Sworn to War Read online

  So she walked up to the dancing horse’s forequarters and placed a gentle hand on its stunning black neck. The horse appreciated the pat and quieted down.

  Ciardis thought with some amusement that its coat was as dark as her emotions right now.

  Black like the pain and sorrow she felt growing inside her with each passing minute.

  She wondered how it would manifest itself. At the moment, though, she didn’t really care.

  It would come out. In magic and in action. And she wouldn’t be able to stop it. She would just ride the wave it crested like an avenging harpy, and smile on the fortune that she might even be able to join Thanar, wherever he had been taken to.

  She didn’t really think he had gone into some fabled realm of the gods, after all.

  The bluttgott had to come from somewhere, her mind cautioned her.

  But just because the gods lived somewhere didn’t mean that the Emperor’s little trinket had access to it. It was far more likely to be some ancient torture device with a particularly depraved way of executing its victims. Death by lightning torture was not a particular way she wanted to go, or ever see again.

  Thanar hadn’t had a scratch on him.

  No wounds had bled.

  He had just been overwhelmed by pain the likes of which she had never seen, and then he had been gone. Ciardis remembered what Thanar had said about Maradian before he had disappeared. He had warned her to be careful, to not underestimate his capacity for evil and for pain.

  So when she looked at the Emperor, she saw him through Thanar’s eyes now. As an enemy to respect and a person with no end to his vicious depths. In a way, these circumstances had made her understand like she never could before.

  Ciardis met the Emperor’s eyes as he finally looked away from the ruins of the smoldering palace. He said in a conversational tone, “I do appreciate your willingness to temper your compassion, Weathervane. To both learn from your betters, and to embrace the pain that can give.”

  Ciardis’s head jerked back. What could he possibly mean by that?

  As he looked down at her from his seated perch on the tall, handsome horse, Maradian continued, “You were worthy of my praise when you first came to court, and you rise in esteem with every passing moment now. I do believe this will be an excellent familial partnership.”

  Ciardis licked her lips. She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘Thank you, Your Imperial Majesty’.

  It stuck in the craw of her throat like a wedge she couldn’t dislodge.

  Maybe Maradian expected that, or perhaps he just didn’t care.

  He kept going as if they were now the best of friends. “You know, I felt just the way you’re feeling right now when I killed the first person I truly felt was close to me.”

  Ciardis couldn’t help herself. “Who?” she croaked.

  “The Empress,” he said simply. “Bastian’s wife and I were more than just family, we were friends. It hurt to do to her what I did. But it had to be done. For the good of the cause.”

  Ciardis flinched as he threw her own words back in her face. Was there anything she wouldn’t do for the cause? Was there anything Maradian hadn’t done? Their causes may have been vastly different, but who was she to say that hers was any less self-serving than his? She had benefited in magic, notoriety, and wealth from all her escapades.

  Had the Emperor not done the same?

  Don’t think like that, Ciardis, she heard Sebastian caution her in her mind. Or maybe it was her conscience?

  She was having a hard time telling the two apart now in the wake of what had happened to Thanar. It was like she was standing underwater and every thought, every emotion, and every action was just out of reach at the water’s surface. She had to kick and push to reach any of them; the trouble was, she was in no way inclined to move.

  She wanted to sink into the depths of her soul and revel in her misery. Surround herself in empty darkness and silence.

  If only the Emperor would stop talking, so she could do that.

  Outwardly, Ciardis kept her dead gaze on Maradian’s face like a good little puppet. Her hand was still on the horse’s neck. Sebastian was still standing behind her and hadn’t moved.

  What does Maradian want from me? she thought bleakly.

  He still hadn’t left, and she honestly wondered if he wanted some kind of praise before moving on. Praise for killing Thanar. Praise for pushing her to accept the ‘new’ her and to move beyond emotional ties.

  When she tried to focus on the Emperor’s words and get out of the miserable thoughts dominating her head, he hit her with another blow she hadn’t anticipated.

  “The dragon,” Maradian said in a casual tone, “we’ll discuss later.”

  Ciardis felt bitterness rise in her throat. She had left Raisa behind like so much trash. It hadn’t even occurred to her to inquire about the comatose dragon after she had been so blindsided by the Emperor’s imperious request.

  She felt bad about that, but that was a small bit of darkness in the huge void that was her pain about the daemoni prince.

  Swallowing deeply, she wanted to hit him as harshly as he hurt her. She couldn’t do that without killing him, and now more than ever, with the daemoni prince gone, that was a fleeting possibility. But she could put worry in his gut like the misery that tormented hers.

  As the Emperor turned his black stallion away, she hastily grabbed the left side of his reins. Not strong enough to unsettle the horse, just enough to stop him.

  Maradian looked down at her with an irritated expression and an upturned nose, as if to say Our conversation was done.

  Ciardis let a cold smile grace her face. One that was supremely polite but dead on the inside.

  “You’ve killed another one of the few living souls that made me a better person. You’re a mind mage; you can probably tell that I’m sincere in saying this. If I kill your god, I might not stop there,” she said quietly.

