Eyes of Kings (Flesh & False Gods #3)

Prologue

MANY YEARS AGO

Sinoa Tuoleimi was going to lose this war.

The verdict traveled through her front lines as an inevitability.

They had sacrificed security for speed. Ravaged a path across Talin, fought fiercely through provinces where they barely emerged with their supplies intact.

From the onset, and in that critical period preceding it, every advisor serving her retinue warned there was only one track toward victory.

She needed the stronghold. She needed to win it from her brothers.

She’d tried. She had tried with everything she was capable of—but her patron god had deserted her.

The south is lost. Yi has burned.

The tides must recede when the moon tugs. The sun must fall when the earth spins. And failing to win Yi meant her forces would soon collapse. The melee was over.

Sinoa pressed harder on her horse. When she glanced back, there was nothing behind her for miles, only sand and dust, yellow and brown in the dying light of the day.

She urged forward, crossing from Actia into Rincun.

The white sleeves of her dress blew wide to either side of her; the crown on her head whistled with the wind.

She’d left her battalions. Her generals in the north continued to hold their lines, but they would hear about the decisive battle in Yi before long.

Her forces were tired. They would abandon their posts.

Worse, soldiers would defect to her brothers’ camps instead.

There, they were promised food, water, shelter.

There, they took up the mantle of divinity.

Her brothers claimed the king of the heavens had spoken to them.

They were to be his representatives on earth, and Sinoa was undeserving.

She released a scream. The cold ground shuddered, bracing against the onslaught.

Rincun and its people were used to it—to her.

While Talin fought a civil war, its vassal states stayed tense, watching these behemoth rulers come and go.

Princess Sinoa built her palace in the mountains years ago.

From the moment she was of age to administer the kingdom’s affairs, she chose the north, because the north was unpredictable, but the north was also resourceful.

Talin’s north followed her when she went to war.

Ximili Province kneeled first. Then, on a second offensive, she took Teefa Province.

Her forces grew—her numbers swelled. Down she marched, into Lankil and its capital city: Er.

The Palace of Heavens threw a triumph in her honor.

The Palace of Heavens crowed about their returning queen, their rightful queen.

They trusted Sinoa, the named heir. Though she was thirdborn, she was most beloved.

They didn’t trust Akilas, the usurper, the debauchee, the firstborn.

While Sinoa kept peace with their northern vassal states, Akilas remained with the Palace of Heavens.

Prince Akilas was often found drunk in taverns and making a mess carousing through the streets.

Upon the king’s death, he claimed the throne in joint possession with Potau—the secondborn, the forgotten—and Lankil Province waited for Sinoa’s rescue.

Lankil Province accused Prince Akilas of killing the king himself and hiding the divine crown.

After all his talk about unseating Sinoa as the heir, it was a fair assumption.

Sinoa let them believe it. Because the truth was that she had traveled into Er days before her father’s death and stolen into the Palace of Heavens.

The truth was that Sinoa Tuoleimi had marked a sigil for her patron god on her chest and prayed.

She had entered the king’s sleeping quarters unseen.

Put her hands on the divine crown. Pried and pried, even as power bled down the walls and moaned under the doors, even as her father woke and cried for help.

The blood had flung in radial streaks across the bed, resembling the shape of a scarlet eye.

Sinoa did not let herself look away. The removal of the divine crown was rarely survivable for a person’s qi.

She had understood the consequences. It would kill her father.

But what else was she to do: wait for Akilas to take the crown first?

He was already declaring that the gods spoke to him.

The king was growing old, growing sickly, but Sinoa did not have time at her disposal to wait for natural succession.

With the king dead, Sinoa slunk back to her palace in the mountains. She waited for her brothers to discover the body, to declare themselves the new kings of Talin—because she knew they would. Then she marched down, wielding her righteous claim to the throne.

Long live Her Majesty. Long live Her Majesty ten thousand years.

She led her army below the Jinzi River. She moved without mercy, almost sapped her power dry clashing with the forces that her brothers recruited to defend their position.

When their numbers started to rise, awed by the displays of divine power that Akilas and Potau had suddenly acquired, Sinoa feigned discovery of the divine crown.

She placed it upon her head and seized heaven’s qi with her mortal hands, sacrificed from herself again and again, breathed in sync with the mountains, the waves, the rolling plains.

And still, it hadn’t been enough. Her brothers, indeed, had won the favor of the pantheon!

Why? What did they have that she didn’t?

What was it about their qi that had spurred the gods to descend and fight, that had blown the breath of victory over their soldiers while Sinoa possessed only her own might?

Her offensive had weakened through Yingu, through Dacia, then fragmented when it counted most. She failed to take the metropolis in the southeast. Yi, the beating heart of Talin, where her camps were burning, where her brothers left her soldiers as ash.

Her advisors begged her to declare her loss, spare the rest of her army their lives.

Somehow, somehow, she’d almost won all of Talin, but the kingdom would not be hers.

Surrender, the letter had scorned. She could hear Akilas laughing while he penned ink to paper. Potau over his shoulder, always taking his side when they were children too. The blood will be on your hands.

