Chapter Fifteen The Villainess and the God-Child #5
The cool, clawed tips of the Emperor’s gauntlets stayed at the sensitive skin behind her knees, not straying upward an inch.
The scarlet lightning that had burned like an offering in the sky and written their names on the clouds now wrapped around her ankles.
Twining around her legs like red ribbons, tongues of red fire criss-crossing and climbing, higher and higher beneath the thin veils of her skirt until they wrapped her thighs and tugged her forward on the throne, hips tilting, the veils of her skirts parting like curtains.
Against her will, Rae let out a small shocked gasp.
The wind snatched the gasp from her lips and carried it away into the howl of the abyss.
Between her legs, the Emperor leaned forward.
She felt his smile curve against her inner thigh. “I have a mouth.”
If Rae spoke, her voice wouldn’t be entirely steady. That would not help her seem like a woman who had been around the block and underneath the kitchen table.
The Emperor leaned back ever so slightly. The whine of protest that rose from the back of Rae’s throat startled her. It seemed to surprise him, too. Shame burned her cheeks until she remembered. She could throw herself at him. This was all part of her evil scheme.
Whenever the late king made a pass, Rae told herself she should do it, because she believed he was her favourite character. Do it for everybody who never got to kiss the beautiful alien or the goblin king. All the while her body insisted she did not know this man.
Her body needed no convincing now. Lines of enchantment tightened around her legs with the gradual gentleness of vines and heat that didn’t burn and almost didn’t hurt, lightning zinging and stinging thorn-sweet beneath her skin.
Echoing the enchantment, heat curled in a tight, hot spiral in the pit of her stomach.
She might never forgive herself, back home with only a book for company, if she did not sin now.
Key looked up at her through his eyelashes, thick black curtains with bale-fire brimming beneath. This was how it felt, to be flirted with by a burning abyss in the shape of a man.
His voice rasped, rough as the surface of a tiger’s tongue, which could lick flesh to the bone. “I asked you once before, remember? May I kneel at the altar?”
He was kneeling already, utterly unselfconscious. A cold doubt of consciousness shimmered through her. “That was before we knew you were a god. If I say yes, is it blasphemy?”
Probably due to her evil nature, the cold flicker of awareness became a guilty shiver and a sigh even as she spoke.
The Emperor said, “Let us pray.”
He sank in between her parted thighs, breath on heated skin. She didn’t even know what she should call it. She knew many words which seemed clinical or absurd. So many girls in books talked about their cores, as if they were a bunch of apples.
Caught between his mouth and ropes of lightning, she lost her grip on words and got a grip on his hair.
The black hair was lost beneath the white veil of her skirt like someone ducking beneath a tablecloth to have a clandestine feast, but she had the wild locks twisted around her fingers.
She took sobbing breaths as tongues of flame slid up, along, around and inside.
Caressing, insinuating, scorching and tormenting without mercy.
She screwed her eyes shut.
Against the darkness behind her eyes flowers bright as stars bloomed, stars spread to glittering spheres. She screamed like the damned, but she was queen of hell.
The skies opened. Sheets of silver rain muddled with silver sheets of lightning, like being tossed around in a silver bed.
Rae was instantly soaking, thin white skirts plastered transparent against and between her legs.
She slid dripping fingers from Key’s hair and caught at his shoulders, pulling him onto the throne of enchantment and upon her wet body.
She savoured the weight of muscle, metal and leather pressing down hard, straps digging in and buckles pinching at sensitive points of flesh through the drenched fabric of her dress, and she savoured the taste of his wonderfully cruel mouth.
“Key.” She pressed her rain-slick cheek to his. “You can—will you—”
“I told my ministers I would not,” said the Emperor coolly. “Until we are married. Do you still insist on the Queen’s Trials?”
Rae blinked lightning-bright rain from her eyes to see clearly.
Her body wanted to relax into a state of ecstatic languor, but the cold was creeping in.
The Emperor had serviced the treacherous bitch he killed in the books, too.
Made her beg in bed, before she begged for her life. Rae hadn’t wanted to remember.
He spoke with analytical precision that made her think of the battles he would plan. The battles he would win.
“That was new to you.” She flinched, and he scoffed. “It’s no surprise. Anyone could tell what kind of man the king was. You were pleased well enough, my lady?”
“Well enough,” Rae said faintly.
“You wanted me back then, at the Night Market. And still now, I think, though you’re scared by…” The Emperor’s claws flashed illustratively across his throat, the red glare of his eyes. “Or does being scared make it sweeter for you, my lady?”
“Would you have me pleased or scared?”
His gauntlet skimmed her waist, toying with the twined leather and ribbons there. “I will have you as you are, and you are both. Come. The Oracle’s cave is sealed. You’re pleased. Keep your side of the bargain.”
“The bargain,” Rae repeated warily.
Key will be all right? she had asked the goddess.
If you fulfil the terms, the divine voice had promised. Victory over the enemy. True love. Escaping his doom.
How did he know?
“Our bargain,” said the Emperor. “Be a bride to the abyss. Be my evil queen. Make me believe. You haven’t convinced me yet. So make a beginning, my lady. Call off the Queen’s Trials.”
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. The sound came from somewhere else. Outside the palace, beyond even the city walls. Rae didn’t have Valerius hearing. She might have heard war drums over this distance, but she shouldn’t be able to hear singing.
