Sworn to War Read online

  She dragged a finger along the dusty railing as she thought.

  Because the railing formed more of an ornamental structure than an actual barrier to anything, she hadn’t even had to break her gaze away from the man who was still as an imperial statue.

  Untouched by the chaos around him.

  Unmoved by the destruction that was tearing his palace apart tile by tile.

  Unmoved even when servants, frantic servants, practically tripped over him in their haste to flee.

  In fact, several had almost run right into the very man they all served. Those that had come too close had bounced off an invisible barrier. Barely seeming to notice, they rebounded and ran off in a hurry.

  But Ciardis noticed.

  “A shield?” she murmured to the two who stood beside her.

  She was assessing his strengths and weaknesses just as much as they were.

  “A tight one,” Thanar purred. “Practically undetectable.”

  “Which is impressive, given the fact that the man that is acting as my father can’t be accessing the power in the nexus below us,” Sebastian said. “Not given the turmoil it’s going through at the moment. It would be like touching sky fire and hoping it didn’t burn you alive.”

  Ciardis pressed her lips together in a grimace.

  Then where is Maradian’s power coming from? What is his gift? she wondered.

  It was something that she should have obsessed over long before meeting him on the field of battle. But no one seemed to know much about the prince who had stolen his brother’s crown.

  And besides…it wasn’t like Maradian had given them much choice on when and where they would be fighting. He had bested their plans at every turn.

  One such as he might have assumed that they would have backed down because of that. Been submissive heirs who understood their place in the imperial courts once and for all.

  But that had all changed when the Emperor had hired the counsel from the abandoned city of Kifar. It had changed when Seven, under the Emperor’s command or out of his own prerogative, had murdered Ciardis Weathervane’s friends. Had killed one of the last remaining members of the Weathervane clan.

  All in the name of the Emperor. The man and the legend had signed his own death warrant then.

  She was just here to ensure that the death was served.

  3

  “Well, Ciardis Weathervane?” the Emperor called up to her balcony in an almost jovial tone. “Shall we end this staring match and get to why you’re here?”

  Ciardis stiffened but didn’t speak.

  Instead, she let her grip on Thanar’s hand and Sebastian’s arm fall away. Walking across the debris-covered ground, the small crunch of gravel and plaster crumbling beneath her feet with every step, she made her way to the banister that would lead down to his level.

  Her hand was steady as it floated just above the railing that she was ready to grip at a moment’s notice. She descended the crumbling steps, wary and heart-racing as she anticipated falling through the floor of the unsteady staircase with every shift of her weight from one foot to the other.

  Her face was frozen in a grimace as each step that she made echoed in the ballroom like a bell ringing its last toll.

  She heard Sebastian descend apace behind her and the flutter of Thanar’s wings as he flew up, briefly caressing her hair, before he too began the slow descent to the man who awaited them all.

  As Ciardis turned a practical eye on the Emperor, she saw that he radiated calm.

  Amusement, even.

  This was all a game to him.

  “Sociopath,” she whispered, not even bothering to utter the minor curse mentally.

  The Emperor either didn’t hear her or didn’t care.

  He merely turned his gaze to track Thanar as the daemoni prince floated down to the first floor of the ballroom. Thanar was moving from one level to the next so sedately, it was almost as if he was magically slowing himself down.

  Squinting at Thanar out of the corner of her eye as she nimbly hopped over a rotted-through step, she decided that he was in fact using magic to slow his arrival.

  He stood on a barely discernable platform of air that whirled below him like a flat hurricane.

  It was almost invisible to the naked eye, but the winds that gusted off his platform and into the staircase descending to the first level with smooth curves were much more tangible. The small gusts of wind even kicked up small bits of plaster and dirt.

  But the biggest thing it did was destabilize the banister. With Ciardis still standing on the steps. She heard an ominous crack that told her she needed to get off this staircase now, before it crumbled to the ground, taking her and Sebastian along with it.

  Just five more steps, she thought gamely.

  She was eyeing the top of step number four and the rest of its lower level compatriots which were missing across such a wide stretch of the staircase, they quite possibly may not have existed in the first place.

  She wouldn’t have put it past the Emperor of all Algardis to have palace ballroom steps crafted from the very magic of the empire itself.

  Steps made of magic and air, she thought with a rueful sigh. What a vain waist of magic and space. Not to mention bloody inconvenient when the entire palace is on a magical fritz.

  Or at least most of it was, from what she could tell. And unfortunately, this staircase was fracturing at this very point of contact, and she was left with a conundrum.

  Jump and fall. Or ask for some kind of help from who knows where. Thanar was busy looking impressive on his cloud of air. But Ciardis shouldn’t have discounted Sebastian Athanos Algardis familiarity with his own palace. She watched is he gamely moved ahead. It didn’t seem to bother Sebastian; he stepped onto the last visible step beside her and held out a hand.

  Ciardis blinked and looked over at him.

  She didn’t want to take her attention away from the Emperor who awaited them so patiently just a few feet away, but she figured that if Maradian so much as twitched a finger, Thanar would let them know.

