“Don’t hurt him, Aurek—” Himika cut herself off. Even she probably realized it was a lucky hit and I was unlikely to be dealing a death blow any time soon.
“You’re jealous of me. You always wanted to win against me. It was the one thing you could never have,” Seron said. “You wanted to be stronger than me—but you never will be.” Another barely managed block, and then he grabbed my clothes and slammed my body against a tree. I managed to tilt my head just enough that my horns scraped bark instead of my head getting clocked.
But he was still holding me there. I could feel the burn of his gaze. “That’s…true,” I said. “What do you want me to say?”
“Say you’re sorry!”
“About what? Haven’t I always been good to you?”
“You’ve been ‘benevolent’, Aurek. Not my brother. Just my king.”
He threw me to the ground; I rolled, and then I was on my feet again and the fight was back on. I heard Himika making a sound that was scared but also just frustrated.
If he remembers all of this, maybe it’s true. Maybe this is how he really feels.
No. I couldn’t let Izeria’s mist play games with me like that.
But…there is something there.
I remembered when I used to play with the swords and he wasn’t allowed to touch them. I remembered his sullen silence. He knew they were mine, not his. They were the king’s treasures. They weren’t supposed to be for children, but it was my sacred right to touch them, and when I asked to see them, the guards had to say yes.
And in that moment, I remembered a spark of glee inside me, that Seron wasn’t allowed to have them, because in all other ways, he was always stronger.
“Seron…I do remember that day!” I said, forcing out the words as we circled each other. “The day you’re talking about. You’re—you’re right, I was playing with the swords. And I didn’t let you touch them. And—you asked. I remember that, you asked, and I said no. Because you were already so strong, so good at everything. You could fish and hunt and brawl and explore so easily, and I would never be your equal but I would have been so much closer if…” I broke off.
I had always been jealous of Seron.
And he had always been jealous of me.
But when he had the blood of Orvenu instead of me, he took from me the one thing I had. I let him have it because I loved him, but I didn’t really want to.
Of course I didn’t.
“I was strong,” Seron said. “But you were the king.” Seron rushed toward me.
The tea was fading again. I had managed to stay alive. Managed to hurt him enough that he cursed. And he hadn’t drawn any blood from me.
Was I just blessed by luck today, or was he holding back?
Either way, this fight couldn’t go on much longer.
I had clung to this sacred sword for all these years. I considered it mine. Saramu. The king’s sword.
Now I dropped it onto the snow and spread my arms.
“Seron—you are the king,” I said.
I still sensed him coming.
“No!” Himika shrieked. “Seron, no!”
In that moment, I thought, my best friend might kill me. Maybe Izeria had destroyed him. Maybe she was capable of that after all, and I had badly misjudged the situation, and Himika was about to see my head separate from my body.
A rough hand connected with my cheek and knocked me into the snow.
“Ungh!” That wasn’t what I expected. My head was spinning.
But at least I was alive.
Seron kept moving past me. He grabbed Himika and threw her onto his back, and then he turned into a dragon and spread his wings.
“She’s mine,” he said. “I am the king, yes. Yes, and I will serve my queen.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Himika
Oh dear gods.
I was barely holding on, scrambling for a grip as Seron shot into the air, and I saw Aurek below me, staggering. He seemed dizzy.
“Seron!” he shouted.
I lowered myself onto Seron’s back, inching up toward his neck. My initial terror settled into a strange calm. I knew the real Seron was still in there somewhere. He had to be.
I wrapped my arms around his throat, glancing down. Oof, this was too high to fly with someone I didn’t trust. And it was an erratic flight too. His wings were shaky. “Seron, put me down!” I commanded. “I might be pregnant with your babies! Put me down and you can do whatever you want to me, just don’t hurt the babies!”
He lowered toward another clearing, on a rocky hill top, his feet slamming into a rock. It jarred through me, and then he turned into a man with me still atop him, so I was suddenly clinging to his human neck as my body fell against his back.
