This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

CHAPTER 1

Rain drenched the city, cold and relentless.

It leached all color from the medieval-looking buildings, turning the world gray and soaking through the filthy rag in which I had swaddled myself.

The sour stench rising from the grimy folds was truly epic.

I couldn’t feel my toes, and my fingers were going numb.

The three-story buildings towered over the alley like the walls of a stone canyon, boxing me in. Sometime between yesterday evening and this morning, my stomach had turned into a painful bottomless pit. I hadn’t eaten in three days. I wasn’t even shivering anymore. My body didn’t have the energy.

I checked on my rock again. It lay in a puddle by my feet, a cream-colored chunk of building stone about the size of a large grapefruit.

Any bigger, and it would be too hard to grip with one hand.

I had found it this morning and carried it through the rain for two hours until I found the right bridge.

The rock was still there. I touched it with my foot to make sure. It felt solid and real.

I peeled myself from the wall and leaned a little to glance out of the alley.

In front of me a narrow stone bridge spanned the width of a rain-swollen river.

Another wall of medieval buildings loomed on the other side.

Behind them, a tower soared, a spire rising at least six hundred feet, silhouetted against the storm-choked sky and topped by a huge flower of translucent, milky glass.

The flower’s petals were shut into a bud, guarding the observation deck in its center from the storm.

Every few seconds, bright gold sparks dashed through the enchanted glass.

A dozen dark shapes circled the flower, surfing the wild air currents. My brain expected them to be birds, but birds had only one pair of wings, not two. The feeling of wrongness was overwhelming.

Yep, the Mage Tower and the strange bird-things were still there, too.

I huddled against the wall.

I couldn’t touch the Mage Tower, but I knew it was real.

For one, I had pictured it differently. In my head it was a flawless pale needle, elegant and almost dainty.

If this had been a hallucination, what I saw would’ve matched the vision in my head, but the reality was nothing like that.

This tower jutted up, defiant, its walls worn but strong, as if it had grown from bedrock.

And it felt old. Like it had stood there for thousands of years and would stand just like that for another millennium, timeless and indifferent, while the city around it crumbled into dust, rebuilt, and crumbled again.

No, it was real, like this endless rain, like the pain in my freezing bare feet, and like the gnawing ache in my stomach.

In the distance, a bell tolled four times. Four pm.

It wouldn’t be too long now.

To say that this was not the way I envisioned spending my Sunday would be a criminal understatement.

Today would’ve been my one day off. I should’ve spent it watching Netflix, nibbling on a pizza, and reading while lounging on my couch in my tiny apartment, in my soft sweatpants, warm and dry.

Not wrapped in a dirty rag, shivering in a grimy alley, while the sky dumped gallons of cold rain on my head.

I wasn’t a big reader through most of my childhood, but when I was sixteen, my first serious boyfriend broke up with me, and it was hell.

My brain kept rehashing every moment of the relationship in excruciating detail.

One afternoon, as I lay on my bed, wallowing in self-pity, my mom handed me a thick fantasy book, and when I turned my nose up at it, she told me, “Maggie, you need to live in someone else’s head for a bit. ”

I’d thought I would read a few pages. When I came up for air, five hours later, my breakup was an afterthought.

Some seriously messed-up stuff happened on the first page, and I had to find out how it turned out.

Somehow by the end of those five hours, the book had wrung me dry. I could deal with life again.

I’d tried every genre under the sun since, but fantasy was my vice of choice.

There was something about blades and magic that did it for me.

Deadly sword-masters, thieves prowling through moonlit streets, dark magicians, warrior princesses, ruthless nobles, majestic dragons, hideous monsters, I loved it all.

Put a hot dude in armor with a sword on the cover, and my eyes glazed over while my hand crept to the buy button, budget be damned.

I had read enough fantasy books to fill a library, but that very first series was my special treasure.

Set in the city of Kair Toren, capital of the kingdom of Rellas, the story revolved around the power struggles of eight noble families, and it was so full of fantasy tropes, it would be clichéd except that the superb writing moved it right past stereotypical into classic.

