DRAWING ATTENTION #2
“He will not prevail,” she said, cutting him off. “Your mate will eliminate him.”
Beside me, Roirdan reached out curiously toward a pale pink blossom, but Nivelle flourished her hand and summoned the same magical rope she’d conjured before.
No, not rope, I realized . . . but lightning. This time, it zapped his skin, drawing a hiss from him. He snapped his head up to her, but instead of malice, his eyes danced with intrigue as he shook out his singed palm.
“There will be others who will need protection,” Niall continued. “Your goddess could offer the Dionachs as an added defense.”
The wardeness rolled her wrist at her side. “That is not my call to make.”
“But you can gain us an audience with her, can you not?”
I flicked my eyes to him.
An audience with the witch goddess?
Beside me, Roirdan’s brows pinched in concern, clearly trying to anticipate his High Lord’s next move.
A slight pulse of power rippled off Nivelle, as if she were expelling frustration. “We do not draw attention from our goddess unless we are in dire need of it. She communicates to us when necessary. That is our dynamic.”
“And why would you not commune regularly with your own goddess?”
“That is none of your concern.” She waved him off.
Niall sent out a pulse of his own power in response—a call to attention. It was muffled to nearly nothing here in this land, but because he was significantly more powerful than any other fae back in Anbrya, enough remained to get his point across.
Nivelle whirled on him, fear and fury in her now glowing blue eyes. “No! You must not—”
A sudden boom rocked the ground beneath us. The trees shuddered and the air stilled, as if all the oxygen had been sucked from it, and a chill seeped in, enveloping us in its cold grasp.
Nivelle fell to one knee—seemingly on instinct—and tucked her chin to her chest. I spun, trying to find who she was kneeling for, but I only saw a thick fog barreling through the trees.
Niall and I both cast out our shields. They were thin, pathetically weak in this place, but something was better than nothing.
Silas’s wings flared as the shields skirted past him, and he whipped his head in our direction, eyes wide as he scanned the both of us. “How?” he hissed.
When I gave him a confused look, he stepped closer. “Your power may be an exception because it is of the gods,” he whispered, “but his”—he jerked his chin at Niall—“shouldn’t be this strong here.”
I took note of the awe and the worry in his eyes.
Before I could ask what he and Nivelle were so afraid of, a throaty female voice washed through the atmosphere.
“You dare defy the laws of my land with your magic?” She was addressing Niall, and she sounded enraged, yet surprised that he was able to manage.
“Who are you, Son of Shadow?” Her words echoed as if they were uttered from deep within a cavern.
And beneath those words, a rasped whisper floated through the air.
“Darkness Incarnate,” it said. “Flame of Dark.”
Niall searched for the source of both the voices, but the fog cloaked everything beyond our immediate area. He was the usual portrait of poise as he replied, “I’d say I’m someone worth speaking face to face with. Show yourself, and perhaps I’ll tell you.”
I shot him a glare that said, This is not the time to test an unfamiliar entity!
He only lifted the corner of his lips in a smirk.
Up ahead, Nivelle hadn’t looked up from where she was kneeling.
The female’s voice leaked out from the vapor once more, sounding closer this time—worried. “Your essence is . . . familiar.”
“Is that so?” Niall crooned.
“It shouldn’t be,” she warned. “Who are you?”
“I am the High Lord of Calledan.”
“A fae?”
“In the flesh,” he said with a slight grin.
“That is not possible.”
The mist drifted closer to Niall until it was nearly upon him. Roirdan was instantly there, ready to meet the phantom opponent—should he need to—but Niall pressed a hand against the commander’s chest, steadying him.
Seeming to glean what it needed to, the mist balked and shrank back to the tree line.
“Flame of Dark,” the whispering voice hissed.
I stepped up to Niall’s side and took his arm. The cryptic name-calling had me on edge, but Niall’s tone remained calm as he said, “My scent shouldn’t be familiar to you at all, but if that’s the case, I’d say we have a problem.”
Another hiss slid through the trees, followed by the female’s voice. “A problem indeed, High Lord. For many reasons. These lands are a prison; no one ventures here.”
Niall made a show of looking around, as if examining the space like he hadn’t already seen it. “Seems rather pleasant for a so-called ‘prison.’”
His reply earned a warning glance from Silas.
Suddenly, the land—the very atmosphere—evaporated.
The twisted, moss-encrusted trees, the garden, the glistening stream—all of it was gone.