  The Emperor scoffed, but leaned forward in his saddle in frank amusement. “Is that supposed to scare me, child?”

  “No,” Ciardis said. “Just make you think. I don’t want to cleanse this world. But all the people you’ve hurt. All the people you’ve killed. They don’t deserve this.”

  The Emperor looked at her thoughtfully, and then clucked his tongue. “Bravery is one thing. Foolish bravado is another. Get some rest, Weathervane; you have a lot of work ahead of you. I can’t wait to see what you do next.”

  He picked up his reins, signaled his stallion to take off in a fast walk, and Ciardis couldn’t do a damned thing to stop him. So she watched as his soldiers marched double-time to keep up as he rode off to whatever destination he had to go to next.

  She wondered if she could even try to hit him in the back with fierce lightning. But they had an accord now, and she had a job to do, even if she felt like she was sinking into a mindless black chasm herself.

  It was time to mend a city at war…with itself.

  30

  Ciardis didn’t have anything left in her except righteous fury. Nothing could crack her exterior. Even as Sebastian pleaded with her to talk to him, she ignored him. She would speak when she had to. When they needed to plan to march, when they needed to gather nobles for convening, when they need to find this or that magical object in their quest for something to kill the bluttgott with. It even crossed her mind that she needed track down the wyvern, and with it Terris and Christian, if they had any hope of using it or the bearer of the collar, the hated counsel Seven, against the god. But for now, she sank back into blessed silence.

  It was almost a relief to just walk forward. Not to deal with anything more serious than putting one foot in front of the other. She didn’t know where Lillian was, and she didn’t care. The only reason she still recognized Sebastian was because he kept pestering her in her ear like a hummingbird searching for nectar.

  The very thought of Sebastian as a bird with a long thin tongue mining her ear for wax made her crack a smile for a second. A bright sp
ot of amusement in day that kept threatening to consume her with darkness. Except this time, it had won. She felt like she was scrambling for purchase in a well so deep and dark that she couldn’t even see the entrance to know how far she had to climb up to get out of it. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced before. She decided to revel in it; it was her only choice.

  Rise or fall with the challenge was her new motto. And if she was going to rise, she had to will herself to win. To move beyond just pain and turn that emotion into hatred. That was her new well of power.

  Her feet carried her forward and her heart, alive with hate, made her stronger. As she got her first full view of the destruction awaiting her, Ciardis had to gasp at its totality. It was heart-wrenching to exit from a healers’ hall and the surrounding area and walk back into what could politely be called a disaster zone.

  The tableau of an imperial palace in complete disarray was a hard one to shake.

  Where before walls had been falling in, now they were gone.

  Fires burned from the stables to the salons.

  People ran every which way.

  But she didn’t care. Not so much.

  If this is what being dead feels like, Ciardis thought to herself wryly, I kind of like it.

  At least a little. Now that she had experienced the emptiness, it was hard to shake the desire to just sink into the feeling. To combat that, she forced herself to take in her surroundings, to really experience the panic and the pain of the people in chaos around her.

  It didn’t really work the way she wanted it to, though.

  She was hallucinating. She saw a speck in the sky growing closer with every passing second.

  It looked familiar.

  Ciardis felt her breath hitch. She heard people shouting and screaming as they pointed up at it.

  The glowing blue form was unmistakable to Ciardis Weathervane.

  To the servants, it represented the beginning of the end, though. From the screams and rants she heard as people began to panic and run, she gathered that they thought the bluttgott had finally come.

  But no Ciardis knew that wasn’t it. She didn’t know yet what shape or form the god would take but it wasn’t this one.

  As excitement rose in her chest she shouted, “It can’t be!”

  It was. Thanar was back, and he looked pissed.

  He flew toward them with a speed she didn’t even know he possessed. As he careened to her side, he angled sharply and banked his luminescent wings. From the glimpse she had caught of his face, he was searching for something.

  His eyes were black with hatred.

  My hatred, Ciardis thought with glee. She didn’t know how, but she had been projecting Thanar’s feelings from wherever he had been before.

  She couldn’t help but shiver at the implications. At the feelings of fury radiating off him and her as well.

  He circled in the air, veering off whenever he came too close to her. Ciardis began to long for him to let go of whatever held him in the air.

  But he wouldn’t; she knew that. In the same way she had understood the depths of the malice he had been feeling, even separated as they were by hundreds of yards—possibly an entire realm.

  The problem was, unlike her hatred, he was quite willing to take his pain out on others. The crowds gathering below him like ants on the ground were in serious danger, and they didn’t even realize what particular danger they were in.

  As Thanar came around for one final pass, the Emperor came thundering back to her side on horseback. Only six of his numerous guards came with him, four of which were doubled up on the horses behind their malevolent leader. Ciardis had the brief recollection that he had a good number of soldiers walking when he first arrived, so it made sense that if he had set off at a fast pace, they had been left behind.

  Maradian pulled up his stallion beside her; the horse reared fiercely.

  But Ciardis wasn’t too focused on that. She had seen a shadow in the sky. A shadow that didn’t belong to a bird, and certainly didn’t come from the daemoni prince.

