Chapter 38 Scion of No One #3
When my fighters had fallen in battle, I had consoled myself with the knowledge that they had gone on to rest, gone into the arms of the loved ones and ancestors who had passed before them.
Not for one second had I imagined that they would be here, suffering and tormented, and coming to hate me for abandoning them to their fate. How could I not have considered this?
Saeris’s voice sounded as though it were coming from underwater. “. . . you, Ibanwae. Tell me, how do you see yourself being of service to this court?”
Kavan was gone.
A female high blood had replaced him and was bowing, her eyes glued on the floor.
Her hair was a frizzy black mass, so voluminous and wild that it almost hid her whole head.
She wore a high-collared black dress, long-sleeved, its skirts brushing the ground, hiding her feet.
Aside from her head and her hands, every part of her body was covered.
Her voice swept through the hall in a hoarse whisper.
“Your Highness. I am known to every member of this court. I was here at the beginning, when our kind first spilled righteous blood in service of our king. My hands designed and oversaw the construction of the fine palace that you now call your own. My lord father charged me with the engineering and construction of siege machines, sewer systems, and all the infrastructure and planning required when the Cogs were built. He was particularly pleased with the weapons of war I created on his behalf. Weapons of iron, designed to inflict unimaginable pain upon the vile Fae scum who beset our home and attempt to divert us from our glorious purpose.”
Vile Fae scum.
I could see only the crown of her head, but I could picture her expression as she spat those words at the ground.
“I put myself forth as the next Lord of Midnight, and request that I be made Keeper of Pain, so that I might renew my efforts in the design of equipment that will bring the Fae dogs to heel once and—”
Saeris spoke over the female. “What is our glorious purpose, Ibanwae?” Unruffled. Calm, even. But my mate was livid.
The name Ibanwae was so old and out of style that it probably hadn’t been spoken outside of this court in centuries.
The woman it belonged to looked up, revealing a face full of tattoos.
Runes, to be precise. They were dead runes, though.
Long inactive. Barren of magic and turned ash-gray by time.
It was a shield. Once upon a time, this female had been an Alchemist.
Her eyes were black, pupil bleeding into iris, bleeding into white.
Open scorn met Saeris’s question as the female slowly drew up to stand straight.
“The same glorious purpose that Sanasroth has always striven toward, Your Majesty. Domination over the other courts. Total supremacy over the Fae. Mandatory blood tithes. Livestock breeding farms. Feeding farms—”
Saeris held up a hand. “Yes, thank you. That’s enough.”
Ibanwae huffed, her dead runes shifting as she pulled a disgruntled face. “Does the reality of your court displease you, Your Majesty?” she asked. “Perhaps you haven’t the stomach to rule over a people such as these.” She spread her arms wide, gesturing to her fellow high bloods.
A thick silence fell over the crowd. To the right, Tal leaned against the wall by the foot of the dais, arms folded over his chest. His face was blank, his eyes fixed on Saeris, waiting, as everyone else was, to see what she would say.
Saeris regarded Ibanwae, exuding a proud, cool confidence that made me want to cheer on her behalf.
She looked every bit the regal, unshakable queen she needed to be in this moment—as unreachable and cold as the distant mountains.
She didn’t say anything in response to the jibe.
Just stared at the female. The high blood took Saeris’s silence as a sign that she had caught her on the back foot; she smirked coquettishly, sending sidelong looks at the other vampires gathered at the foot of the dais, who had clearly come to hear her speak and show their support.
After a long, long moment, the vampire’s smile began to fade, though.
Saeris didn’t blink.
Someone cleared their throat.
On the table to the left, someone shifted, causing a chair to complain under their weight.
And still Saeris stared at the female.
Ibanwae lowered her eyes to the ground. “You understand, I do not mean to offend the throne—”
“I understand violence,” Saeris said. She spoke softly, with no inflection or emotion.
The entire hall heard her words. “I understand . . . that it is a tool.” She waited.
