Four days had passed since her return to Issin. Four days during which she had banned Kronos from her bed and spent her every waking hour in the training grounds of the city. There was only one way to exhaust the rage that burned inside her.
After Danae, Issin’s armorer, gave in following a protracted battle that lasted well after sundown three days ago, Mila challenged the best captains and troop commanders of the battalion stationed at Issin to a fight in the arena. Of all the soldiers she tested her mettle against, only Aäron still stood.
As she engaged in yet another fierce encounter with Jared’s former archer, Mila could not help but admire his tenacity. By all accounts, he should have admitted defeat that morning. Yet, here he stood, his expression as determined as it had been the day she first clashed swords with him, on their way to Hazaara.
As she parried his blows and countered deftly, a rare sense of calm suddenly filled Mila. She blinked, surprised.
Aäron hesitated. Mila glimpsed the flash of concern in his eyes, twisted out of the way of his attack, and came up behind him, one blade at his neck, the other digging into his side.
‘Never show empathy for your enemy,’ she said in his ear.
He froze in her embrace, his chest heaving with his breaths. ‘What if the enemy deserves a second chance?’
This close, Mila felt the vibration of his words rumble through his body. She also sensed the wild drumming of his heart and the heat of his skin. It sent a shiver down her spine that had little to do with fear. She lowered her blades and took a step back, suddenly eager to put some distance between them. Despite Aäron’s hooded gaze, she detected the same awareness in his posture.
Before she could question him about his cryptic words, a patter of feet to her left distracted her. Mila looked around. Eleaza and Emet were crossing the arena, faces flushed with excitement. The clamor of voices and the clash of weapons rose around them once more as the dozens of soldiers on the training grounds resumed their practice, expressions sheepish at being caught staring.
Mila sighed. It was not every day that she so readily entertained a crowd of spectators. My standards are slipping.
‘Mama, can you show me how to do that?’ said Eleaza as she drew near.
Mila smiled faintly. ‘I can.’
Her gaze shifted to the boy hovering behind her daughter. She had heard of his treatment at her husband’s hands in her absence.
‘What about you, Emet?’
The boy’s shy expression turned to puzzlement.
‘Would you like to learn how to fight?’ said Mila quietly.
Emet’s eyes rounded.
Eleaza giggled and clapped her hands. ‘Oh! Oh, I want to teach him! I think he will make a great soldier.’
Emet gaped between the two of them, too stunned to utter a single word.
‘Do you think this wise, Princess?’
Mila turned and gazed at Emet’s grandmother. The older woman had come up behind the children and stood watching her warily.
‘I think it is a good idea for a companion to my daughter to know how to defend himself, and her, if the need arises.’
Emet’s grandmother cocked her head. ‘Do you fear that he will need to do so, Princess?’
Mila read the silent challenge in the servant’s eyes.
‘Not while I am here. I will not let anyone lay a single finger on him while he is within my sight.’ She paused. ‘Not even the prince.’
Aäron stiffened beside her. She glanced at him. He was staring at something beyond her shoulder, faint lines creasing his brow. Mila twisted on her heels and steeled herself for another confrontation with Kronos.
But it was not her husband who stormed across the training grounds toward her.
Kronos gulped down a tumbler full of wine and gazed across Issin from the terrace outside the palace’s main reception hall. A quarter league to the west, the arena stood bathed in the red glow of the dying sun.
The color matched his mood. It had been too long since he held Mila in his arms. The desire and frustration he had experienced during their months of separation had grown to fever pitch in the last few days of her denying him their conjugal bed, so much so that he feared his unconsummated passion would drive him mad. He wanted to taste his mate’s lips. He wanted to mark her skin. He wanted to sink into her body and lose himself in pleasure so intense it sapped at his consciousness.
Her anger at his recent actions had stunned him, even more so than her behavior in the throne room of Uryl, when she confronted their father. Although he had noticed her growing dissatisfaction with Crovir’s orders over the years, Kronos never suspected she would challenge the older king so openly, and over such a trivial matter at that. As the lieutenant commander of their army, she had done much worse in the past, and had trodden over the bodies of thousands across many a blood-soaked battlefield to grow their kingdom.
