Blades Of Destiny (Crown Service Book 4)

by Terah Edun

  Nissa nodded. “Very well. That is our purpose for luring this rather…intrepid individual here, after all.”

  Sara cocked her head and let them continue. The longer they talked, the longer she and her people lived.

  “Good,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t we just skip the pleasantries and get to the demands, then?”

  “I already told you I’m not joining your little band of merry killjoys,” Sara said, pre-empting their efforts. “I’m not going to say I’d rather die than join, but you’ve got nothing that would make me a willing volunteer, either. I’ll live a woman of the Empress’s Guard, thank you very much.”

  Nissa leaned over with a satisfied smile, and the glow of the fire lit her face. “We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

  Leaning back, Sara looked between the ball of fire growing in Nissa’s hand and the saccharine smile on her face, and realized that this was going to be a long, torturous night indeed.

  26

  Sweat began to bead liberally on Sara’s forehead and slip down her back as Nissa stood so close that it felt like Sara was standing in a furnace. The only reason Sara didn’t flinch or wilt was that she was used to this heat from her time working as a weapons blacksmith, but even so, she winced as the ball of flame burned brighter with every second.

  She wondered if a person could be baked alive just by standing so close to the heat, and she figured if this kept up, she was certainly going to find out. But the Sun Mage looked fit as a fiddle as she tossed the fireball back and forth between her palms casually.

  Even Gabriel backed off a bit and put what Sara was certain was a protective shield between himself and Nissa with a quick movement of his fingers to scratch a sigil in the air. She was watching both of these mages closely, and unfortunately, neither seemed in a hurry to stop her from dancing on the edge of sanity. Twisting and turning did nothing to abate the heat, and Nissa didn’t even seem to be trying to torture her, although amusement did burn in her eyes as she watched the War Mage burn.

  Sara promised herself that if she got out of this mess, she’d return the favor. Though she wondered if, in a game of tit-for-tat, she and the Sun Mage were technically even already.

  It was hard to tell. Even harder to remember that she wasn’t here to avenge past murders or imagined indiscretions in the Sun Mage’s or the Illusions Mage’s head. She was here to capture them, not to gain retribution. The rest was for the empress to decide. Sara just had to stay alive long enough to heed those commands.

  So when Nissa said, “How about we sweeten the pot, then?” Sara’s ears perked up. This at least sounded good for her, because both Nissa and Gabriel seemed to be rapidly losing patience, and Sara feared what would happen when two of the most powerful mages in the empire decided to give in to their temptations.

  “Perhaps elsewhere,” Gabriel said.

  “Perhaps so,” Nissa added.

  Heart beating fast, Sara wondered what was going to happen next. Gabriel had shown a clear propensity to create his own portals before. Perhaps he would do so again. However, he laughed and wagged a finger at her.

  “Not this time, my little chickadee,” he said. “I’ll have to rely on someone else to transport us, as this…quarry, as lovely as it is, is not of my own making.”

  Sara was relieved that this time they weren’t caught up in one of his illusions. At the snap of Gabriel’s fingers, a second-rate mage raced forward. She could tell his rank because he wore a badge, not unlike the discs of the Imperial Armed Forces, which declared his rank for all to see.

  Gabriel leaned forward and whispered in the man’s ear, “Have us transported to—”

  Sara, sinking back onto her heels, didn’t hear the rest.

  Before long, a whirling blue portal, large enough for one small dragon to walk through with room to spare, opened up.

  Without prompting, her people were gathered up with a Kade guard to either side of them and frog-marched through the portal. Karn, Marx, and lastly Isabelle, Sara noted curiously, had the distinction of having four guards, each at diamond points, escort them through. When the Kades got to the powerful mages of her group, including Linus, they wasted no time in spelling them asleep and carrying them through on stretchers.

  As Sara nervously eyed those individuals tasked with spelling mages asleep, she looked over at Gabriel in surprise.

