29. Stealing from a King
Atlas
The darkness drew closer as if it had leaned closer to listen.
“A king does not waste his words on servants and second sons,” he went on, and there was no cruelty in it, which was somehow worse. No, only the weight of certainty. The arrogance of a thing that had outlived every kingdom that ever thought to challenge it.
“You have crossed half a world and bled at my threshold to walk into the one realm every wise creature in either world has the sense to avoid. Tell me, young king of The?kós… have you come to conquer my lands.”
It wasn’t a question. It was an amusement he was permitting himself, the way a great cat permits a mouse to run a little.
And then his gaze dropped, at last, to the woman in my arms.
Something moved behind his face then, a flicker of a predator marking a thing it had not expected to find in its own den.
He looked at her grey, still face, at the black veins climbing her throat, and at the way I held her against me as though my arms could be a wall between her and the whole of his terrible kingdom. Which was no doubt why one dark brow rose by the smallest degree.
“And what,” he said softly, “is this? An offering, just for me?” The blue eyes lifted back to mine, cold, mocking, and insufferably entertained.
“How thoughtful. Though I confess I am at a loss as to what you imagine I should do with it. I have ruled the dark since before your gods drew breath, little king, and not once in all those long ages have, I found myself in any particular need of a human.”
“We did not come to conquer anything.” It was Theron who answered, smooth and unhurried, one king to another.
“We came because something of yours has been stolen, Shadow King. Taken from this realm and turned loose on worlds it was never meant to touch.” He let that settle and watched it land.
“I rather thought you might wish to see the proof of it for yourself,” Theron added, and for the first time, the cold blue eyes sharpened with something other than contempt.
He was silent for a long moment. Then he lifted one clawed hand and made the smallest gesture, no more than the turning of two fingers.
And all at once, the watching court was gone.
The figures in the alcoves, the eyes burning along the galleries, the whole silent army of them simply faded away back into the dark from which they had come.
Doing so until the vast hall stood empty but for the seven of us, as even the warriors who had brought us here melted away.
Only the ruined creature at his right hand remained, and not for long.
“You as well,” the Shadow King said, without looking at him.
“My king.” The voice ground out low, and for the first time, the marble face turned toward us, as though measuring what it might cost his master to be left alone with armed strangers out of another world. “I would counsel against…”
“I did not ask for your counsel, Rhadamanthys. I gave you leave to go.” His blue gaze slid sideways, “You may take it, or you may stand there and discover whether I meant it kindly.” Even I swallowed hard at the threat, and there was very little I feared in my life.
Something flickered in those golden eyes of the one he had addressed as Rhadamanthys.
Not fear, I realized, but the deep and weary displeasure of a servant who has watched his master do unwise things many times before and expected he would do so again.
Yet he didn’t argue. Instead, he bowed stiffly and slowly before withdrawing into the dark.
But I didn’t miss that he went no further than he had to, nor that he took the dismissal as the insult it was.
The Shadow King’s attention returned to the rest of us, or should I say to Aster, and to my brother, still standing at my flanks.
“The rest of this is a conversation between kings.” He flicked the clawed fingers toward the doors.
“My people will see your Minotaur and your kin somewhere they may wait in comfort.” I looked around the place and nearly slipped by muttering that I highly doubted that.
The place looked more like a tomb than anywhere comfort was found.
I was even surprised he knew what the word was, as it had no meaning here, that was for damn sure.
As for my brother and my second-in-command, not surprisingly, neither of them moved.
“With respect,” Aster rumbled, in a tone that had very little of it, “we’re not going anywhere.”
“Where my brother stands, I remain.” Lazaros had set his feet, his jaw, every line of him gone hard. “You’ll have to send more than shadows to move me from it.”
The Shadow King let out a slow breath through his nose, the sound of a being whose patience he wore for show and was on the point of setting aside. He turned that hard gaze to me, then to Alexandra, who was fading in my arms. He said nothing at all and let the silence make his argument for him.
He was right, and I hated to admit it when I gave the order,
“It’s all right.” The words came out rough. “Lazaros. Aster. Go with them. Wait for us, I have a feeling we won’t be long.” I lifted my eyes to my brothers at last. “Please.”
I thought Lazaros would refuse me even then, but relief surfaced as his shoulders dropped, and he gave me a single, tight nod. He gripped my arm hard enough to bruise as he passed by. As if he feared it was the last time he would ever see me.
Fuck, I hoped he was wrong.
Aster wasn’t finished. His jaw set, a protest was already rising. But before he could get a word out, Theron’s hand came down on his great shoulder.
“You heard your king, young bull.” His voice was low and not unkind. “Now is the time to do his bidding, not to argue it.”
My friend looked as though he might argue that too. Then he released a low breath through his nose and followed Lazaros.
After their figures disappeared, the great doors closed, and it was just the four of us. Three kings, and my reason for living slowly dying in my arms.
He came down from the dais then, and gods, the size of him. He stood a full head above me, and I am not a small man. He moved through the dark of his own hall the way a current moves through deep water. Holy without effort and without sound, the shadow-robes flowing endlessly about his feet.
“Well,” the ice-blue eyes settled on Alexandra. “I suggest we put her somewhere rather more comfortable than your arms before you drop her out of sheer stubbornness. Follow me.”
He turned and walked without waiting for a reply, and we followed, because what else was there to do.
He led us up through the castle, and I did not mark the way, knowing that turning back might have cost me my life, given how vast the place was.