He narrowed his eyes. There was also the matter of the man Mila had assigned to train Eleaza. Although he acknowledged the archer’s superior fighting skills, Kronos could not help but feel that his wife had chosen Aäron for reasons that went beyond his abilities in the arena of war. There was no doubt that the human cut an impressive figure on the training grounds. And from what Kronos had gleaned from his spies in the barracks, it was also clear that he regularly refused the advances of the female attendants and servants who wished to lie with him.
A commotion at the bottom of the terrace drew his gaze. A pair of attendants rushed after two figures crossing the elegant courtyard fronting the main hall. Kronos stared. He recognized the one in the lead. She climbed the steps, crossed the deck, and stopped a few feet from where he stood, her stance rigid.
‘Why?’ said Phebe in a low voice.
Kronos studied her with a mixture of surprise and irritation.
‘I was not aware of your impending visit.’ He waved away the attendants who had followed her. ‘What brings you to Issin, cousin?’
The woman behind Phebe drew back the cowl covering her head.
Kronos frowned faintly as he gazed upon the clumps of charred hair dotting her bald head and the burn marks disfiguring her face. ‘Who is this?’
Phebe’s face darkened. ‘You dare?! You dare ask who she is after you burned down her city and killed all her people?’
Realization slowly dawned. Kronos scowled and reached for his sword.
‘Stop.’
Kronos froze at the command. He blinked and looked around.
Mila stood behind him, still dressed in her battle clothes. Rafael was at her side. A short distance away, Eleaza huddled next to the captain charged with her training, fingers clasped tightly around his large hand.
The sight was a dagger in Kronos’s heart.
‘Is it true?’ said Mila, her voice devoid of emotion.
Kronos’s gaze shifted to his mate’s face once more.
‘Did you destroy Hazaara?’ she asked softly.
Kronos straightened. ‘Yes.’
His answer hung in the still air, a stark reality that caused something to shift in Mila’s eyes. The emotion he thought he had glimpsed on the day she returned to Issin was now clear to see. It rocked him to the core like few things could.
‘On whose orders did you go to Hazaara?’ said Rafael.
Kronos registered the fury on his face distractedly.
‘King Crovir, obviously.’ Though his heart thudded rapidly against his ribs at his wife’s expression, Kronos kept his voice firm. ‘What is it to you anyway, cousin?’
‘Phebe and I travelled to Hazaara at the request of Hosanna, to help with the plague that afflicts the city,’ said Rafael. ‘There was nothing left but ashes and burnt rock when we got there.’ He glanced at the disfigured woman. ‘We found one survivor. Ishvi, the daughter of Governor Nazul.’
‘How could you?’ snarled Phebe. ‘All those men, women, and children. They were already dying, Kronos!’
‘Then it was as good a way as any to make sure the plague did not spread!�
�� he snapped.
Nazul’s daughter jumped slightly.
‘Is that why King Crovir ordered you to destroy the villages inside the main territory of our empire in our absence?’ said Mila silkily in the tense silence. ‘I was not aware they were similarly afflicted with disease.’
Kronos clenched his jaw. ‘You know full well he wanted to make an example of them, to deter other villages and cities in the kingdom from forsaking their tithes.’
‘Did my father know of this?’ said Rafael coldly.
Kronos frowned, anger stirring inside him. ‘There was no need for my uncle to be involved in the matter.’
Phebe drew a breath in sharply.
Rafael straightened and narrowed his eyes. ‘I think King Bastian would not have approved.’
‘I agree,’ said Mila. She walked past Kronos and stopped before the silent woman who stood watching them. ‘I am sorry, Ishvi. Jared and I failed in our promise to you and your father.’
Shock reverberated through Kronos. Never in all his hundreds of years of existence had he heard his mate apologize to anyone.