The characters felt so real, they practically jumped off the page.

The series had two books, The Thieves of the North and The Lords of the East. The third one had never come out.

I had been rereading those two books for the last ten years.

Whenever life got to be too harsh, I would grab them off my bookshelf, and they never failed to pull me out of whatever funk I had going on at the time.

I could quote passages from memory. I had stalked the author’s abandoned website religiously for any hint of a release date.

I haunted the fan groups looking for rumors and stewing in collective frustration.

Adrian Latour, the author of the series, was always an enigma.

He didn’t do social media or appearances, and his bio, with a blank square where the author photo should have been, consisted of a single sentence: Adrian Latour, man of dreams and chronicler of stories.

After the second book came out, he seemed to vanish.

He never wrote anything else, and nobody offered an explanation as to why he stopped working.

The story just cut off. One of my favorite characters was left standing on a box with a noose around his neck for a decade.

Three nights ago, after a long day of delivering groceries, I went to sleep in my apartment south of Austin and woke up in Kair Toren.

A hint of movement on my left made me turn. Something small padded through the rain toward me. I brushed the water off my face.

A red furry creature padded out from the rain-soaked alley and stared at me with unblinking dark eyes.

Its head was round, with curved marten ears that stood straight up, a button nose, and very long whiskers.

It didn’t walk, it slunk, its longish body sitting low on four short legs that ended in webbed hand-paws armed with sharp retractable claws.

It was as if an otter and a Ragdoll cat had a baby and dyed it red.

A stelka. A female one. Males had tufts on their ears.

Stelkas infested Kair Toren and its five rivers, catching fish and rats, eating garbage, raiding cellars, stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, and generally being a nuisance.

Like overly smart foxes, except that normal foxes at least hesitated before they scurried over to take a bite out of someone five times their size.

Last night, exhausted and desperate, I’d fallen asleep under some busted crates, and this morning I woke up because one of these red assholes decided to chew on my leg.

The stelka opened her mouth and showed me sharp white teeth.

It couldn’t be.

I crouched and tilted my head, trying to get a better look.

There it was, a white patch on the stelka’s chest that looked like a lopsided half-moon. I had seen a dozen stelkas in my three days of stumbling around the city, and only one of them had a white patch like that. I must’ve been really delicious.

“You followed me.” My voice creaked like I had crawled out of the grave.

The stelka eyed me.

“Nope. Not happening.”

The little creature took a step forward.

I showed her my rock.

Another step.

I gripped the rock and hit the cobblestones with it.

The beast shied back and hissed.

A piercing screech tore through the air above us. I glanced up. One of the weird birds swooped at the tower in a suicidal dive and rammed the petals.

For a moment, the entire flower went dark, barely visible in the rain.

Oh crap.

The bud pulsed with pale light. Tongues of golden lightning erupted from the petals, snaking toward the birds. They tried to flee in a panic, but the lightning chased them, stabbing at their wings.

One of the bird-things cried out, plunged from the sky, and smashed onto the paver stones between me and the stelka with a wet thud.

It was about the size of an eagle, with a long whip-like tail tipped with a fan of dark feathers.

Its wings were wide, its long hind legs were sheathed in contour feathers, and all four of its appendages ended in paws armed with sharp talons.

A lorsse. Those long dinosaur-looking jaws were a dead giveaway. So that’s what they looked like. In the books, they came out during storms and were attracted to magic.

The bird-thing clicked its needle teeth and tried to rise.

The stelka lunged forward. Her mouth closed on the creature’s neck and bit down.

Blood drenched the feathers. The lorsse went limp.

The stelka growled at me, clamping the neck in her teeth, slung the dead lorsse over her back—it was bigger than she was—and took off deeper into the alley, back the way she had come.

That’s right. And don’t come back.

I slumped against the wall. Kair Toren in a nutshell.

One moment you are flying high and screaming at the world, the next someone bites your throat and drags you off into a dark alley.

It was unhinged, but I was almost sorry to see the stelka go.

In the past three days, that little beast was the only living creature that had acknowledged my existence.