I let go quickly and took a step back, as he turned toward me and grabbed my hands. His grip was so tight it hurt.
“I was supposed to kill him!” he shouted at me. “I hate him!”
“No, you don’t.” I tried to keep my voice steady and calm. “You love him. It isn’t always perfect. No close relationship ever is. Sometimes, you don’t even like him, I’m sure, but even then…you love him.”
He went silent. I studied his face. His black hair was still held back with a tie, but it was a tangled mess. It looked like he hadn’t untied it and brushed it in days. His skin had a more sickly pallor. And his eyes had that…coldness. That wasn’t like Seron at all. Seron was an honorable man; a warm man.
“I know you,” I whispered. “Seron…I know you.”
“My name is Tanu.” He sounded uncertain, but angry.
I reached for his hair and he swatted my hand away. “I’ll bet they’re his babies.”
Those words really brought a lump to my throat. Maybe I don’t know him. Maybe this is Emperor Leonidas all over again, where I fell for his kindness because I wanted so much to feel safe.
I hesitated, and I felt something inside me. Maybe it was the babies. Maybe it was the gods. Maybe it was just my own heart, the woman I was becoming.
No, I thought. You do know this man. This is a test. It’s a cruel test, but Izeria’s magic can’t break past true love.
This was a man that I loved. Even before, he was not the quickest to show his emotions. Seron sometimes hid behind stoicism or a quick, dry joke. He didn’t always trust himself. He let things build up inside him.
There is a part of him that has let anger build up at Aurekdel for a long, long time, and she used that.
I succumbed to instinct. I stood there in the snow and cold, but I was so hot with adrenaline that I didn’t even feel that. I dropped my coat off my shoulders onto the snow, and then I tore off my sash and lifted my dress off my head. Now I stood there in my underthings and my boots, my pregnant belly exposed.
He watched me without moving, which I took as a good sign, although my heart was pounding with terror.
I grabbed his hand and put it to the roundness swelling there.
“These are your children,” I said. “Are they the children of your blood? I think they might be. But I don’t know—for sure. It doesn’t matter. There is no man in my life more ready to be a father than you. The moment I wanted to have children was the moment I saw you with a child. This is because of you, and I need you to be there when they’re born. Seron…I need you.”
His hand, so tense against my skin, but so warm—slowly melted against my skin. So slowly.
The babies were moving like crazy. Gods only knew what their impression of this day must have been.
His throat bobbed as he swallowed down some emotion. His eyes seemed to shift. The storm was passing.
I wasn’t sure if I was actually safe.
This still wasn’t my Seron. Not yet.
He took a step closer. “My…children,” he said. “Himika…”
I dared to touch his face now.
He caught my hand when my fingers were a hair’s breadth away.
He looked at me with lust and some lingering anger. “You’re his queen,
” he said. “Not mine.”
“I am your queen,” I said. “Your queen. Your only queen.”
He thrust his tongue in my mouth, his hand taking my hair and twisting it once around his wrist. I couldn’t escape if I wanted to…but I didn’t.
I missed him so much.
Even if he was broken, I knew I would fix him. I knew he was mine. He belonged to me and he would never truly hurt me. All Seron had ever brought me was pleasure and passion, a passion that he allowed to build slowly inside him as if he thought I was never really his, until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
But I was his. And in that moment, I surrendered completely to his warm mouth, the smell of him, like leather and crystal, which was like rock but more clean and magical and sweet. Oh yes, and man. He smelled very much like a man. Sweat and hunger, a warrior’s smell, the smell of a soldier returning from battle.
He kissed me until I was nearly exhausted with it, and then he released my hair so it fell all over my shoulders. He picked up my coat and pulled it roughly onto my arms, the soft fur lining warming me. Then he took my wrists in both his hands, and pushed me against a wall of rock. I knew that despite the warmth and softness of the coat, it would be rather painful, what he was about to do, and I still felt wet heat gush out of me.