Looking beyond Ibanwae, she took in the high bloods in their laces and satins, and the gold-rimmed, etched wineglasses spiked with Fae blood, and she addressed them all.
“I understand that the high bloods of Sanasroth have run amok these past one thousand years. I understand that Malcolm let chaos reign here, while he was off waging a war he could not win. A war that cost Sanasroth its resources and depleted its wealth at every turn. There will be no livestock breeding farms. There will be no feeding farms. Over the coming years, we will focus on rebuilding this court—”
“And while we’re rebuilding,” a sharp voice called, “what do you propose that we eat?”
Fucking Zovena.
I was going to ash her one of these days and wear her fangs as fucking earrings.
The Lord was on her feet, slinking around the table toward the dais.
Her tittering, imbecilic friends moved aside for her as she passed them.
She was dressed in a blood-red velvet gown that cut a savage silhouette, her blond hair braided and wound artfully around her head.
Rubies flashed in the hollow of her throat and at her ears.
Each of her fingers was clad in gold and precious stones.
Atop her head, she wore a golden-leafed laurel that looked suspiciously like a crown.
Saeris ignored the viper, her attention still fixed upon Ibanwae. “These aspirations you speak of. They are not end goals. It sounds to me that the goals for all at Sanasroth are safety, security, legitimacy, and food.”
“Hah!” Zovena snorted. She prowled before the dais, acid burning in her eyes as she faced the high bloods. “Isn’t that what I just said? Food, your highness. We need to know what, or rather who, we will be eating!”
Saeris didn’t rise from her seat. Didn’t even frown as she flicked her hand at the table to the right, and a candelabra—which had been crowned with eight shivering points of evenlight—flew from the snow-white tablecloth and twisted in midair.
It formed a length of metal two feet long and struck Zovena from behind, curving around the back of her neck.
The Lord of Revels let out a shriek as the malformed candelabra dove downward, pulling her off her feet; it slammed into the obsidian floor with a loud, metallic clang, biting into stone, pinning Zovena to the ground by her neck.
I’m pretty sure you just shattered her jaw, I said into Saeris’s head.
She’ll recover, was my mate’s acerbic reply.
I ducked my chin into the collar of my shirt, hiding my smile until I managed to banish it from my face.
“Ahh! You . . . bitch!” Zovena yanked and pulled, but try as she might, strong as she was, she couldn’t tug the mangled candelabra from the obsidian floor. The metal was servant to no one but Saeris. “Let me up!” the Lord seethed.
Ibanwae, who had started her petition with much the same energy as Zovena’s outburst, gawked at the other female, pinned by her neck to the ground, and swallowed thickly. “I would like . . .” She stopped speaking when Saeris slowly rose from her throne and began to descend the steps.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose, every instinct I owned telling me to get up and put myself between my mate and the danger that stood before her.
I couldn’t do that, though. I wouldn’t undermine her in front of these leeches. I stayed where I was, and the inaction damned near killed me. What was she doing, though? And why was it making me so fucking hot under the collar?
With shoulders relaxed, spine straight, and head held high, Saeris made her way down the steps and skirted around Zovena.
She collected a chair from one of the tables and dragged it, back legs scraping loudly on the floor, over to Zovena, where she set it next to the prone woman, sat down, kicked her feet up, and rested her heels on the female’s back.
“Be still,” she commanded before the outraged Lord could buck her off.
Zovena screeched. “Get off me, you stupid f—”
“Be quiet.”
Calm as the center of a storm, she was. Brutal.
Cruel. Lethal. Even I wouldn’t have fucked with her in this moment, resting her feet on the back of a female whom most of this court was afraid of.
I would have fucked her, though. I desperately, desperately wanted to do that.
There was something deeply arousing about my mate owning her power.
Turning to Ibanwae, Saeris plucked a piece of lint from her skirts. “You were saying?”
“Keeper of Pain,” the female said, eyes glittering, voice a little shaky. “I would like to be the Keeper of Pain.”
