by A. G. Howard
Desolation had torn through Lyra when she’d relived those final moments. The realization that she had no family had brought her more anguish that fateful day than the horrors she suffered.
Spine pressed into her throne for support, Lyra looked into the audience where Luce’s red hair stood out, then back to the dais from Selena to Cyprian. She caught Vesper’s gaze last and a calm reassurance filled her heart: she had a family now, one that would never betray her; one that accepted her just as she was.
Riding that confidence, she gave Vesper the signal to begin.
He tipped his head, the jewels on his savage crown reflecting glints of candlelight, then raised his hand to get the audience’s attention. The chatter died down as he stepped forward to address their four prisoners.
“To be clear, it was my personal intent to behead each of you, in the same manner I did your Sir Bartley. Due diligence for the heinous acts committed against a sweet, quiet twelve-year-old girl, whose only crime was being born of the same noble blood pumping through your own black hearts.” He had everyone’s attention. Silence reigned, the only sound the blubbering and sniffling of Lyra’s cousins. Vesper’s fierce expression fell on Griselda. “I have seen with my own eyes the horrors you inflicted upon my queen, in the name of hate and envy. I’m also aware of how far your barbarous acts spread, from Eldoria’s honeysuckle-and death-infested castle to the Rigamort and the goblin camp, as well.” He cast a glance at Lyra, then back to the stone-faced Griselda. “Consider yourself blessed your niece can gentle the beast in me. As she’s the only reason you’re still breathing.” He took his throne then, his robe’s hem swirling around his feet as he nodded to Lyra. “My Lady Queen, vengeance is yours. Bring on the spectacle.”
That was the cue. Stunned ooohs and ahhhs rippled through the crowd as Cyprian led in two brumal stags. Behind them, Lyra’s shadows herded in Lustacia’s cursed goblin half-lights, forging their own path through the darkest parts of the room. Dregs came in, bringing up the end. Cyprian took his place among the other guards surrounding the dais at floor level. The stags had no reins or bits to guide them, no ropes upon their necks. All it took was Vesper’s mental persuasions to bring them up the stairs and onto the platform, just as Lyra’s thoughts beckoned to her faithful shadow attendants. Lyra stood upon their arrival, surrounding herself with Griselda’s victims.
Lustacia screamed and shook her silver hair. “It hurts! My head!”
Griselda’s stony mask slipped as agony showed on her face, too. She bit back a groan and struggled to free her blood-tinged fists, shoulders straining against the futility.
The stags bent their graceful necks, touching their antlers to the heads of the two who had maimed their own.
Griselda and Lustacia cried out as the seeds planted within their scalps burst and flourished into full-sized horns. Wrathalyne and Avaricette squeezed their teary eyes shut.
A wave of shocked astonishment stirred the crowd.
Lyra gestured for Griselda to be taken from the room, leaving her three daughters at Lyra’s feet. The moment her aunt was gone, Lyra began signing and Prime Minister Albous stepped forward to translate:
“Are you not my cousins? You should’ve been my playmates, my sisters, my confidantes. Yet you laughed and teased, mocked my plight and my voice. You stood by as your mother fed me poison in a comforting glass of milk, doing nothing to aid me. Will you plead ignorance, being children yourselves when it all began? Will you seek to convince me you were victims, too? I might believe you. I have scars to prove my suffering. Perhaps yours are within . . . visible not by your skin, but by your calloused actions. I might have mercy, should you vow to change . . . to learn empathy and have kinder hearts.”
Wrathalyne and Avaricette nodded and coughed on wet sobs. Avaricette spoke for them both. “Yes, we want to grow! To be kinder. We beg your mercy!”
“Then let it be so,” came Lyra’s answer on Prime Minister Albous’s voice.
The two girls struggled to stand and put distance between themselves and their sister, believing they were pardoned.
“They are to kneel before their queen!” Vesper leaned forward and shouted through clenched teeth from his throne. The guards came forward and forced the girls back to their knees, holding their sword blades flat atop their heads.
The two froze, suppressing their cries.