Staircases wound upward past all reason; galleries opened on one side to that bottomless, storming darkness.
Corridors hung with tapestries long gone to gray rags, lined with doors that made me wonder if they had been opened in the past decade.
Everywhere touched with the same gothic decay.
With the same sourceless blue light and the same sense of a place far too large and far too old for the handful of things that still moved within it.
And then he brought us, of all places, to a bedchamber.
It was dark and grand, and an immense canopied bed stood against the far wall, its black posts carved into the same clawing, twisting shapes as his throne.
One hung with drapes, the deep red of old wine or old blood.
Cold blue light spilled from sconces shaped like reaching hands, and a great window framed nothing but the stormy and restless sky.
It was beautiful, or as beautiful as a tomb could be.
Regardless, I crossed the room towards that monstrous bed and laid Alexandra down upon it as gently as if it were our own.
But the sight of her there, so small and gray against all that dark and savage grandeur, very nearly unraveled me.
The Shadow King came to stand over her, and without a word, without so much as a glance at me, he reached down and began to draw back the fabric at her throat to bear the spreading dark beneath.
I had his wrist in my hand before I knew I had even moved.
A surely suicidal move on my part, but one that couldn’t be helped all the same. Not when the beast contained within me was on the verge of erupting.
However, the king looked unaffected by this, nor by the deep, rumbling growl that escaped my lips before I had a chance to swallow it down.
It was hardly surprising because his shadows answered before he did.
Those living markings poured down his forearm in a heartbeat, coiling, tightening, wrapping about my hand and wrist like a fistful of cold serpents.
They clamped down until I felt my bones creak in their grip.
All the while, he had not even so much as flinched.
He hadn’t even looked at me. The darkness had done everything for him and went on doing it with slow and patient pressure that promised to squeeze until there was nothing left of my hand to close onto.
“I can assure you,” he said, mild as still water, his eyes never leaving her, “that I mean her no harm. That, after all, is the very reason you have carried her into the heart of my kingdom. Is it not, young king?”
A hand settled on my shoulder, and I looked to Theron, the sight of him enough to clear my head.
That and the weight of his hand. A gesture that no doubt saved both our lives, mine and Alexandra’s, as it was enough of a warning and a reminder of exactly how much I stood to lose by being a fool in this place.
It was enough for me to let go.
The shadows withdrew from my hand at once, as if sensing my intent and no longer finding it threatening.
They slid back up his arm to settle into stillness, and I, in turn, forced myself to step back to give him room.
Even though every part of me was screaming against it.
Screaming against letting the master of shadows look at what had been done to the woman I loved.
But now that he had room to do so, he drew the fabric aside. His reaction was immediate, as he went very still.
For the first time since we had entered his realm, something cracked the perfect, cold facade.
His brow drew down, and the blue of his eyes flared brighter.
Even the shadows along his skin went taut and agitated, rising off him in fine, restless wisps.
When he spoke, even the arrogance had gone out of his voice, leaving something harder and colder in its place.
“This should not be here.” He said it almost to himself, fingers hovering above the black veins without quite touching them, as though even he would not lay his hand to this.
“This is not hers. This is not solely the means of any witch, nor is it by the hand of any god.” His gaze cut up to me, suddenly highly focused.
“This is mine… My shadows. Torn out of my realm and poured into a mortal vessel like cheap wine into a cracked cup.” The markings on his skin churned.
“Stolen, and foolishly so. But how? How did this happen?”
So, I told him.
All of it.
The buried chamber, the box, the beating heart.
The darkness that had worn my brother and butchered my people and bled through the Rift into another world.
The cause of it, a being called Demetrios, and what little we knew of him.
I explained the darkness that had risen from that empty box and sunk into her chest. Every single piece of information was one he listened to without a word.
His face was a mask of cold fury that I understood better than most.
“Can you help her?” I asked when it was done. “Can you take it out of her?”
He looked at me for a long moment before turning back to her. When he finally answered, it was not an answer at all.
“Shadow is my domain. There is not a thread of it in either world that is not mine by right.” His voice was quiet, certain. “What is mine, I may reclaim whenever I choose.”
It was not a yes.
But it wasn’t a no, either.
Which meant that I had spent enough of these last days bargaining with kings to know exactly what it was.
“And what,” I said through gritted teeth, “will it cost me?”
The corner of his mouth curved, and his eyes began to glow, that glacial blue deepening until it lit the hollows of his terrible face from within.
“I have no use for gold, little king. I have outlasted every hoard ever counted, and every king who died counting it.” The light in his eyes flickered like something feeding.
“What I take is a simple debt. A thing owed, held, and kept, and called due at the hour of my choosing, and not a moment before. And the debt of a king, paid at the moment I have need of it, is worth more than all the treasure in either your world or mine.” He let that hang in the cold.
“You will owe me. The when, and the what, shall be mine to name.”
I didn’t hesitate, even if it meant selling my soul, I would.
“Anything,” I said, as I didn’t even have to think for a single second. I looked at her, gray and fading on his monstrous bed, and there was no price in any world I would not have paid. “Name it, whenever you choose whatever it may be. Just save her.”
“Oh,” he said, his voice thick, and turned his glowing eyes back down to the dying woman between us. “Saving her will be the easy part.” He reached out and laid two cold fingers against her brow before adding,
“Finding her in her nightmares, will not.”