Chapter Thirty-Eight
My mother once told me that before the Great War, the Council had been considering the possibility of expanding and allowing a member of each kingdom to join them. My mother was set against it, as were most. I think they thought it would be a way to dissuade the growing tension with certain lands.
Of course, it never came to be.
I wonder now, if the outcome would’ve been any different, had they allowed outsiders in.
Tabitha Wysteria
Rio Hawthorne had been travelling for days now, leading a sizeable host of her people alongside soldiers and the Black Lotus. They marched along wolverian lands, keeping as close to the great wall as the terrain allowed. The Kingdom of Darkness, and the wyverian castle beyond it, was no longer far.
It had been several days since she had sent two scouts to search for Arden, Ylva, Elric, and Nymeria, who had never returned from the wolverian castle. Rio had expected the worst from their silence. The truth, when it came, was crueler still.
There had been no bodies to bring back for Elric and Nymeria, nothing left to recover. And of Arden and Ylva, there were no tracks at all, no footprints to suggest which way they had fled, or if they had fled at all.
‘They were taken,’ Rio said quietly as she crouched beside the fire, holding her hands out to its meagre warmth. Footsteps approached from behind her, and she could not help the faint smile that tugged at her lips at their familiarity.
‘Can a Black Lotus be taken?’ Elowen mused aloud, her voice musical as ever, each word lilting as if half-sung. ‘If so, your father, King Florian, was not especially thorough in his training.’
Rio rolled her eyes. ‘You ought not to joke about such things.’
‘The princess is right,’ Rowan said as he joined them, his stride heavier, more grounded. ‘This is no time to mock another’s distress.’
‘I am not mocking, brother,’ Elowen replied, elbowing him lightly in the ribs. ‘I am merely stating the obvious. No one kidnaps a Black Lotus.’
Rio listened to the silence that followed, keenly aware that both of them were waiting for her to speak.
She merely shrugged, rubbing her hands together in an effort to coax some warmth back into her fingers.
How she loathed this frozen land. Her home was thick with humidity, alive with jungle and forest, a place where green swallowed everything whole, but never snow.
Never this biting cold. She longed to reach wyverian lands, even if the winds there were said to be sharp and the temperatures unforgiving.
At least it would be familiar cold, not this endless white desolation.
‘If they were taken,’ Elowen pressed gently, ‘does it change our plans?’
‘No.’ Rio shook her head, decisive. ‘We continue to King Ozul. We need his numbers. His army.’
She felt Rowan study her. ‘Are you certain your sister is sure of this?’
Rio nodded without hesitation. ‘She is. She said the witches would come for us first. Quietly. Small attacks at the edges. And then they would turn their attention to Velunthar.’ Her jaw tightened.
‘If Velunthar falls, the crown falls with it. And we will not win this war alone.’ She lifted her eyes to the fire, feeling the flames curl and snap. ‘We need help.’
Rio could picture Elowen and Rowan turning towards one another, their brows knitting at her words.
She did not need her eyes to see them; she had long ago learnt how to feel people instead.
Still, there were moments when she wished she could truly look upon them.
They had described themselves to her countless times, patient and indulgent, and she had traced her fingers across their faces, memorising the lines of cheekbones and brows, building their likeness carefully inside her mind.
Her father, King Florian, had given them to her when she was still a child, in the aftermath of losing her sight.
The court children had drifted away from her then, uncertain, uncomfortable, as if blindness were contagious.
Rio had tried to keep up at first, had tried to play their games, to follow their laughter, but she could not see the rules, nor the turns, nor the looks that passed between them.
Loneliness had settled in her chest like a permanent ache.
So her father had brought Rowan and Elowen to court and placed them before her as if they were gifts, telling her that they were hers now to command, to keep and to shape as she pleased.
Rio had wondered where they had come from.
She had never asked outright, but the suspicion had always lingered.
Bastards, perhaps, born of the pleasure court.
Children spared from becoming Black Lotus for reasons she did not wish to imagine.
The thought had terrified her. What if her father decided she no longer needed them? What would happen then?
