The Song
Surely, Urias expected to drown his disappointment in all that liquor.
He choked down his fifth flask of the trip.
They’d only embarked a grand four hours ago.
One would think he’d want to be sober, maneuvering his horse around the holes in the crumbling excuse for a road.
One wrong step and he could find himself and his mount tossed into a sharp bush of poison roses.
Then again, drunk as he was, he might not notice the thorns.
“If you don’t slow down, you’ll die,” Esme warned. They’d fallen through lots of phases in their long lives. Urias had been devoted to the bottle during many of them.
“Not for long enough,” Urias quipped, voice not even slurred. It took a barrel of beer at least to get to him. “Want a drink?” He held out the flask to her.
Esme took it. Every drop she drank was one he didn’t.
“Ugh. This reeks worse than out here,” she said, hacking at the taste of the foul liquor.
Urias snorted at her twisted-up face. “Nothing reeks like out here.” He shook his head at the miles of poisonous vines around them.
On either side of the road were liars’ rose fields.
The flowers had yet to bloom; they always waited for Wallain, Amaris’s summer holiday, to finally open up.
Liars’ rose was a flower red almost to the point of being black, and its scent was worse than rotten rat.
The plant could be crushed and processed into a liquid called liars’ nectar, just a thimbleful of which could kill a horse.
Compress it and spray it across someone’s body, and it corroded the skin to the bone.
It used to grow only in Amaris, until demand for it jumped sharply thirty years ago during the civil war in Thu Pak, a country south of Micrea.
Nothing invigorated the economy like a war, especially one on another shore.
Even when Thu Pak finally found peace five years ago, the poison was still in high demand across the world.
To keep up, Turiel razed a few villages and gave some noble shit ten million talons to oversee the cultivation of a five-mile field of roses fifty miles south of Amaris.
“Song’s balls, I have to be drunk just to breathe the air,” Urias muttered, taking the last sip Esme had left him in the flask.
“Get too drunk and the Song might just come and eat you,” Esme said.
“I’d love for the Song to come blazing out of a Void and eat me,” Urias said, scratching a hand through his hair. “Might seduce him. I think I could. I’m handsome enough.”
“I think bedding the Song would kill you,” Esme said, but now she had to consider the logistics of Song fucking.
“I always wanted to fuck a monster,” Urias mused.
The Song was an old story every child on Esme’s home world was terrified with from the very second they could read.
The fiery god of hell impregnated a princess of night, and their child was the Song.
He was a hatred-filled monster who burned down his home world.
His god parents couldn’t kill him, so they threw him in a tower and sent a snake-bodied demigod to guard him.
He, of course, killed her, and escaped, then went on to slay his whole family and swallow his mother whole.
They say if you press an ear to his belly, you can still hear her screams. He now leapt from world to world, gobbling up heroes and bringing death and sorrow everywhere he touched.
And Urias wanted to fuck him.
“You are a disaster,” Esme said, leaning backwards and stretching her arms up into the night.
“I could get worse.” Urias looked longingly over at her, but that was not in their cards for tonight.
“I don’t get any of this. Omniel didn’t want Magic here.
That’s why he destroyed the Void—to keep us quiet, and to make sure Magic never turned its head our way.
And now he’s just unleashing kingdom-killing spells on everyone?
It doesn’t make sense.” Omniel could make trades with the Void, sure, but he couldn’t handle Magic waltzing into his capital city and burning it down.
Omniel had killed his Void just before his own death, and Micrea had only grown more and more cut off from Magic since then. Until now.
“Omniel didn’t want uncontrolled Magic here,” Esme corrected Urias.
Omniel wanted Magic. That was how the Wraiths had landed in this clusterfuck to begin with.
“This spell is his doing, and the Magic in Amaris is Turiel’s.
Turiel wasn’t exactly policing Amaris like Omniel did.
We used to have to search for a fight. Now the knights run the pits.
” She made a grabbing motion at the flask.
“It was only a matter of time. Jingim’s making better drugs, Turiel cut the People’s Fund, and the kingdom’s a shitshow. ”
“I know, I just… it’s sudden. Magic moves into the city, we have a few bad nights, and next thing you know, the king is dead and we have beartrap spells on our throats. It doesn’t seem connected?”
“It seems extremely connected, but there’s nothing we can prove.” Esme took another drink. “What, did Magic kill the king?”
Urias raised a very dangerous eyebrow.
“And how do we prove that?” Esme asked breathlessly.
“We don’t. We can only be terrified of the possibility. We need to get this under control again—shut down the pits and get the drugs out. I don’t know why Magic and I have the same taste in fun,” he muttered.
Esme snorted. “Well, you’re both vast, empty, eternal caverns of loneliness ready to swallow anything that might make you feel something,” she said, shooting him a look out of the corner of her eye.
“Get fucked.”
“Can’t. Might tip off the Magic.” Esme’s lips quirked up. “Maybe it’s all those one-night stands you’re having. Maybe your wanton dick killed the king.”
“And the fact that I’d also fuck the Song.
I’m sure that’s chaotic.” Urias threw her a bawdy grin.
His smile died to a small curve, and his eyes were terrified, regardless of whatever came out of his mouth.
He veered his horse close to hers and put a hand on her leg.
“I love you. When the world ends, I hope we get to die together.” He was finally drunk, but Esme knew it was a sober sentiment.
“If the world ends, then we can fuck the Song together,” she said, then put her hand on his and squeezed it.
Before Mak’kon had broken them fifteen years ago, they’d been completely enamored with each other.
Their romance was long dead now, but the love between them was a rope pulled taut, braided too tight to cut.
It was why they were still such a unit, even inside their family of Wraiths. “I love you, too. The world won’t end.”
“I sort of hope it does,” he said, slurring as the liquor sank in. “It’s what these bastards deserve.”
He slapped a kiss to her hand, then let his horse wander a bit away. Esme watched him go, swallowing the fear that Urias might just get his wish.
* * *
The town of Prelyn was an itty-bitty dot on the map, barely big enough for Esme to see as she navigated to it over the few days.
The first time she’d visited the place, some twenty years ago when the army settled there, it was barely more than a few thatched roofs.
Now, Prelyn was a walled city with army men manning its gate more faithfully than the knights in Amaris guarded the king.
When Esme and Urias introduced themselves, they were allowed in only begrudgingly.
Unlike every other town in Micrea, the people of Prelyn smiled.
Children played ball in the streets, mothers washed old clothes, husbands exchanged pleasantries over the day’s work, and everyone was smiling.
And they did it sober. Fine, maybe Esme expected the soldiers to have built up the town a little bit, but she didn’t expect well-constructed houses with stone foundations, or orderly land plots, or cleaned, paved brick roads with street names.
No civilian wore weapons, but soldiers with knives tucked into the back of their belts made friendly ornaments for the corners. A street guard system?
As Esme and Urias rode through the city, parents lifted their children to get a better look at the foreign visitors on giant horses, but no one shied away.
They marveled at Esme’s hair and pointed out Urias’s skin, not because they were disgusted but because they were interested.
One girl pulled at her father’s pants to ask why the two of them were that color.
He told her that sometimes it happened to people.
Urias’s mouth dropped when he heard that answer.
Usually, it wasn’t that kind. (“Well, you see, the abominable god sent up evil creatures with brown skin and matted hair.”) Esme couldn’t exactly blame them.
The foundational text of the country told them that she’d been belched out of a snake because an evil incest baby threw a fit.