  He shrugged and said, “Have to be careful. Even a mage with just the tiniest access to his magic, and the smarts to accomplish it, can disrupt a portal these days.”

  Sara grunted in acknowledgement as she hunched in like a turtle and watched the approaching sleepers with dismay. Now that it was just she, Gabriel, Nissa, and a handful of his group left alongside one sizeable and almost stumpy dragon, she didn’t have to appear brave to anyone but herself.

  And she really didn’t want to go to sleep in Gabriel’s hands; not knowing where or how she’d end up was kind of a sticking point. But there was almost nothing she could do. Being bound and incapable of moving, let alone fighting back, sucked.

  As the two sleepers approached her with lightly glowing fingertips, Sara considered biting off their digits before conceding it was a rash decision that was more likely to get her head cut off than not, and the taste of coppery blood tended to ruin her appetite.

  So she simmered and waited.

  To her surprise, they didn’t immediately put her into a coma. Instead, one watched her with something akin to sympathy in his eyes—which, coming from a Kade, was strange—and the other looked to Gabriel for instructions.

  Looking at her with a curious glint in his eye, Gabriel approached. “If I free you from these restraints, will you run?”

  Sara stared back at him. “Wouldn’t you?”

  His lips twitched up. “I might, and yet…I think there is much for us to discuss yet, Sara Fairchild.”

  “I don’t know what that ‘much’ could contain,” she said. “I would think everything we needed to discuss was already done when you kidnapped me before.”

  “Not nearly all,” he said. “In fact, I do recall letting you know that there was a special person alive who—”

  “Is dead as a doornail,” she replied flatly—refusing to be drawn in. Refusing to be fooled. “If you have a proposition, speak it clearly.”

  He chuckled and leaned back. “Oh, a proposition, she says? Very well, here it is. We will free you of the most onerous of your bindings in exchange for your compliance. In return, I won’t order the torture of your men and women for that same time period.”

  “What about their freedom?” Sara asked.

  “Don’t push your luck, War Mage,” Gabriel said. “We are still at war, after all, and you, unfortunately, are on the wrong side.”

  Sara grimaced but nodded.

  The Illusions Mage looked over at the Sun Mage coyly as if to gauge her thoughts on their agreement. Nissa didn’t seem the least bit interested in, or shocked at, Gabriel’s tactics. She just shrugged and flapped her hand at him. “Do what you want with her. Just make sure she comes through the damned portal behind me.”

  With that, Nissa, with another behind her, departed the quarry’s eerie, white, stone basin with a flash of purple magic and walked through the portal. Sara had thought Nissa’s aura of magic would be the same color as the fire in her hands, but she now guessed that she was wrong, judging by the flash. Either that or the guard she’d been walking beside had done something on her orders.

  Deciding that she’d find out soon enough, Sara looked at Gabriel silently, waiting for him to make his move.

  He snapped his fingers, and someone gathered up the other fallen weapons—leaving her beautiful ones behind—and trotted through the portal without a word. Then a different mage approached her to cut away the bindings with a knife practically brimming with residual magic.

  Skin crawling at being so close to a blade that could do far more than just cut rope, Sara itched to get away. Her War Mage instincts were telling her that the blade’s properties were
more suited to flaying skin without a single drop of blood spilled than just cutting rope, and she didn’t want to be anywhere near it if it got the hankering to do what came naturally.

  It wasn’t exactly sentient, the knife, but oppressive. Yes, it could coerce its handler to be more particular about its tasks.

  She heartily disliked weapons like that, and preferred to control a weapon rather than let it control her. But for mages and soldiers who did not have her natural instincts for fighting or surviving on the battlefield, such weapons could be as blessed as gifts from the gods.

  Regardless of that blade’s stature, she hopped up and closer to a guard opposite the one who had freed her.