So Rowan and Elowen had become her shadows. Her constant companions. Her protectors and conspirators. Over time, they became something more than gifts, more than servants.
They became her best friends.
And, in all the ways that mattered, her siblings.
Rio did not have eyes of her own, but Rowan and his twin sister, Elowen, had long since learnt to see for her.
They became her sight upon the world by watching the court, and by watching her own father upon his throne, then bending close to whisper into her ear the truths no one wished a blind princess to hear.
Secrets curled into her mind through their voices, sharp and dangerous, impossible to unlearn.
It was through them that Rio uncovered the truth of the Black Lotus. The truth of what became of the children born in the pleasure courts.
The high noblemen were careless with the women there, indulgent and cruel in equal measure.
On more than one occasion, those women fell pregnant and when they did, the children were taken.
Stolen from their mothers’ arms before they could even be named.
The king claimed them as his own and handed them to the Black Lotus, where they were stripped of childhood and forged into weapons.
They were trained to kill.
Assassins shaped by pain and obedience.
Feared across all eight kingdoms.
And Rio had learnt it all not through sight, but through whispers in the dark, truths carried to her by the only two people who had ever truly been willing to see the world on her behalf.
‘My sister is never wrong,’ Rio said calmly. ‘We ought to know that by now, Elowen.’
Elowen let out a quiet sigh. ‘I know. But what if this time it’s a trick?’
Rio waved the worry away with a small, dismissive motion. ‘She has never led us astray before. Why would she begin now?’
‘Because that isn’t really your sister,’ Elowen replied.
Rio stiffened at once. She tilted her head, attuning herself to the hush of the forest—the whisper of leaves beneath boots, the restless sigh of the breeze—listening for any presence beyond their small circle.
‘Watch what you say out loud,’ Rowan warned sharply.
‘Sorry,’ Elowen muttered.
Rio smiled and blew Elowen a kiss, earning a soft laugh in return.
Even though they had once been given to her by the king, Rio could no longer imagine a world without them.
They were her friends. Her only friends, truly.
For years she had wondered whether they merely endured her out of obligation, bound by her father’s will.
But when the king had died, she had freed them without hesitation.
She still remembered the way they had both embraced her, holding her tightly as they whispered that they would never leave her, for she was the only family they had ever known.
‘We’re only two days away from the wyverian castle,’ Rowan said.
Rio pictured him at once. The twins were both tall and slender, their builds not unlike her own.
Their hair, however, was a striking blue; so different from her short, dark dreadlocks.
Their antlers were smaller too, less elegant than hers, lacking the unmistakable mark of royalty.
Elowen, of course, compensated for that in her own way, forever weaving flowers into them.
Rio had once reminded her gently that she could not actually see the blossoms Elowen insisted on adorning her antlers with.
Elowen had only laughed and hushed her, saying that the rest of them could see, and that the world deserved something beautiful to look at.
‘Maybe you ought to…’ Rowan began.
He did not finish the thought. He did not need to. Rio understood him perfectly.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ Elowen said quickly. ‘What if one of the gods realises?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Rio replied, her voice steady. ‘Just make sure you watch over my body while I’m gone.’
‘Rio…’
She ignored the worry threaded through her friend’s voice. Carefully, she lowered herself onto the cold earth and closed her eyes. It made little difference—she could have left them open. Sight did not come to her either way.
Rio Hawthorne had not always lived in darkness.
Until the age of ten, she had seen the world as clearly as anyone else; the colours of the court, the shifting light through leaves, the faces of those who loved and feared her.
Until her father, the king, traded her sight to a god.
After that, the world was taken from her.
Faces, skies, distances…all gone. She had been forced to relearn how to exist within a void, to move through space without certainty, to trust hands and voices instead of her own eyes.
The darkness had been merciless at first. But time, stubbornness, and the unwavering presence of Elowen and Rowan had shaped her into something formidable.
Unstoppable.
Her eyes had been stolen from her.
And in return, Rio had been given something else.
The power to see the realms of gods.