Chapter One The Villainess Engages the Enemy #2
The Beauty Dipped In Blood gave her betrothed a false smile, rising from her gilded throne, smoothing skirts of ivory and scarlet.
“Enough death for tonight.”
She should have swept out. Instead, as villains will, she made a fatal error.
She sank upon the silver dais to look at her Emperor one last time.
Rae had giggled and kicked her feet over every battle scene through which the Emperor prowled with his legendary sword.
She wept over the page when he sat on the throne beside his dead bride, the loneliest creature under the broken moon.
As lonely as Rae.
The Emperor’s smile faded into the faintest sinister, contemplative curve.
His lambent gaze fixed on Rae, smouldering scarlet.
He was as deathly pale as a glimpse of white ash beneath gold, like a mask in a burning temple.
The dark circles beneath his burning eyes looked inscribed by a skeletal finger dipped in charcoal.
Rae was evil, not stupid. All characters with red eyes were bad news. This one was lethal. She should leave.
Before she betrayed him, before he died for her, he’d liked her a little bit. Kissed her back at the Night Market, gone along with every scheme, defended her against assassins and the king. The Emperor had liked her.
She used to reread all the Emperor’s scenes over and over, just to spend more time with him.
She had looked at the words that made him for so long. He was looking back at her now. A character to make a reader kick a hole through a library window, and steal the book with him in it away. Her Key.
Impulsively, Rae leaned up, and kissed him goodbye.
Hey. Restraint was for heroes. A villain couldn’t resist temptation.
Her kiss was as light as a cinder, falling and singeing whatever it touched.
She was leaning back, lips parted, eyes dazzled, when the Emperor’s enchanted iron claw closed on her waist, his arm as hard as a cage bar.
Key lifted her from her knees, pulling her in.
Rae caught at the jewelled wings of the throne to stop herself from falling into his lap.
It would be the act of an evil vixen to pledge her troth, give him a night to bitterly remember, and slip off before dawn.
So actually, she could do it.
Or could she? Surely Key would expect vixen moves from Lady Rahela. Having spent the entirety of her adult life dying of cancer, Rae didn’t know any.
His mouth against hers was as cool as kissing someone surfacing from underwater, or coming in from a storm.
He breathed in ragged rhythm with her, one gleaming gauntleted claw tangled in the dark of her hair.
The slight curve of Key’s mouth grew more pronounced, though no less cruel.
She knew the shape of that evil smile, pressed against hers.
Rae’s lips curled in answer. For a moment she felt the way she used to, as though they were the only two people in this world who didn’t take everything so seriously.
The only ones who realized they were playing a game.
Perhaps he was thinking of sweet revenge.
Or perhaps he still liked her. Just a little.
Maybe even enough to mean it when he asked her to marry him.
There was a chance it wasn’t all for revenge, but Rae knew him well enough to see the bleak fury building behind his smile, enough rage to claw hearts from chests.
Even if he meant it now, he wouldn’t mean it for long.
No slow burns for villains. An evil candle burned at both ends. She would not last the night. But while the night lasted, possibly she could improvise vixen moves.
For a moment, it didn’t matter that he’d come back wrong. Only that he’d come back.
The silvery steel of Rae’s gauntlets slid on the carved wings of the throne, jet and enamelled bone.
She stood arched over the Emperor for a kiss, hanging onto the throne rather than tumbling into his lap as if it meant a tumble over the edge of a cliff.
The Emperor smiled wickedly up at Rae. Her grip relaxed as the fall beckoned sweetly.
The space between them filled with lightning, the edge of the light brilliant red.
Lightning was another bloody sword the Emperor wielded at will.
If he pulled her in again, Rae would go to him. Even if it was like tumbling off the edge of a cliff.
Instead the Emperor murmured, almost tenderly, “Lie to me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
His voice was hoarse, not with emotion, but a cut throat. “Say you love me.”
Who says I don’t? Except every action Rae had taken since she entered the book said that.
Could you love a book character for real?
Of course not. Rae felt her chest burn with guilt, as though wearing a coal of fire over her heart.
She hadn’t even recognized her favourite character when she saw him.
She’d deceived and betrayed him. How could that be love?
A villainess always faked it. Key was real, but her love wasn’t for real.
“The thing is,” Rae prevaricated, “I just don’t think me professing my undying love would be very believable.
Right now. What with you storming the castle with your army of ghouls, killing an astonishing amount of people, and holding your sword to my throat.
It all happened very fast. Some might call this a whirlwind romance. ”
The Emperor tilted his wild dark head, considering this point of view. “I can make you a whirlwind. If you find them romantic.”
“No thank you! Literal whirlwinds are not necessary.”
Rae had been reckless and careless, but starting from this moment she needed to be careful. She and the Emperor were playing a different game now.
Time to coax the powerful man into complying with her will, as vixens were wont to do.
Rae eased away, knelt again, and lied through her teeth. As requested. “When the time is right, the blood moon is high, the battlefield laid waste, and even gods fall to their knees, my Emperor, I’ll tell you. Then you will believe me.”
This time, Key was the one who reached for her. He traced the line of her jaw with a fingertip.
The gesture would have been sweet, had his fingertip not been encased in a razor-sharp iron claw.
In the earth of Eyam, where divine blood once spilled, enchanted metal could be forged: orichal gold, silver, copper.
Orichal iron, able to cut diamonds, gleaming red as blood.
The orichal of the Emperor’s regalia was the most powerful in the world.
The Emperor’s sword striking Rae’s had turned her sword to silver dust. She could be dust as well, just as easily.
Rae did not even allow herself to breathe.
Key’s voice used to sing. The Emperor’s voice did as well, softer as well as hoarser, an eternal mourning song.