It was like an illusory veil had been lifted, and all around us, nothing but barren volcanic rock and scraps of vegetation—no more than a few inches tall—rolled across the landscape, bathed in the dim evening light that managed to seep through the ever-present cloud cover.
The voice seethed as it echoed around us. “Would you call this pleasant?”
Niall remained quiet. We all did.
And Nivelle was . . . trembling.
“This was all your god-king could scrounge up for us when we arrived pleading for refuge. A slice of stone atop a volcanic rock. And we were expected to carve a life of plenty from this forsaken ground.” Power rumbled and shook the earth beneath us.
Or maybe that was the volcano of which she spoke, growing restless deep within.
“I have made what I can with what little we were given so that my witches could survive.” The illusory landscape reformed, encasing us in Nivelle’s garden amongst the trees, the fog once again drifting throughout.
Niall kept his hands in his pockets and took a wider stance, as if staring down someone in front of him. “But you wanted more—still want, I assume?”
A lush laugh filled the space. “I see the fae are still as guileful as they’ve always been. I tried to come to an agreement with your kind long ago. All it got me was the loss of my finest witches and more heartache. I will not make that mistake again.”
“I am not those fae,” Niall leveled, a tenor of promise lacing his voice.
This time, her response was more reserved. “On that, we can agree . . . Do you ever wonder why you’re not like them?”
I could tell the question caught him off guard by the slightest change in his breath. But he recovered quickly. “I’ve always been a bit curious.”
If she had answers about Niall’s power, about where it came from—
Another throaty laugh, but this one was nervous, off-kilter. “It is certainly no coincidence—you showing up on my land.”
Niall schooled his face into neutrality. “Enlighten me.”
“I knew a power like yours once—ages ago. It brought a reckoning upon all that faced it.” Her voice lowered, as if recalling a distant, unpleasant memory.
“I do not know how that power has come to be in your blood, but it is ancient in its origin. Birthed from another world.” She spoke of Niall and his power as if it were the embodiment of something she revered, but also dreaded.
“My ancestor possessed this power before me,” he informed her.
She clicked her tongue. “Far more ancient than that, I’m afraid.”
“Care to be more specific?”
Gods, he was speaking to an entity that seemed temperamental at best, and yet he was treating her like she owed him something.
I wanted to throw an elbow into his side.
“Nothing but alarming speculation,” she said, her voice winding through the air like she was circling us, assessing Niall. “The fae of old were foolish,” she said. “Thankfully, despite the power you carry, I do not sense the same foolishness in you. A small reprieve—for what it’s worth.”
Niall lifted his chin, savoring the small compliment as a win in his favor. His voice dropped to more of a purr. “I do hope that means you’ll hear my offer, then.”
There was a long pause of consideration. Then, the fog peeled back, and the stranger stepped forth, the voice finally given form. She strode past Nivelle, not even deigning to glance down at the witch who was still lowered on bended knee.
She was tall and lithe, and wore long, dark purple robes that nearly blended into the night. Her skin was creamy, and waves of long, blonde hair billowed out beneath a circlet crown that sat across her forehead, nestling five stones—the centermost being a stunning magenta garnet.
Her face was adorned with markings—like Nivelle’s, but not.
There was a rune on her forehead, peeking out from under the circlet, and two thin black lines of ink began under her chin and ran vertically down her neck, framing the slender column of her throat and disappearing into her robes.
A thick band of smokey kohl stretched across her face from temple to temple, falling over her brows and the bridge of her nose, encasing her eyes—as deep blue as the ocean’s depths—in darkness.
Her irises churned, swirling like a vortex, an obvious tell that marked her as other. A goddess.
Her piercing stare felt like ice, and to my astonishment, the very ground she walked on frosted over.
Her mere presence was a fury.
Niall offered a subtle nod in her direction. “Torin.”
The whispering, fleeting voice drifted through the air in reply. “Son of Shadow.”
Chills skittered down my spine at the otherworldly undertone. The goddess’s lips hadn’t moved when it sounded. It had come from something else, something other.
“Pledge your Dionachs. Help us defeat the fallen god when he comes to wage war, once and for all,” Niall said, “and I will grant you and your kin permanent lands in the mountains of Calledan.”
Roirdan threw Niall a look of surprise, and Silas’s wings stilled. Torin even bristled, obviously not expecting the offer.
Her brow furrowed. “The mountains?”
Niall nodded once. “It seems you and your kin prefer to remain hidden. The mountains offer the perfect refuge.”