Chapter 33 #2
‘You might think you’re gods-blessed,’ Crea panted, swinging her blade at Arla’s face, ‘but you’re nothing more than a game the gods invented to fulfil a prophecy told by the fates.’
Cruel bitch!
Arla laughed then, her very blood alive with the thrill of the dance. Gods, she’d love nothing more than to drive her blade through the throat of this woman.
‘Not a good enough answer. I can stop this at any time, as soon as you agree to give me the answers I’m looking for.’
A thin bead of sweat rolled down Crea’s brow, the weight of her robes unthinkably hot with the effort it was taking to match Arla’s skill.
The assassin’s feet moved as though she were waltzing with death itself, a morbid, dazzling skill she had taken pride in the better she got at it.
She would have her answers tonight. She wouldn’t even have to search for them.
‘Mara should never have invited you here,’ Crea spat, hissing as the tip of Arla’s blade nicked the top of her leg. A game. It was all just a game.
Arla smiled as crimson began to bleed across the sparkling white of the priestess’s robes. ‘Then that is Mara’s mistake.’
She moved like a rainstorm, then.
There was nothing other than a curved blade and a white priestess, a darkened room and the wrath of the gods in Arla’s veins. Arla lunged at her like it was an unleashing, a routine of practised skill and deadlier concentration.
Less than a minute.
Less than a minute was all it took for Crea to fall against the wall of the chamber and blink up at her as Arla’s blade balanced on the column of her throat.
‘Your mistake, Crea,’ she said, her voice so quiet in the deafening silence of the chamber, ‘was ever thinking you could win against me. You speak so loudly of my reputation and forget that I am all too capable of backing it up. Did you really think I’d allow you to raise a blade against me tonight? ’
Panic flared in Crea’s eyes as Arla pressed the tip of the blade harder, eliciting a bead of scarlet and a strangled sound from the priestess’s throat.
‘Please.’
That single word lit a spark in her chest: the need to hurt her; the need to force that blade through her throat; to impale her here in the very place she sought to keep Arla from. She wanted her to bleed, wanted her to hurt and scream and—
‘DRAGONHART!’
Thara’s voice raced through the bond, jerking her back to herself.
Blood ran in rivulets down Crea’s throat and the priestess shook violently beneath the blade.
‘Please…’
‘Enough,’ Arla said, so quietly she didn’t think Crea would hear it. She did, though, her prayers turning silent as she squeezed her eyes shut.
Arla removed the blade, swallowing the bile in her throat at how close she had come to losing control again – how it had taken the interference of Thara again to drag her out of that deadly spiral. It terrified her.
‘Please, I’ll tell you what you want to know,’ Crea whimpered.
‘Good,’ Arla said, sheathing her blade. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’
Crea led her deeper into the chamber where a desk and two wooden chairs sat hidden at the edge of the room.
‘What is it you wish to know?’ Crea’s voice had lost its hardness, its confidence, its everything.
Now she sat across from Arla, her creamy skin stained the colour of rust. There was a piece of Arla that delighted in seeing her undoing of the woman, but mostly she was disgusted by what she’d almost done.
Arla leant back in the chair, arms folded across her chest. She was coming back to herself with every moment she spent in Malarye.
Flambriar had knocked her off kilter, had taken her by surprise in the most real sense, and she had felt adrift, like she was floating, for months. Now she was remembering who she was.
‘I want you to tell me what I have to do to unite the kingdoms.’
Crea looked at her as though Arla had instructed her to jump off the cliff. Ire flashed through her face quickly before the thin bead of blood sliding down her neck seemed to remind her of the situation and the imbalance of power.
‘What makes you think I have any idea?’ the priestess said.
Ah, Arla loved when her subjects were not forthcoming. So many games she could play…
‘Because you’ve made it your life’s work to study the gods and their ways, have you not? Surely someone as learned as yourself would have insight as to what it is the gods would like me to do, Crea?’
It achieved the desired effect. Crea’s muscles tensed as she went to grab Arla over the table, but she clearly thought better of it. Arla raised a brow. She so very loved pressing the parts that hurt the most.
‘I have no idea what you’re supposed to do. You rescued the mages. It should have been enough.’
It had once been Arla’s job to know all the ways a lie revealed itself on a person’s face. Crea’s tells were as plain as daylight.
‘Don’t. Lie. To. Me.’
Something in the priestess’s face seemed to change then.
Perhaps she finally realised that if she didn’t give Arla what she wanted there was no knowing what the assassin would do.
Arla herself didn’t know, truly. Not given how easily she had lost control of herself recently and became trapped in the shadows in the centre of her chest that only chanted kill, kill, kill.