Three more petitions.
A would-be Keeper of Monies. A prospective Keeper of Truths. A hopeful Keeper of Antiquities.
The minutes ticked by as Saeris heard the applicants speak, and she did not move from her position, feet resting on Zovena’s back.
Halfway through the proceedings, she fished out a dagger from the scabbard at her thigh and began cleaning her fingernails with the blade.
Zovena didn’t move. She didn’t say a word.
Only once all the petitions had been heard did she very slowly rise from her chair. She was in no hurry at all as she hooked her little finger underneath the metal band that was cutting into Zovena’s neck and gave it the gentlest of pulls, and then the candelabra came free.
“You may move. You may speak,” she said in a bored tone as she walked away from the female’s shuddering frame and climbed back up the steps.
Zovena was as mad as a spitting snake when she leaped to her feet, but her hostile stance was of no interest to me. The haunted expression Tal wore as he looked away from the female, frowning at a spot on the far wall hanging, though? No wall hanging deserved that level of scrutiny.
“You think this is a game?” Zovena shouted.
Saeris still had three steps to go before she reached her throne. She stopped, eyes finding mine briefly before she turned, her skirts rustling around her, and at last gave Zovena her full attention.
“You seem to confuse the dynamic between us, Zovena. I am your master. I could command you to sit at my feet, and you would bow, knowing death chased the edge of my blade. You mistake my patience for weakness. For tolerance. But test me further, and you will discover the limit of that patience.”
From the moment Saeris had set foot into the Hall of Tears for her coronation, she had been playing a part.
She’d played it well, too. But she wasn’t acting now.
She was as sick of Zovena as I was—impressive, since she’d known the female such a short time.
I had no doubt that she would put the female down with a smile on her face if she got the opportunity.
Zovena shook with the effort it took to cage her retort.
For uncounted years, she had bathed in the warm glow of Malcolm’s approval.
Unchecked. Unchallenged. Beloved of her king.
It must have been raw indeed to find herself out in the cold, standing in the shadow of the female who had killed him.
Taladaius sauntered across the five-pointed star, a casual smile playing across his face, but there was a tightness around his eyes that could not be mistaken for anything other than worry.
“Come now, high bloods of Sanasroth!” he called.
“The petitions have been heard!” He raised his hand high, holding Ereth’s ring aloft for all to see.
The large amber-orange jewel at the ring’s center caught the evenlight, refracting rainbows up the walls.
“It is time to discover who will become our next Lord and don the fifth Ring of Midnight—”
“Actually, Taladaius, I believe there’s one more petition we’ve still yet to hear,” Saeris said coolly. She took her seat on her throne, calmly smoothing her skirts.
Tal’s composure wavered as he looked up the dais, the muscles in his throat working.
The fleeting expression that passed over his face seemed to say, What the fuck are you doing, Saeris Fane?
He knew nothing of a sixth candidate for the ring in his hand.
I knew nothing of it, either, which meant that this surprise announcement from Saeris must have had something to do with the journal.
“Our queen surprises us,” Taladaius said in a tense voice.
“How lucky we are.” He swallowed thickly, then closed his hand around the ring he was still holding in the air and lowered his hand to his side.
With a flourish of a bow, he said, “As it pleases you, Your Highness. To whom shall we open the floor?”
The tension in the Hall of Tears had already been thick enough to cut with a knife, but it grew suffocating as discord broke out among the high bloods.
Saeris had already sighted the figure who emerged from the sea of vampires, but shouts of outrage erupted from the tables as the Blood Court’s nobles finally saw who their queen had brought before them.
This was how I remembered him: kitted out in fighting leathers, with a sword strapped to his back and his head held high.
Gold flashed in his mouth as he came and knelt before the throne, offering a chagrined half smile. In a voice that rang loud and clear across the hall, he said, “My name is Foley Briarstone, and I have come to be of service to my queen.”
But his dubious expression said something else entirely.
I hope you know what you’re doing, half-breed.