by K. A. Tucker
Because apparently, I was at the wheel of a murderous uprising.
“Why are you helping me?” I blurt.
“I owe you a life, do I not?”
“But … you think I killed your parents. I didn’t, by the way.”
“Zander mentioned your continued and adamant refusal on that matter. Though we have sufficient evidence to prove otherwise.” She sounds so detached, only hours after her parents were poisoned. At least Zander is passionate over their loss. But maybe she’s still in shock. It doesn’t seem like her day has gone much better than mine. “A great many things do not make sense right now, beginning with why you would save me from the river when it is quite clear you wanted us all dead. The truth is, I’m not doing this for you. I despise you. I’m doing this for Islor, and for Zander.” She worries her pouty bottom lip. “He ended up caring for you far more than he ever expected to when the marriage was arranged.”
My marriage to Zander was arranged?
“You fooled him. You fooled all of us, even though I never cared much for you to begin with. But my brother is not thinking clearly, and I fear having you condemned to death will hurt him more than he realizes. Even if you deserve it.” She shakes her head. “I cannot explain this overwhelming sense of foreboding, but I am choosing to listen to it.”
The corridor splits off in two directions; she heads to the right. “This way. We must hurry. Boaz will be sounding the alarm at any moment.”
“Aren’t you going to get in a ton of trouble for helping me?” What is the punishment for breaking out a woman sentenced to die for murdering a king and queen?
“I am the princess of Islor. Boaz cannot punish me,” she scoffs.
“And what about Zander?”
“I know how to deal with my brother.” The worried look on her face betrays her bluster. Whatever she’ll earn for this, it won’t be pleasant.
I follow her up a narrow staircase. She draws her cloak over her lantern and then eases open the door. We’re back outside, this time in the shadows, surrounded by branches. The smell of cedar fills my nostrils.
“Are we in—”
She covers my mouth with her palm. We stay frozen like that, listening as a clink of metal sounds to my left. Must be a guard nearby. Elsewhere, shouts are rising. I assume Boaz knows I’ve escaped by now and is anxious to put another arrow through my heart. Still preferential to what they have planned for me.
Annika uncovers my mouth. Together, we creep forward through the covert cedar tunnel as soundlessly as possible, every snap of a twig and rustle of a branch stealing breaths from my lungs. We must be in the same garden I found myself in earlier, though nothing is visible from within these cedar walls.
We reach the end, and Annika uncovers her lantern. She guides me down a set of steps and then along another passageway made of stone, this one smelling of earth and mildew. It’s so narrow, I doubt most soldiers could maneuver through, at least not wearing their armor. It was likely built for civilians needing to flee. In some spots, I have to stoop to pass.
“Are we still under the castle?” I ask.
“No. We’re passing beneath the curtain wall. I cannot get you out of the city tonight, so I’m taking you to the sanctum where you will seek protection until I can reason with my brother. It’s the only safe place for you within Cirilea. Perhaps in all of Islor.”
“You think you can do that? Reason with him?” Maybe I can slip out on my own once I have my bearings. This wouldn’t be the first city I’ve slinked around, though it’s certainly the first where I’d be hunted by an army.
“It’s worth trying. My brother is now king, and there are a great many things expected of him. Hopefully he can learn to make decisions based on his head and not his heart.”
Because apparently, I broke the latter.
Just recalling the pained look in his eyes brings a swell of pity to my chest.
Annika’s shoes scuff along the stone floor with her rushed steps. “How did you break me free of the merth? It was in its raw form, and your hands were bare.”
I remember her using that same word down by the river. She must be talking about the silver rope. “It fell apart.”
“Raw merth feels like a thousand razor blades slicing across your skin while it subdues you, rendering you utterly immobile. It does not simply fall apart beneath your touch.” Under her breath, she adds, “That does not make any sense.”
“The story of my life at the moment.” People don’t wake up in a strange, primitive country with an army chasing them after a crazed woman drives a sharp object through their chest, and yet here I am.
“You are different from before. The way you speak, the odd things you say …”
“I’ve been trying to tell you guys.” Maybe if they start picking up on how poorly I fit into this medieval cosplay, they’ll stop insisting on killing me.
We meet yet another set of stairs, but it leads to nothing. “I suppose you would seem different, though. This is the real Romeria, is it not? The version we saw before was the farce, the one to win us over.”
“That’s not …” What I meant. I sigh. How am I supposed to explain myself when they don’t trust a word that comes out of my mouth? Then again, if I’m to believe Sofie, then knowing who I really am is just as dangerous.
“Take this.” She hands me the lantern, and with both hands, yanks on a lever. The ceiling above us shifts to one side with a grating sound—like stone scraping against stone. It opens wide enough to climb through.
Annika collects the lantern and leads me up.
“That’s so cool,” I murmur, taking a moment to appreciate the mahogany pew that shifted over to reveal the secret passage.
“Cool,” she echoes as if testing the word. “Ybarisans are strange.”
I quickly scan our surroundings. Their sanctum is a church, and it appears we’re in the far back corner of it.
“Come, we will find the high priestess. She must be consulted if you are to receive shelter here.”
