Chapter Twenty-Six #3
He formed a pair of void scimitars in his hands and whirled, dodging the first pair of void daggers Lady Niyarre sent his way and knocking the second set out of the air with his own blades.
He snarled and threw the scimitars, transforming them mid-flight into a volley of void arrows that impaled her between her neck and gut in a dozen spots.
Then he directed the arrows impaling Lady Niyarre to disintegrate, reverting from the solid weapons back to their natural shadow state.
He commanded the shadows that now writhed over Lady Niyarre’s wailing form to burrow into the Stone Warden and wreak greater havoc on the inside.
Her wails hit a particularly earsplitting pitch when he set his shadows to slither into the crevices of her soul.
Like a ravenous beast who’d just run down prey, they devoured her vital organs and thus the Stone Warden’s very essence.
When Malachi was done, when her screams abruptly halted, there was no soul left behind inside the corpse for Nyaxia to collect and welcome into the Mist Isles.
Nychelle would scold him for it later, but in the moment, he gave zero fucks about the mephitic stench of fear that permeated the feast hall and grew thicker by the second.
Good. Let them cower. Let everyone observe, and deeply understand, precisely what will befall them if they’re foolish enough to follow the Stone Warden’s path and plot against me, or any queen I claim, or any heirs I’ll sire in the future.
Giving his folk an Apollyon queen and siring heirs were, after all, events he’d have to contend with relatively soon.
So he might as well put the proper safeguards in place this night against further treason in a future where such acts would become untenable.
He cut a glower around the hall, skewering each of the remaining lord primes who were not part of his Cadre with a cautioning look. They each smartly bowed their heads in a show of silent fealty. There were nine in total, and three of them were snakes that would soon be expunged from the court too.
Malachi let them squirm for a few moments before nodding and acknowledging he’d accepted their displays of allegiance for now.
Jakobi and Shionne had carried proof from Cygrove that Niyarre and Tareek hadn’t plotted alone, but he’d deal with the remaining guilty parties in a different manner.
If he was going to take out multiple lord primes at once, he needed to be strategic about it to mitigate the upheaval.
He next focused on the two tables that Lady Niyarre and Lord Tareek had formerly occupied.
“When a lord prime of a cardinal bloodline betrays the crown, Court Law allows for the extermination of that bloodline. It is my right as king to exact that precise penalty,” he reminded the remaining fae of the Niyarre and Tareek bloodlines.
The color drained from each of their faces.
A tall, dark-skinned male—Taodrick Tareek, who was Voshon’s nephew—dropped to his knees.
“Please, Your Grace,” he begged, “I did not have any knowledge of the former lord prime’s machinations.
” The faefolk of the Tareek and Niyarre bloodlines quickly followed Taodrick’s lead, dropping to their knees, professing ignorance and pleading for mercy.
Kadeesha still stood beside the Tareeks’ table.
She held herself stiffly as she looked upon Malachi.
A kernel of annoyance flared at the way she regarded him in judgment—as if he was being horrific instead of simply and wisely carrying out a sentence that was well within his right to dole out.
He projected a look back that told Kadeesha this particular matter didn’t have anything to do with her now that she had been allowed to claim Voshon’s life in recompense for the debt she was owed.
Anything that occurred beyond that was Apollyon business.
He shook off the accusation that blazed in her amber eyes.
At least, he tried to. But her damnable voice rang through his mind all the same, and it leveled the same charge at him that she had when first arriving at his court:
He and Rishaud were two sides of the same monstrous coin.
For some reason, he couldn’t shake her accusation loose. He didn’t want to be—he refused to be—the weak ruler his father had been. But also … he was loath to think of himself as a king who was a mirror image of the bastard he detested most in this realm.
Malachi looked away from Kadeesha and back upon the kneeling fae who beseeched him for mercy.
“The young among your bloodlines, any stripling the age of seventeen or below, will be spared interrogation,” he told the prostrate fae.
“All others will be taken to the dungeon and submit to an inquisition that is carried out personally by myself and my Cadre,” Malachi informed the fae of the alternative sentence he decided upon, which he supposed he could live with.
After decreeing it, he didn’t look back at Kadeesha.
He impressed upon himself that he didn’t care to check and see if she still lambasted him or if his decision had gained him absolution.
He told himself that it didn’t matter one way or the other because he didn’t care what she thought of how he ruled or the male he was.
He’d made this choice solely because it only mattered what his wider court would think.
As much as he despised it, there remained the prophecy about him bringing ruin to the Apollyonfolk.
He wouldn’t let his own actions clear a path that made it easy for Rishaud to be successful in bending yet one more prophecy to his advantage.
It was also prudent to keep as many powerful, loyal Apollyon fae around as possible for what came next—the external war with the Six Kingdoms.
And because of these truths, he also knew he needed to place some distance between himself and Kadeesha Mercier in order to keep things in the right perspective and retain clarity without her clouding his judgment or any of his actions.
Because everything about her was as cloudy as a raging tempest.