Chapter Five #2
But his answer is interrupted by shouts and the score of heavily armed guards who march into the paddock accompanied by a half dozen runecasters, Clem, Hamid, and the king himself.
A very furious king, by the look on Roshan’s face.
I shove my guilt away, feeling the newly healed azdaha stiffen menacingly beside me.
“Suraya, move aside!” Roshan’s voice snaps like a whip, clipped and cold.
His kingsguard form a half circle at his back, the runecasters already beginning to weave containment spells.
The collar and bracers start to glow that ominous red from earlier, and suddenly, the azdaha’s nostrils flare in distress.
With the open connection between us, I feel his pain like a stinging echo, until he brutally throttles the link.
I still feel it, but I know it’s a hundred times worse for him.
“Call off your dogs,” I shout to the king. “I’m not in danger, but I can’t promise that they won’t be.”
Razulek whines, his barbed tail whipping out as his long neck undulates in a serpentine motion. One well-placed swipe of that thick tail or his wing, and these idiots would die.
“You’re hurting him. Stop!”
The azdaha’s huge head sways forward, putting me slightly behind him, and for a moment, it seems like Razulek intends to protect me, even while he’s being battered by the runes on the collar.
Clem lets out a loud curse, her features tight with worry.
Considering the guards’ reactions and their raised jādū weapons, I suspect it looks different from their perspective—like the azdaha is about to consume me as his next meal.
“Don’t harm him,” I yell, ducking under Razulek’s head. Then I form the words in my head and push them toward him, wondering if he can receive my thoughts as I’d heard his. Razulek, what are you doing?
Protecting you, he replies weakly.
“They won’t hurt either of us,” I say aloud. My eyes flick to the runecasters and meet the king’s livid face. “Roshan, please. Call them off. He’s in pain, but he’s defending me.”
For a heartbeat, a seething penumbra slithers through his gaze, his armored fist clenching, but then he tilts his head, his voice soft and discreet. “You disobeyed me.”
“You’re overreacting, it’s—”
He doesn’t let me finish. “I forbade you, and you defied me.”
His words are like blades, eviscerating me publicly.
My ears burn with humiliation as I swallow and survey the guards crowding the corral.
I’m not a child to be scolded, and he shouldn’t treat me like one.
I was never in any real danger. And if he’d trusted me in the first place with information, I wouldn’t be so eager to ferret out secrets on my own and break his asinine rules in the process.
My jaw sets as he shows no sign of relenting.
Very well. If he wants to play this game in front of an audience, we’ll play.
My chin rises. “I didn’t defy you. You said not to go to the arena.” With a calm I don’t feel, I sweep my hand around, keeping my expression neutral. “We are not in the arena, and I wanted to assess the condition of the azdaha for myself.”
He frowns at my composed reply. “And I told you, it is dangerous.”
“Not to me,” I counter. I feel my blood boil at his tone but lower my voice a smidge, though I’m sure that those closest can still hear me. “You can’t control everything, Roshan. Stop thinking that you know what’s best for me or that you know better. I am perfectly safe.”
His eyes narrow when steam pours from Razulek’s nostrils. “Are you?”
“I am safer with him than any of your militant guards.” Or with you for that matter . . . I don’t say those words, but I feel them like lead ballast tearing through my heart. When did I no longer feel safe with Roshan?
From behind his cousin, Aran steps forward, and the azdaha releases a bone-chilling growl of warning. At the king’s short nod, my stomach dives. “Aran, don’t hurt—”
But it’s too late.
The runes on Razulek’s collar and cuffs glow from red to a sickly yellow. In the same moment, a savage paroxysm rips through our muted link, making my spine bow from the agonizing force of it. I whimper, eyes darting to the azdaha, whose wings are curled down, his entire body shaking.
“Stop! Aran, stop! You’re killing him. He’s already weak. He won’t fight back!”
Razulek whines as he cowers and finally crumples into a shuddering heap. The bracers don’t only limit his magic, I realize thinly. They are designed to inflict nerve damage, packing enough of a punch to render a massive beast useless.
Belatedly, I realize that if he hadn’t throttled our connection, I would likely be in a similar state.
Razulek is no longer moving, his huge body twitching uncontrollably as a strangled sob bursts from me.
The smell of charred flesh fills the space, the jādū collar continuing to blister the already patchy scales at his neck. He keens in agony.
Gods, why won’t they stop hurting him? I have to do something!
My own runes burst into light, my simurgh roaring at the barbarity.
A tornado of air magic from one of the runecasters slams into me from the back, knocking me to my knees as if I’m a secondary threat, and I scramble groggily to my feet, feeling like my spine has been snapped in two.
A feral growl emerges from the nearly unconscious Razulek that lifts the hairs on my neck, and his tail slashes in a burst of strength.
It catches the man who struck me in his ribs with the barbed end, and within seconds, molten red boils spread over the man’s skin.
“Take the beast down now!” someone commands. Hamid, I dimly recognize.
No. I feel my magic surge, snaking between the bodies before me in gleaming ribbons, on the verge of incapacitating them all.
Roshan’s gaze darkens. “That is treason, my love,” he whispers so softly that I almost don’t catch it.
Half delirious with pain, I scoff. “What will you do, Your Majesty? Lock me in the dungeon? Put me in straps like a horse to be broken?” My throat tightens as I stare at the heaving azdaha. “Or fit me with a jādū collar like his?”
“Enough of this nonsense. Cease this ridiculous display.” The king’s eyes spark with anger, and I recoil at his frigid tone, my heart trembling at a stranger I suddenly don’t recognize.
“Tell your guards to stand down. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Please.”
My magic thunders in my veins and I struggle to rein it in. Razulek is near death, his pulse too faint to take much more, and with weapons pointed at us, my simurgh wants nothing more than to eliminate the obvious threat.
An imperious stare bores into me. “I said enough, Starkeeper.”
Starkeeper. Not Suraya, not Sura, not my starling.
My heart fractures.
Not so long ago, my gardener-prince turned king would have dismissed everyone and taken me into his arms, no matter how upset we were.
He would have kissed me, stroked my cheek with his calloused fingers, whispered words of reassurance and affection.
Soothed me, trusted me, loved me enough to know that I could never hurt him.
But this king with the dead eyes doesn’t move.
“Roshan.” His name emerges as a faint plea.
But my gardener is gone, and the king of Oryndhr is cold, that shadowed brown gaze so devoid of empathy that it’s an arrow to my chest. His answer is in his rooted stance and stony silence.
My instincts are screaming for me to leave before things get worse and before I do something I regret. I need to go home, back to Coban . . . to the last place I felt safe.
The beginnings of my portal begin to form, sparking into an oval shape. I ignore the gasps. The only reason I haven’t created one before is out of deference to Roshan, as well as a lack of practical experience.
Portal magic is dangerously precise. But I’d rather risk ending up in the middle of a lava pit in Droon than stay here a second longer.
“I’m leaving,” I whisper. “Don’t try to stop me.”
I’m so focused on anchoring the portal to Coban that I don’t feel the damnable prick at my neck or hear the soft whisper of apology from Clem until it’s much too late.
The portal dissolves into nothing as I surrender to the sting of betrayal and the bittersweet embrace of my most hated nemesis . . .
Jade.