  The female put a warning hand over her weapon as Sara, who was rubbing her aching wrists, got closer. Sara was careful to keep her head meekly tucked down and her focus on easing the aches of her formerly confined shoulder blades and the wrists that had been tightly straight to her side.

  No sooner had she gotten feeling back into her hands than another guard approached and quickly slapped iron manacles on her wrists. They were so heavy that they made her hands look dainty, and that took some work.

  Glaring at the guard sourly, Sara saw him match her look for look, not sorry at all as he maneuvered the locking mechanisms. Then he put two sealing pins in his breast pouch and turned to nod to Gabriel—indicating, presumably, that she was ready for transport.

  Wanting to get to her cohort’s side as soon as possible and ensure they weren’t being abused, Sara trotted meekly to the center of the group of soldiers, and as they began to walk forward in formation, so did she.

  The dragon, on orders, went ahead. Before Sara reached the gate, she felt two others join them. The guard with Gabriel and the Illusions Mage himself. She was in no position to complain, so she didn’t.

  But she did ask, in a very polite tone, “You’re not going to leave my swords behind, are you?”

  “Now why would I ever do that?” Gabriel said as he leaped out from behind her and she realized she had walked straight into a second trap. He had been waiting for her to break down and beg for her babies, her swords.

  As she closed her eyes in fury and then opened them to glance to the left, and at least be assured he was keeping his word, she saw him dip down with a satisfied grin and grab both of her swords.

  “Wouldn’t want to leave these beautiful specimens behind,” he said with a cheeky grin.

  Sara mumbled a protest that she could barely hear herself.

  It sounded a lot like ‘screw you’.

  As Gabriel took up his place behind her, she said, “What did I do to deserve you in my life? I couldn’t have done so much evil to have such an asshole follow me from death field to death field.”

  “You deserve a lot of things,” Gabriel said dryly. “But I have a request of my own, War Mage.”

  Sara tilted her head over her shoulder to indicate she was listening, but she didn’t turn around.

  “Try not to pout,” he said with an impish air. “It ruins your bloodthirsty image.”

  Sara almost whirled around and gave him a piece of her mind, but she knew it would do no good, and with her hands in manacles, she couldn’t reach wide enough to wrap her fingers around his neck, either.

  So as hard as it was, she kept her back to him and proceeded like this entire affair was her idea.

  She thought of pleasurable ways to make him pay. Starting with putting his digits in thumbscrews and ending with hooking him to a rack and winding away.

  It wasn’t the most appropriate of daydreams for an official leader of the Imperial Armed Forces, but she had been done with toeing the imperial line right around the time that he ran her on a wild goose chase in the middle of night, only to unveil a trap that a brigand would be proud of.

  Oh, yes, revenge would be had.

  27

  Back ramrod straight, Sara stalked toward the portal and wherever he intended to take them next. She wanted to whirl around and wipe the satisfied smirk off his face with a resounding punch, but she was in his thrall as long as he held her cohort at risk. So she walked forward and hoped she could come up with a plan to get out of this mess within the next day. Because that was all the time she had before she was supposed to meet up with her field commander for a supply run, and who knew what Barthis would think if she not only did not show up, but also disappeared off the face of the planet.

  Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.

  A guard turned to look at Gabriel carrying her swords and said, “Sir, we’re ready?”

  “Proceed, then,” Gabriel said calmly behind her, and then she felt a shift.

  A bit of purple magic appeared in the air, much like what had been summoned beside the Sun Mage earlier, but this mage didn’t wait around. It zoomed straight to the portal, changing the compositions of the colors—for instance, from a swirly blue to a deep amethyst. Then the transition was done and they were walking forward.

  It wasn’t the portal ahead of her that concerned her, though, it was the mage who had dropped his shields behind her.