“Lustacia, these creatures”—the prime minister paused as Lyra gestured to the goblin apparitions—“had families and lives. They made ill choices, serving your mother . . . but so did you. Is their penalty fair, taking this form forever? Being separated from all they know, being indentured to your will?”
Lustacia’s neck bobbed forward, as if she couldn’t bear the weight of the antlers. Her head drooped so low the pronged tips touched the floor. “I would rather be an apparition bound to another,” she sobbed, “than bear this vile mutation. Their pain is nothing compared to mine.”
“If you so believe, I can release you of the antler curse.” The prime minister delayed interpreting as Lyra withdrew three vials from her robe’s inner pocket and handed them to Dregs.
The little goblin shopkeeper stepped forward, face-to-face with Lustacia’s kneeling form, and opened the first vial.
Lyra resumed her speech with Albous’s aid.
“Since you’re convinced the half-lights suffer less, you will share their lesser fate. Drink at Dregs’s hand, and lose your horns. The trade-off, however, is you’ll be bound to him as a half-life silhouette. You will serve the goblin, as your goblins serve you.” She turned to her other two cousins, drawing them back into the sentencing. “Wearing another’s skin is the most effective way to learn empathy. Share your sister’s penalty. Drink, and prove yourself more human than you ever were in your present form. Demonstrate this desire to grow, and you will live. Refuse, and choose death.”
As Albous delivered Lyra’s ultimatum, the guards shifted their blades to the back of each girls’ head, prepared to lop them off should they refuse.
Lyra’s cousins cried out for their absent mother while gulping from the vials Dregs offered. Wrathalyne hiccupped, Avaricette coughed, and Lustacia gagged. Then, with nothing more dramatic than a poof, the three sisters disintegrated into black, smoky shapes that hovered around the goblin shopkeeper, awaiting his command.
Gasps and stunned cries erupted in the audience.
Lyra flashed a knowing smile to Vesper. She had shared her plan with him, not to tell her cousins that the potion’s effect was only temporary. Her hope was that when each one awoke from their half-life in two years, they would be so grateful to be human once more, they would never take the responsibility of humaneness for granted again. Lyra wanted to allow them a chance to prove themselves above Griselda’s wicked ways when no longer under her thumb, while keeping them out of kingdom business. This had been her solution.
Vesper inclined his head in a show of respect.
She returned her attention to her feet, where Dregs bowed prostrate before her. His three new half-light servants did the same, which forced those five apparitions chained to Lustacia to bow as well. “By avenging my family, you brought honor to our kind,” Dregs said, his bulbous eyes filled with admiration. “From this day forward, fair queen, our loyalties are realigned. Come to us seeking any favor. Our fealty will never waver.”
She touched his brow affectionately, and he kissed the slippers on her feet. He then stood and filed down the stairs with all eight apparitions in tow. He stopped and found a place in the front row where Lyra had asked him to wait within sight of Griselda. Once he and his band of silhouettes were settled, Lyra had her aunt dragged in again.
“What have you done with my daughters?” Griselda snapped as the guards shoved her to her knees.
“They are here,” Lyra answered with her prime minister’s assistance. “They’re watching and waiting. Their fates rest upon you.”
“You lie! I can’t see them!” Griselda jabbed at Lyra’s leg with her antlers but Lyra sid
estepped the attack. From his throne, Vesper spoke a command to his stags. One leapt forward, tangling its prongs with Griselda’s. The regent cried out for help. Lyra stroked the creature’s coat, coaxing it to break free and settle at her side once more.
Lyra began signing again.
“It is time for you to answer for yourself, Lady Griselda.” Prime Minister Albous’s deep voice grew more somber with every word he passed on. “Are you not my aunt? You could’ve been a mother to me in the absence of my own. You might’ve been a comfort to your brother who lost his wife. Yet instead, you conspired to see us both dead. What have you to say?”
“I say I’m not to blame.” Griselda spewed her rebuttal and glared at her niece, barely allowing the prime minister to finish. “It was my destiny to have a hand in the prophecy. Not yours. I was told thus and made it so.”
“You were told by the shrouds.”