It’s the middle of the night. “Won’t she be at home, sleeping?”
She scoffs. “On a night like this?”
I pursue Annika as she zigzags along aisles and cross sections of the nave, past stately columns and rows of pews and open areas. Above us, a mosaic of gold shimmers even in the night, but it’s far too dark to make out the illustrations and patterns. The air smells of sweet pine and roses.
She cuts across a midsection to take the main aisle, still lit with open-flame torches.
I gape at the floral arrangements lining the path to the altar, of blush-colored flowers the size of dinner plates, their fragrance as potent as walking into a florist shop. There must be thousands of blooms along this center aisle.
“It would have been a beautiful wedding.” Annika’s gaze drags first over the bouquets and then over my dress, her voice reluctant when she adds, “You would have made a stunning bride, I will give you that.”
Her meaning dawns on me, a numbing realization. “I was supposed to marry him today.” I look down at my dress. Even torn and bloodied and otherwise ruined, it is still remarkable. It must have been my wedding gown. And all these flowers must have been for our ceremony.
But on the day I was to marry Zander, I had his parents killed instead.
Who is this other awful version of me?
“Yes. And you would be in the nymphaeum doing things with my brother that I don’t want to imagine.” Her button nose scrunches. “And who knows? With the blood moon, the fates may have blessed you with offspring on this night.”
The blood moon. Sofie said something about it moments before she stabbed me.
“You might have brought peace to so many lives, if only you could move past your hatred for us.” A sheen coats Annika’s eyes as she picks up the pace toward the altar. “I will secure your asylum and convince my brother to either hold you prisoner or escort you across the rift to your kingdom. I would prefer the second option, so I nor my brothers must look upon your
conniving face again. I doubt the war council will support such a plan, but if they should? You shall return to Ybaris, praise Islor for its mercy, and make sure your people know we are not the monsters you paint us to be. We simply do what we must to survive.”
I’m trying to process her rush of words, but my first up close glimpse of the altar distracts all other thoughts.
Or more specifically, the four majestic sculptures that stand at the altar’s corners, carved from stone and buffed until gleaming.
My eyes instantly lock on the one with horns coiling high toward the ceiling. His chest is broad and powerful, as is the rest of his sculpted, unclothed form. He stands as a human would, but on hooved feet. There is no mistaking him. He is the carved creature in Sofie’s vault, the one she named Malachi. She called him a fate. In the corner opposite him is the tall, lithe woman with petite breasts and a broad crown of antlers jutting from her head. Aoife.
Two more statues bank the other corners. I hadn’t noticed such creatures in Sofie’s crypt, though I was suitably distracted. One is a female with generous hourglass curves and butterfly wings protruding from her back; the other is a stocky man with two shorter curved bull-like horns.
These are Sofie’s four fates—four gods—the ones who are responsible for all life, according to her. They must also be the gods of these people of Islor, if they are looming over the altar. I have never heard of anyone worshipping such idols as these.
As we get closer, Annika’s expression turns to one of panic. “Margrethe?” She darts up the five marble steps of the dais. I spot the pair of feet poking out of folds of white cloth a second before Annika rounds the altar. Her blue eyes widen and her downturned mouth opens, and then she lets out an ear-splitting scream that ricochets through the grand space.
I run up the steps, dread seizing my insides as I brace myself for another dead body. What I see is far worse. Half the woman’s neck has been ripped out, and holes stare back at me where eyes have been gouged. She’s in a pool of blood that soaks into her pristine white garb, torn open across her abdomen by deep claw marks to expose her mutilated womb. There’s so much blood. “Who would have done this to her?” I whisper.
Annika stumbles over her feet as she scrambles to back away from the body. “We need to return to the castle. Now.”
“But you said this was the only place I’d be safe from execution?”
“It’s clearly not safe now! Not with a daaknar loose inside our city walls!” She throws a hand toward the maimed body. “Not when it has killed the only person in Cirilea who can send it back to where it came from!”
“A what?”
“We don’t have time for whatever game it is you are playing, Romeria. There hasn’t been one of these in Islor in two thousand years.” She rushes down the center aisle, but then stops and spins around to glare at me. “Of course … This was you, wasn’t it! Did your caster beckon it?”
She must mean Sofie. Did Zander tell her everything?
“Is this Ybaris’s grand finale, to let one of these beasts ravage our people, on a day that you’ve already caused so much harm?”
“No!” At least, I hope not. How could anyone be a part of releasing something that would do that?
She continues backward down the aisle. “Stay here if you wish. It’s your beast, maybe you can tame it. But you will not get sanctuary here, not from a corpse.”
Movement stirs to my left.
“I need to get to my brother before it surprises him—”
“Annika.” A cold wash of fear prickles every inch of my skin as I watch a shadowy form rise from between the pews, climbing to a height far greater than any human. “Stop.”
Either she sees the terror in my face or hears it in my voice, but she follows my gaze and turns to face the figure as it edges forward with slow, stealthy movements along the narrow pew. Firelight from the torches illuminates a creature scarier than anything I’ve ever seen in any horror film. But maybe that’s because this monster is real.
