Chapter 66
Arkyn stops before Kyzari’s cell, locking eyes with the princess. Bold-blue orbs, like crystals glinting in the dark, bearing more life than when he last met her gaze.
When she was hopelessly pleading for mercy that simply does not exist.
The pale-blue gown hangs in filthy tatters off her sharpened edges, her long hair whiter than it was. Any warmth shocked from it since he tore through her little parchment pet.
Something Arkyn muses over. Finds interesting.
He flicks the lid on her pah’s weald, releasing a bulb of fire. Closes it again.
“Open the gate.”
His voice moves down the tunnel like a seep of ink.
Kyzari’s brows pinch together. She scrambles to her feet, tucking messy tangles of hair behind her ear as a masked guard clonks the lock open and pulls her gate wide. The hinges squeal in protest.
“Where’s—” Kyzari’s question cuts off with a gasp. Her hand flies to her mouth, eyes on her auntie getting dragged along the tunnel, into the flaming torchlight. A limp weight strung between two of Arkyn’s masked guards.
Blood leaks from Veya’s nose, ears, and eyes, the runes on her temples cut through—disabling them. No longer necessary.
Veya doesn’t fight as she’s backed against the bars on the outside of her cell, tethered in place with an iron chain. The dark dents beneath her eyes underline the flatness in her gaze. The deep exhaustion after three slumbers of sleeplessness.
The vacant hint of failure.
Kyzari’s clamped in wrist shackles, her tether to the ground released. She’s herded out into the tunnel, attached to the bars with a chain short enough that when she tries to jolt toward Veya—to help her—the shackles bite.
Kyzari melts back. Not that it stops her from nipping wide-eyed glances at her broken auntie.
Arkyn looks at the empty meal bowl sitting in the corner of Kyzari’s cell, flicking the weald open … closed … open …
Hope, it seems, is alive again. Sure sign the truth has been shared between them.
Kyzari knows her mah lives. But does she know her pah is not Tyroth—King of The Shade—as everyone believes? Does she know her pah is none other than Kaan Vaegor?
Arkyn almost laughs at the irony, snapping the weald shut.
Fate must want him to have his revenge, otherwise Kaan’s spawn wouldn’t have landed on his doorstep. It smiles on him, Arkyn is sure. Offering the blood of Kaan’s blood to scratch his bloodlust with.
Kyzari peeks up, meeting Arkyn’s stare through matted tendrils of hair. Only the swiftest glance, though he sees a spark of light in her eyes despite the dire circumstances.
He smiles, the tips of his fingers itching so much it’s an effort not to lift them to his mouth and gnaw. “Find it.” Kyzari’s cheeks lose all their pallor, filling him with sadistic glee. “Whoever has the diary will be beaten.”
Veya heaves, like the first breath after almost drowning. She whips her head around, watching the guards pour into both cells.
She screams past bloody lips, mining the strength to wrestle against her chains—veins bulging, tendons stretched. Kyzari, however, goes so still Arkyn half wonders if she’s turned as solid as that glinting stone on her head.
Guards rip Kyzari’s and Veya’s straw pallets to shreds, scattering their contents across the filthy floors. One holds up both halves of the torn parchment lark. “What about this?”
“Leave it,” Arkyn mutters, holding Kyzari’s cold stare. “There’s no life left in it anyway.”
Her lids flutter, threatening to squeeze shut. The first sign she’s struggling.
The diary is retrieved from beneath Kyzari’s waste bucket, passed to Arkyn from one of the guards, who dips his head in servitude.
The princess finally blinks, sending a tear darting through the dirt on her cheek.
“I thought you would’ve learned,” Arkyn murmurs, waving the diary. “Hope only leads to pain and disappointment.”
The softest whimper slips past her now-trembling lips, but she keeps her chin high, eyes blazing with hope that will soon be snuffed out.
He breaks her stare, turning to Veya, who thrashes like she’s prepared to unsheathe the skin from her hands in the effort to free herself.