“My lady, I love you. But believe in you again? No. Between us, love is possible. Belief is not.”
The tip of an iron claw lingered in a sharp whisper of a moment, indenting the skin beneath Rae’s ear.
A helpless shudder passed through her, the anticipation of pain, the memory of a razor that had shorn off all her hair when it started falling out in clumps.
The iron sting lifted from her neck, only for the Emperor’s claws to sink hard into her hair. He held her, face uplifted to his.
“Tell me a story I want to believe. Even if I know better.”
She saw her death in his eyes. That was bearable. She’d pictured her death before. It was worse to see all his rage, and pain, and fear. She was the last person he’d trusted. She might be the last person he would ever trust.
I love you as a knife loves a throat. He said those words when he entered the throne room. How much could that be?
That was the point. He didn’t love her. Not really. There was nothing in Rae to inspire love.
Nobody could love someone who had hurt him that much. He must be plotting her death. Rae hoped so. It would be too awful if Key believed he loved her, because he had no one else.
Lady Rahela would disappear tonight, never to be seen in this world again.
That would confirm the Emperor’s cynical views about humankind, and probably launch a reign of terror, but the reign of terror was coming anyway.
There was nothing Rae could do about that.
Reigns of terror needed to be dealt with by the good and true. Someone should call in Lord Marius.
One day, Key would truly love somebody and realize he never truly loved Rahela. For now, Rae was grieved to hurt him one last time.
Held captive in iron claws, Rae looked into his red eyes. “Believe this, if you can: I’m sorry to leave you.”
Abruptly, Key released her.
“Don’t be sorry. You won’t leave me. We’re going to have such fun together. I was thinking, in the abyss.”
The Emperor mentioned the abyss very casually. Would he kill her just as casually?
His face said he would. “I was thinking about all the lies you told. They never did add up to a sum that made sense. You informed me and Emer you forgot everything about your life. Then you spun me a tale about a grave childhood illness. You claimed to the court you could see the future, but I notice the future is not exactly as you described. I can’t help wondering, what’s the truth behind all this smoke? ”
She owed him that, at least.
“The future I described did happen,” Rae told him. “In a book.”
“A book?” the Emperor repeated. “Is this a joke?”
He was raised in the gutter. Only the aristocrats of this world could read. Rae could see why this sounded like a very cruel joke.
“In another world. In another version of this world, but I made a huge mistake—”
The Emperor cut her off. “I didn’t ask for an explanation, my lady. I asked for sweet lies. Why would you tell me your secrets? You never did before.”
Why should the Emperor believe her, if she told him the truth? How could anyone believe her? Rae nodded.
The Emperor shook his head. “I intend to keep you with me always. I will hunt out all your secrets in time.”
Distant in her own ears, Rae’s voice whispered, “What will you do, when you learn all my secrets?”
The Emperor sounded as playful as an apex predator toying with its prey before it went in for the kill. “I never know what I might do next.”
Rae decided to combat all this sinister innuendo by getting extremely literal. “You can’t keep me with you always, darling. Sometimes I need to use the bathroom.”
“Well, you can’t leave now, darling.” Key’s voice rang with mockery as he echoed the endearment. “We simply must receive our guests.”
A question died on Rae’s lips, answered by a nearer thunder than that in the sky. The slaughter outside had ceased, the enemy army quelled or butchered.
In the quiet, footsteps rang. Headed towards the throne room.
Key crooked a claw. The doors swung open. The dead, lining the luminous green crystal walls, came to attention like rotten soldiers.
What remained of the court had scraped together enough courage to investigate. The surviving king’s ministers stood at the doors of the throne room, stately blue uniforms in stately blue tatters.
Prime Minister Pio stared. “Who are you?’
Key wiggled his iron-sheathed-and-clawed fingers in a little wave. “I am the Emperor. The son of the gods, risen from death to rule you. Remember, there was a prophecy?”
Thus it was that the aristocratic assembly, selected to govern the country of Eyam in wisdom and dignity, beheld for the first time their foretold leader.
The divine Emperor, risen from flame and commander of midnight, sat with a leg slung carelessly over the throne arm. He winked. It was clear none of the ministers had expected the wink.
Key raised an eyebrow. On another man, the eyebrow would look interrogative. On Key the gesture seemed a demand, possibly for money and lives. “You’re not happy the prophecy has miraculously come to pass?”
Someone hissed, “Is that a servant?”
The reply came, even lower, “It’s the servant who died.”
Rae only realized she’d begun to smile at Key’s antics when the mention of death fell like a blade to cut her smile away.
Elevating his voice over the whispers, Prime Minister Pio’s demand rang like an aristocratic bell calling an insolent servant to obey. “Where, may I ask, is the king?”
Thunder rolled into an expectant pause. Every soul in the throne room shuddered except Key.
“The king?” Key mused, tugging on a jauntily swinging garnet earring Rae had given him once, as if trying to recall an unmemorable name. “Oh, the king. Green eyes, brown hair, had me put to death? That king?”
Uncomfortable silence answered.
Already balanced on his throne like a leering devil on the edge of hell, Key tilted precariously sideways. He leaned over the elaborately carved arm of his bejewelled throne to grab something he’d dropped on the floor.
“You want the king?” asked Key.
Cautiously, the ministers nodded.
The Emperor grinned like a lightning flash. “Catch.”
With careless ease the Emperor tossed his trophy to the prime minister. Pio’s hands opened automatically to receive it.
As the red light of the ravine spread across the smooth golden floor, further staining the king’s throne room, Rae watched the prime minister realize what he held: King Octavian’s head.
Blood drying his glossy hair into black straw, summer-green eyes lost beneath the grey cloud of death.
All the ministers of the court saw, and believed.
This wasn’t the king’s throne room any more.