Page 30
Story: A Kingdom Ruthless and Radiant (Age of Fae Romantasy #2)
Chapter 30
Way Ahead of You
S tellon
This couldn’t be happening. How was this happening?
Sweet Raewyn’s life could not end like this.
Twisting my head to see the King, I said, “Please Father. Stop this.”
My sire rolled his eyes and took another sip from his goblet. “You’ll be back to yourself in a few minutes, boy. Trust me, I’m doing what’s best for you.”
You’re asking the wrong person.
The non-verbal message had come from Pharis. In my state of emotional distress, my mental barrier against him had cracked.
All I want from you is your immediate exile, I responded.
He cracked a smile, seeming completely unaffected by what was happening. You’d miss me if I was gone.
The hangman stepped over to the lever that would release the trap doors Raewyn and Sorcha stood upon, awaiting the final order from the King.
My father stood and walked to the front of the platform, raising his hands to quiet the crowd.
“My esteem shines upon you,” he bellowed.
“And mine upon you,” his subjects roared in unison.
“You’ve been invited here today to witness justice,” he told them. “These two humans—one of them a commoner, and one of them a witch—threatened the lives of your benevolent King and my innocent children.”
Loud boos filled the air. Father smiled and allowed it for a few moments before extending his hands and pressing down on the air in front of him.
The attendees quieted instantly.
“Our Kingdom cannot abide sedition of any sort, if it is to continue to thrive. And no foe, no matter how clever—or innocent seeming—can ever hope to stand against us. Let this serve as a warning to any who would dare to try.”
Raising his goblet toward the crowd, he said, “May the Grand Star brighten your way.”
The response was loud and enthusiastic. “And may it ever warm you.”
These people were having fun —at least the Fae among them. The humans were probably horrified but too afraid to say or do anything about it.
Exactly how my father wanted them.
He looked toward the executioner, and a frenzy of desperation overtook me.
Throwing the contents of my goblet in my guard’s face, I took advantage of his momentary distraction to grab the dagger from his belt and slice through the cord binding me to my chair.
My father turned around, reacting to the commotion. “What the shaded stars—”
I bolted to the staircase leading down from the platform, intending to run to Raewyn as soon as I reached the ground.
Unfortunately, I never did.
“Stop him,” the King ordered, and the guard at the bottom of the steps rushed upward, blocking my path.
When I tried to throw myself over the railing to the ground, he grabbed my clothing. One of the guards who’d been protecting my family on the platform came down to help him, and the two of them hauled me back up to stand before my father.
“You are an embarrassment,” he said under his breath.
I was immobilized, trapped, completely useless to Raewyn.
Darting my eyes over to Pharis, I sent him a desperate plea.
Do something. Help her. Stop this from happening.
What will you give me? he asked, making deals even now.
Anything you want, I screamed at him mind to mind. Everything I have. Take it all. Just save her.
He grinned at me. Way ahead of you, brother.
A shadow covered the arena, and a loud screech pierced my eardrums as a powerful wind buffeted me and forced my eyelids closed.
When I opened them again, I saw a flash of movement and color and then a white-hot blast of fire.
A dragon.
The largest I’d ever seen. And I’d never seen one this close—no one had and lived to tell about it.
It swooped past our platform and circled low through the arena, dipping its head as it reached the gallows.
The hangman turned and leapt off the back of the structure, but before he hit the ground, the dragon scooped him up between its rows of sharp teeth and crunched down.
The two guards who’d been standing behind Raewyn and the Earthwife jumped from the raised wooden edifice and scrambled underneath it, away from the dragon’s view.
Raewyn. She still stood there, hooded and bound, helpless.
All I could do was watch in horror as the dragon blasted the gallows with its fire, burning the top part of the structure. The rope attached to the noose around Raewyn’s neck was instantly severed.
I ran to the edge of the royal platform, yelling down to her. “Jump! Raewyn, run and jump!”
