Page 32

“Watch my tone? After you humiliate us and say we’re a bunch of greedy little children, waiting for presents? You don’t get to play that game, now.”

“No matter what legalese may negate the deal, his honor will not allow them to renege.”

“How do you know that for certain?”

The vision is my most striking memory, the most clear in my mind. The three of the triad, striding towards me, hunger in their eyes, my scent in their nostrils driving them mad.

And I felt them. I felt every inch of their beings, and it cemented my hatred for them. Doman’s rage, his lust for war, his strength and conquest. A warlord who views the universe as his birthright. And the need, oh Gods, the need, ravenous, the three men like starving wolves as they hunted me down.

But under all that rage and violence, something else. The platinum thread of honor inherent to him that guides his code. I know, more than I’ve known anything before, that he will hold his side of the bargain, no matter how I wriggled out of it.

“I know.”

“You better be right,” he says, and stomps upwards through the tunnels, grunting as he strains under the weight of the shielding device, and we turn the corner to a cave that holds the source of that tiny little magma flow, which branches off from the main river of fire.

Heartbreak River. Named back when arranged marriages were more common, when Magnar had opposing familial clans who hated each other dearly, the old men and women marrying off daughters and sons to try and wield alliances to gain primacy. But at the core of the marriages was the sacred right of refusal.

A man could choose not to step over the magma flow, and no one could force him.

And a woman could bring the husband-to-be to Heartbreak Ridge, the huge, over forty-foot gap over a chasm overlooking burning death, the main magma flow that feeds the factories and smelting forges of Magnar. Many a man walked up to the flow and turned back, staring across the gap at the woman out of reach.

Some others, their hearts broken, attempted to leap across, plummeting screaming to their death.

“Come on then,” growls Thrain, stomping towards the ledge. Twenty feet from it, he stops, and the atmospheric shield is humming three times as loud, struggling with the intense heat emanating from the pyroclastic flow. He places the shield generator on the ground and, shaking his head, steps out of sight.

Behind me, the Magnarian is broadcasting this live to the universe, and I cannot understand Prince Doman.

Why would he want his humiliation shown to the universe? Why would he not simply give up, privately?

His conqueror’s aura I felt for an intense moment that stretched like a lifetime makes me sweat. Because though thisis an impossible task, somehow, someway, I know he will not give up. My ruse might have slowed him down, but when he has destroyed the War-God, when he has crushed all opposition, I know he and his triad will come back for me…

But until then, I will be safe.

Emerging from a shadowed tunnel, Doman and his triad step onto a jagged stone ledge, overlooking the precipitous drop of over a hundred feet below. The air shimmers with the latent heat from the destructive potential that looms beneath. Their armored suits may shield them from the impact, but not from the consuming flames that would reduce them to ashes, the flames that would melt their crowns into liquid gold. The ambient glow of the magma below casts an ominous light on their hard features, making their cold, marble faces even more alien and menacing. Their Orb-Armor suits glow as they fight against the heat, but even they cannot stop it entirely.

Doman’s golden mane is slick with sweat, clinging to him, and his battle-brothers step back, away from the ledge, as he looks down into the fires of the pyroclastic flow, then up at me.

I do not see defeat in his eyes.

I see only his iron will, that same thread of platinum in his soul that molds with his honor, the hard core of his being.

I understand too late, and my blood runs cold.

He is going to jump.

He can’t give up. Not when his prize is so close.

He is going to plummet into the fires, and then Pentaris will be doomed. Not by his triad’s hand, but by his Queen Mother. Our spies have reported on her, and she has changed in the last decades, becoming more paranoid, more cold, willing to kidnap a pregnant woman and hold her captive, willing to do anything to end the war.

She will blame me for her son’s death, and she will stop at nothing to get her retribution on me and everything I care for. It all comes crashing down on me at once.

Doman steps back from the ledge, tracing his steps.

Then his hungry, blue eyes stare at me.

I am about to yell, to admit defeat, to move this back to the small flow before I damn every one of the hundred billion souls of my sector, when he charges forward. He eats up the ground in huge steps, and without hesitation, his booted foot plants against the edge of the ledge, and he flings himself into nothingness.

He flies through the air, his blond hair whipping in the wind, his eyes only on me, jumping impossibly far, his hand outstretched towards me. Five feet from the edge, and I can see every line on his hard, marble face, when without a sound, he disappears into the chasm.