Chapter Twenty-Five Arion #2
“No,” she argues. “She tried to take Mortia’s old shore-palace. Who can blame her? It sits atop a veritable trove of quartz that your king has never once tried to mine.”
“It was a siege,” I say flatly. “You had to expect a battle.”
I glance down at the silvered cord—it’s given up on trying to free me, instead shooting out from my chest into another mirage of fog that disguises the rest of the room.
The door must be behind it. And beyond that—Zephyra.
I don’t feel anything through the bond. Not anger, fear, or pain.
But I’m alive, so she must be too. However, we won’t be for long.
I need to get these fucking binds off.
Gavriall glances around, undoubtedly memorizing the rest of the room. Star charts, oceanic maps, and a porthole to our left, peering out into a rain-soaked sky. We must be on one of their sky-bound ships.
She doesn’t spare Gavriall another glance.
“What is a warlock doing traversing Stormborn waters? One of our newest vanguards spotted a beast flying close to our wall, and you’ll understand if we’re a little…
protective of our border. Especially where Mortia scum is concerned.
But we never expected to investigate and find you.
” Lightning hisses from her fingertips, but unlike my magic, it feels pure.
Chaotic. It roils, expands, and crackles along her palms, as if waiting to shatter the ship into a hundred jagged edges.
“Mortia’s strongest warlock near our territory with mermaids. ”
Gavriall glances at me uneasily. Tension thickens with the royal’s powers.
No one else in Tempest has magic, just the single line of succession descended straight from Tempestas himself.
Able to wield storms like knives. Princess Amaya is something of a demigoddess, and we’ve fallen straight into her clutches.
She’s young, probably a few years before her thirtieth birthday, with a mother of seventy-six sitting firmly on the throne.
The princess will want to prove herself.
She’ll want revenge for the deaths I wrought.
She’ll want to bring my head to the queen.
“Oh, you know,” Gavriall says with a casual wave of his bound hands, “we were just out for a leisurely swim. The current swept us far, far away.”
Amaya narrows her eyes at the historian. Without warning, lightning strikes Gavriall. A single bolt hits his shoulder, and his body convulses. His eyes roll back in his head. “I hate liars,” Amaya says as Gavriall seizes with a pained moan. “Try again.”
My fingers twitch. Magic hums beneath my skin. If only I could access it. The Stormborn may be able to conjure weather, but I can conjure everything. I could exsanguinate the princess in seconds. She would drop dead on the spot.
She grins, seeming to read my mind, and shrugs again. “Your turn, Warlock Stone. Perhaps if your reasoning is decent, I’ll spare you from death.”
Gavriall tucks his knees into his chest, recovering breath by breath. The skull on the table cackles with unbidden glee. The clouds above darken considerably. And the silvered cord—it vanishes within the enchanted fog.
I hate liars.
I hate being powerless. I hate the threat of death. More than anything, I’m really fucking sick of losing my mermaid. So I lie.
“We were swimming.”
Amaya’s boots slam onto the floor, and she grips the armrests of her chair with white knuckles. Lightning flickers out from her hands, then descends on me with wicked speed. Good thing I was waiting for it.
I raise my hands high overhead, letting the electricity strike—and burn straight through my poisoned ropes.
The second they fall from my wrists, my magic surges forth. I deflect the rest of the lightning with a simple wind as the princess leaps to her feet and hail the size of her precious coins cascades from the storm clouds. My wings beat them away. Piece by piece by piece.
“You can try and kill me, warlock”—the princess snatches three blades and wields them between her knuckles like claws—“but you won’t survive the rest of the ship.
It’s teeming with guards and soldiers. They’ll slice up your merrow before you can flee this cabin, and then they’ll slice you navel to nose.
We are in Tempest territory, Warlock Arion Stone. You can’t save yourself here.”
I glare at her. Magic twitches on my palm.
She’s only partly right—we’d be able to survive the ship, but we’d be lost afterward.
Tempestas controls the weather from the sky over his small continent, and if one of his direct descendants dies in a bloody fight beneath him, there’s no telling what the god will do.
This isn’t Mortem—ripped apart and banished to the Fathoms. It’s not the merrow goddess either; the forgotten lore of monsters.
Tempestas’s tornados whirl across the walls.
His storms beat down on the stone roofs of a thousand homes.
Which means even if expending the magic necessary to explode this ship wouldn’t kill me on the spot, Tempestas fucking would.
Gavriall understands this, possibly faster than I do, because he climbs off the bed and brushes a still-trembling hand through his shoulder-length hair. “Why—why are you in the skies, then?” he asks. “If you’re the princess, why are you up here playing captain instead of sipping tea in the palace?”
Amaya catches hail in her hand and crushes it in her fist. “Why is Mortia’s strongest warlock in our territory, fraternizing with the enemy of all humankind?
” Ice shards dust a blue woolen rug, and she grounds them further beneath the heel of her boot.