She might have heard me, maybe not, but in either case she ran forward, flying off the edge of the platform and hitting the ground, where she fell to her knees.
It had not been a moment too soon. The dragon torched the rest of the gallows with dragonfire, incinerating the witch atop it and the guards cowering beneath it.
Their screams tore the air as Raewyn got to her feet, still hooded with her hands tied behind her back, and began running blindly.
I hoped she’d reach the shelter of the arena stands, but before she even got near the wall of the pit, the dragon’s shadow covered her.
It dived and grabbed her in its talons.
Terror split my chest, grabbing my heart in its fist and squeezing until I saw black spots in my vision.
Screams echoed all around me, some Raewyn’s, some from the terrorized onlookers, some from the people on the platform with me.
I might have screamed as well for all I knew.
Turning to the guard nearest me, I grabbed his crossbow and loaded a bolt into it, firing it at the dragon. The projectile bounced off the creature’s scales unnoticed as it rose into the air again.
“Don’t, you idiot,” Pharis yelled over the chaos. “You might hit Raewyn.”
I ignored him, knocking another bolt into the bolt rest and pulling the trigger. Being crushed to death in a dragon’s talons—or eaten—would be a death thousands of times worse than hanging.
If it was the last thing I did, I would spare Raewyn that.
This strike landed on the dragon’s neck where the scales were smaller and hopefully thinner.
Apparently, it felt the blow that time, because it changed directions, turning back toward our platform.
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be harmed. And it appeared to be angry.
“Now you’ve annoyed it,” Pharis said. “Stop firing.”
“I have to do something,” I shouted back at him. “Unlike you.”
He laughed out loud. Had he gone mad?
No one else around us was laughing. Mareth shrieked then seemed to snap out of her frozen stance and turned toward the stairs.
Father, being older than her, was faster. He ran past her, literally shoving my sister out of his way. Knocked off balance, she fell to the wooden platform.
Over his shoulder, Father shouted an order at us all.
“Protect your father. Protect the King. Do whatever you must so that I survive.”
Oddly, his command felt different. Weaker somehow than any he’d ever issued to me.
Devoid of Compelling glamour.
Pharis laughed again. What was happening?
Searing heat behind me caused me to whip back around toward the front of the platform where the dragon had just completed a fly-by and was now swooping down over the screeching spectators.
They were rushing the exits, climbing over each other in some cases. No doubt many would die from trampling, if not dragonfire.
Raewyn, for now, was still alive.
As the beast had passed, I’d caught a glimpse of her, still wearing the hood, squirming in its grasp.
Once more I loaded the crossbow.
“Stellon, stop,” Pharis ordered, and strangely, I did, though I’d had no intention to.
Wait. Had he gleaned—
A fireball licked the front edges of the platform, making everyone yelp and duck.
When the flames cleared, I saw the dragon flying toward us at high speed. In the back of its open mouth, an orange glow gathered as it prepared to fire again and this time, annihilate the platform.
There was no time to evacuate. One of the guards dove off, preferring to die of a broken neck rather than burn.
Like everyone else around me, I covered my head and hit the floor.
I heard the airy blast, felt the incendiary heat above and around me, and… nothing.
No pain. No heavenly music and ethereal lightness indicating I was in the afterlife either.
Opening my eyes, I raised my head and looked around then down at my hands and arms. My skin was unblistered, my clothing not even singed.
Smoke was everywhere. Crawling through it, I found Mareth lying on the floor with her hands still over her head. She was unburned as well.
The guards who’d chosen to remain with us were also unharmed, though the wood all around us was blackened and smoldering. In spots it burned outright, and the flames were spreading.
“We have to get down from this deathtrap,” I said to Mareth and helped her to her feet.
As we ran for the stairs, I searched for Pharis but could not see him through the smoke.
My father’s personal bodyguard yelled, “The King! Where is the King?”
I looked over the edge of the platform and spotted him.
He’d made it down the stairs to the arena floor—where his smoking corpse now lay.
