Sworn To Ascension: Courtlight #6 Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 1

  Ciardis Weathervane felt her lungs start to burn. She had been running for what felt like hours but had only been minutes. Running without end and without pause. She ducked down an alley and rested her hands on her knees. She didn’t know how she’d gotten here. Outside in the cold night air. Cold and alone. Hunted and frightened. But she was determined to figure a way out of her predicament.

  Then the howling bays of dogs on the hunt came to her ears.

  Ciardis forced herself to stand up again with a grunt. She took a hesitant step forward toward what looked like a large, open street and then stopped.

  “No,” she whispered to herself as she shivered. “I need to get off the streets. On high ground. Then contact the others.”

  Desperate for a solution, she looked around as the sounds of the dogs barking grew closer. Spotting a door slightly ajar, she hurried over and pushed against it to get inside. The door opened a little wider. Wide enough for Ciardis to see it was held by a wooden lock.

  Ciardis looked down at her bleeding feet. She knew that she couldn’t run much longer. This was her best chance. With deep breaths she threw herself against the heavy door. Once. Twice. Then the door gave and she crashed into the interior room with a loud crack.

  Stumbling into the dark room with nothing to light her way, even her magic seemed off tonight, Ciardis scrambled to close the door and look for anything that could help her.

  Fumbling around she found a wax candle with a fire-starter tied to the candle holder’s base. Striking it quickly, she tried to discern where she was. But the light didn’t alleviate her worries. In fact, she stared around in dismay. There was nothing but wall-to-wall crates all around her.

  Deciding to at least block the entrance against intruders, Ciardis grabbed two of the crates and pushed the heavy things in front of the door with a grunt.

  Backing away with a pant she said, “That should hold it for a little while.”

  She sought out another exit, but it wasn’t long before she realized the door she had blocked off was the only way in or out, and by the time she had confirmed that the dogs were at the door sounding like the hounds of hell.

  Ciardis backed away from the door until her knees hit a crate with the wobbling candle in her hand.

  In walked a monster of her dreams. It was brutishly large with bulging muscles, fur and a wolf’s head. It was standing upright on its hind legs.

  From mangled jaws, it said, “Master, I’ve found her.”

  Ciardis shivered in fear as she strained to see what was beyond the monster in the darkness.

  She didn’t have to wait long. Out of the shadows walked a hooded man. As he lowered the cowl that protected his face and summoned a mage light, Ciardis felt her heart freeze.

  Emperor Maradian Athanos Algardis smiled with a dark grin.

  Ciardis let her frightened breaths cloud the air as she shivered from the cold and tried to back away with nowhere to go.

  “Very good Rus, very good. Now devour her.”

  Before Ciardis could even scream the beast-like monster rushed toward her on all fours. The last thing she saw as her mind descended into darkness was its wide jaws coming down on her face.

  It didn’t take long after that for Ciardis to surge up from her bed with a bloodcurling scream. For a moment, in the time between rising from dreams into reality she was still unsure where she was or even if the nightmare had been real.

  Panting Ciardis tossed the heavy blankets off her shoulders as she said, “It was just a dream. Just a dream.”

  Clutching her face she felt the wet stain of the tears she had cried in her sleep.

  Sighing Ciardis fell back into her sumptuous pillows and said, “Then why did it feel so real? That’s the second one tonight.”

  She turned her head and looked at the mage water-clock that took up a corner of the room next to an open window. Then she groaned. It was a few hours after General Barnaren’s celebratory send-off and already the night was taking on the deep purple and dusky tones of a dawning day. It wasn’t quite the next day yet, but it was coming. Ciardis Weathervane knew that and she was dreading the moment the day truly began and she would have to get out of bed. When she had wearily tucked herself in for the night, mind whirling from the meetings with the nobles, the Companions’ Guild, and the emperor himself twice, she had been sure she was not going to like what was coming the next day. But she hadn’t imagined a night spent battling nightmares and dreams of darkness either.

  Now she was sitting bolt upright in her bed and a fierce dread was clawing its way up from her stomach and through her throat like a poison that was choking her from the inside out.

  Ciardis raised a trembling hand to her throat, almost on the verge of retching at the sensation. It reminded her for an uncomfortable moment of the Shadow Mage who had taken the Ameles Forest into a darkness that the Land Wight couldn’t follow. He had been the mage who had slaughtered hundreds of kith and human villagers alike while working through the darkness of shadows, ensnaring a person’s mind and magic to his call. But it was the physical presence of his magic that she recalled now, shadows like inky blackness that slithered and crept along the forest floor like snakes in the wind. She remembered because he had used those very same shadows to restrain her like a calf before the slaughter. She had been pinned down on the forest floor, squirming in the loam and unable to break free from his tentacle-like grip before Terris had intervened. It had taken Terris’s magical hold over the wendigo, the skill that gave her name of Kithwalker, to save her, and Ciardis would never forget the cold shudder of fear that overtook her body as she had lain there helpless.