Griselda’s mouth puckered in disbelief at Lyra’s insight. Lyra had remembered Griselda mentioning the shrouds to Lustacia those last moments in the coffin, as well. And when that memory returned, Lyra’s own interaction with the collective made sense at last. Griselda was the Eldorian princess the shrouds had lost to a sylph—Luce, judging by the wings trapped within Eldoria’s castle courtyard—so many years ago. It was Griselda they waited for, even now.
Lyra’s hands and fingers—growing tired from strain—took up again, to give Griselda’s cruel speech from that fateful day new life by making the sentiments her own.
“Take heart, Aunt, for you have indeed had a hand in the prophecy, as indicated by the blood tainting your skin. I abhor every crime you’ve committed, yet there is something for which I owe gratitude: Thank you for putting me in a box and sending my dying body to the ravine, for there I met a witch whose kindness showed me beauty beyond appearances, and a sylph whose persistence showed me that life could be found in ash and thorns. Because of you, I learned to look past the surface. Thus, when I met the prince in the form of a Pegasus, in a place between bias and kingdoms, outside of traditions and creed, I had no preset expectations of a prophecy or political pressures. We met on the common ground of anonymity, loneliness, and seeking hearts. At your hand, we forged a comradery that grew to unconditional trust and love. Now we’re equals, capable of ruling side by side. Capable of uniting our kingdoms under one sky. So yes, you are responsible for who I am today, and for the queen I’ll be from this day forward. To show my gratitude, I will tell you how it’s going to end, since you won’t be here to see for yourself. After you awaken from the sleeping draught you’ll be given, you will find yourself exiled to the Ashen Ravine, just as you left me, in a box filled with every creeping, flying, and crawling creature you’ve ever crushed beneath your shoe, struck with a book, or fed to a bird. Should you escape your tomb, you will face the guilt of your crimes in the place it all began—among the shrouds. However, first I will allow you one chance to rescue your daughters, who moments ago received the same potion you thrust upon the goblin smugglers.”
Dregs commanded his three half-light attendants to drift forward to the dais’s edge. Griselda’s eyes bulged upon realizing they were her children.
“No!” she screeched. She doubled over, her shoulders sinking as she wailed. Even without a conscience, she had claimed to love her girls. A shame that love was always secondary to her schemes.
“Declare me as your queen,” Lyra continued, the volume of Prime Minister Albous’s voice intensifying to regain the hysterical regent’s attention. “Aloud, here before our Eldorian representatives and all of Nerezeth’s witnesses. Pledge your fealty to me and give me the devotion my lineage warrants. Do this, and though it won’t save you, it will free your daughters from their wretched fate. Perhaps this might make up for the experiences you robbed them of while isolating them from the world.”
Lyra’s chest tightened as Griselda lifted her head and snarled. She struggled against the binds holding her fisted hands at her back, bringing the guards to her side. This was the final part of Lyra’s plan: to take the temporary quality of the half-light potion one step further. The effects would wear off eventually, yet only Luce, Dyadia, Lyra, and Vesper knew this. Griselda didn’t have such knowledge, any more than her daughters did. If her aunt cooperated, Lyra would announce to everyone that her cousins would be freed after a short imprisonment in their cursed forms. Then Wrathalyne, Avaricette, and Lustacia would at last see their mother choose them over her pride. And they would see her accept Lyra as the rightful ruler. Should Griselda refuse, Lyra would send away her cousins with the goblin, ignorant of their short sentence, and they would have the next two years to contemplate their mother’s selfishness and betrayal.
Either way, all three girls needed to witness this moment, to truly be free from Griselda’s evil influence.
Lyra held her breath, hoping her aunt would do the right thing.
Griselda regained her composure. “I will see . . . that no one ever calls you queen!” Her refusal echoed in the great hall and she spun on her knees. Before the guards could gauge her intent, she opened her fisted hands, allowing a small orb—aglow with snaky turquoise light—to drop from her fingers.
Startled gasps broke through the audience. Luce’s bellow from the back drowned them out: “She means to set the queen on fire!”
“Lyra!” Vesper leapt up from his throne and caught her around the waist, dragging her out of the rolling orb’s trajectory and beside the thrones where the prime minister, Serena, and Queen Nova already huddled along the wall.
