Chapter Twenty-Six The Lonely Destiny of the Villainess
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Lonely Destiny of the Villainess
Soon after his queen died, the Emperor visited the Oracle’s cave of visions and wonder, and asked to see his lost love in the Oracle’s pool. She answered the prayers of those faithful to the Great Goddess, but she denied the goddess’s son.
“This pool shows mortal fates, and the threads that connect souls in the mortal world.”
“Are we not in the mortal world?” he beseeched.
“We are in the mortal world, and gods do not belong here. With a thousand eyes I see the winds of change, and every ripple in a sea of mortal souls. From a thousand tongues I hear songs and stories. I have lived a thousand lives in a thousand worlds. Ask how many times I have seen you rise and rule. But I can see no bright thread of connection between you and your lost queen, to follow through the dark maze of the dead. She is not looking back to find you.”
The Emperor bowed his wild head. He would never beg, unless for love. “Is there no hope?”
“You are a god. You can have anything, except hope.” When the Emperor flinched, the Oracle took pity on him.
“There is still love. There are still worlds to conquer. Wait. Your mother calls for you. There is a prophecy to hear. Once I speak the words, they must come true, but there are many paths to truth.”
The Emperor refused to hear the prophecy. He left the Oracle’s cave never to return.
Years later, the Emperor held the Burning Hearts Ball. Tradition dictated the Oracle must be invited to grand occasions, though she never came.
On this occasion, the Emperor did not invite the Oracle. At this insult, the Oracle knew she must attend. So for the first time in seven hundred years, the Oracle went down the mountain of truth, to tell the child of gods his doom.
Excerpt from the Once and Forever Emperor series, now revised, ANONYMOUS
Rae ran into the dark, as fast and as far from her maid and stepsister as she could go. What were Lia and Emer doing in the Cauldron? She’d sent them away.
It was her one good deed, but it seemed the villainess couldn’t do good.
She tried to get home, and people died. She tried to find the hero true love, and people died.
Dark whispers followed her procession through the city, rumours flying with the bright flags.
According to the rules of the world, everything she did was wrong.
Maybe that was Rae’s fate in every world.
When everyone called you a villain, they must be right. And once you were a villain, everything you did was wrong and went wrong. Once you were a villain, hurting you was right.
Good people got to be happy. Her father had his new family, her old boyfriend and her best friend had each other, all her old friends had their whole lives before them. Rae had only long nights with loneliness and the cold certainty that if she reached out to anyone, she would be betrayed.
Maybe if she was a better person, she would have the heart to trust someone again.
She couldn’t. When Emer grabbed her and the axe gleamed above her head, Rae had seen only the Iron Maid of the books, cutting through pages and shadows to kill her.
In the other world, Rae only had the story. Now she was in the story, but she felt she was losing it. The story was breaking apart in her hands.
Whatever world Rae walked through, she walked alone. She stumbled down an alley, legs and arms stinging from the scrapes when the crowd tore the litter apart to get at her.
When Key gave her the torch, she enjoyed seeing the silver sparks light fear in every face. She told herself people wouldn’t hurt her because she had power now, and they would not dare.
Rae was almost unsurprised when a man lunged at her from the shadows, slamming her against a brick wall.
All the breath knocked out of her in a sob, Rae expected the next thing she felt would be a blade sliding between her ribs or across her throat.
An end, after two worlds, in a dark alley. At least it would be quick.
“I’ll take your jewels first, harlot,” the man said in her ear.
Rough hands tore at her throat, fingers pressing down hard on her larynx so she could not scream and pulling hard at the chains around her neck. She was pinned, unable to breathe, unable to fight. She would be mugged, strangled and thrown in the Tears of the Dead River.
The would-be mugger cried out and stumbled back, hands lifted, as though the heavy, dark jewel of the cursed necklace had burned his palms.
Rae caught him off balance, before he could grab her again. She snatched the knife from its sheath strapped to her leg, beneath her new bruise-coloured skirts, and stabbed out wildly.
The first strike didn’t kill him. She didn’t think he was dead until the fourth, when he stopped trying to grab at her and she heard the bubbling gurgle of blood rise to his mouth.
When he slid, heavy as a sack of meat, onto the cobblestones, the weight pulled Rae’s knife down with him.
By the silver light of the divine pyre, streaming down this dark alley and turning it into a ribbon of moonlight, she saw the blood on her empty hands.
The last time Rae killed a man had been the first time. The second came easier. Horror mingled with the same vicious satisfaction she’d felt when she’d wielded the silverthorn torch. Cold shivers shook her limbs, but her heart pulsed and burned along with the red jewel on her breast.
The shadow of a crown fell across her bloody palms. She felt she could close her fingers around the crown and keep it.
Rae looked up. The Emperor walked down the eerily illuminated alley of the Cauldron towards her, a great shadow soft-footed as a cat, moonlight and enchanted firelight silvering the edges of his armour.
His wild hair crowned his shadow. Key’s shadow had always walked crowned, and she’d never seen it before.
Key lifted a brow at the body. “You don’t like to kill people.”
Rae was breathing hard. “I don’t think he cared about my preferences.”
“Stay beside me. I will kill your enemies,” suggested the Emperor. “Say the word and see it come true, my lady. Anybody who ever hurt you, dead at your feet. You won’t have to lift a finger. Or would you rather go?”