“I thank you, sister.” He passes the diary to one of his guards, flicking the lid on the weald, distracting from the itchy, feverish shake running through his fingers.
“Had you not come and offered me such clarity, I would’ve gone to great lengths to keep the princess alive, given the diadem requires a host to feed on.
” He shrugs. “Knowing I can place it on my Fire Lark is somewhat a relief. I hear she’s grown to be rather competent with the Creators’ songs during her time away.
Too competent. The extra shackle will be useful. ”
Veya stops fighting, her next words snarled through gritted teeth. “Once Raeve learns the truth, she will obliterate you. Shackle or no. As will Kaan.”
He won’t. He’ll be dead within cycles.
Arkyn doesn’t say the words aloud. Doesn’t admit the trap’s already been laid. He’s not one to taunt fate.
“I agree,” he muses. “My Fire Lark could obliterate me. Except I forged her. She fears little more than she fears me.” With a snap of his cloak, he gives Veya his back and shapes his hand into a tingling fist around his brother’s weald.
A trigger that has Veya trying to lash her shackles loose, screaming with pitched desperation. “Beat me instead! Please! I’ll do anything. ANYTHING!”
Arkyn ignores his sister. Homes his bloodlusting attention on Kyzari, her pretty features marred with loathing.
She stares at him through eyes pitching almost as dark as the Aether Stone, and Arkyn sees his Fire Lark in the way the princess holds herself. In the way she looks at him like there’s a deeper, darker rage welling beneath her skin.
Another treasure, he realizes. She just needed a little buff.
But Kaan doesn’t deserve a daughter. Not when his mere existence snuffed the life of Arkyn’s dear mah. The one fae who loved him.
Treasured him.
Kyzari gathers a wad of saliva and spits on Arkyn’s cheek.
He chuckles, remembering his Fire Lark when she first came to him. Blazing.
Fearless.
He swipes off the spit while Kyzari holds his stare—defiance sizzling in her eyes. She doesn’t falter; not a lick of terror to be seen as he swings his entire body into a fisted throw, striking Kyzari’s temple so hard a cracking sound fills the tunnel, echoing off the walls.
She crumples. Slides down the bars, landing in a rumpled knot of filthy blue material, hair dashed across the ground like moonlight spilled from a cracked jar.
The atmosphere shudders.
The guards look at each other, passing wary glances, but Arkyn doesn’t notice the juddering disruption … frothing for more pain.
More suffering.
Bloodlust paints his vision red.
He drops a knee and jerks Kyzari up by the scruff of her dress, her body a dead weight as he whips his arm and strikes it forward, her head snapping back from the force as the softest whimper slips from her lips.
He strikes again.
Again.
Breaking his knuckles against Kaan’s young while remembering the flat eyes of his mah when he found her dead on her pallet—gone.
Picturing his pah’s face splitting with each fisted blow, renowned for being almost identical to his second-born son, who now sits the bronze throne.
Wears the bronze crown.
Veya’s shrill screams become distant background noise as Arkyn paints himself in Kyzari’s blood.
Only when her heart is barely beating does he pry back and force himself to straighten, suffocating the feral urge to mulch her into the ground. Rolling his head from one shoulder to another, he draws deep, heaving breaths through his open mouth.
Savoring the taste of his revenge.
“Put her back in the cell,” he drudges out, taking a moment to admire the blood smeared all over his trembling fists before he loosens his grip on the weald.
Pockets it.
The guards get to work on Kyzari’s lock, grab the princess by her ankles, and drag her back into her cell, leaving a crimson smear.
Arkyn’s head snaps to the side at the sound of Veya’s soft, pathetic cry.
Bunched on the ground, she meets his gaze with tears streaming down her cheeks, her face contorted with despair.
“My Fire Lark needs her diadem back.” He delivers his next words like a spread of flames. “You, my dear sister, must keep her daughter alive until the time comes to hand over the stone. Or don’t. Doom the world to ruin. Your choice.”
With that, he spins and bleeds into the dark.