“It must’ve been up her sleeve!” one of the guards shouted as he forced Griselda closer to the center. In the instant the sphere touched the ribbon draping the dais’s edge—so meticulously arranged for the coronation by Griselda the prior day—the second guard slammed his boot down to stop it from falling into the audience. The orb burst on contact, enveloping him and his armor in flames of turquoise, rose-pink, and white. His sword dropped from his hands as blisters charred his exposed skin. The stench of broiled flesh tainted the air. He screamed and fell to the floor below. In his wake, the flowers and ribbons around the platform ignited. A blaze rose high and swift—cutting off the stairs and sealing everyone upon the dais in a line of enchanted, deadly flame. Heat singed Lyra’s skin, and she coughed at the smoke surrounding her and her companions as they pressed their backs to the wall. Everyone lifted their robes and tucked them tightly around their bodies, putting distance between flames and fabric.
“Guards! Bring water!” Vesper commanded.
Dregs sent his apparitions—Lyra’s half-light cousins and those five that belonged to Lustacia—to retrieve buckets from the kitchen, as they could move faster than any human feet.
“Water? Bring the ocean . . . it won’t matter!” Griselda released a cackling laugh, as if she’d gone mad.
A chord of terror struck in Lyra’s heart, seeing Vesper’s dark eyes reflecting flames—outside of him instead of within—seeing his jaw clench in a vise, having no power over this element he once ruled. She beckoned her shadows. They dipped and swayed around her and the others, dispersing to helpless, sooty streaks and retreating to the corners of the room as the blaze overpowered them.
The audience backed toward the door while both Eldorian and Nerezethite guards joined forces and moved forward, dousing the holocaust with the water brought in by the apparitions. The searing crackle and roar only grew louder, brighter, hotter—muffling the panicked curses and shouts of the guards.
The stags brayed, hedging toward Lyra and her group where the fire hadn’t yet sparked. Their safe spot was shrinking. Lyra held tight to her king, squinting against the brilliant glow. Griselda’s hem was dangerously close to the dais’s blazing ledge; a part of Lyra wanted her to erupt into flame, yet another part knew it would never be justice enough.
Luce appeared overhead in his ethereal form. “These flames are enchanted . . . made of sunlight. Only the purest strand of moonlight will squelch them!”
Upon that revelation,
Queen Nova pressed close to Lyra and her son, her lilac eyes bright with fear. “Your stags, my son. You must bleed them of their moonlight magic. It’s our only hope!”
Vesper’s firelit face paled. He looked sick at the thought, twisted up with dread to consider the logic behind her words. If only Dyadia hadn’t left for Eldoria, they could call upon her for help. But it was up to them alone.
Vesper looked at his family and Lyra. While withdrawing a knife from his belt, he called a stag to his side. It came willingly, lowering its prong tips. Lyra knew he’d do what he must as king, though it would kill him to do it.
Wait . . . she stopped him just as he caught the stag’s antler and held his blade to the base that glimmered like silvery-blue diamonds. Their blood isn’t pure moonlight. She blinked. You once said my lashes are slivers of the moon. What could be purer than that?
Vesper studied her blankly, as though shuffling through his memories as Scorch. Perception crossed his face and he sheathed his knife, cupping her chin with his hand. Together? His silent question passed to her.
She nodded. The flames were almost to their thrones now, close enough Lyra’s toes burned within her slippers at the oncoming heat. Still, she looked nowhere but Vesper, reading the apology in his gaze as he plucked one long eyelash free. It surprised her, that the stinging pain lasted only an instant this time, though it appeared to cut her king much deeper. Grimacing, he dropped the lash over the leg of fire creeping closest to them. The glistening hair caught an updraft and fluttered toward the ceiling. Within the space of a breath, it transformed to sheets of glowing liquid that sluiced across their heads and the dais in a cooling deluge. Lyra lifted her face, relishing the saturation of her clothes and hair as she stood beneath her first rainstorm. The flames snuffed out on contact, leaving the platform in a sooty, wet haze.