The Betrayer’s Serpent #4
“But maybe… maybe we’ll be okay. Give me that hope one last time, Bast.”
Hope had earned Esme every scar she had. “I’m tired of being punished for disobeying, Ryukyhn.”
“Then we figure out how to kill Isobel in a way that doesn’t anger the Bond.”
“As soon as she’s gone, it’ll be Belchin on the throne.
” Esme wrenched her hand from his, smoothing her hair back.
“The line of succession is as long as your arm. Lukas Rivellion and Janos Rivel after him. Then Gavin Danveran and all three of his sons. Then Lord Farrow. There are five more nobles behind him, each with at least one heir. Then there would be the generals. Dahl and her second in the north, Gustoe and his seconds to the west, Joh’el and his second in the south.
That’s more than twenty-five people spread across this country we’d have to kill, including both heirs.
And then the spell would also have to be void or we’d just be dead anyway.
Those are shit odds at best, impossible at worst.”
“Not if the seven of us try hard enough,” Urias countered. “We can kill the heirs, and their heirs, and after that we can kill Turiel’s bastards. We can burn this country to the ground. And if we die… we won’t be here, and isn’t that our goal anyway?”
Esme looked back at him. He was serious, his eyes dry and clear.
They absolutely could do what he said. They could spread across this country like a plague and murder and burn and pillage everything until Micrea was a black smear across the land, and it may kill them, but on the small chance it didn’t, they would be free. What would freedom even feel like?
She imagined freedom was a cool breeze in that village in Uhmer.
She imagined it was the warm lapping of the ocean at her ankles, the wriggling of her toes into loose sand.
She imagined it was the rightness of her hair braided tight against her scalp in the style Omniel hated so deeply that he barred her from wearing it.
She imagined it was kneeling in front of a fire, praying.
Freedom was Ojalla actually hearing her for the first time in nearly a century.
Freedom was speaking her own language, screaming in it, laughing in it, crying in it, singing in it.
To hear her name, her name, in her accent.
Hear it as her mother spoke it when she’d first held her crying baby.
Freedom was warmth rolling through a home full of love.
Warmth that could grow hands and knead her tired muscles, that could whisper in her ear, “It’s over, now. You can rest.”
Esme could kill for that warmth.
But that ocean lapping at her ankles would be tinged red with the blood of millions.
Her feet would sink into carrion. Her hair would be speckled with bone.
She would kneel at the funeral pyres of thousands of children.
Her village would sit atop a mountain of dead.
That warmth she craved would waft in from Amaris, the city gates locked from the outside, fire eating every single person who’d ever dared to live inside it.
That was not the warmth she wanted.
“That’s too much blood, Ryukyhn.”
Urias wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her middle. He bowed his head into her shoulder. “Even in bondage, you dare to be a pacifist, Esme.” Esme. Because the woman bargaining with him to save Micrea was not the Bast hungering for home.
“I’m not a pacifist.” She used to be. Once upon a time, before she was Esme. “I just can’t commit genocide.”
“You sound like a monk.”
“I was a priestess.”
“Of a death god.”
“And I never gave Ojalla more than She needed.”
Urias looked out of the window, shaking his head. He smiled down at her. “Well, if you refuse to kill a country with me, we’ll find another way around. We’ll have to control the new king. Can’t let him do just whatever he wishes. We know how that ends.”
“Of course not. Humans are hardly suitable to run a household, let alone an entire kingdom.” Esme smiled.
She tried not to chafe in his hold, shifting her weight.
His hands were heavier than she’d ever felt them.
Of course, Urias had just suggested they kill a country of people and maybe drop dead right after.
“Let’s just hope that nothing goes wrong for the next sixty years,” Urias said, moving a lock of hair behind her ear, “and hopefully we can find a more decent way to escape. For your sake.”
Sixty years…
Esme looked back down at Amaris and saw a pair of guards hauling a woman out by her arms while she scratched at their hands.
Her clothing was thin and frayed at the edges.
When they got to the gate, they unlatched a small door and pushed her out.
Esme watched her body tumble down the hillside until it landed in a clump of fabric and red-stained hair.
Expulsion was a common punishment for those found guilty of stealing food from the castle kitchens—kitchens manned mostly by those starving in the Foot.
Esme almost changed her mind.