Chapter 21 #2
But when he’d wheeled around, it hadn’t been one of the fearsomely beautiful faces that greeted him.
It had been one just as perfect, just as fierce—but far more familiar. He hadn’t known whether to rejoice or curse the arrival of the man who seemed to be half-wraith, slipping in and out of their lives like a specter. “Fodur.”
His father stood taller than the other thanes, but now he crouched beside Daemon—Sig, at the time. “Took you long enough.”
“What?” Fodur’s voice had sounded teasing, but that made no sense.
This was not a situation made for levity, and Fodur, of all people, ought to have known it.
The way he vanished, his visits lasting only hours or at most a few days—he was a revolutionary.
He’d never said it, but their whole family knew.
There was no other explanation. He wouldn’t joke about the injustice he was so busy fighting that he’d rarely been there to watch his sons grow up.
“I was never certain if it would be you or your brother who would first wake up and realize you are not Elyon, not the one with control over life and death. That you must seek help to achieve what matters most.”
Sig had been about to ask who Elyon was, but the words froze on his tongue when Fodur pulled out a knife. It didn’t glint like metal would. It looked like flint, but this certainly wasn’t time to build a cooking fire.
Fodur had reached for his right hand. “Strike the flint, my son.” He’d drawn the edge over Sig’s finger, blood welling up. “Fan the flames of freedom.”
Sig’s palm had burned, the heat so sudden, so consuming, that he’d wondered if his father—his own father, absent as he had been—had poisoned him with something. Something that made his vision swim, made the familiar features of the man who’d sired him flicker as if he were made of pure flame.
Fodur had nodded over the berm, toward the Blessed. “Make him bleed.” He’d pressed the crude blade into Sig’s hand.
Permission to attack, he’d thought at the time. To use whatever violence necessary to win, to save Tuva. He’d thought, as he went roaring over the berm and launched himself at the Blessed beast, that Himmel had granted him favor. That he’d win. That, somehow, it would change things.
Now, he realized what it really was. His father—not just a revolutionary, not even human if what Perla said was true, but rather a seraph—had primed Daemon’s blood with the flint, called those nanites in it to alertness. Opened the door.
But he’d needed that Blessed’s blood to Awaken the fire within him.
He hadn’t saved Tuva that day. He certainly hadn’t saved himself, only landed himself in prison. But he’d slashed the man in the side, and he’d obviously gotten blood into his own still-bleeding wound.
The fires had Awakened. And they’d changed things.
Had brought the weight of the Crown down upon him and gotten him tossed into Helviti.
His father’s knife, the very blade used to Awaken him, had been confiscated and handed over to Axel, still with Sig’s blood on it.
Effectively showing him how to find the same power in others. All while Sig burned Below.
Eternal damnation, Axel had called it. Because the Giver had reduced him to a daemon.
But his fodur’s words echoed in his mind still, again, after all these years. Wake up and realize you are not Elyon, not the one with control over life and death. You must seek help to achieve what matters most.
He hadn’t saved Tuva that day because he’d fallen back on his own strength, and even with the newly-lit fires that he’d had no idea how to harness, it hadn’t been enough.
Just as it hadn’t been enough for the endless years Below.
Hadn’t been enough to help his people escape the chains of slavery.
It—him, his own power—had never been enough. His way only led to failure.
What had finally brought change to Fjordlandi? A young woman opening her heart to the Giver. A young man willing to risk his own neck to teach a princess the way of faith.
Daemon had been wrong. All these years, he’d been wrong.
He wouldn’t make the same mistake today. Not my power, he prayed toward Himmel. Yours. Only yours, Eternal One.
His senses opened, and he felt the heat of the water, increasing the farther down it went.
Hotter and hotter, until he found its source—the river of lava.
A pull, a tug, and he brought that molten rock up through the thin layer separating it from the spring, into the water, fast enough that only the outer layer could harden and crust over.
As water turned to steam and sought an exit, the stone trembled. Pressure built. Daemon pulled more, replacing water with lava, forcing the steam upward, outward.
The prison shook. The voices, a cacophony around him, turned to shouts of surprise and even pain as ice locks melted, turned to gas, and exploded out onto them.
He pulled lava into its place. Molten rock every place ice had been, the very bars of the cells becoming streams of it. The prison warmed, grew hot, sweltered.
The ice-hewn Blessed cried out in distress.
It would serve them right to bake in here. To die of it like countless thanes had in their ice. To let their screams fuel him, feed him.
Strike the flint. Fan the flames of freedom.
But then he remembered his father’s glowing eyes. They hadn’t been giving him permission for vengeance. They’d anointed him with some other purpose. A nobler one, if he was strong enough to grasp it.
Kyrja, young though she was, had demonstrated that strength. She had righted wrongs, beginning in this very place. Then had shown mercy to those she’d sentenced here, rather than ending them on the spot, as Daemon would have done.
Her words had said life was punishment, but he’d known even then that it wasn’t true. She hadn’t put the Council in this prison to torment them, but because hers was not a heart that could take a life.
He pulled back the heat. Not from the locks or the bars, but from the stones. As she’d pulled back the ice for Nikanor and the other prisoners who she’d since released. And so, for all of them.