The golden crown on his head had melted, running in rivulets over his blackened, open-mouthed skull.
“Oh,” Mareth exclaimed and turned her face away, into my chest.
“Don’t look,” I said and followed my own advice as we descended the steps together.
When we reached the ground and got a safe distance from it, Mareth and I both turned back toward the burning platform. Her hands came up to cover her mouth.
“Pharis,” she said.
“I’ll go back for him.”
I ran toward the platform, but before I could reach it, it collapsed, and the flames exploded into an inferno. Throwing up a hand to shield my face from the heat, I backed away.
No one could go into that kind of fire—and no one could come out of it alive.
Pharis.
A distraught voice called his name as well.
“Pharis,” Mareth cried. “Oh gods, did he get out?”
I turned to see her beside me. She had run to try to save him as well. Now we both stood looking at the burning wreckage.
Tearing my eyes away, I searched for him—and for the dragon.
There it was, high in the sky over the arena, flying north. I stretched my hand up as if I might somehow stop it then let it fall impotent to my side.
My legs buckled, sending me to my knees as the world stopped spinning and slowed to a halt.
She was gone. Raewyn was gone.
Mareth’s gaze followed mine, watching the dragon until it disappeared into the clouds.
She turned back to me, tears streaming from her eyes.
“I think… I think Pharis did that.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Before we came out here this morning, he asked to borrow my glamour,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me what for but promised it was for a good cause—a matter of life and death, he said. I gave it to him.”
Reeling from shock, I blinked and thought about it.
“I think I gave him mine as well,” I said. “Just before the dragon appeared, I told him he could take everything I have if he’d save Raewyn’s life somehow. I think he might have gleaned Father’s glamour too.”
“You’re right. I felt a change,” she said.
“So he used my Augmenting glamour to amplify Father’s Compelling glamour and your Animal Communication to control the dragon. Did he ever tell you he was capable of holding so many at once?”
Mareth shook her head. “No. I had no idea.”
We both looked around the decimated arena, nearly emptied of people now.
Dark smoke rose from multiple spots. Even the stone walls were damaged, melted from the devastating heat of dragonfire.
Glancing back toward what was once the royal viewing platform, Mareth wiped tears from her sooty face, leaving black streaks on her cheeks.
“I guess Pharis was willing to die for her too,” she said, “like you were. He literally gave his life—after collecting every power he could to save her.”
But had he saved her?
I looked up toward the sky where Raewyn had vanished. She was literally in the grasp of a dragon, the wildest creature that existed in all the realm.
If my brother had perished in the fire, he was no longer in control of the beast.
Who knew how far it might take her and what it would do to her when it landed? That was if it even took her to the ground. It might just tire of carrying her and drop her on a whim mid-flight.
Raewyn. I had lost her.
Mareth dropped to her knees as well, throwing her arms around me and pressing her face to my chest, weeping over our losses.
It felt as though the dragon’s sharp talons had pierced my chest, ripping my heart free and dropping it from a great height.
Wrapping my arms around my sister’s shaking shoulders, I let my own tears fall.
When we’d both cried ourselves dry, Mareth got to her feet and snuck a wincing glance over at Father’s body, which was no more than a gold-capped skeleton now.
Amid the rubble of the viewing platform and scattered about the arena, there were other remains. Which of them belonged to Pharis?
I stood, my eyes scanning the devastation for another melted crown, half hoping to see one, half hoping not to.
Surely if he’d lived through the bedlam, he’d be standing here with us?
Though we had not parted on good terms, I still grieved for my brother. For the close, loyal relationship we had once shared.
Mareth’s swollen eyes came back to meet mine.
“Stells… you’re King now,” she said.
With a jolt, I realized she was right. No more infinite stalling or interference from Father.
No threat of displacement from Pharis.
No one controlling my every move. I was now my own man.
I was the undisputed King of Avrandar and the Sixlands.
And I couldn’t have been more unhappy.