  Never again, she had vowed to herself then, and true to her word she had learned to defend herself and others as best as she was able, but the situation she faced now duped even her. It was months later and the Shadow Mage was dead, but in his place had risen a host of other enemies.

  “Enemies that I need to fight. Enemies that I need to defeat,” she grumbled to herself as she rolled over in her bed. “But how?”

  Now as Ciardis stared around at the opulence of her chambers, the same sense of foreboding that she had felt in the Ameles Forest when facing off against the Shadow Mage returned. The heart-pounding fear mixed with wariness that told her clear as day that something was coming. Something evil. Something dark. The problem was that she already knew what that something was. She just didn’t have the tools to stop it. Not yet.

  Ciardis briefly closed her tired eyes and reopened them. Sleep would have been nice. Sleep would have been heavenly. But when a dark sense of foreboding dogged your every move, sleep was a
luxury. Carefree dreams were impossible. And they had been ever since she’d returned from the warfront in the north. Preventing rest. Preventing peaceful dreams. What was left? Restlessness and a headache that made her want to kick something ... or someone. Starting with the emperor and ending with the god of death and destruction.

  Sniffing and folding her arms in irritation, as she fought not to rub her temple for the fortieth time, Ciardis remembered the last time she been beset by such a restless night and a painful morning. It had been when she was twelve ... and desperately needed to get a tooth pulled. Then, as now, she had held out hope that a solution would appear and the throbbing pain would magically disappear. Of course, it hadn’t and she didn’t think a simple, painless solution would appear now either.

  “Not yet, anyway. To save the empire, I need to find a lost dragon device and hope the god doesn’t come barreling through the rift between our two worlds in the meantime,” Ciardis said with a shudder as she sank back down under the covers with her nose peeking out of the bundled blankets.

  “Such an easy task,” she said mockingly, internally cursing the throbbing headache that wouldn’t go away. She knew that the solution would come the hard way ... like it always did. With blood and pain and death.

  But Ciardis tried to focus her thoughts on other things. Anything to take her mind off the problems that were giving her so much discomfort. At least for now. So she let the blankets fall to her neck and breathed in deeply as she stared up at her canopy and remembered the eulogy in dedication to brave General Barnaren. The man who had passed on his advice to her with his last living breath. The man who had given his life to give the entire empire just a little more time before they had to face the blutgott’s wrath.

  As she turned her head and pulled her hands up to rest her cheek on the cool side of the pillow, she whispered aloud, “We miss you. You gave us extra time to fight toward our salvation; let’s just hope it’s enough.”

  Ciardis knew that as long as she was awake, she would keep thinking the dark thoughts that had led to the blistering headache in the first place. Even if her sleep was disturbed by vivid dreams, it was better than lying awake with thoughts she couldn’t suppress. So she cleared her mind and pushed out anything but a blankness that held no sounds, no memories, and no words. Just endless space. As she closed her eyes and fought to sink into the obliviousness of sleep, the loud sound of a smack against her windowpanes caught her attention. Ciardis surged up from where she had managed to curl into her pillow, with a long knife that she had quickly pulled from underneath a second pillow, and looked over at the window, but she only saw a bird sliding down its surface, stunned from its head-on collision.

  Ciardis couldn’t help the hysterical laughter that immediately sprang forth from her mouth. Relief came over her and her headache lessened, at least for a bit.

  “Well, better a bird than an assassin,” she said, bemused. She slid the sharp knife back into its secure hiding place and once more curled up.

  This time she lasted all of five minutes before she growled to herself and said, “It’s no use. I can’t sleep. Not today. Perhaps not this entire week. Because that’s what it’s going to take. An entire week to travel to Kifar.”

  And she knew that entire week she’d be tossing and turning, if not outright awake, just like she had been last night.

  With a restlessness she couldn’t shake, she sat upright once more and pulled some pillows around to support her back. Ciardis couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. She couldn’t sleep in the empire’s most luxurious bed with silken sheets, soft down comforters, and enough pillows to build a fort.

  “There’s no way the road to Kifar is going to be any better,” she said, thumping her head back onto the pillow in irritation. She couldn’t say she wouldn’t survive the road to Kifar, because that wasn’t true. She’d slept in the open forest of Ameles to the east and bunked in the frozen tundra of the north; she would survive a week’s trip to the west. But that didn’t mean she would have to enjoy it.

  For the moment, though, she would enjoy the softness as she refocused her mind and her head became filled with concerns about the future, flitting through her mind so fast that she barely had time to register one before another came to take its place.

  Thoughts of her upcoming journey to the west.

  Thoughts on what it meant to be betrothed to one man and bonded to another.

  Thoughts on how she had become an enemy of the man who stood to be her father-in-law.

  But above all, she wondered how they were going to defeat a god of death and destruction, the blutgott, with a noble retinue more interested in self-preservation than outright battle, an oblivious population, and an emperor that would rather see them dead than assume more power over his dominion.