I’d wondered if you served only your Aflame or your Blessed queen.
Perhaps the answer Daemon had shown Stefanos two days ago hadn’t been the right one. Perhaps when he’d bent the knee during the coronation ball, it had been only a display, for Nik and Elianne’s sake more than Kyrja’s. But he’d revise it now.
Her father, his before him, Daemon had called a tyrant. He refused to ever, ever call them king. But from that first moment, he’d recognized something different in Kyrja and had no trouble giving her the title she deserved.
Queen. But not just that. His queen. She led them, even when she wasn’t here.
Led them into a better way. A way that would make his father, and the One in Himmel, proud.
And so he would honor her rule, even when she wasn’t here.
Truly bend the knee to his true queen. Do all in his power to solidify the kingdom she strove to establish, one of equity and mercy and truth.
Freedom.
Once he felt the lava fill every crevice of the crystal locking system and sealed off the access to the springs, Daemon pulled his hand away from the stone. Stood, blinked to clear his eyes of the past, of himself, and focused again on the world around him.
His family were all taunting the Blessed behind the new bars with grins and laughter—and in Eldrid’s case, a few rude gestures.
Perla was staggering back to her feet, braid drenched in sweat.
With fumbling fingers, she unfastened the clasps on her jerkin and wrestled it off her arms. No doubt with the new heat, anything more than the undershirt beneath her thigh-length leather coat had been suffocating.
It was the sudden wave of exhaustion that made him forget to look away, that was all. Not the fact that, dressed in leathers just a few shades off her hair color, she looked like a honeyed version of an Aflame.
She stumbled a bit as she moved toward him, clearly as drained as he was.
If ever there was a time for a truce…he held an arm to steady her. “Thanks. For holding them off.”
She nodded, then leaned against him, resting her forehead on his shoulder long enough to drag in a deep breath. Then pushing herself away. “Good work yourself.”
It was the first time she didn’t add some teasing moniker—King of the Daemons or hot and handsome—and the fact that he missed it made him give a brusque nod and turn to seek out Elianne. She’d clearly only kissed him back the other day because he’d surprised her.
Still. He’d relived it a hundred times since, replaying it in his mind like a recording on a crystal, especially when Perla taunted him.
Elianne was the one he’d been trying not to think about for decades.
And now that they had their freedom, his and Eldrid’s agreement didn’t seem so important—Eldrid had been full of grinning stories about the pretty women who stared at him every time he walked through Reykstoll.
His brother clearly wasn’t hung up on the one they’d agreed neither of them could have.
Until half an hour ago, he’d thought she’d be leaving for Ellas with Stefanos, thought that kiss would have to fuel him through the next twenty years…but maybe not. Maybe she—what was she doing?
She’d been standing before one of the cells, not saying anything like the others, just staring. Hands curled into fists. Now, it looked as though some rope holding her back snapped, and she flung herself forward, into and through the columns of seeping lava, into the cell.
“Elianne—no!” A new surge of energy got Daemon to the cell, which of course had Isidor in it. Who else could have made her do something so stupid?
By the time Daemon arrived, she’d already curled her fists into the white robe Isidor still wore, from Nik’s trial. Flame met ice, making steam and smoke curl up from the contact. “You sold your own daughter, you arrogant coward. And cost me, yet again, my son.”
Isidor’s brows actually knotted. “Your son?”
“Nik!” She screamed the name, the explanation, and Daemon saw both incredulity and disgust settle in Isidor’s eyes before the mask of ice obliterated it.
The former tyrant let her slam him into the block wall, a smug smirk on his lips. “I take it Stefanos arrived, right on schedule?”
“Elianne.” Daemon hesitated at the bars.
Yes, he could pass through them just as she had, but didn’t she realize that put her within the reach of his magic?
The channels of crystal kept him from the outside world, but that didn’t keep him from being able to influence water within his cell.
And the human body was still made primarily of water—even theirs. “Get back out here. Now.”
“You do not get to live, to smile, to rejoice in your evil while they’re in the hands of that monster!” She slapped a hand to Isidor’s face and held it there. Veins glowing. Hand turning red.
“Elianne—stop. Now.”
Isidor fought her, of course, with magic instead of limbs. Pushed ice against her fire, but she was too angry. Too far into the flames. He’d kill her or she’d kill him, but there’d be no truce, nothing in between.
Daemon would either lose the second woman he’d come to care for to death, like Tuva, or be forced to lock her in this prison for murder.
He had no choice but to intervene. Elianne would not be the first person tried under Kyrja’s new justice system. He shouldered his way through the bars, the lava as comfortable as a fountain.
But Isidor moved in that moment, shoving off the wall, bringing Elianne with him, resorting to physical strength with a roar. Daemon didn’t have time to react before they were both crashing into him.
There was a flash of blue light as he felt Isidor’s magic collide with his, light like what came from Perla’s hands, but far more intense.
A spray of red-tinted ice, a soul-shattering scream.
A bolt of pure lightning zapped through him.
More than heat, hotter than lava, and aimed straight at his heart.
Elianne slumped at his feet.