed out of her throat. Rage was wasted on the powerless.
Each biting second of agony when Esme’s throat expanded to breathe plunged the knife of her failure deeper into her gut.
In that way, Omniel had never died. Maybe his body had weakened and withered and bloated and burst, but he would always wield the knife.
Sink it deep the second she dared hope to be free of him, and twist it when she tried to inch away.
Esme had no desire to move. She wanted to liquefy, to slip into the floor, to melt into its cracks and be nothing. If her body wasn’t hers to use, she didn’t know why she had to be inside of it.