“Am I,” Rae asked slowly, “not free to leave?”
“Leave if you wish. But do me a last favour.”
Her knife was lost beneath the ribs of a corpse. There was a blade in the Emperor’s gauntleted hand as he walked towards her, his shadow swallowing her whole. It wasn’t the divine sword, wasn’t Longing for Revenge, but the blade looked sharp enough to pierce.
Open your heart. Let the god in, men of the Divine Order said in the books. What if that was not a metaphor?
Studying the knife, Rae expected to see a chased-gold hilt, another rich possession of the Emperor’s. She hoped to see the many-toothed blade Key had crafted himself, something that would show Key was still in the Emperor somewhere.
Instead, it was a plain soldier’s knife, not even orichal steel, with a chip in the blade. Key kept his weapons meticulously clean, but this blade was coated with a film of blood.
The Emperor watched for her reaction. “I took it from my guard, the boy you told me to me spare. Remember this blade?”
Rae shook her head.
“You didn’t get as close a look at the blade as I did. This is the knife that cut my throat, before I was thrown into the abyss. Do you remember now? I can see how you might have overlooked it. You were kissing the king when I was killed.”
He drew close, a silver-limned looming shadow, the dark waiting at the heart of the silverthorn pyre. He was near enough to strike, near enough to feel his warmth in the dark space between them, in this Cauldron alley drenched in silver fire.
Rae had read and watched scenes when she found it hard to tell if the effect was intended to be sinister or sexy. Maybe the answer was always both.
Terror made your pulse race, your eyes dilate, and your blood pound. So did desire. Fear lay down side by side with longing, and the chill of fear turned longing into heat. That shouldn’t be right, it must be wrong, but it was a wicked truth nonetheless.
She was villain enough to accept that, and think how she could turn the plot to her ends. Rae watched the Emperor. Someone she had loved before she ever knew him, someone she had loved without ever knowing it until she lost him. A monster, back from the grave for revenge.
There was enough strength and speed in her gauntlets for this. To catch him by surprise, and seize a crown of shadows by grasping a handful of his wild hair.
“I kissed the king when your throat was cut,” Rae whispered. “I’m kissing you now.”
She drew his head down and their lips met, like a dry torch waking to life at the touch of a spark.
The Emperor pressed the knife into her grasp. Rae watched as he closed her gauntleted fingers over the hilt, watched as fiery light surged down the alley like a scarlet and silver ocean to swallow them both. When she opened her eyes, the red light of enchantment had washed her hands clean.
“No more blood on your hands,” the Emperor murmured, almost tenderly. “Unless it’s mine.”
His claws slashed the air, fast as a creature in a horror movie.
Her heart smashed against her ribs, like the last blow on a door about to crash down.
Rae whipped up the knife, her hand in his hair pulling his head back to expose his throat for easier access.
His collar of rubies glittered rich red in the silver radiance of this night.
The scar this very knife had made lay, a dark secret between them, hidden under the line of fire.
“I never wanted to kiss the king,” Rae snarled. “I would rather have stabbed him.”
With a knife to his throat, the Emperor laughed. “That’s what I wanted.”
“What?”
“If you betray me again, I want you to cut my throat with your own hands.”
Rae shook her head, but she didn’t lower the knife. His clawed gauntlets dropped to circle her waist, sliding down her sides into the skirts.
“Everybody would be grateful,” the Emperor urged, and Rae’s mind reeled.
“They pretend not to hate me, but they always did, and they still do. Every soul in this kingdom dreads what crawls out of the abyss. They fear the dead and the divine more. They wanted to expect me, they never wanted me to come. Every day the eyes of the whole city rest on me, asking: am I a god from the stars, or a monster from the pit?”
“Stars or the pit, who cares?” Rae whispered. “You’re with me.”
This was her monster, this was her moment. She kissed him again. He kissed her back, moving in eagerly against the knife.
The clawed gauntlets pricked her flesh like thorns through the black tatters of her skirts. She was wearing black silk spiderwebs, rent to dark threads beneath his hands. His hands curled into fists, steel skimming the sides of her thighs, so the claws didn’t tear her skin.
“Did you see how they looked at me? Did you hear what the man called me, before you turned him to ash? The scheming Harlot of the Tower, the whore of the god. Are they wrong? I do want to crush my enemies. I want never to be the one more hurt again. I want power.”
“Then hold power,” Key murmured into her mouth, as a steel fist moved between her thighs.
Between the brick wall and the monster she moved, but not to escape.
Moved upon the enchanted steel ridges of the gauntlet, feeling pleasure build between her legs and travel up her body.
Rae locked her teeth against a moan, not a victim’s moan at all.
Heat built up in her as if she would be the one he turned to ash next, and oh, being the whore of the god was sweet.
Once her body had seemed such a vile thing, a vessel meant only for holding pain and not able to do even that. Pain had kept overflowing and cracking her sides, leaving her a broken thing, poisonous to be around.
But here, as the red flame had turned silver, her story could transform.
In a new body, in a new world, where pleasure was possible.
Love might be possible between us, the Emperor had said himself. Trust is not.
In every world, pain remained a certainty. Even with every other muscle gone ecstatically lax, Rae held her hand steady, and the knife to his throat.
The procession back to the palace was uneventful, but when a ghoul helped Rae out of her litter, there was a note in his dead hand. From the Cobra.