He lifted my hands up above my head and I felt something cold catch them. I realized he must have spotted a vein of crystal there and now the crystal, surprisingly soft, coiled around my wrists and held me there. Now we were almost face to face. I was dangling on the wall like a prisoner for a moment until my heels caught small niches in the rocks to help support me.
I suppose…I was his prisoner.
He hooked my underwear with a claw and yanked it down. Then he stripped off his coat and threw it aside.
He was so big and strong and beautiful. Now, the sickly pallor seemed to leave him somehow. The snow and the desire in his eyes made him seem brighter. He pressed his hands to my skin, running them down my sides, tugging down the bandeau to expose my breasts. Now the hands slid down to my hips, holding me up, easing the strain on my arms. I sighed with relief and he took my nipples in his mouth one by one, sucking and biting them as I got wetter still. I had missed him even more than I realized.
However, everything about him was tinged with some foreign influence. His touch. His eyes. His grip.
I felt like he was still on the edge of violence. That is not my Seron.
Then he took my knees in his hands and spread me and speared me.
“Ahh…” I moaned, my passage clenching tight around him, feeling every inch of him pumping in and out of me, taking me in the way only Seron could. He wasn’t as animal as Ezeru. But he was so strong, and his cock was long, and every stroke was like the thrust of a weapon. I was panting, just taking it, overwhelmed by a mixture of pain and pleasure, despair and relief.
“Seron…I’m your only queen,” I said again. “Tell me.”
His hands gripped my ass hard. His eyelids were heavy as he lifted his head to look at me, as if reluctant. I saw a flicker of…something.
“I…,” he began.
I kicked out my feet and crossed them behind him, yanking him against me and holding him there with all my strength. “Tell me,” I insisted. “If you’re going to get to fuck me like this, I’d better be your only queen, because I love you, and you love me, and you know it.”
“I want you,” he said. “And…you are. You are my queen.”
“Do you remember our life together? Seron…my sweet Seron…” I bit my lip. “She did such a terrible thing to you. Let it all go. Drive it out.” I wasn’t a priestess, I couldn’t heal him with my body and our love, but Seron needed someone to tell him to let go. I knew that much.
He growled as he drove into me. I had to scream with him. His thrusts hurt but even then, I wanted him. Part of me craved this. Seron’s anger, letting loose. He had never been this sort of man, but maybe a part of me always knew deep down that there was something else under the surface.
Behind Seron, I saw Aurek suddenly fly up onto the ridge. He immediately spat out his clothes, transformed, swept his robe on with a slightly aggrieved air, and walked up to us.
Seron didn’t let me go. “I’m the king,” he said. “She’s my wife.”
“Himika, are you all right?” Aurek asked, in a tight voice.
“Yes…” It came out breathless. “What about your head?”
“Fine.” He slid his hands up my hips. “She’s my wife,” he said.
“You chose to share her when you were the king, but I want her all to myself. I want you to know what it’s like to be deprived of something.”
“As if I don’t know that!”
“I had nothing to do with you going blind! But you’re the one who ruled over me for twenty years. Everyone whispered that my father was that crazy old mage. Everything I had is because you let me have it.”
“Please!” I cried. “Seron…this isn’t…like you…” I struggled wildly against the crystals that held me. I wanted to touch Seron’s face—or maybe smack it.
“She’s all mine now.”
“That isn’t how we do things,” Aurek said, and his voice was turning acidic as his hands grabbed me possessively. He slid in behind me against the wall, holding me like I belonged to him.
“It is now. Even as the king, I’ve let you rule behind me. I was timid. Izeria showed me that I don’t have to do anything for you anymore.”
“Damnit,” Aurek snapped. “How much of this is her spell work? Some of it is really you, isn’t it? Blaming me for all the things that I had no control over. I am sorry that everything you had was because of me, but that’s how being the king works! And how was I supposed to know I wasn’t really the king?”
“Aurek, it’s not Seron,” I said. “These aren’t his eyes.”