‘It was not your fault,’ mumbled Ishvi in the stunned silence. She touched her disfigured face. ‘Prince Rafael wanted to heal my wounds fully but I would not let him.’ Her dead gaze focused on Kronos. ‘I wanted the scars to be a reminder.’
A bark of manic laughter escaped Kronos’s lips. ‘Come now! I do not believe what I am seeing and hearing. The princes and princesses of this kingdom bow to no man.’ He scowled. ‘Have you forgotten that humans exist only to serve us? Their lives and fates belong to us. Why are you—?’
Nazul’s daughter moved with a speed that stupefied everyone. She snatched the dagger from Mila’s waist and charged across the terrace, her mouth open in a scream of rage.
‘No!’ shouted Mila, fingers clutching at Ishvi’s robe.
It slipped from the woman’s shoulders and fluttered to the ground.
Kronos reached for his knife, blocked her attack, and stabbed her in the heart. There was a moment of frozen stillness. It was shattered by Eleaza’s scream.
Nazul’s daughter stared blindly at Kronos. The dagger fell from her grasp and clattered to the marble floor at her feet.
Rafael caught her as she fell. He lowered her to the ground, yanked the blade out of her chest, and threw it aside. Blood bloomed across her dress, a pulsing, crimson tide he desperately tried to quell with his hands.
They watched, motionless, as he unleashed his healing powers to save the dying woman. The flow of blood slowly abated. Sweat beaded Rafael’s brow.
It was then that Nazul’s daughter raised a hand and touched his face with trembling fingers.
‘Let me go,’ she whispered. ‘I want to be with them.’
‘I can save you,’ Rafael said angrily.
Phebe knelt by his side, features pale with grief.
‘I know,’ Nazul’s daughter replied. A tear slipped out of the corner of her eye and trailed down her scarred face. ‘Thank you, for everything that you have done.’
Rafael inhaled raggedly before slowly lifting his hands from Ishvi’s flesh. She smiled. A moment later, her face slackened and her body relaxed in death.
The lull that followed was broken by footsteps. Mila headed past them, her face locked in an icy mask that sent a jolt of fear through Kronos.
‘Where are you going?’ Phebe called after her.
‘To stop this.’
Chapter Sixteen
Moonlight bathed the plains east of the Ufratü River in a pale light. On a hill up ahead, the citadel rose, dark walls flecked with the orange glow of flaming torches. Mila urged Buros on, the beat of the stallion’s hooves echoing the wild drumming of her heart, her gaze focused on her destination.
She had left Issin with one thought in mind. To put an end to her father’s acts of madness. There was only one person whom she trusted to stand firm at her side when she challenged him. Her grandfather, Romerus.
She glanced at the distant lights of Uryl to the right as she approached Romerus’s fortress. Tonight. I shall go there tonight, come what may.
The soldiers in the guard towers gaped as she raced up the hill toward the towering gates. Alarmed shouts rose from the ramparts. The counterweight mechanisms that controlled the beam blocking the gateway rumbled into life as she approached. The portal opened ponderously. She slowed Buros and slipped through the widening gap.
‘Our apologies, Princess,’ said a captain as she pulled up outside the barracks. ‘We did not receive a message about your visit.’
‘I did not send one.’
Mila leapt off the stallion and headed across the courtyard toward Romerus’s palace. A chariot parked to the left drew her gaze. She froze in her tracks before whirling around.
‘Is the king here?’ she snapped.
The captain nodded, eyes widening at her tone. ‘Yes, Princess. King Crovir arrived a short while ago.’
Coldness filled Mila’s veins. She steeled herself and headed inside the palace. It was not long before she came across several of her grandfather’s attendants huddled in a group in one of the courtyards. The expressions on their faces slowed her steps.
‘What is going on?’ she said brusquely.
‘Greetings, Princess,’ they murmured, bowing hastily.
Mila turned to the oldest attendant.
He hesitated, his face pale. ‘King Crovir ordered us to leave the chambers of his father. We fear—’ he glanced at the other servants, ‘—we fear he may not be sound of mind right now, Princess. His mood was most strange.’
