by Meagan Hurst
Nineteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-four people later, the room was filled. And silent. The Council was full, minus the newly emptied de la Nepioa seat, and despite it being offered to her, Z chose to stand. She had spent seven days preparing for this day, while the Rangers mourned, and she knew what she had to say. She was given the floor, and she was grateful for the lack of immortal manners required.
Setting the foundation for the people who would, in the future, rescue her as a shattered shell of a person from Tenia, she made sure the Rangers understood what they could be if they so desired. They asked questions and she gave answers that she considered to be safe. Some of this they would have to discover through trial and error; some of it they had to decide on their own.
Twelve days later, she managed to excuse herself. From here on the Rangers were on their own. Yazimta le Tribarn had assumed command of the gathering upon Z’s announcement that she was leaving, and she fled the main halls of Arriandie. The Arriandin was helpful here; he provided her with extra passages to get back to the depths of Arriandie. She kept in the back passages, and she reached her destination out of habit, but once she was certain the waters were deserted, she slipped out of her hiding place and approached them. A bitter taste made its way to her mouth. She had come here to seek advice—she had ended up playing a part in the assassination of her great-grandfather. The only blessing was having seen Nivaradros in his younger years, but even that was a double-edged gift: what would he be like when she returned? What would she be like?
Looking into the depths of the waters that would support the Rangers when Tenia made a bid to poison their wells and would later protect and keep the Alantaions safe from harm, Z smiled and closed her eyes. Home, she thought before once again stepping off the ledge and into the waters below.
“I once believed I had seen much in my lifetime. And then I met you. You redefine possible.”
Z let out a laugh as she opened her eyes and got to her feet. The water had deposited her on the cold stone ground of Arriandie in her time, but it had managed to place her on her back. “Believe me when I say I am not trying.”
“Oh I believe you, but I find that even more alarming.”
Z rose and turned to face the Dragon; Nivaradros was watching her with neon eyes. From a distance. Surprised, she took a step forward before she paused. “Nivaradros…?” she called.
“You met me,” he stated in a tone that told her he feared something had changed.
“Yes.”
“I killed Baryaris—your great-grandfather…the only one of your relatives to love you unconditionally, without bias or abuse.”
“Yes.”
“You know of my past.”
“Yes.” Z took a step forward and met the Dragon’s eyes. “And I don’t care, Nivaradros. I returned, did I not? How long have you been waiting?”
“Since you left,” the Dragon breathed with a shudder. “As if there was anywhere else for me to be. You were hurt, Zimliya. You had been betrayed at a level you had never considered before. Then you met me—younger, different, and dangerous in a way you haven’t had to deal with for a while. You had just gone through several…losses and you were dragged into the middle of a negotiation between me and the man you had visited for reassurance. A negotiation for his death at my talons.”
He was worried things had changed. Well, he was right to be worried, things had changed. But not in the way he feared. “It was not your fault, Nivaradros. I was there. I know what happened.”
“I was enjoying his death.”
“Until I asked you to stop. You stopped, Nivaradros. I didn’t expect that of you. Nor did I expect you to spare my life. Or save it.” Her voice shook as she held her ground. “Niv, I liked meeting you back then. I enjoyed it. Despite everything that happened, I learned a lot. You remember the conversations we had—why would I hold anything against you?” And she had felt their connection even there. Exhaling as she made her decision, she raised her eyes to his and let him read her.
She had caught him off guard. The Dragon returned her gaze and evaluated what he saw. His entire form relaxed. “You listened to my advice.”
“I still have to utilize it, but yes, I got your point. And I am not holding Baryaris’s death against you. It was his choice, and by doing that you helped the Rangers in ways you cannot imagine. It started to sever the ties between the two kingdoms and it needed to be done.”
“But you cared for him.”
“Yes. In a way I never cared for the idiot. In a way I am incapable of caring for Midestol. In a way I couldn’t care for Nivo or Kitra. In a way I only once felt as a small being for the couple I thought were my parents. But not in a way that would never be repeated.”
“The Mithane.”
“I’ve known him longer than I ever could have known Baryaris. He’s been through more, and he has yet to try and kill me over it.”
“He will never try to kill you,” Nivaradros snorted. “He is the only immortal, besides myself, that I am certain of. He’s even more protective of you than the Shade is. He may be the politest of the immortal leaders around, but he is the one I would cross last, and only if I was seeking my demise.”
“You have already crossed him.”
“Well, yes, but I wouldn’t cross him now.” She gave him a black look and the Dragon chuckled. “Alright, I would, but I am certain you understand the point I am trying to make.” Nivaradros was regaining his humor at long last and she was grateful for it.
“The Mithane?”
“He is holding council meetings every other day. Shevieck has been a part of all of them—he is still alive,” the Dragon added. He moved and raised a hand to her face. When she didn’t shy away his fingers brushed her skin. “You haven’t asked the question I thought you would,” he admitted as he let the hand fall from her cheek.
“And which question would that be?”
“Why I tried to kill you so many times when we met the first time, for you, and the second for me.”
She grimaced. “It does make me rather interested as to how you went from being so damn curious to wanting to kill me.”
