Of Bargains & Betrayal (Pantheon of Lies Trilogy #1)

Prologue

THE KING AND HIS SEER

Once, there was an Odessan king who was never considered to be a man of any unreasonable impulses. He never ate or drank in excess. Never raised his voice unnecessarily, nor found himself overcome with anger. His ambitions were always reasonable, his emotions guarded, and his decisions rational.

A well-measured king in every regard—until he met the seer.

Goddess above, she was radiant.

At barely nineteen summers to the king’s twenty-five, she arrived to commence a decade-long appointment as High Seer to the Kingdom of Odessa, as dozens upon dozens of her kind—the ethereal high fae—had done before her.

But where the king remembered her predecessors as poised and statuesque women, she rolled in like a storm of silken blonde hair, billowing cream robes, and half-thought-out statements.

She laughed like every moment of humor might be her last, gorged herself on knowledge like she may never read again, and the king fell quick victim to her captivating siren song.

Obsessing over every amused look the seer cut him, every smile he surely didn’t deserve, every lingering touch she treated him to.

Images of her fueled his mind in the most sacrilegious ways; left his body aching and desperate in a way no woman ever had before.

An entire year he lasted, mesmerized by her from a safe distance.

He hadn’t planned for an invitation to join the seer for scrying to be anything more than that.

Truly. He hadn’t planned for her to sit so close, either, on a nest of pillows on her office floor, and touch his thigh every chance she could.

He also hadn’t planned to kiss her, but the third time her gaze hovered at his mouth and her tongue darted across her plush lips, the king couldn’t help himself.

Neither could the seer.

She let the king have her that night, on the floor beside the artifacts of her esteemed holy work, and for every night for months to come.

He was her first, and she dreamed of being his last. But the king, in his young and foolish fervor, overlooked the importance of precaution in the throes of passion.

So had the seer, in her windswept naivety.

It wasn’t long before the lovers were faced with the consequence of their inarguable urges: a spark a life.

A spark of life that, despite its unexpectedness, was a cause for joy.

It was, after all, life they created. A product of love and passion, and all the good things in life. And when their hazel-eyed daughter came screaming into the world, the king and the seer had never known such unrequited love, such optimism for the future.

But one day in the not-so-distant future, the seer developed unsettling omens in her readings.

Disease. Famine. Upheaval.

She saw none of the righteous greatness that one would expect her to relay of the king’s reign. Every thread led to unsettling ends. Every decision with grave outcomes.

Even worse, the seer’s visions only grew darker as weeks and months passed.

She could no longer glimpse the chains of events that would lead to her foretelling, only the cataclysmic culminations of them.

And when painful, jagged glimpses of what was to come painted an image of her daughter—her sweet babe of a daughter, the physical embodiment of her love for the king—as a grown woman, engulfed in flame in a barren land, the seer unraveled entirely.

If there were to be a single purpose to her gift, it would be to see that outcome never come to fruition.

But that determination came at a tremendous cost.

The young king would find his once radiant muse deep in her chambers, disheveled and lost to a day of scrying while their infant daughter screamed herself sick, hungry and desperate for affection.

The seer had incoherent apologies and excuses for the king as he pulled their daughter from her crib, but the woman who once transfixed the fabric of his soul had no place in his attention anymore.

Not while that inconsolable babe shook against his chest and drove a stake straight into his heart, creating a wound that would never heal. His daughter’s tiny, perfect hands would cling to his garb with such frantic fear while she sniffled and coughed as he tried to pacify her.

For the first time in his life, the king felt an anger that was utterly unsoothable.

But still, the seer wept at his feet. Apologized desperately for her lapse, for her efforts were in the name of seeing their daughter spared from a flame-wrought end.

She prayed for the benevolent king not to lose his once unwavering faith in her.

Gave her reassurances that it would not happen again.

But it happened again and again.

The king had never known a sound to stoke rage in his soul quite like the wail of his inconsolable daughter, and he found his hand forced.

It was both the hardest and easiest decision he ever made: to place his daughter in the care of nursemaids, to pry her from the woman whose womb had given her life.

But that hazel-eyed, rosy-cheeked babe was his flesh and blood, too.

His legacy, even if his court objected, and he would be damned if an ounce of harm ever came to her while he drew breath.

The seer’s place at Caenleigh Fortress endured a painful death after that.

She stopped visiting the gardens and lookouts she once studied and basked in.

Grew absent from the council meetings that demanded her presence, as dictated by her post as High Seer, if she could be called such a revered thing anymore.

Even during the visits the king mandated she had with their daughter, she grew apathetic.

More interested in staring off into the aether than playing with the child who was ferocious for her attention.

So, the king made the second hardest decision of his life.

He wrote to the enclave of seers, cloistered deep within the high fae lands of Elysiel, and destroyed centuries of tradition. None of their gifted disciples would ever serve an Odessan king again, including the one his mangled heart still loved.

In that all, he gave the seer an option.

A final olive branch.

She could stay with him at Caenleigh Fortress.

Have the opportunity to prove herself as the worthy mother he knew she could be.

Dedicate herself to him and their child, born of a love that had once been inarguable, as long as she agreed to leave her consuming pursuit of damning and fruitless visions in the past.

The seer declined.

So, the king asked her again.

Then he pleaded.

Finally, he begged.

But she turned him down as easily as it was to breathe.

And, five years into their daughter’s life, the seer left Odessa.

She never returned. Never wrote.

And she never knew the force of nature her daughter would become.