  Now that he wasn’t playing around and had let loose his power, Sara swallowed deeply, because she could feel the Illusions Mage walking just a few paces behind her. Like a wave of heat that rippled in the air, the power touched her back from head to toe and felt as thick as a blanket. Sara knew now that even when she had fought him in the prison he’d made out of thin air, she had been out of her depth. She could see now why he’d earned his reputation as one of the foremost mages in the empire. But that didn’t change the fact that she was still Sara Fairchild, and she had never met a challenge she couldn’t conquer. So what if this man had the balls to go toe to toe with her?

  Sara would see if he could retain them after she was through with him.

  She stepped through the portal into a veritable anthill of people, soldiers who took one look at her and spat in her face.

  And they had excellent aim.

  She wasn’t shocked at their attitudes. She had seen it all before. What she was shocked at was the fact that they were—to a man and woman—all Kades, wearing the dark blue uniforms of the enemy of the empire, and yet they stood here on enemy soil going about their business as free as birds.

  At least she assumed this was the Algardis Empire still. Who knew what the Kades had been up to in the years since their uprising though? They could have built a system of interconnected portals to a far-off island or one of the neighboring kingdoms to the east, they did exist after all. If would be cosmic irony if the Council of Mages had set up their own kingdom afar while still making life in the empire hell for its residents. But that was only a theory and this landscape looked a bit too familiar for it to be foreign. She was even more convinced as she walked around, the guards occasionally turning her this way and that as they took her with them. It took her a second, but she realized that this was the same Kade outpost from before. She was just more familiar with it from an aerial standpoint.

  And then Sara realized grimly why the surrounding Kades were looking at her with death in their eyes and not a few shivs in hand.

  She was actually grateful to see Gabriel pick up the pace and move to walk in front of her. Interceding on her behalf, in his own way. Or at least clearing the path enough that they weren’t being stopped and held back by a crowd who were trying to push her guards away and get at her.

  Sara wanted to say she should have known this was how they’d feel about her. Perhaps they had been able to see her magic manifest the same as she could see theirs. Either way, they knew she was responsible for the explosion that had happened in their midst and taken out hundreds of their most capable mages.

  They had, of course, already gotten a very serious amount of retribution, but she was still alive, and if she was being fair, one enemy—particularly the ringleader—still walking the planet was one too many.

  That ringleader, in this instance, happened to be her.

  She didn’t confront them even as they did their b
est to stare her down. She just kept her head high, spittle and all, and kept walking between her guards who were all walking closer to her now, this time for her protection and not their own.

  Wryly, Sara thought about what her life had come to and how she’d imagined walking back into camp. It certainly hadn’t been this camp. Marching with her hands chained in front was definitely not how Sara thought this day would go. Especially after being promoted to lieutenant commander, but she guessed it was just another adventure in a long string of incidents she was beginning to see were more interconnected than she’d first surmised.

  At the very least, she was getting a helping of humble pie.

  Being kidnapped and taken for a fool when you were supposed to be one of the greatest fighters the empire had ever seen had a way of deflating your ego, even the well-deserved portions of it.

  But it didn’t lower her curiosity or her thirst for vengeance, either. So she slowly raised her head a bit to take in her surroundings, try to get a count of soldiers running around, and perhaps a look at their weapons while she was at it.

  Before long, Sara noticed they were being marched toward an exterior location near the camp, but she didn’t notice any of her cohort walking in the same direction or waiting for her. And that, like nothing else, put a knot of worry in her belly.

  Face troubled, Sara tried to ask Gabriel, but he had moved so that he was walking too far ahead for her to easily get his attention.

  As they kept walking, though, she had no choice.

  She yelled out her question.

  “Illusions Mage—tell me, where are my friends?” Sara said, which got corresponding yells and hollers from the crowd surrounding them.

  None of their words were in the least bit polite.

  As she continued walking, with Gabriel lagging a bit to let her catch up, she heard him say, “We never said we’re going where your men are.”

  Sara was stumped for a second, so surprised that she actually stumbled and a guard had to catch and steady her before she went down amidst a crowd that would have been on them like a pack of wolves scenting blood.