  Sebastian gave her a tired smile.

  It wasn’t weary in the sense that he needed to rest, though.

  It was weary in the sense that he was tired of the life that had been handed to them.

  Tired of the constant battles we have to fight, she supposed.

  Still, his smile had a sharp edge as he wiggled his fingers, silently insisting that she take his hand.

  So like a debutante at her first ball, Ciardis Weathervane slipped her dusty, blood-speckled left hand into his palm. He smiled.

  And this time, the smile came with a look that said he would give her the world if he could.

  Ciardis felt her heart leap in response. Not out of love, but out of triumph.

  He may have been tired. They both may have been weary.

  But just as she was ready to see this fight through to the end, so was he.

  So are we¸ the daemoni prince corrected her in a chiding tone from where he stood off to the side watching the emperor with his arms crossed impatiently in front of him. The daemoni prince was quite ready to get this over with, she could tell.

  A wry grin crossed Ciardis’s face at Thanar’s insistence that it was a group effort. In response to her nod, Sebastian tightened his grip on her hand and, with a boost of magic, caused them both to leap across the missing steps and down to the floor below.

  Ciardis felt wind that came out of nowhere and took their bodies up in flight, just as a bank of air softened their landing.

  It was all as effortlessly done as when Thanar had floated down to the ground from the floor above on his flat hurricane. She assumed that the daemoni prince had anticipated their needs and matched them.

  Not that helping out others was his usual forte, which is why she called out his name in mild surprise. Thanar?

  Wasn’t me, the daemoni prince replied, a sour note reverberating in her mind. He was both mildly impressed and mildly pissed off.

  She felt br
ief amusement at his internal conundrum. Now that was Thanar for you. Ciardis turned to the only other person in the room who could have manipulated earth’s gravity so deftly, raising an eyebrow at Sebastian.

  The prince heir, for his part, studiously avoided her gaze, dropped his hand from her waist with a light squeeze, and walked around her so that he was finally face to face with the man the world saw as his father.

  Their conversation had taken less than a minute, but as Ciardis turned around, she ruefully noted that she hadn’t been worried that Maradian would launch an assault on their backs.

  Which said just as much about her as it did about his state of mind. Because she had been right not to be fearful just yet.

  That wasn’t the emperor’s style. Not when confronted with an opponent face to face as they were. As far as she could determine anyway. It wasn’t quite within the guidelines of protocol to come out and ask him directly if he intended to hit any of them in the backs, she just had to trust her instincts.

  It was one thing to manipulate, plan, and execute delicate offensives from afar, in the shadow of night or in the bright of day.

  But to stab someone in the back when they had come to parlay: that was far too common.

  The Emperor of Algardis may have been a lying, conniving murderer. But common he was not.

  Ciardis knew that.

  Sebastian knew that.

  Thanar knew that.

  So they abided by the unspoken rules the Emperor had set out when they had first begun their long walk across the palace grounds to confront him face to face. Unspoken in the sense that the rules were as old as the court itself. Passed in the lore of old custom and even older traditions.

  It wasn’t something that Ciardis was too familiar with. Growing up in a village far from the procedures and oratory that made the imperial courts so very exciting and so very deadly all at the same time had its benefits.

  But she sensed a comfortableness with this scenario from Sebastian.

  He was at ease in a way that he hadn’t been before, when she had told him of her plan in the Chamber of Imperial Astronomy, surrounded by gilt stars hammered into the very walls and a night sky above that was as magical as it was natural.

  But now, he had settled into his skin.

  Their walk across the palace grounds to this ballroom had taken an hour of their time, maybe more.

  An hour to reflect on the dangerous destruction that they had wreaked on the palace grounds, but that the Emperor had exacerbated far beyond anything the triumvirate was capable of alone. Sebastian had seen the physical devastation of his power unleashed, and she had traced the magic of the nexus that was unravelling the very foundation of the palace walls to only one other person.

  The Emperor himself.

  4

  In other words, they may have cracked the walls.

  But it was this man who was destroying the entire palace. Deliberately, as it turned out.

  Ciardis could feel the power emanating from the Emperor like a wave of heat that was radiating outward into every surface around them. Buckling the floors and the walls as it passed through towards more distant parts of the palace.

  They didn’t know why. But just as Ciardis had sensed the power of the nexus snaking through the palace with a well point off in a far corner of the ballroom, Sebastian had known that it was his blood that was controlling the riot of power that was ripping away the fabric between the Aether realm and this mortal realm.

  When he had internalized that thought, Ciardis had felt it.

  His anger had spiked and swelled. It changed from a mental state laced with fear and regret, to one which demanded retribution.

  He was once more the prince heir she had faced in the Northern Mountains. The one willing to let her be tortured if her pain held the answers he so desperately needed to save an empire.

  And that was good. Because the boy who was prince heir needed to be ready to become the man who would be Emperor. For all of their sakes. For the empire’s very survival.

  Ciardis swallowed tensely and nodded slightly to herself as she acknowledged, And for that to happen, we need to follow the rules. This cannot be a hysterical coup d’état. The death of the Emperor deserves no less than the solemnity of an affair of state.