“Are you truly prepared to try and assassinate a foreign princess, Stone?” Yellow veins flicker inside her eyes, and her hair falls from her previously messy bun as the wind in the room whips faster. Faster.
“Yes.” The silvered cord shimmers white. I try to reach Zephyra through it, to tell her to escape, to fight, but nothing returns through the bond. Not a thought or feeling, not even a color. Zephyra is still knocked out cold. She won’t be awake to learn of her fate—for better or worse.
Princess Amaya Frost levitates on a swift wind, her plum-purple dress billowing at her thighs, her weapons belt rattling. Her gaze darkens from gray to charcoal, lightning still crackling in her irises. “Mors est velox; Fathoms non est,” she murmurs, the divine language ancient as time itself.
The skull repeats the message in the modern tongue, “Death is swift; the Fathoms are not. Fight, dear child. Fight and win. Bring glory to us all.”
Gavriall marches straight up to the skull and turns her around, barely avoiding getting his fingers chomped off.
“Young man,” the skull admonishes, “die, die die.”
“That’s not even a rhyme!” Gavriall swipes at the mounds of treasure, forcing the princess’s attention onto him. I assume he’s stalling for time, buying me a moment to murder her quickly, until he says, “Tempest is a kingdom known for its million resources.”
He snatches up a coin, another and another, flicking them between his fingers with the dexterity of a practiced gambler.
“You have hoards of gold, silver, bronze, gemstones, crystals, minerals, and more. Is that right?” He glances at the princess, raising an inquisitive brow, challenging her to state otherwise.
“The thing is—Tempest is a small continent, roughly the size of Mortia’s coast and capital.
It was desolate for one hundred years post-Mortem.
That was the reason for your trade agreement with Mortia.
They shipped you food and goods that you couldn’t produce yourselves. ”
Graceful as a feline, Amaya stalks forward. She brandishes those claws like a feral panther. “Who are you? I wish to know your name before I splatter your blood.”
“I can see where you’ve inherited your feminine wiles,” Gavriall says with a vague gesture toward the skull, “but I’m not insulting you. I’m reasoning with you.”
“You’ve the charisma of a doorknob,” Amaya says.
Gavriall retreats a step, watching the lightning continue to crackle in her gaze. “Possibly, but I’m also right. Tempest broke their agreement with Mortia the day they tried to secretly claim the shore-palace for their own. The day a certain warlock… removed the threat.”
“Killed my people,” Amaya snarls.
I step between them, instantly understanding Gavriall’s point. “Tempest hoards are dried-up.” My gaze locks on to hers. “You’re not partaking in some kind of royal vacation in the skies—you’re treasure hunting.”
“Yes.” Gavriall shakes his bound hands, trying to loosen the ropes. “They’re treasure hunters, led by a semidivine huntress.” He glances at me from his periphery. “And you really could’ve given me my moment. I figured it out first.”
I glare at the cloud-covered ceiling. “I figured out she was the princess first.”
“I woke up first,” he argues. Then he pauses and sniffs, looking away quickly when I catch his eye. “I simply wanted to snuggle for a moment.”
The floor throttles with thunder—both Amaya’s and my own.
Our frustrations mix, and the air smells like char and rust. The princess searches my gaze, her power thick and heavy.
I should run her through with a glass sword before she can slit my throat.
That would be the smart move. A soldier’s move.
However, she blinks, and the lightning dissipates in her eyes.
She tosses her blades onto the table. “I did not take you to seek vengeance, Warlock Stone. We found you in the waters after receiving word from another ship of a devastation in the Greenwood Isles. They said the land was dried-up and the people were dead. Each person had been drained of life, body parts gnawed off and intestines strewn across ash. They said a winged warlock lay at the center of a massacre.” She sweeps her hair away from her face, twisting it into a bun and impaling the knot with a peacock-feather quill. “It was you.”
“We didn’t kill anyone,” I growl.
I don’t want to tell her about the heart. I won’t tell her.
She grins as if she already knows. “Tempest sent infantry—spies—into Mortia years ago to excavate your mountains. Your northern cities are bare, void of almost any life at all. My infantry couldn’t understand why—until they dug too deep and stumbled upon a vicious cult.
Only one survived to tell me about it. He was missing a leg,” she says.
“The cult gnawed it off at the knee. The devastation on Lucia’s isles wasn’t entirely your fault, was it?
“I did not take you to seek vengeance, Warlock Stone. I want to help you. Whatever you seek must be worth a pretty copper if that cult—if your entire kingdom—is after you. I’m merely offering to help you obtain it and…
perhaps split the rewards.” She raises her chin, and her eyes gleam with mischief.
She extends a hand. “What do you say, Stone? Shall we reach an agreement of our own?”
Low and eerie, the skull sings to herself, “Daughter of Tempestas, son of Mortem, whatever you reap, you will not sow. In the end, a patch of dirt, your bodies lying low, low, low.”