Chapter 34 Rhiannon
RHIANNON
Inside the elevator, a classic bossa nova song that had been massively popular about sixty years ago played. Ember swayed slightly to it. Calypso glanced back at her, raising an eyebrow. Max just sighed.
Lara grinned at me, then started to sing. Her face was covered in blood. Ember joined in, wiggling her hips. Max shook her head, looking back to me for a rebuke, I suppose. I shrugged and lent my voice to Ember and Lara’s. We hadn’t done our usual ritual of singing to a mixtape on our way here.
“It’s good luck,” I hissed at Calypso between verses.
The redheaded Maere shrugged, adding her voice to the rest of ours.
“You have to sing,” Ember added, shooting a mock glare back at Max as the chorus started. She rolled her eyes, but sang along anyway. We didn’t fuck with tradition.
The six of us sang as the elevator crept to the basement at a glacial pace. At around Floor Two, when the song started over on some bizarre loop, she looked at Calypso and said, “This is why people don’t take the Orphium Maere seriously.”
Calypso giggled, but she didn’t stop singing. Admittedly, she had the prettiest voice of all of us. The elevator doors opened up on dozens of armed soldiers with guns trained on us. These were not the guards from above.
This was one of the Authority’s elite forces. Lara looked to Ember for direction. There was a crimson glow to her eyes that should have sent the soldiers running, but of course they didn’t know better. “Can I go first?”
Ember made a gallant gesture. “But of course.”
Lara stepped out of the elevator, beaming at the soldiers with her most dazzling smile. I wasn’t sure how they didn’t all fall instantly in love, but they kept their guns pointed squarely at her.
“So,” she said amiably. “Unfortunately, we are here to kill you all. Fortunately, we’re not the monsters you are. I’ll give you the same offer I gave your dead friends upstairs—run while you still have the chance, and live another day.”
They opened fire on her as an answer, but she moved too fast for them, her sword slicing through the kneecaps of the first row of soldiers like a hot knife through butter. The rest of us moved, pushing the fallen towards the elevator.
Bullets hit me, but they refused to enter my body as my sword drank more and more blood.
There wasn’t time to think or even time to strategize.
It was just us butchering them. More streamed towards us from the teed corridor at the end of the hallway.
A few stumbled backwards as our bloody footprints left their fellow soldiers behind, the same bossa nova song from the elevator repeating again as we walked towards them.
“We’re just going to keep killing you,” Max sneered. “Don’t you get it? You can’t beat us.”
A pale elderly man in an obscenely expensive suit pushed a hooded figure through the crowd of soldiers. He’d had expensive hair plugs put in, when he would have looked better going bald. His face had been tweaked and altered many times, but he still wasn’t remotely handsome.
Recognition slithered through me, bile rising in my throat at the sight of his face. I’d never seen him in person, but I knew my enemy: Archibald Blaire, the Third.
As for the hooded figure… it didn’t matter one whit that her face was covered, or that he’d stripped her of her royal vestments, leaving her only in a slip of an undergarment. I would recognize the set of my mother’s shoulders anywhere.
I pushed past Ember and Lara. “Absens haeres non erit,” I said in a low tone.
It was the last thing she’d said to me before skewering me with my own sword. An absent person will not inherit. From underneath the bag over her head, my mother laughed, the sound throaty and arrogant.
Her head twisted backwards, as though she could see through the fibers of the bag over her head and wanted to see his expression when she insulted him.
“Perhaps you should end things now, Archie. You have the right kind of face for a cowardly death.” Her bagged head tilted to the side, raptorial even at a disadvantage. “Like a dead fish.”
Max snorted at her insult. Calypso covered her mouth as my mother laughed with them. Blaire struck her hard across the back of the head, but she kept laughing. “You’ll have to hit harder than that if you want to silence me, darling.”
He did have a face like a dead fish, I decided. It twisted into some perversion of a smile. Then he drew a syringe from inside his jacket pocket and jabbed it into her neck. Rather than plunging liquid into her, he drew out an entire vial of blood.
In what felt like slow motion, he pushed her towards me, then spoke a single soft word as the group of soldiers parted for her to stumble through: Fire. I lunged for her as my sistren instinctively flanked their queen.
But it didn’t stop the bullets from finding her. The white silk of her slip was blossoming crimson when she fell into my arms only seconds later. This had all been theater. A trap.