  For the second time that day, she thought, It can’t be!

  But this time, she didn’t say it out loud.

  Sebastian heard her anyway.

  She heard him whisper two words in her mind—It can—before he pulled away physically and repositioned himself. Ostensibly to go calm the crowds, but she knew better.

  Hatred was coming this way, and it had a target.

  As Thanar sped towards them again, she had the thought that he was beautiful, like a dark, avenging angel.

  Fury was written over every line of his face and clenched in the tight dive of his body.

  He managed to land with a very smooth entrance.

  When he did, he purred to Ciardis mind-to-mind: Come.

  It was a command unlike any other he had ever given her. She wanted to go, but at the same time, she rebelled. Because she was Ciardis, and taking orders from anyone was like being force-fed sand.

  When Thanar gave her an imperious look and she saw his eyes were shining with a blue glow like the stars, she couldn’t help it. She had to go over and see if he was all right.

  But Ciardis hesitated before throwing herself at him.

  It turned out that her hesitation was right. Thanar’s eyes weren’t just blue. Blue energy raced up and down his body like crackling lightning. As he opened and closed his wings, which looked larger to Ciardis’s eyes, even they had arcs of blue lightning running all over them.

  Ciardis licked her lips as she tentatively touched his bare chest. Then she ran them up his side, hesitant. Waiting for the lightning to flare across her palm. For it to hurt.

  But the worst it did was pinch, like a glove that was too tight.

  She pulled back and looked up at him in confusion.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “What happened to you?”

  “The gods happened to me,” Thanar said in a voice that was calm.

  Ciardis’s heart flipped. He looked different. He was acting different.

  This was much too strange.

  Thanar looked down at her, then turned her around and gathered her in his arms, back-to-chest.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said softly as he briefly rested his chin in her hair. “It’ll all be fine.”

  “How do you know?” she asked—her voice hesitant, and hating herself for the weakness.

  She felt the smile in his voice as he replied. “Because I talked to the gods, and we aren’t alone.”

  She thought about it for a second. What he was saying and what he was not saying.

  Her breath caught in her throat. “So it worked?”

  “Oh yes, it did,” Thanar said, giving her a gentle squeeze. “I just needed one moment more to say my goodbyes.”

  She laughed. “Well, luckily for us that wasn’t the last time we saw you. I’d still be furious too.”

  Maradian cleared his throat. As Ciardis looked over at him from where she was watching the blue lightning arc around them like it was in the middle of a springtime shower, she glowered. She didn’t want anything spoiling this moment. Especially him. But Maradian was not to be ignored.

  The Emperor looked entirely too pleased, to Ciardis’s eyes.

  “It worked,” Maradian crowed in delight.

  “Oh yes,” Thanar cooed. “It did, and I have you to thank for introducing me to some…friends.”

  Ciardis knew that tone.

  It meant trouble.

  As Thanar released her from his grip and pushed her aside, she was sure of that.

  Maradian, however, either didn’t know or didn’t care. It might have been because his winded soldiers caught up with them again and they were once more surrounded in a lightly boxed ring. But this time, they were on the open palace grounds.

  Just as Maradian seemed to realize he might not command the advantage he had before, the skies roared. This time, Ciardis Weathervane was the one to scream in delight.

  A dragon roared out of the skies
with a mighty crash.

  Raisa didn’t give the surrounding company any chance to fight back. Instead, she swung her claws and her toothy smile in a fury that hinted at more than a desire for revenge.

  She was hungry.

  Ciardis and Sebastian stared in open-mouthed horror at the savagery Raisa inflicted in just a few subtle blows. When she elected to turn human, her mouth dripping in blood, even Thanar shivered.

  There stood the ambassador from Sahalia, and she smiled a cold smile.

  “I knew I should have killed you when I first had the chance,” she said in silky fury. Her voice was directed at the Emperor, and even Ciardis shifted uncomfortably at the malice in her tone. She hadn’t known that the dragon harbored such hate for the man, but she guessed that she understood now why that was. Besides, Raisa was a diplomat; hiding her hatred would have been the first test of her willpower.

  As she stepped forward, the guards in front of the Emperor quickly rushed to do their duty. Ciardis had the feeling that they’d rather apprehend her than kill her, but in a fix, anything to fight back against an angry dragon would do.

  That was their undoing. They should have run screaming. In a flash of her fist, the ambassador of Sahalia ripped the throat from one and tossed the other so high up in the air that when they came splashing down, the entire ground around them was splattered with their entrails and blood.

  Ciardis wasn’t sorry about that.

  Raisa is only doing her duty, she thought with a satisfied glint in her own eyes.

  Forgetting her distaste for him for the moment, Ciardis happily shouted at Maradian, “Emperor, your men are getting clobbered. Surely you should do something?”

  Maradian gave her a distracted, frazzled look. He couldn’t run. He was boxed in by his own soldiers; besides which, his stallion had taken off at the first sign of a roar, unseating him promptly. If he tried to flee, she and he knew that there was nothing faster in the world than a dragon on foot or in flight. He had no recourse.