Apprehension darted through Mila. She exited the quadrangle and hurried through the palace to the garden in the center of the fortress. Her grandfather’s private quarters finally appeared up ahead, a low building straddling a platform that overlooked the beautifully-sculptured grounds.
The sounds of an argument reached her ears as she passed a water fountain. Mila recognized her father’s voice and silently climbed the steps to the deck that ran around the edifice. She paused in the shadows of the curtains framing one of the archways leading to an open-air reception hall. Two figures faced each other across the marble floor some dozen feet away.
‘You need to rest, my son,’ her grandfather said calmly. ‘You are not yourself tonight. Stay and we shall talk more in the morning.’
‘No!’ barked Crovir. ‘We shall resolve this matter right now!’
Mila stiffened at her father’s tone. The light from the oil lamps dotting the chamber cast stark shadows across his face, lending him a cadaverous appearance.
Romerus studied Crovir with a patient expression. ‘So be it. What is this matter of such urgency that you found it necessary to come and see me about it in the middle of the night?’
Crovir glared at him. ‘Your disillusionment.’
Romerus blinked, shock flashing across his face.
‘I can sense it,’ Crovir continued. ‘I have for many years, ever since the death of my mother. You regard me with contempt.’
Mila clenched her jaw. She could tell Crovir was wildly inebriated. This was clearly evident to her grandfather as well.
‘I do not know what you mean,’ said Romerus. ‘I have supported you and your brother in all of your endeavors since you came of age.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Crovir sneered. ‘You always do. You are the epitome of the perfect father. But that does not mean you wholeheartedly approve of our actions.’
Crovir’s words sent a shard of ice through Mila’s mind. Behind them, she sensed a wealth of frustration and loathing for the man who had given him life. Her unease grew tenfold.
Romerus was silent for a long time, his lined face shuttered.
‘You are right,’ he finally acknowledged in a steady voice. ‘I cannot deny that I have deliberately chosen to remain blind to your acts over the last few hundred years. Even when Mila and her siblings spoke to me of your ill-treatment of your wives. Even when Hosanna came to tell me about the rising levies and the misfor
tunes befalling the cities you rule. Even when I heard of the thousands you have casually murdered in the name of growing your empire. I always refused to recognize your callous actions.’
Mila startled, stunned by this unexpected revelation.
Crovir went deadly still. ‘My empire?’
Sadness filled Romerus’s eyes. ‘Yes, my son. Your empire. The one you and your brother have built. I never asked for it. Neither did your mother.’ He hesitated. ‘But I made a promise, a long time ago, to the One who gave me the gifts that would save you and Bastian from death. I promised I would allow you free will. So I could only watch and weep and pray that you would find your way again, somehow.’
An ugly expression distorted Crovir’s features. ‘You think I have lost my way?’
Romerus gazed at him. ‘I did not raise a monster.’
Blood thrummed in Mila’s ears in the deafening lull that followed. Something flashed on Crovir’s face. Something unworldly. Fear gripped her for the first time in her Immortal life. She took a step toward the threshold.
‘I am sorry to hear that, Father,’ said Crovir in a strangely detached voice. He crossed the floor toward Romerus. ‘Here, let me end your agony.’
There was a sound then. A sound that Mila had heard countless times, on a thousand battlefields in untold lands. She froze, unable and unwilling to comprehend its significance.
A sigh left Romerus’s lips. His hands rose to the red stain blooming across his robes and the blade embedded between his ribs.
Shock dawned on Crovir’s face. He stepped back and let go of his dagger, his expression clearing, as if waking from a dream.
A scream built up inside Mila’s throat. Tears blurred her vision. Still, the sound would not come.
Romerus stared at his bloodied fingers for a moment before lifting them to Crovir’s face, a faint smile on his lips. ‘I forgive you, my son.’
He kissed Crovir’s brow and cheeks before slowly collapsing in his arms. Crovir gasped and lowered his father awkwardly to the ground, hands shaking uncontrollably, eyes wide with terror.
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