Chapter 1 #2
I could not afford a mistake. Not here. Even now, I felt eyes on me from all sides. People watching, waiting for me to show weakness.
I studied Astrid for a long moment. Her gaze remained sharply on mine, never wavering for a second to ogle my scars.
My gut instincts? They told me she was trustworthy.
But my instincts had done irreparable damage to me recently—the sting of the Hellbringer’s betrayal still flooded my mind every time I allowed my thoughts to wander.
And with everyone in the country calling for my head on a pike, trusting a Lurae was not an easy task.
Trusting anyone was not an easy task.
But Freja and Volkan were right, as much as I wanted to deny it.
The meeting to sign the treaty between our warring nations was tomorrow, in the Kryllian palace.
We needed a teleporter to get there on time.
I didn’t want to bring another person into my small circle of trust. But there was no other option.
I signed, stumbling over my words, “You must be loyal. Sharing secrets…not allowed.”
A smile cracked across her face, brightening her features. She nodded enthusiastically.
“The war is over,” I continued. “We plan to make the Lurae and Nilurae equals. We need a teleporter to join our cause.”
“I will do it.” Her jaw set with determination, and something like excitement grew behind her eyes. “Just tell me what—”
Her attention flickered past me, to the desecrated remains of the temple.
Astrid lunged for me, wrapped her arms around my middle, and threw me to the ground.
I may have been suspicious of her, but I was fully unprepared for her to tackle me.
The back of my head slammed against the ground, and black spots danced in front of my eyes.
Astrid’s entire body weight pressed me into the ground.
Freja was screaming something unintelligible, and cries of shock echoed across the buildings, bouncing back and forth to twine with the song of my Lurae.
My magic woke with a vengeance, moving without my permission. It latched on to Astrid and tossed her off me. She landed heavily with a grunt and a groan but didn’t move. I spared half a thought to feel guilty, but my head was spinning.
When I sat up, my dress was covered in blood. Wounded. I was wounded. Shit. I ran my palms down my front, searching for the open gash I couldn’t feel. Was I in shock? There was no other explanation for why I couldn’t—
Freja’s voice solidified. “Volkan! Help her!”
My best friend knelt beside Astrid, whose hands clutched her abdomen on the right side. The hilt of a dagger peered out from them, and I realized suddenly that it had been meant for me. Astrid had seen the danger and attempted to push me out of the way.
I stood and the world swayed around me. An assassination attempt. I wanted to laugh, but my head throbbed so painfully I almost collapsed again. The perfect timing for a true test of Astrid’s loyalty—one she’d passed with flying colors.
The song of my Lurae swelled, taking over until I could hear only the melody. It moved in tempo with my rushing heartbeat. I watched Volkan run over to Astrid, kneel beside her. The threads stretching from me yearned to move closer. There, there, where the blood is pooling on the ground—
I steadied myself. I couldn’t look out at the crowd of once-friendly Nilurae and returned Lurae soldiers, not when I already knew the variety of expressions that would face me.
Instead, I focused on Freja’s tear-strewn face, Volkan’s concentrated expression as he ran his hands over the wound.
He grimaced when he grabbed the blood-slick hilt and wrenched the dagger from Astrid’s flesh.
She groaned, the sound making its way straight to me.
Someone had tried to kill me. To remove me from the throne permanently. And in the process, they’d hurt an innocent person instead.
The song in my veins rose in a crescendo.
Distantly, I heard my friends calling my name. They told me to slow down, to stop, to come back. But I had no interest in listening. Not when the assassin had fled into the rubble. They could not be allowed to walk free.
I moved with purpose, the gasps of the fearful crowd fading behind the lullaby. My dress caught against the jagged edge of a soot-stained wall and tore. Freja would scold me for that later, I knew.
I didn’t care.
The threads of my magic that had stretched into every person around me earlier had solidified into one solid string connecting me and the would-be assassin.
It stretched out, winding around corners and over piles of crumbled rock.
The white stone of the temple faded as I followed it into the Nilurae side of town, where the buildings were closer together.
More shadows—easier to hide here. But as the hum of my mother’s voice sounded in my ears I followed the anchor that led me true. I ground my teeth, my vision tunneling to only the path ahead. And I felt the end of the thread tethered to my chest hitch and begin to reel itself in.
I was no longer hunting a killer. I was dragging him back to face his penance.
My breath stuttered, but I didn’t stop moving. How am I doing that?
The song escalated, tempo rushing now. The magic was ravenous, clamoring for control. Working without my permission. It had clawed its way to the front of my mind and seized its chance to end this in blood.
I should have minded. But I didn’t—not when I arrived in front of the Sharpened Axe and the man at the other end of the thread stumbled to his knees in front of me. He’d used red paint to draw a familiar symbol on his forehead: an eye, dripping blood in three dots down the bridge of his nose.
He panted, hands and knees scraped raw. I hadn’t seen what happened, but I’d felt it.
When my mind succumbed to the Lurae, only my cold, calculating self was left.
She knew the exact paths an escapee would have taken through these familiar streets.
Her magic had grabbed hold of his body, his will, and pulled him stumbling back the way he came.
Had dragged him on his hands and knees to me here.
I crouched down beside him. He snarled.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Lurae or Nilurae?”
The daggers in my sheaths trembled. One pulled itself free and thudded to the ground, then spun in place and launched itself at my throat.