As she slumped into my arms, my mother gave an order from beneath the bag I pulled from her head. “Destroy this place.”
Ember heard her and nodded. “Get her out of here.”
I pulled the torc from my neck and placed it around hers. The adamantine shackles fell from her wrists. My mother looked up at me, her skin far too pale. I raised an eyebrow at her. “Don’t you dare pass out. Work on healing yourself.”
My mother had been adept with magic for thousands of years—even this far from the island, she would be able to access her power. Until I met Cassandra, I’d thought she was the most powerful scholomage to have ever lived.
A bit of color came back to her skin, and her lips curled into a familiar wry smile. “I shall live.”
Her words were confident, but there was nothing reassuring in my mother’s eyes.
Ember’s gaze met mine, and I knew. My friend was a brilliant leader in battle, but her strategy for getting the most people out alive was unmatched primarily because she had an uncanny way of identifying those that would live, and those that would die.
Ember’s slow inhalation told me all I needed to know. My mother wasn’t going to make it. She’d been hit too many times. “How long?”
“Maybe an hour,” she said. “Make the most of the time you have left. We’ll clean up here.” I could hardly hear my heartbeat over the roar of my blood. Ember turned back towards the fray, calling, “Lara, go with them.”
But Lara was beyond us now. She sprinted after Blaire.
Ember didn’t have to give another order; Max was by my side.
Ember nodded to her and turned back to the fight, while Max covered me as I lifted my mother as gently as I could over my shoulder and prepared to run with her.
“Kara and the Aradios Maere will meet us at the back door,” she said into my ear. “Follow me?”
A pang of worry went through me. This wasn’t how I was used to doing things. I’d have preferred my own people take care of this, and though I loved Max and always would, she was no longer part of my cohort.
She seemed to see my hesitation, her dark eyes going soft. “Things do have to change with us,” she murmured as she pushed me back from the fray. Our friends were slaughtering the remaining soldiers. “I have a feeling we’re going to need each other more and more in the coming days.”
Whatever this had been, Blaire had baited us in the worst way. I glanced up at the cameras in the hall. Footage. He had footage of all of this. Of us breaking in and massacring humans. Without context, this would end us.
I’d worked with the Consulate for long enough to know what they could clean up and what they couldn’t. If this footage got out, we were fucked.
“Fine,” I agreed. “Let’s move.”
And then we ran. The halls were empty, so strangely empty. But the cells were full of our people. I stopped, setting my mother gently down on a plastic chair outside an office. I gripped her chin. “You understand what’s happening here?”
She nodded once. It was all I needed. My mother was nothing if not cunning. She probably knew more than I did.
“I cannot let our people die here.” It wasn’t a request for permission, nor was it the kind of meek admission of ambition that I typically gave her.
A slow smile appeared on her face. “Do what you need to. I could use a moment to bolster myself.” She took my hand in hers. Her skin was freezing cold. A ring appeared in my palm. “You will need this.”
I looked down at the ring in my hand, a simple gold signet, with symbols of our house carved into it.
What my mother suggested by giving me this ring was impossible, but I had never been one for denying a truth when one was presented.
If this was the end of Silea Hyperion, who was I to deny her last wishes?
“You owe me at least a few hours,” I ordered her, staring straight into her eyes. “After all you’ve done, you owe me that.”
My mother nodded again. “Do what you must. But wear the ring.”
I slipped it onto my righthand index finger, and felt a surge of power like I’d never known.
Suddenly, I was connected not just to the island’s magic, but everything.
For a brief moment, magic seemed boundless, endless, filling me with the deepest, most comforting darkness, and the warmest golden light.
In my peripheral awareness, Max stepped back from me, kneeling. “Domina.”
“Get up,” I snapped. “I’m no different than I was a moment ago.”
She shook her head. Max had always understood the mysteries better than the rest of us. “That isn’t true and you know it.”
I did know it. But I didn’t want it to be true. Because if I were to be Otrera’s queen, it meant everything I held dear here was over.
From her plastic chair, my mother said with a prim smile, “Do ut des.”
I give that you may give.
She knew she was ruining my life—any chance of happiness I ever had. Queens of Otrera did not marry. They did not even take long-term lovers, for fear of being corrupted by love. They ruled alone. I wanted to slap her silly, but thought better of it.