“I got tired of waiting. Things happened between the time I met you and the time you returned. It hadn’t occurred to me that when you did make an appearance you would be a mortal human hatchling. I was taken aback by your age, your lack of immortality, and your scars. You were wounded when I met you in my younger years, but you weren’t shattered; the hatchling I first met was. I was angry about it. Frustrated and caught off-guard. I thought you would be far better dead than what you were, and it took me some time to realize that I would get to watch you grow, change, and heal if I let you live. And you proved to have what I had seen in you before; you didn’t hold my attempts to kill you against me. You stood up for me, in fact. Killed some of my kind to keep me safe. When I realized I had made an error, I knew I could not seem to immediately accept your presence. I had to appear to grow used to you over time. I apologize for it. It was my mistake.”
“Not a mistake,” Z countered, “so please don’t apologize. And you’re lying to me, Nivaradros, our original interactions were all just a ploy. You didn’t want to raise suspicion, so you pretended to hate me. But you never hated me.” Hesitating, she held his eyes with hers and smiled as some of the tension left his form. Standing on the tip of her toes, she kissed him without a hint of unease. Exhaling when she broke the kiss at last, she sighed as she acted on the first decision of many. “And so you are the first to know: I am resigning as the de la Nepioa.”
Midestol
Looking out the window into a saturated landscape, Midestol watched his warriors and his mages drill without pause through the storm. And it was more than a mere storm. An average of two inches an hour fell, and the floods the rain had caused brought more problems than Zimliya had—which was hard to fathom considering the woman’s aptitude for being precisely where he needed her to not be. His granddaughter, however, had been silent as of late, and that wo
rried him. He had been able to gather very limited information on her whereabouts since he had spoken to her Dragon in the heart of the Alantaion kingdom, when Nivaradros had convinced him to walk away from the Alantaion lands.
He loathed it when he didn’t have knowledge of her location. Not knowing the full extent of her condition was also vexing, but not as irritating as being unable to guess whether she would be there to counter things he set in motion. Following the Shade’s surprising offer to deliver a Ranger, Midestol had expected an immediate response from Zimliya once his role in the woman’s torture, and eventual demise, had become clear. Instead he had gotten nothing. Not a word, no attacks, and not so much as a sighting of Zimliya anywhere outside Arriandie—or inside Arriandie come to think of it, though the days of his ability to gain information from the Alantaion kingdom were coming to an end.
She was his so-called ‘heartless’ granddaughter, and the lack of retaliation was concerning. Zimliya didn’t react from personal grudges, but not even she could ignore what had occurred. Her Shade had betrayed her, and he had tortured a Ranger before sending the still living Ranger home as a trap. Zimliya should have said or done something and yet, two months later, there was nothing. The best bit of information he had been gifted with put her in Arriandie, with her Alantaions, but it couldn’t be confirmed. Security surrounding the previously overrun kingdom was tight enough that Midestol couldn’t even get a touch of magic into its outermost borders.
Which hinted at Zimliya’s presence, but it wasn’t enough to go by. She had enough knowledge and skills with magic to create that kind of defense and leave, but he couldn’t say which way she would have gone. She was also slower in making an attempt to gain back the other kingdoms than he had expected. Retaking the Alantaion kingdom was the only move she had made, and he had practically handed it to her. He wished she would quit shifting on him. Ever since she had been granted her immortality, Zimliya had been harder to outmaneuver—and his blood relationship to her had been a bit of a shock.
Unfortunately, their blood-ties hadn’t helped him. He had always liked Zimliya. She was a challenge—his first actual challenge in several thousand years of dealing with the occasional Do-gooder that had popped up. He had managed to kill all challengers within their first few meetings. Even the original Ranger Baryaris hadn’t proven to be a challenge; the man had died in some random Tenian attack. But Zimliya? Oh, she had thwarted one of his attacks at a young age, and when he had managed to capture her after several failed attempts, nothing he had said or done to her—or others—seemed to trouble her.
Granted, she had also been a big nuisance, but that was beside the point. When she hadn’t cost him thousands of his warriors and wasted countless resources, magic, and plans, she was quite intriguing. Even when she had angered him, she was still something. He had spent years trying to pinpoint a weakness. Since she was missing the ability to feel pain herself, he had stopped torturing her and brought in others in the hope that watching someone else suffer would cause her to break. It was surprising how many people couldn’t handle watching the pain of others.
Instead Zimliya had flipped the game to her side; she had appeared to experience no anguish and even gone as far as to offer helpful suggestions. None of which seemed to cause her an instant of doubt or grief, and Midestol had found himself both furious and even more admiring of the girl. If she wouldn’t flinch over the fate of unknown others, he had decided to test her with people she knew. Of course, in order to do that he had needed to learn who she appeared to care for, which had seemed to be no one.