Yet song was what Rae heard, a chorus issuing from many throats.
A crystal-clear song that rang as though it would make crystal shiver and shatter.
She remembered someone in the books referring to a family in Tagar as the song of silver tongues in the East. She wondered why they were singing in the rain, then she saw the result and wondered no more.
The song silvered the dark, and the rain that hit the radiant silver-gilt air slowed then dissipated entirely. A perfect circle was cut into the storm-clouds above. Light bloomed in the wasteland. The raider army was holding off the Emperor’s storm.
Magic was dying out in Tagar. In the books, Tagar couldn’t withstand the Emperor’s power. But Rae had brought war to the Emperor’s shores early. The raiders’ magic had not entirely faded yet.
Rae scrambled from the throne of enchantment. When the Emperor followed, the light of the throne and the lightning in the sky died, vanishing into darkness as if they had never been. As if nothing had ever happened.
Better if it had not. Rae leaned forward, holding onto the parapet, and desperately tried to make out shapes in that bright, charmed circle beyond the city walls.
The raider army was not only a disaster on the night of the Emperor’s rising, and an enemy force that must be defeated. They hailed from a whole different land in this world still strange to her. A land that would be stranger to her still, with their own customs, their own gods and their own magic.
Ivor the Heartless, and his general the Beast of the West. Names Rae remembered because they sounded like stories, but they were only background dressing, making the true story richer. They died without ever really becoming part of the story.
Except here they were, alive. Because of Rae.
Here they were, in the heart of the story.
She recognized the young king at once, though she had no idea what he looked like and though the raiders were across the city, distance making them as small as an illustration on a page.
Ivor the Heartless never appeared alive in the books, never spoke a word.
The first and only time he appeared, he lay stretched beside the slab upon which he crafted his monstrous creation, dead and cold as the stone.
But his sister Vasilisa, the Ice Queen of the books and the princess Rae had come to know, kept her brother’s great helm after he died.
A curved metal cylinder that covered a man from skull to shoulders, face-plate a bright blank with only the thin shadow of a visor-slit, decorated with tiny symbols: golden tigers and silver harps.
The monarch’s private guard all wore the great helms of Tagar, but none but the king’s helm had a crest, a dozen crystal points set around the metal in a circle like a crown of icicles.
The Ice Queen would look at the empty helm and imagine her brother’s face, because she missed him so dearly. Ivor had been her twin.
The king’s great helm wasn’t empty now. Ivor shone bright as the shields of his men, arrayed behind him in a wall of radiant silver.
A raider champion stood to Ivor’s right, broad-shouldered and imposing in flowing furs.
Anybody opening a book to see this illustration would recognize a band of heroes standing in the spotlight of the sun.
A brave company who sailed the high seas to punish those who plotted against their king.
While the wicked Emperor loomed all in black, one gleaming clawed hand on the waist of a bloodstained beauty. The Emperor’s dread shadow spread across the wastes from the walls of his terrible palace, in which he kept their princess imprisoned.
Magic powers of song and sunshine, going up against magic powers over storms and the dead. That strongly suggested a literal light and dark side.
This felt like a story disaster to Rae. It felt like the bitter chill of a wind changing, the earthquake of a world shifting beneath her feet.
An anti-hero becoming a villain. She and Key, the Emperor and his sorcerous blasphemous harlot.
Becoming the evil, debauched pair whose unjust rule must be ended at any cost. So that good would triumph, and everyone else would live happily ever after.
Except for Key and Rae. They would be doomed, to death or loneliness.
“You know what? I hate to say this, but we need Lord Marius. He’s the White Knight who will lead our armies to victory.”
If the Last Hope was on your side, then yours was the right side. But the Last Hope was gone.
An ugly edge appeared in Key’s voice. “I can lead an army to victory, my lady. Trust me.”
“It isn’t about me trusting you. Everyone trusts Lord Marius to have principles!”
“It’s true I have no principles,” admitted Key.
He didn’t sound particularly torn up about it. Lightning lit the whole sky, as white as the ivory ceiling in the Room of Memory and Bone.
“Maybe you should have principles!”
“Maybe I should.” Key smiled, brief and sharp. “But I don’t want to.”
“You said you would try to be a hero,” began Rae, but she was already shaking her head. “I have to go.”
She whirled away from Emperor and the abyss, slippers sliding on the stone as she ran.
It was no use. He wouldn’t listen. Rae didn’t expect him to.
She wasn’t losing sight of her goals just because he had touched her.
Villains stripped bare all the time without stripping off any defences.
Anti-heroes slept with and discarded legions of ladies, which was fine because those women weren’t special.
The goddess had told Rae the score. She wasn’t a heroine, whose pure light could change an anti-hero’s morality from charcoal to dove grey.
Rae needed to hurry. She needed to find her betrothed’s one true love.
“Running away so soon? What are you afraid of?”
Rae’s restraint snapped to let a piece of truth fly free. “I’m afraid you might kill me.”
“Don’t worry, my lady.”
His voice was gentler than the rain. Rae was comforted, for a moment that didn’t last. His voice made her turn her head, for a last look over her shoulder.
Hope flared and died on the curve of the Emperor’s slow smile as he told her: “Death isn’t so bad.”