The folded wings of a bat jut out from its hunched back, hanging tattered, as if something with claws had shredded them. Its skin looks charred, like that of blackened chicken, and yellow fluid oozes between the cracks. But it is the two horns that my petrified attention is most riveted to—twisty black horns protruding from a bulbous forehead.
My mouth has gone bone-dry. This can only be the daaknar, the beast that mauled the high priestess. And now it’s sizing up its next prey.
“By the fates …” With stiff movements, Annika steps backward, away from it.
It releases a guttural noise and hops up onto the back of the pew with ease, showing off sinewy hind legs that look powerful enough to launch it into the air, even if its wings fail it. Its head tips back to sniff the air, but its eyes never leave Annika as it sits perched like a gargoyle, waiting, allowing her to put some distance between them.
It’s waiting for its target to run so it can give chase before it kills her, as it killed the high priestess.
As it, or one of its kind, must have killed that woman in a factory parking lot.
My father has been telling the truth about what he saw all along.
Now is not the time to reexamine his delusions, though. Annika is about to be torn apart by this thing because she was helping me escape. Her death will be on my hands, another strike against me in the king’s eyes. While I might not deserve to take the blame for what happened before I woke up, letting this happen now will weigh like fault on my shoulders.
If Annika can get to the passage, the daaknar will not be able to follow her through that narrow space. She can get back to the castle and warn Zander.
Adrenaline thrums in my veins as I grab a gold-plated chalice from the altar. “Hey!” I throw it as hard as I can at the daaknar’s head. It catches the top of its horn, and the beast roars in response, swinging its glowing red eyes in my direction.
I ignore the shudder that courses through my body beneath that predatory gaze and reach for the next closest thing—a stone bowl that will be harder to throw but more painful if it hits its mark.
I whip it at the creature. This time, it lands squarely against its chest.
With another roar, this one laced with fury, the daaknar abandons its original target, leaping from pew to pew toward the dais, tearing chunks of wood with its razor-sharp claws.
I throw another chalice at it to keep its attention focused on me as I hiss, “Run!” I might be able to buy Annika enough time.
“You’re making it angry!” she hisses back.
“Isn’t this how you tame one of these things?” I mock, my fear numbing my legs.
“It’s going to kill you!”
“Still better than being burned alive.” I hope. I fumble for another object, anything I can throw at it. My fist closes over the hilt of a curved dagger, vaguely aware that it’s slick with blood. The weapon is not much, but it’ll have to do.
The floor beneath me quakes as the daaknar lands on the dais. I dismiss Annika from all thought, my focus now on how I might survive this thing. The way it looks at me as it ascends the steps, its lips unfurled to show a row of translucent yellowed teeth …
There is no taming something like this, even if I was the one who let it loose.
It stalks forward with heavy, snuffling breaths, slowing as if to decide which way around the altar it should take—right, past the carcass of its last kill, or left, around the front. This close, I can see the jagged barbs on the ends of its talons, useful to keep its prey in place.
I struggle to ignore the stench of its rotting flesh, curling my fist around the dagger’s hilt as I back away. If I can injure it enough to slow it down, maybe I can get to the passage, if Annika hasn’t already closed it. Otherwise, I’ll escape through the doors and give Boaz and his men something far more threatening than me to chase.
I give the candelabra a swift kick to send it sailing.
The daaknar swats it away as if it were nothing more than a fly. With a deep s
narl, it lunges.
“Go!” I shout, stabbing upward with all my strength, driving the blade into its gut. Its answering roar rattles my eardrums. Not wasting a second, I turn and run.
I make it all of six feet before those barbed claws pierce my shoulder, carving through my flesh and bone. I howl in agony as it hauls me back, the pain excruciating. With its talons acting as hooks to anchor me in place, limiting my ability to squirm, it takes its time, brushing away the loose strands of hair from my neck with its other paw. The gesture is oddly gentle—almost human—and yet the tip of its claw scrapes across my cheek like a razor slicing skin, remind me that it is far from human.
Whatever crazed bravery drove me to challenge this thing has vanished, leaving me trembling in terror.
It leans in and inhales deeply, as if savoring the scent of a fragrant meal it’s about to devour. I’m vaguely aware of Sofie’s ring hot against my skin, but my thoughts don’t settle there long, too busy grappling with the reality that the figment of my father’s imagination is about to kill me.
The daaknar opens its maw and needlelike fangs extend from its upper jaw. A bloodcurdling scream rises to my throat as they sink into my neck. The burn is unbearable at first, but the pain fades quickly, as does any fight I have left.
Somewhere, far in the distance, my mind registers a shrill cry of agony before the darkness swallows me whole.
Chapter Nine
Sofie struggled to lift her limp body off the ground. She had never channeled that much power before—she doubted anyone had—and it left her near the point of oblivion. But now was not the time to surrender to weakness.
Something had happened.
She used every ounce of strength and the stone coffin to haul herself up to where the two bodies lay.
Malachi’s gift, embedded deep within Romeria’s chest and glowing with radiant flame, was quickly fizzling. As was the glimmer of light from the gold in her ring.
Sofie’s insides churned with nerves as she watched the tokens extinguish. Her task was complete. Now, there was nothing she could do but wait.