“You liked putting me in my place,” Seron said. “It was the one thing that made you feel bigger and stronger than me. You still don’t want to give it up.”
“Yes! You’re right!” Aurek shouted. “I want to be the king. In fact, I deserve to be the king, because I’ve done it all these years, and I’m good at it, and it’s not an easy job! It’s not even a job you want!”
“Maybe I do. Or maybe I just want you to stop acting like you deserve it.”
I tried to let them have it out for a minute, but as they spoke they were starting to wrestle over me, like Seron was playing tug of war again and I was the rope. Aurek put his hands over my breasts, and Seron put his larger hands over Aurek’s hands, and thrust deep into me so that my tailbone pressed into Aurek, who was definitely getting as aroused as he was angry.
Aurek pushed back and I was trapped between their two tense, warm bodies.
“You’re hurting me,” I gasped, but at the same time, I was definitely still turned on. “Please let my arms go…”
“I hate you,” Seron said. His eyes burned past me to Aurek.
I felt Aurek’s chest hitch.
I remembered something Ezeru said about Izeria’s mist one evening. I once saw Dvaro capture a husband and wife and instead of executing them, Izeria made them kill each other over an argument they’d had. The mist twisted their thoughts.
“Seron…you love Aurek more than anyone, don’t you?” I whispered. “That’s why Queen Izeria is trying to use you to kill him. You might be arguing over something real, but the depth of emotion comes from love.”
They went still, but they were breathing hard and still very tense and I’m not sure they registered my pleas. The twins were still moving around inside me like crazy.
“If I ever loved him, I damn sure don’t love him now,” Seron said. “He’s always been the one who loves me. Admires me. Worships me, even. But to me, you’re just a brat, Aurek.”
“You’re the one who swore a champion’s vow of chastity even when I said you didn’t have to. What was that for? If it wasn’t because you were waiting to share with me, what was the point?”
“I never wan
ted to share with you.” The anger in Seron’s voice hurt me too. I knew this wasn’t who he really was. I remembered the moment when Aurek and Seron were together inside me, and all I felt then was love. That was real. Not this.
“Liar…,” Aurek said.
Seron was hurting Aurek, either way. It was a cruel spell. There was just enough truth in it.
My arms were burning. They hardly seemed aware of what they were doing to me. I shut my eyes. I was aware of the crystal binding my hands. Seron was a healer. Could he purify himself? I wasn’t so sure. Seron wasn’t Seron right now. I had enough magic to sense where crystal met soil and make my healing teas. I wondered if I could tap into crystal and heal, even though I wasn’t a crystal dragon.
I struggled, shooting pains going down my arms. Even though Seron was holding me up, I was exhausted from the way he’d pinned me to the rocks. I couldn’t find the power in them the way I could when I grew and harvested plants.
I was a human, and that was how human magic worked. We weren’t elementals. We needed tools. Gilbert needed songs and strings to spin his enchantments; he couldn’t just tap into mist. And I needed my garden, where crystal and soil met and could be worked into spells.
Seron thrust into me again. “Tell him that you are my queen.”
“Seron…,” I gasped. “Please remember. It will never matter who wears the crown. Or who is stronger. I love you both. I love your flaws and your strengths. I love the children we will share. Nothing will ever matter as much as our love for each other.”
The crystal glowed, and I felt the glow shoot through me. My belly warmed in response.
I’m not a crystal dragon, I realized. But I have one inside me.
In that moment, the babies were revealed to me. The life growing inside me knew my pain. It drew magic from the crystal and I became a channel. I felt my skin warm from head to toe.
Seron clutched me. “My moonlight…”
“It’s your children,” I whispered. “Seron. This is your magic. I feel it. I’m sure of it.”
“My…”
I saw a change break across his face.
The cruelty in his eyes faded away, like the first golden sunrise after a raging storm.
The Kingdoms of Sky and Shadow Box Set: A Fantasy Romance Page 73