Chapter Eighteen Samira #2
And Finan had chosen that. Been ready to condemn his own grandchild to it, abandoned her in favor of it.
He must have known all this and yet… Anger rose inside me, sudden and acute.
An incomprehensible decision, choosing the dark over his family.
A horrible, evil decision that spat in the very face of Ketet.
With physical effort, I pulled my gaze back to Rade. “You wrote to King Zaid about this,” I said, recalling what Keir had said that fateful night in the throne room.
“I did,” he confirmed. “Multiple times, in fact. He never answered my letters.”
If the king had known, had Amunet? But that didn’t make any sense.
It was true that no Ashoran would stick their neck out to help the Kaldfolk, but if the threat was coming to us, and so swiftly, Amunet would have done something with that knowledge.
Organized the Khada Guard on her own if she had to.
She was stubborn. She would have acted. And unlike King Zaid, she would not have kept us ignorant of the threat that affected all of us.
Would she?
Guilt curdled in my stomach at doubting the Gods-Chosen for even a second. It didn’t matter what King Zaid had or had not done, my queen was nothing like him. That I knew wholeheartedly.
And yet.
The Kaldfolk weren’t cannibals. They weren’t heretics. Two of the three things I’d always been told were lies.
The Shroud was real. I’d seen it with my own eyes, felt its call. Rade clearly had magic, but he’d have to be incredibly strong to fabricate an illusion that massive. He hadn’t even been strong enough to remove an elderly man from his rocking chair.
Unless that was just part of the ruse, to make me think he wasn’t strong enough.
But the fear in Velka’s eyes, the unease Keir was doing his best to hide, those didn’t look fake. They had seen monsters. They had seen tragedy. Rade said every member of the Seven was cracked in some way. Maybe the Shroud was why.
Trying to undo the knot of thoughts swirling around my mind, to sniff out manipulation or untruths, was giving me a headache.
I asked, “So why am I here?” I was looking at Keir, who had made the decision to kidnap the Gods-Chosen. He met my stare unflinchingly.
But Rade was the one who answered. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, light brown eyes boring into mine.
“We’ve tried everything,” he insisted. “Spells and incantations. Prayed to Ketet. Pleaded with Shaya. Nothing has worked. But”—he licked his lips nervously—“there is one thing we haven’t tried. ”
“What?”
He glanced at his friends before scooting closer, our knees brushing. “I wasn’t chosen as king for my fighting ability. Any of the Seven—any Shifter in Kaldfold, for that matter—would have me beat there. I was chosen for my magic, gifted to me by Eira.”
One of Ketet’s daughters, Goddess of the Lost.
I gaped. “You are Gods-Chosen?” I could not remember a time the gods had sent two of their children at the same time.
He huffed a laugh. “No. Not chosen. Blessed.” His face grew serious. “There is no one more lost than those trapped in the Shroud. Eira sees that, and she entrusts me to save them.”
Gods-Blessed. I had heard of people who had been touched by the gods. Different from King Zaid’s blessing to rear Shaya’s daughter. More tangible. Usually reserved for healers, seers, or soldiers. Or… a king.
Now I understood the weight on Rade’s shoulders. It was the responsibility for his entire people.
“Can’t you just pull people out of the Shroud?” I said.
“If I’d been king when the Shroud first took hold, maybe. But now I’m not strong enough to do it on my own.”
“That’s where you come in,” Velka said.
My heart skipped a beat at that. Rade took my hands in his.
“You are of Shaya’s blood.” Eagerness coated his every word.
“His power flows in your veins, the same power that makes up the Shroud. If we were to combine our magic, I think we’d be strong enough to close the wound, as it were. Plug the leak.”
I nearly choked. “Combine our magic?”
He released my hands abruptly and returned to his desk.
I looked at Velka and Keir. Keir’s face was tight, but Velka was watching me with unveiled hope.
“There is a ritual. Our ancestors called it the Merging,” Rade explained as he opened an old tome, its spine near disintegration.
He thumbed delicately through the pages until he landed on the right one.
“It hasn’t been used in ages because it is only fit for those with power—power that hasn’t existed among humans since the War of the Ancients—but the chieftains of the old world swore by it. ”
He held the book out to me. I took it with unsteady hands, the vellum cover rough beneath my fingers. I didn’t bother looking at the words—as a slave, I had never been taught to read—and instead focused on the drawing in the center of the page.
It showed two people, a man and a woman, with red tattoos all over their faces. Their palms were pressed together, and a red glow emanated from between them, swirling up and around their heads.