I leaned to the side. In one swift movement I pivoted, using my body weight to swing myself around and follow the path of the blade as it scraped over the edge of my neck. My hand shot out and latched around the hilt.
I tucked it back into its sheath and secured it there. “Lurae, then.”
“You don’t deserve the throne,” he snarled through gritted teeth.
My Lurae tensed along with my shoulders. It wasn’t an uncommon sentiment, but this was the first time anyone had taken it so far. “My father didn’t deserve this throne either.”
Footsteps sounded behind me, frantic on the cobblestones. Volkan’s voice called out, “Wait, Revna! We need to question him.”
And my shoulders notched higher, my Lurae wrenching control from me for a brief moment. The thread between myself and the would-be assassin fluttered, and a full-body shudder traveled through him.
The dark whisper of my thoughts pulsed in time with the high notes of my mother’s lullaby. Volkan doesn’t trust you.
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the thought.
They know what’s happening to you, how out of control you’ve become.
I inhaled sharply.
And the attacker hissed, “You and all Nilurae scum deserve to die. You’re not even worth breeding.”
He spat in my face.
By the time I blinked, my hand was wrapped around his throat.
Fury fell like an avalanche, burning through me with icy fingers.
The song increased to a frantic tempo as my hand shook, as the gasping man clawed at my skin until he drew blood.
It occurred to me that I could crush his windpipe with nothing more than my own strength.
He had no real training—had relied on his Lurae long enough that when it was rendered useless, he was, too.
Dimly, I heard shouting behind me. Heard him choking for air. Through his gasps he managed to eke out his final words: “Long…live…Callum…”
My song knew what I craved, what I so desperately desired. And so it flowed through my fingers until every pound of his heart resonated in time with the music. Until the threads that bound his life to his body were directly in front of me, poised and ready for the quickest mental tug.
The symphony ended with a loud crack as his neck twisted until it snapped. The only applause for the performance was the hollow thud of his lifeless body hitting the ground.
When a hand came down on my shoulder, I whirled. The world around me was colored red at the edges, my teeth bared in a snarl. But when I recognized Freja had been the one to reach out, I backed away.
The world began to return to itself. Freja’s face was pale. Neither of us wore a cloak, and her teeth chattered in the cold. “Revna,” she said slowly. “Are you all right?”
With every heartbeat, my magic receded and my awareness came back.
Every muscle in my body shook. The scratches on my right hand from the assassin’s struggle stung, and nausea rose in my stomach.
Volkan stood behind Freja, running a hand through his hair as he watched the scene.
Astrid huddled against the tavern wall, her arms wrapped around her midsection. She was deathly pale.
And through the windows of the Sharpened Axe, more horrified eyes stared at me. Silence and stillness had swept through the building, rendering everyone a perfect witness to my crime.
I wondered if the building itself wished it could shrink away from me. If it remembered the last time I’d spilled blood on its floors, the last time I’d left someone for dead within its line of sight.
“He deserved it.” The words I spoke felt far away, a desperate attempt to cover my lack of control. I turned to Freja again. “Did you hear what he said? About me? About you?”
Freja took a tentative step closer. “I know. I know.”
“He did deserve it,” Volkan said quietly, stepping close enough that no one watching from a distance could hear. “But Revna…”
I couldn’t look at him as he sighed, his disappointment a nearly tangible thing. He continued. “Now we can’t question him. We have no idea if he was working alone or with a group. Whether an attack like this will happen again.”
Astrid caught my attention and signed, “I’ve never seen magic so powerful.”
I swallowed down the scream threatening to burst from me.
Turning away, I brought my eyes to the crumpled body lying in the snow in front of me.
Blood dripped from his mouth and nose. Long live Callum, he’d said.
Surely he meant the man who had created Bhorglid and the Holy Order of Priests hundreds of years ago—the leader who had declared Nilurae were less than their Lurae counterparts.
A strange sentiment, considering Callum had been dead for nearly four hundred years now.
But I’d never know what the assassin meant, because I had killed him.
Panic clawed at my throat, the truth sinking in. How had this happened? How had my awareness, my ability to reason, slipped so forcefully that I was unable to keep from killing him? How had my magic twisted my emotions and my thoughts until there was no path left but violence?
He didn’t deserve to live after he said such horrifying things, part of me cried. Before you won the Trials, every Nilurae in the city would have celebrated to know you’d killed such a horrible excuse for a person.
But I was queen now. The familiar dread that lodged in my chest like a permanent stone returned in full force, its weight suffocating.
And the sight of the body, broken and lifeless, brought back the memory of another body much the same.
With every blink, the scene in front of me changed.
The dead man wasn’t an attempted assassin but my mentor, the closest thing I’d had to a real father.
I wasn’t wearing this dress, but one ragged along the bottom from where Volkan had used a knife to saw off the blood-soaked fabric, to hide my crimes during my coronation.
“Revna. Breathe.” Freja’s hand was around my bicep, and I resisted the urge to scream, to pull away from her, to prove I was ripping at the seams, because she still didn’t know—
A familiar figure stepped out of the Sharpened Axe, lumbering over to join our small party. When he scratched his beard, eyeing the body with a hint of disgust, I had to swallow the vomit burning up the back of my throat. Of course he would arrive now, when I was thinking of his death at my hands.
Halvar raised an eyebrow at me. “Looks like you’ve got a bit of a mess here.”