Chapter 1 #3
Myrina’s loper met Aurora’s, tossing its sleek russet head, its friendly nicker encouraging Aurora’s grey to come closer, their horns clacking as they touched in greeting.
“I must admit, I’m…surprised by this turn of events,” Myrina said carefully, eyeing the long line of soldiers in their wake.
“Are you?” Aurora asked, keeping her face neutral.
Did she really expect Aurora would let the king doom all of Trisia without fighting back? That she would allow him to take her back to Aureum with nary a word of protest for his despicable lies?
“My goddess would not have blessed your union had your passions been false.”
She spoke as if she were unaware of her nephew’s treachery. That it was Aurora who had been the betrayer, had knelt before Passion with lies in her heart. But if that’s what Myrina wanted to believe—to pretend—then Aurora would oblige her.
“Isn’t hatred a kind of passion?”
“Yes, it is. The same as lust, ambition, the creative spark. But Passion has never bound people in matrimony who despise each other. When She dyes the thread of fate between people, it is always—and only—because there is the potential for love.”
There had been lust. That was a certainty.
One he must have felt too. But that had been all.
There could be no love without trust—without truth.
The king was incapable of both, as he’d proved time and again.
It was Aurora’s fault for not paying attention, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow.
“But did She? Dye our threads?” Aurora cut Myrina a withering glare.
Aurora didn’t know enough about the marriage rites of Passion’s temples to know if Myrina was lying.
Even in her time, a marriage blessed by Passion was rare, and almost exclusively the preserve of forbidden lovers.
Unions that were always looked at with pity for the youthful mistakes they typified.
A mistake Aurora was currently paying for with unspeakable pain.
“She did. I stand by what I saw yesterday, and what I still see today.”
Aurora turned away with a scowl. She couldn’t accept that—refused to. It was bad enough she was bound to Drakon. Surely, her fate wasn’t so cruel as to tie her to two monsters. Lies came so easily to these two. It was easier to believe this was all another part of the king’s ruse.
“Forgive me if I find that difficult to believe, after all your beloved nephew’s lies.”
“He’s betrayed your trust?” she asked, her brows knitting in sympathy.
Aurora’s scream was lodged in the back of her throat.
How dare she pretend not to know? But Orithyia had warned her that the best way to deal with Myrina’s false concern was to fight as though she had ice in her veins.
It wouldn’t stop the high priestess, for she was nothing if not tenacious, but it would remind Aurora not to thaw in her presence.
“He’s betrayed all of Trisia. My trust was simply collateral damage.”
It was then that the sky opened up, a light drizzle promising to turn the rest of the day into a steamy soup. Just what she needed.
A rider came up to them, a paladin of Knowledge.
“Your Highness, we’re pitching our tents for the day to wait out the rain. Her Holiness has invited you to join her.”
Aurora’s gut knotted with dread. Warning Aurora about how best to deal with the king and his aunt had only been part of the lecture Orithyia had delivered.
“I’ll accept her invitation.”
The paladin turned around without even so much as a greeting to Myrina.
“Please excuse me, Your Holiness.” Aurora nodded and turned her loper around.
“I know you feel as though you’re all alone right now, Your Highness. Please remember that whatever else happens, I take my duties as high priestess seriously. You will always find compassion in my tent, the same as you will in my temples.”
But not truth. Not safety. Not kindness without ulterior motives. Those were lost to her—for now. One day, when she’d completed the task she’d been sent here to do, she might find those again. Today was not that day.
Aurora directed her loper to the enormous black tent that Orithyia’s clerics had already pitched, refusing to meet the eyes of the Aurean soldiers as she passed.
But she could feel their hostility, their suspicion.
It rolled off them in waves, their glares like heated daggers trained on her back.
She wasn’t their queen, as their king had been at pains to explain.
To them she was merely an enemy—a seducer and betrayer they were forced to endure until their king gave them orders otherwise.
She supposed she should be lucky the king hadn’t immediately ordered some gruesome accident to befall her.
There was still time for that, which is why she planned to remain with Orithyia for most of the trip, only drinking and eating what her people consumed, only sleeping where they slept.
The clerics largely ignored her—the same as the Viridians.
Her royal tiara had bought her nothing but the grudging tolerance of the Viridian soldiers and nobles.
Aurora was still the woman who had humiliated their queen, who had helped their true princess run away, and whose position was as insubstantial as the piece of paper that had bestowed it.
Their orders were obvious—to destabilize Aureum, to undermine its king, to win the Dragon’s Flank for Flora, if not the whole of Aureum.
Aurora was simply a means to do that. If she wanted to make any allies who would help her with Drakon, even grudging ones, she would have to earn them.
It would be up to her to pay for their aid in blood—her blood.
Aurora released a shaky breath as she neared the black tent, slowing her loper. Fear rooted her to the saddle. She wished she could run, ride hard and fast until she reached Hyllus and Epicasta. But they were a whole day ahead of her, and soon the road would turn into a slurry of mud.
“Your Highness, may I assist you from your mount?”
Aurora felt her gut churn anew.
Stentor, the queen’s general, forced to come along to restore the goodwill he’d lost when the king had escaped Flora’s trap—and his surveillance.
The same man who had dragged the king through every scrap of dung on the road to Boreas and paraded him, covered in filth, through the streets of the capital.
Now she was to make him her ally with the only means left at her disposal.
“Thank you, General,” Aurora replied, her skin crawling as he helped her dismount.
He tucked her hand in the crook of his arm, a shackle made of flesh and bone. As he pushed aside the flap of Orithyia’s black tent and ushered her inside the stuffy, dim space, her heart sped in her chest.
There, in the middle of the tent by the brazier, on a pedestal all its own, sat a metal cuff with spikes pointed inwards.
The same device the high priestess had used to force her vision of Epicasta’s wedding.
The same device Aurora had agreed to don again.
To make this loathsome man her ally. To buy her army one gruelling vision at a time.
Orithyia appeared out of the gloom, a bony finger tapping the wretched device, her gaze pitiless as she placed the mind’s eye stone on the pedestal. Aurora swallowed down bile.
“Shall we begin?”