“Back then,” Rade said, “every ruler was blessed by the gods, and the Merging ensured that the ruling pair were equal, power shared between them so that they would lead as one.”
I studied the drawing. The light around their heads seemed gentle, soft. Like an embrace. And the hands that were pressed together showed matching rings around their fourth fingers.
Wedding bands.
“This is a wedding ceremony,” I stated dubiously as Rade resumed his seat beside me. When he didn’t respond, I looked to Keir. “You brought me here to marry him?”
He didn’t even flinch. “Yes.”
I almost laughed. The Kaldfolk, instead of fleeing the palace when the Khada Guard turned on them, risked life and limb to kidnap my queen—not to eat or kill her, but to marry her.
But my laughter fizzled before reaching my lips.
It was too… small. That couldn’t be the whole plan. There was something here I wasn’t seeing. If Queen Amunet were here, she would know it instantly. Even if the Kaldfolk weren’t heretics, even if they hadn’t torn me apart like they’d done to those guards—
A wedding.
A merging of magic.
Because they wanted my queen’s power.
That was what this was about. Not uniting against a common foe. This was about power. A wedding ceremony that would bind magic… merge it as one. If Rade had access to the Gods-Chosen’s power, if he could use it however he pleased, he could drain her entirely.
He could steal it.
Why should I trust their story? Maybe the Shroud wasn’t the Underworld. Maybe it was just a blight affecting Kaldfold, some corrupt magic left behind by their strange powers. That certainly seemed a lot more probable than the Underworld bleeding into our realm.
This might just be an elaborate ruse. Rade wanted to scare Amunet so that she’d feel she had no choice but to unite her magic with his. And with the Gods-Chosen’s power at his fingertips, who knew what the Kaldfold king would do? Take revenge against Ashorah, for sure.
That was a plan worth drilling into the Frozen Sands for, worth months—if not years—of preparation, worth the risk of infiltrating Khada Palace and its legions. The Kaldfolk wanted the power of the Gods-Chosen.
Though Rade’s gentle eyes didn’t look like a thief’s…
“I needed you to see it for yourself, Amunet.” His breath brushed my cheek.
I hadn’t realized we were both leaning over the pages until then.
“To see the threat. The magnitude of it, and understand that no army would be able to stop it, no one person, either.” He lifted his eyes from the book to meet mine.
“A Gods-Chosen and a Gods-Blessed. If we don’t do it, your people and mine will be doomed to the Shroud, to that perpetual night stuck between realms, a fate so much worse than the Trench. ”
My gaze caught on another drawing, and my mouth went dry.
The man and woman lay on altars, head to head, with their arms hanging limply over the tabletop. Blood streamed from slit wrists.
“What is that?” I asked.
“The last part of the Merging,” Rade replied. “It looks much scarier than it is. Our magic will protect us from the wounds.”
“But I—I—” I grappled for an excuse. “I haven’t gone through the Igniting. I don’t have access to any power for another—”
“Twenty-two days. I know. If we begin quickly, the Merging will end on your birthday, when you’ll have your powers. It’s perfectly safe. You could save us immediately, before any more are lost to the Shroud.”
I shook my head again. This was how they’d find me out. It didn’t matter how much he pleaded, what he said. I didn’t have that power. The ritual would kill me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t—
I drew a deep breath, staring down at the book, and forced my panicked thoughts to calm.
I could leave. That was what Rade had promised. I could turn my back on all this. It wasn’t something I could fix anyway.
But my queen had twenty-two days left. Still plenty of time for word of her location to reach the Kaldfolk, for them to track her down and steal her power.
And then it hit me.
I didn’t actually have to finish the ritual.
All I had to do was stall.
If they believed I was Queen Amunet for twenty-two days, if I could keep their attention fixed solely on me for twenty-two days, then the Gods-Chosen would be able to claim her birthright and Rade wouldn’t have a chance to steal her magic.
If what Rade said was true, if the Shroud was the Underworld reaching into this realm, my queen would fight it off.
She may have been chosen by Shaya, but her purpose was to save us.
She wouldn’t let this darkness spread and claim her people, no matter who was at the root of it.
And with her powers, she wouldn’t need a Kald at her side to do it.
I looked up into Rade’s eyes and squared my shoulders. “What do I have to do?”
“Does… does that mean you’ll help?”
“Yes.”
Velka yipped joyfully, clapping her hands on her thighs. The tension drained from Rade’s shoulders as a wide smile spread over his face. “Thank you,” he breathed, voice thick with emotion.
But when I looked at Keir, he was silent, face utterly blank and yet probing. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
Three weeks. I just needed to last three weeks.