Crea leaned back in her own chair, the action illuminating her face in the lamplight and showing all the sharp angles and sunken cheeks. Had she always looked so … tired? She twisted her hands in her lap, her eyes faraway, her voice small and insignificant when she finally spoke.
‘I never wanted you to come here. The punishment from the gods, the failing of the kingdoms … I thought it would stay contained to Kastonia and Hadalyn – Flambriar too now, I suppose. I thought the continent would be safe if you didn’t come here.’
‘The continent has been suffering too, you know it has. I can see how sick you are, Crea. How you’re terrified that the wasting sickness that has claimed so many lives across the kingdoms has somehow found you, too.’
Panic erupted across the priestess’s face before it melted into something that had … given up.
‘Perhaps. But you being here … well, I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, does it.
You fulfilled the second half of the prophecy the moment you stepped foot on these shores.
Why do you think I tried so hard to shoot you down before you could land here?
The clock has begun ticking and we all live on borrowed time. ’
That when the risen takes flight to seek an ally, the clock will begin its duel.
‘So, what, by coming here I’ve set us all on a path to death and destruction anyway? There’s no use in trying to unite anything? Don’t give me that, Crea. You and I both know you haven’t given up.’
‘I think,’ Crea said, an emotion Arla couldn’t place was slowly seeping its way into every line of the priestess’s face, ‘I think history is repeating itself. Prophecies aren’t created without reason. What better justification than to right the wrong that happened a century ago?’
Goosebumps prickled across every inch of Arla’s skin, the chamber suddenly colder than it had been a second ago. Crea looked deranged, illuminated as she was by lamplight, her face too knowing.
And yet Arla believed every word that came next.
‘You know of Damon, yes?’
She nodded once, a weight settling on her chest at the mention of the last dragonhart. His name was cropping up an awful lot for her liking, and after what Hyacinth had said – that his hunger for power had corrupted him – it couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? Elrod was hungry for power too…
Crea continued, looking at Arla through her lashes, a sombreness weighing her down.
‘The dragonharts did have power – a magic channelled from the gods, enough to break the world apart. But Damon … he was the last one for a reason. That power corrupted him. He wanted more and more until he began to turn on the mages too. It sent him mad in the end and he impaled himself on his own sword. It is written that the gods vowed never to allow any future dragonharts to have that sort of magic again lest history repeat itself. They knew you were coming – it has been prophesised for a long time – you were never granted the gift of magic so that you may never succumb to its corruption. The mages are to be protected by the dragonharts, Damon’s actions and his obsession with magic went against that. ’
‘Then something went wrong,’ Arla interrupted. ‘I know what I felt. It was magic—’
Crea raised a hand. ‘If you let me finish speaking, you might get the answers you were happy to almost kill me for.’
Arla bit back a smirk.
‘The very magic the gods kept from you is housed within your dragon. Only in the direst of circumstances will that bridge open up to you. That’s all I know, I swear it.’
And it wasn’t fucking enough.
She wanted more.
‘Tell me now, Crea,’ she said, the softness of her voice giving way to a sharpness that cut the air. ‘If you know what I am supposed to do in order to unite the kingdoms, to fulfil this ridiculous prophecy, you will tell me now.’
The woman that erupted before her was not the same person who had surrendered to Arla with a sword at her neck only minutes before.
Crea surged to her feet, sending the wooden chair skittering across the floor. A wildness bit into her face, her eyes wide and unseeing as her hands slammed against the surface of the table.
‘You think I don’t want you to unite the kingdoms?
’ she cried. ‘You think I want to feel my body fail me? You said it yourself, Arla, I am sick, and because of you and your inability to solve a prophecy you were born to fulfil, I will likely die before the end of the year. You aren’t a protector. You’ve damned us all.’
Every word was a shard of ice through her chest. Needling.
Piercing. And though she felt it all keenly, she knew in her heart that every word Crea spoke was true, she breathed deeply and found that calm place she had spent so many hours disappearing to.
Maybe three weeks ago she would have let the words settle upon her, let them bully her into becoming a shadow of herself – the gods knew she’d felt that way since she’d woken up in Flambriar.
But now, since she’d come to Malarye, she was remembering who she was, she was remembering the girl she had been made into, and she wouldn’t let the words of a dying woman convince her that this was all her fault.
‘Believe what you like,’ Arla said, rising from her seat, the weight of the sword at her side a reminder of who she was and what she was capable of. ‘But if you think I can’t appease the gods within eight months, you severely underestimate my reputation.’
She left the priestess slack-jawed and staring after her as she left the chamber, her boots clipping against the floor as she made her way out of the tunnels.
To an observer, it would be the strut of a victor, yet she couldn’t help but think she’d lost.