That had shocked him. In the beginning, he had tried to convince himself Zimliya did care for others and just hid it well, but after capturing several mortals—and then moving to immortals—he found that Zimliya only would rescue them if she thought she needed them. And it was impossible to narrow down why she needed them. A case in point was his favorite example of how unreadable she was. He had managed to capture the former heir to the Syallibion throne, the older brother of the current Syallibion ruler. He had appeared to be close to Zimliya; she had appeared to be close to him. So Midestol had managed to get the immortal alone. Managed to get him captured. But while Zimliya had come, she hadn’t rescued the Syallibion. She’d left him. And Midestol still didn’t know why.
Her absolute failure to react the way he had expected her to, especially considering the importance of his captive, had baffled him. He had taken out his confusion on the Syallibion, demanding answers regarding Zimliya’s mind. The answer, his captive had insisted, was simple: Zimliya couldn’t be expected to think or act like a normal human being. His life had proven to be too much of a risk to save, and she would let him die because of it. In fact, Zimliya had returned to kill the Syallibion, and she hadn’t hesitated over her decision. Worse, Midestol discovered there was no way to discern which way the woman would react, whether she would come to spare the fate of beings she knew, come to kill them, or fail to show up at all. The seeming randomness of her actions made it futile to use anyone against her.
She hadn’t claimed friends; she didn’t have family. The closest thing she had to either was the Shades, who were untouchable, and the Rangers, whom he could never find. Crilyne had surrendered the sole Ranger he had ever captured alive. Although he refused to stop trying to find a weak spot, Midestol was willing to concede one may not exist. At least not one he could exploit. He was not foolish enough to test Zimliya’s new relationship with the Dragon. The safer course of action was to capture Zimliya and talk with the woman, because that seemed to be a middle ground both of them could tolerate.
Sharp and confident when dealing with him, she didn’t mind walking naked through his castle if he demanded it of her, and later she appeared to choose to do the same on a whim of her own. That part of her he would never understand. She was willing to barter with him to save one of his slaves from being raped for the night by offering to take their place. He had always accepted those offers but, so far, it appeared Zimliya hadn’t been touched, and his men refused to clarify what had occurred.
On top of that, Zimliya had managed to keep him from extending his power for over a decade. He had even lost land and power. She had won wars on three worlds, compromised his hold in two, and managed—until her most recent leave of absence—to keep his hold from growing on this one. She had control over any army she wanted in the so-called Alliance, and that enabled her to be able to raise an army to counter his forces almost as soon as he mounted an attack. If he gathered the whole of his power and struck before she could rally her allies, he might win, but his timing had to be precise. He didn’t know the full force Zimliya could call, and he suspected she would not abandon her allies.
Then again, the destruction of Tenia had killed more than five million people that Zimliya had at one time felt honor-bound to protect. She’d continued that protection without wavering until the whole of the world had come into play. With the way the Tenians had treated her and the rest of the Alliance, her refusal to let the kingdom fall had baffled him. And then her sudden change of heart—as wise and understandable as it was—had been even more confusing. She hadn’t pulled her support of the kingdom; she’d actively used magic to destroy it.
Which, with her dislike of magic on top of her personal connection to Tenia, made him wonder how she had managed to hold herself together. Sources he had in the area mentioned Zimliya had died and returned only after the Dragon had intervened. Which had augmented his interest in the Dragon all over again. Nivaradros was the Warlord and had cut his race’s numbers in half. He had also killed more beings in this world in a three thousand year period than Midestol could claim—which was irritating. Yet when Zimliya had died following a massive undertaking of magic that should not have been possible for her to attempt, much less succeed at bringing to completion, it had been the Dragon who had refused to let her passing be final. It was the Warlord who was responsible for bringing her back to life.
And something had happened between them. Som
ething Midestol hadn’t anticipated in all his years of toying with Zimliya, in testing her. Nicklyn had gotten close to her, but despite all of his efforts, Zimliya had kept most of herself locked away. Nicklyn hadn’t gained anything more than a student-teacher relationship, and Zimliya had used one of Midestol’s own training techniques on Nicklyn in the end: Master kill Student or Student kill Master. If Nicklyn’s death had scarred her at all, she hid it well. She spoke as if his death had wounded her, but her actions implied otherwise. Nivaradros, on the other hand, meant something to Zimliya.
More alarming, was the influence the Dragon seemed to have over her. It had been Nivaradros who had pushed for the agreement that allowed Zimliya to meet with him on non-violent terms, and had the Dragon not pushed it Midestol knew Zimliya would have refused. But strangely enough the Warlord had pushed it, and Midestol was indebted to him because of it. His granddaughter had made the meetings easy on him; she didn’t hold him accountable for any actions while their meeting was ‘family-based.’ It was yet another reason to cherish and admire the women who was also his greatest foe.
If he had only discovered her existence sooner—before the Rangers had ruined her. He admitted to himself she wouldn’t be what she was, since in his lands women were for pleasure and to bear the next generation. But, oh the power the girl had at her fingertips was enough to make him willing to do anything to acquire it. Although with her immortality, he was no longer certain he could acquire it, even if he managed to kill her. She had always been damned near impossible to kill to begin with. Seven times he had had her concluded she was dead—no breath and no heartbeat—and yet somehow, she turned up alive and relatively well. Often it was just in time to foil another one of his plans.