  With a curse, Ciardis scrambled to untangle herself from the luxury linens, and threw some of those soft down pillows across the room in anger for good measure.

  With a furrowed brow, Ciardis realized that she wasn’t mad at the pillows or the linens. She was mad at the convenience. The luxury of lying in a bed that felt like a cloud when she was surrounded by worry and couldn’t sleep because her night was wracked with anxiety. She had come to the capital to warn the imperial court. She had done so and now it felt like that for every step forward she made, it was one more step backward.

  To stave off an anxious mind, she put her feet to the test by getting up and pacing the room. Back and forth. From the bed to the washroom. Then from the window to the door. Anything to keep her feet moving as fast as her mind was whirling.

  “I should be traveling the land and preparing fortifications,” Ciardis said in disgust. “Convening with the mages and seeking the best mage spells for offensive actions.”

  Her pacing had taken her to one of the broad windows of her bedroom. Ciardis walked toward it and took in the few twinkling lights on the streets below, the lights of the streetlamps in the distance.

  With a sigh, Ciardis continued, “Instead, where am I going? To the westernmost edge of this empire.”

  She knew that the errand could possibly be the key to ending the war against the god before it began. If she and Sebastian were able to obtain the collar of Diamis in their hands and its wearer on their side, they could close the gate of Ban before the blutgott emerged from its other realm. Or so the legend went.

  But that’s a big “if,” Ciardis thought wearily.

  What is? she heard Sebastian call in her mind in a sleepy tone.

  Ciardis didn’t stop her restless pacing as she barely paid attention to the second mind in her thoughts. Hearing Sebastian’s thoughts no longer felt strange. She had become so accustomed to it to that it almost felt normal, and when she couldn’t speak to him mind to mind, she felt a void in her mind as sharp as a missing limb. Or at least that’s what it had felt like when she and he had been blocked from each other’s minds when surrounded by six of the emperor’s pet silencers in the imperial audience chamber.

  Ciardis? prompted Sebastian’s bodiless voice warily. Ciardis was only half listening to his second persistent request for more clarification.

  I don’t know, she whispered in her thoughts. Half to herself. Half to him. But he heard.

  Know what, Ciardis? Sebastian said calmly as she felt him physically rise and move to get out of the bed. He was halfway across the palace from her, but because of the bond forged between the two of them, they might have been side by side. It was both comforting and disconcerting. She’d have to be more careful with shielding her thoughts.

  No, don’t get up, she said with an almost intense urgency.

  She felt him pause in his movements. Wary. Everything all right?

  Ciardis grimaced as she stared into the air and ran her fingers through her already ruffled hair.

  Everything’s fine. I’m fine, she answered.

  She felt Sebastian’s disbelief. He didn’t believe her. That was all right—she wasn’t so sure she believed herself.

  Chapter 2


  Right now, while the world felt like it was spinning out of control, she continued to pace around her room and chew on her fingernails. She took a deep breath and wondered what was happening to her. She knew that if her mother Lillian had been there to witness the nervous tic, she would have slapped Ciardis’s hand away from her mouth and admonished her that a lady didn’t bite her nails. Just as a lady didn’t clench the fabric of her dresses so tightly that they bunched and wrinkled in her grip.

  Good thing I just became a lady, Ciardis thought in amusement as she passed by the large window. I get a few weeks of reprieve, at least.

  Taking a deep breath, Ciardis stilled herself and stopped pacing momentarily to refocus on Sebastian. I promise. I was just thinking aloud ... I can’t sleep. Everything’s happening so fast.

  It is, isn’t? Sebastian said as he relaxed back into his pillows. But it’ll be all right. The nobles won’t challenge us; they can’t now. Not while the emperor supports us.

  For a moment, Ciardis focused on the dark anger in Sebastian’s voice as he voiced the word “emperor.” She wasn’t insensitive to his feelings. Ciardis couldn’t fault him for the hatred he held for the man he had to call father. Sebastian had a right to be angry. The emperor was not only a fraud, but he also had made it quite clear that his “son” was highly disposable and could be replaced at any time. If she had a father like that, she’d be pissed off too.

  Not that she knew who her father was. The one time she’d brought him up with her mother Lillian Weathervane, the conversation had been shut down so fast that Ciardis had been left blinking in dismay. So she didn’t have a clue who he was and, to top it off, she’d never really had a parent as a child in Vaneis. To find one, when she’d had none before, was enough for her. Never mind the fact that her mother was imprisoned for regicide. She was alive. She cared. That was what mattered most to a young woman who had grown up as the unwanted, little orphan girl of Vaneis.

  The nobles don’t worry me as much as our active enemies. The ones that don’t care who they kill as long as they get what they want. Like your aunt. Like the Shadow Mage, Ciardis clarified. The nobles only want to ruin us. They won’t kill hundreds of innocents in their desire for revenge. At least, I don’t think they will.