  The honor of an honest death, said Sebastian solemnly in her thoughts. I can give him no less.

  Whatever happened this day, it would abide by the rules of the nobility. Challenge and battle. It didn’t matter that Maradian was the man who ruled over them all. He too, now that he was forced to do so without a guard to hide behind or a chess player like Seven to deploy in his stead, would follow the ancient rules laid out in court combat.

  And he would be willing to die by them. As would they all.

  Ciardis flicked a glance over at Thanar. “Almost all,” she whispered to herself in dry wit.

  You could never predict precisely what the daemoni prince was willing to live for. Or die for.

  Ciardis refocused her attention as the prince heir’s foot crushed a piece of plaster with a satisfying crunch. It was a sound that didn’t really mean anything in the long run, but at that moment it was like a slap to the face, a call to arms, and a sharp crackle up her spine.

  As Sebastian stopped in front of his blood relative, he whispered her mind, The land is back. Let’s get this done.

  She read the fierce sense of pride and the undercurrent of hate riding Sebastian’s words.

  She couldn’t object to it. If anything, her hate was stronger.

  Following the prince heir to face their mortal enemy, Ciardis swallowed deeply and said frankly to the Emperor, “Do you regret what you did?”

  The man with the cold, calculating eyes of a murderer who had taken the life of his own blood to get where he was today laughed as he said, “Regret, dear child, is for the weak, and I am anything but weak.”

  Ciardis heard Thanar land not far from them, but he didn’t step forward to stand beside them. Instead, he walked in a semi-circle until he flanked the Emperor.

  If Maradian noticed the daemoni prince’s maneuver, he didn’t say a word.

  Ciardis, meanwhile, thought about how empty the silence truly was.

  Glancing back and forth in surprise, as if they would suddenly appear from the shadows at any second, she asked, “Where are your guards, your imperial majesty?”

  The Emperor replied, “Completing their sworn duties, as I must complete mine.”

  Before Ciardis could reply to that puzzling statement, Sebastian lashed out with a voice filled with hate, “Why?”

  The Emperor turned his gaze on Sebastian and looked over him as a hunter would a specimen he had bagged for display.

  “Why what?” the Emperor asked in a miffed tone.

  Ciardis heard Sebastian suck in a sharp breath before he released it seconds later in the tense atmosphere.

  “Oh,” said the Emperor in a soft tone, letting the confused look drift off his face as easily as he had taken it on. “You mean why did I kill my family?”

  “Our family,” Sebastian said in an outraged hiss. “My father’s beloved wife. My father himself. I wouldn’t put it past you to have killed your own father as well in your conniving plans to grasp the throne.”

  “You have an active imagination,” Maradian said with a slow smile. “But not an inaccurate one. However, telling you why I set out to murder each and every member of the Algardis family, with the exception of my beloved sister the princess heir, would take far too long.”

  Ciardis stiffened. “You owe us that, at least. It is the right thing to do.”

  “It is also the only way you will ever be memorialized,” Sebastian said with hatred in his voice. “As a killer. You might as well tell us of your exploits. Because when the day dawns tomorrow, I will send out an edict to have every statue celebrating you yanked down, every line of poetry in praise of you banned, and every ruling that so much as hints at your greatness reversed.”

  Maradian didn’t ev
en blink. “If you ever take the throne, then that will be your right.”

  Sebastian growled and stepped forward, almost passing beyond the invisible line in the ground that kept them from each other’s throats. Stepping over that line meant opening the duel to all comers. Ciardis almost wished he had, so they could get this over with.

  Let’s slap him in the face with a glove and be done with this charade, she thought with dark desire.

  It was Thanar who replied, Not yet. There’s something here.

  What? Ciardis asked. A detailed account of the Emperor’s nefarious deeds? They would be useful, but if nothing else we can point to Sebastian’s stolen power, the murder of the last empress, and even the downfall of this palace if we need to provide a public statement of guilt for his death.

  No, said Thanar. That’s not quite what it is.

  Then what? Sebastian asked in exasperation.

  Just wait, Thanar said with something in his voice that Ciardis couldn’t quite read.

  She shifted uneasily, ready to snap at the daemoni prince, but something told her to hold back.

  A moment later, she was glad she had.

  5

  Maradian tilted his head. Slowly, with his arms spread wide to assure them that he was not about to attack them, he began to pace back and forth.

  “Oh, the things I could tell you, my nephew,” the Emperor said after he had come back towards them after a long pause.

  “Give us the highlights,” Thanar said coldly from where he stood directly behind the Emperor who faced them down with no fear. Thanar was at least fifteen feet away from Maradian’s back, but even from that distance the darkness in his voice caused Ciardis to shiver.

  Thanar’s voice promised pain. Neverending pain.

  The daemoni prince may have been curious about what the Emperor had to share with them, but that didn’t mean he would outwardly express any such eagerness.

  Maradian, however, didn’t flinch.

  Instead he sighed. “You know…I’ve never told anyone this story.”