The blood was already on her hands. Outside those most loyal to her in Lankil, where she’d made her base, she was losing her people and their allegiance.

Even her favorite advisor thought as much.

Accept the loss, he urged. Ask for mercy and she might be spared her life.

Her brothers might exile her, but she’d be allowed to live in the north, beyond the bounds of Talin, beyond Rincun, atop the mountains where she once governed. There, she would be undisturbed.

There, she would have no power at all.

Sinoa didn’t stop riding until she reached the mountains.

Her crown burned with light, golden as her eyes, showing her the way.

Very well—they wanted her cast afar. The snow on the incline melted where she stepped.

On each stride closer to her palace, she begged the pantheon to listen, to give her some other recourse.

The heavens determined all upon the mortal realm.

There was not so much one god of fate, but a godling of the thirteenth year and a godling of good decisions and a godling of marital bliss.

There was no god of the sky, but there was a god of the western rain and a god of the eastern clouds and a god who decided which way the wind blew only when the sun crested over the zenith.

So many of them, yet only one had answered Sinoa’s prayers.

The palace was silent upon her arrival. She had cleared it when the war started, evacuated her staff, reassigned her soldiers. Sinoa stepped into the atrium, and the world slowed.

“Answer me,” she whispered. Her legs moved through mired air, climbing the stairs for the throne room. “Please.”

The godling had offered an impossible solution, shaking her head when Sinoa asked for something sooner, anything sooner, and then the godling had disappeared entirely.

Perhaps her patron did not believe Sinoa would actually make the attempt, but there was no world in which Sinoa would accept this loss.

She would be forgotten. Erased in the history books when it came time for her brothers to tell the tale of their victory.

They couldn’t do that to her. She was a Tuoleimi.

She was a mortal who could afford to play god.

Sinoa emerged at the top of the staircase. Silver moonlight streamed through the glass, each rectangular block a perfect fixture on the cold floor.

There would be no controlling when she returned. No ability to determine what role she would play, how she would manifest back into her power. But she would. Even if her patron had forsaken her, she trusted this offering. It did not come without risk.

Sinoa Tuoleimi sat down on her throne.

In Lankil, the first splatter of blood touched the soil. In the palace, she drew the sigil onto her cooling skin.

As her people started to die for her sacrifice, Sinoa breathed in.

The godling is cast into the mortal realm with as much subtlety as an explosion.

She squeaks upon crash-landing, the throne room floor freezing against her back. For fuck’s sake. They didn’t have to shove her out of the heavenly realm like that—even if she was being expelled.

The godling sits up. She scans her surroundings. On the throne sits the dead princess with her crown, stolen, despite her bloodline. The palace has been frozen to preserve the power waiting to be unleashed. The white mountains wait quietly beyond the windows.

Yes, this is her fault. She can acknowledge that. And here she is, paying for it.

The godling gags. The pantheon will say that she owes them—of course she needs to monitor the fate of the divine crown.

The pantheon promised to cover up her wrongdoings, make it seem as though she volunteered to descend.

She felt so bad about the grievances committed in her name that she would save the rest of the gods from suffering.

The mortals will hear this tale as though the gods are selfless, honorable entities, but that is far from the truth.

Those petty bunches want someone to suffer, purely so they can convince themselves they’re doing something to help the situation.

The pantheon is powerful enough to influence the mortal realm, but their heavenly realm is far from infallible.

Her handiwork broke the heavens. Qi leaks from the ether.

Rot is spreading into each tier of the pantheon.

How horrible would it be for the mortals to learn that, in the end, their gods fare no better than them.

The godling slinks over to the dead princess on all fours, bracing for the chance that Sinoa Tuoleimi might suddenly wake.

No—nothing. She’s committed to her gruesome deal, dead as a rotted plank of wood.

She has rolled anew on her mortal fate, despite the odds that it will be the very same game board when she wakes.

The godling warned her about this. But that is the trouble with helping mortals.

That is the trouble with the godling’s domain.

She rises, breathing onto the dead princess’s face.

A sharp blade of qi shoots from her throat.

It settles over Sinoa, over the crown. When the war begins again, the godling will be the only one who can retrieve the divine object.

She must secure herself some advantage, after all.

While she is still capable, while the dregs of her heavenly qi remains accessible.

The godling lies down at Princess Sinoa’s feet.

Once Sinoa Tuoleimi is reborn, the godling will wake too, rendered in a mortal body.

The king of the heavens has declared it.

He calls it governance; she understands it is his hatred and his love offered in kind.

For her mistake, this will be her last gambit, but it will be her domain’s greatest undertaking yet.

She will pull Sinoa from the game board and place herself on it, finally a participant in this rapacious turn for Talin.

Invoking such power caused the heavens to break. What are they to find on the other end of it—and who can soothe it, save for the one who started it?

The godling closes her eyes.

When Princess Calla Tuoleimi is born with a mighty cry in San-Er, the godling opens her eyes at the other end of the kingdom. She’s cold. Half of her child body is buried under snow at the base of the mountains, as naked as a mortal birth.

And, as expected, she doesn’t remember a thing.