Chapter 1 #2
But he might as well be speaking to the storm itself. His words glide right off me.
He might be a god…but I’m starting to understand that I’m something else, too.
As a ferocious cry tears from my lips, I twist my fingers in the air. More roots burst out from the floor to wrap around Vale’s legs, weaving into his armor to drag him down to his knees, the river waters rapidly rising up around his waist.
I throw out my hands to send a dozen hawks swooping toward his eyes. Their talons catch the candlelight, sharp as razors.
The Serpent Knife clatters out of his hand and skids across the floor.
Any human would duck to protect themselves from the onslaught, but Vale?
He smiles up at the hawks grimly as he unhooks the battle axe from its harness on his back, and sweeps in a vicious arc that slices every bird clean in half the second that it attacks.
Blood-stained feathers rain to the floor.
Anger coils hotly inside me, and before I realize what I’m doing, I weave my fingers in the air again.
The rushing Ramvik River bubbles up faster from the floorboards and builds with the force of a tidal wave, headed straight for Vale and the other fae near the head table.
At my side, Basten watches with a mixture of horror and awe.
A flicker of doubt runs through my belly.
Does he fear me like…this? What I’ve become?
But that worry is swallowed by the memory of my father ordering his death, and I shove my hands to command the wave to rise even higher.
Then, the air splits.
A flash of golden light blasts from the window—it’s Samaur, God of Day. He wields his sunlit fey to blind me, trying to break my focus.
But I summon thick clouds to block him and his sunlight.
When both Artain and Samaur’s attempts to subdue me fail, Iyre growls, reaching her fingertip toward my temple. In a flash, I know what she’s trying to do. Steal my memories. Scramble my brain until I don’t remember who I am.
I command the water to blast straight at her instead. She’s slapped backward, drenched down to her prim white boots.
Woudix—cold, patient Woudix—raises his palms toward the flock of ravens overhead. Black fey sparks from his palms, but before he can release the charge, I sweep my hands together. Wind crashes in from both directions, extinguishing the spark.
Wild with power, I throw up my arms. Thunder crashes against the tower walls, raining dust down from the ceiling joists, splintering the three-thousand-year-old head table.
“Enough!” Vale shouts, his voice clapping like a massive bell.
He frees himself of my vines and steps forward, towering over where Basten and I crouch in our shelter of vines, by all appearances ready to smite us both to ash. And yet, there’s the slightest waver in his eyes.
A flash of uncertainty.
Fear, I realize—of me.
For a heavy moment, everything quiets. The wind. The shrieking hawks.
Even the five gods.
“You claw your way back from death itself,” my father snarls, “you split the sky with storms, and all for what? To save a mortal?”
I lift my chin and seethe, “You started this when you gave his death order.”
“He’s human! He’s so much less than you.”
I bristle, cheeks reddening with building fury. My voice drops. “You have no idea the lengths I’ll go to keep him safe. I’ll open the earth. Bury the five of you so deep you’ll never rise again.”
Vale’s laughter booms through the shattered hall, but there’s a nervousness to the way he paces. “You’re unstable. Not yet practiced. Stop your histrionics, and I will strike a bargain.”
My heart—my cold, ice-block heart—slams in my chest. Anger makes my limbs quake with tightly coiled power. “Why would I bargain with you? You stabbed me!”
Vale picks up a handful of soil thrust up from between the floorboards by my earthquake. “A fae bargain,” he spits out. “Unbreakable. Stop this, and Lord Basten will remain safe from me for as long as he is in my kingdom.”
My vision is starting to blur at the edges. Exhaustion is rapidly overtaking me. I burned too bright, too hard. My dress is stained with crimson blood, but when I touch my hand to my chest wound now, quicksilver spills out instead.
My ears suddenly tune into the distant screams of the castle servants. Are people hurt? Did…did I hurt them?
“Sabine.” Basten wraps his arms around me. “He’s right—you have to stop this or you’ll kill everyone in the castle.”
“Basten,” I choke. “I don’t…I didn’t mean to…”
“End this,” he urges in a low murmur.
My words fall away. I don’t know what’s happening. Where I went…how I’m back.
But I trust in Basten.
“A pinch of earth to close the deal,” Vale recites the fae bargain phrasing. “What’s given now, the ground will seal.”
With a shaky hand, I reach through my fortress of vines and clasp a fistful of dirt, letting it sift through my fingers. I repeat the bargain’s wording on broken lips.
“It’s a bargain,” I say.
In that instant, all the strength goes out of me.
There’s nothing left in me but hollow veins and a strange hunger that shreds its way through my insides, demanding sustenance that I can’t put a name to.
As soon as the last few clods of soil fall from my fingertips, my body gives out. I slump onto the floor, half-tangled in the vines I brought forth from deep underground. I stare dimly up at the ceiling, crawling with spiders who answered my call.
And in the chandelier?
My mirrored image winks back at me, fractured into a hundred quivering reflections. Not the girl who was locked away in a convent for twelve years. Not the woman paraded bare across half of Astagnon, either.
Something else.
Fey lines burst with silvery light from my temples and down my limbs. The shells of my ears rise to faint points, matching the upward lilt to my eyebrows.
Sharpened incisors wink from my parted lips.
Not painted.
Not costumed.
Ancient.
Real.
Whatever I am now…
it’s not what I was.