Page 79 of Crown of the Dunes (The Ballan Desert #2)

I spun around only for horror to paralyze me as I caught sight of Prince Calix at the top of the steps.

Dangling from his hand, scrabbling on her hands and knees, was Keera.

He held her by her hair, hauling her head up to look at the carnage before her, even as blood stained her chin, dribbling over her lips.

Her eyes were glazed over as if in pain, but cleared as she took in the carnage before her.

Another feral shriek split the air as she saw the bloodshed, and she thrashed against Calix.

Despite her weakened state, she nearly overbalanced him.

He kicked her in the side, and she ceased her struggling, but the fire in her eyes only grew hotter.

“Stop, or the queen dies.” He shouted to be heard over the commotion.

The pitch of the battle lessened, letting Keera’s responding shout be heard.

“Keep fighting,” she urged. “Defend Kelvadan.” Her voice was a raspy croak, but I heard it nonetheless.

Still, the fighters around us hesitated. They did not lower their weapons, but the riders of Kelvadan and Prince Calix’s men faced each other in an uncertain standoff.

I took off, cutting through the suspended melee and running toward Calix. He would die where he stood. I would turn him into nothing but a bloodstain on the palace steps. I wouldn’t even need a sword to do it.

I hadn’t noticed Keera’s sword dangling in his other hand until he turned it toward her, resting the point under her chin. I skidded to a stop at the bottom of the short set of stairs leading up to where they stood before the palace doors.

A few short months earlier, I had placed the Champion’s circlet on Keera’s head in that very spot.

“Tell the riders to surrender, and I will give her the antidote,” he demanded.

“Don’t,” she croaked.

Calix cut her off by pulling her head back further, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Fire built in my veins, its heat dancing at my fingertips, but I tamped it down. I had surrendered to save Keera once before, but she was too stubborn to do it to save herself .

“These riders aren’t mine to command,” I shouted at Calix. “They answer to their queen and to their commander, not a prisoner like me.”

“I thought your commander might need more encouragement, since your queen seems intent on dying,” Calix drawled. “So, I made some other arrangements.”

He jerked his head, and two figures emerged from the shadowy passage behind him. Between them slumped a third, head fallen forward as he was dragged into the open, dark braids falling forward to obscure his face—but I recognized the golden beads.

An inhuman shriek of anger split the air just off my shoulder as Aderyn caught sight of Neven.

She took two large strides forward, but I caught her with an arm around her waist as Calix dug Keera’s saber into her neck.

Despite the fiery glint in her eyes, a whimper escaped her that was so quiet, I knew she had tried to stifle it, but it echoed in my head even louder than the chattering voices of the desert.

Neven raised his head, and a shuddering gasp of anger escaped Aderyn as he revealed a split lip and a bruised cheekbone.

“Don’t surrender to them,” he said.

Calix clicked his tongue. “You’re tougher than I expected for a weaver. But what if we make it so you can’t weave?”

The two of Calix’s men holding Neven threw him to the ground. With a nod from their prince, one of them grabbed his wrists, forcing his hands flat on the ground before him.

“No, stop!” Aderyn cried, breaking free of my grasp. She ran to the base of the stairs, and for the first time in my life, I detected fear in her icy eyes.

“Aderyn, don’t.” Neven looked up, meeting her eyes. His eyes were wet, and his voice trembled, but he soldiered on. “Don’t surrender this city to him.”

Then, the other man who had been holding Neven brought the hilt of his saber down on the back of Neven’s hand with enough force to sever it if he had used the blade.

The wet crunch of bones shattering was drowned out in a split second by Neven’s howl of pain.

A wave of nausea rolled over me as I took in the sight of his crushed hand—the end of several jagged bones poking through torn skin.

I had inflicted worse injuries in my day, but never on an unarmed man. Never on one who hadn’t raised a blade against me.

“Stop,” Aderyn sobbed. She held up her arms and let her sickle blades—wet with blood—fall to the ground with the clatter. “Riders, drop your weapons. We surrender this city to you.”

The sound of metal against stone echoed through the courtyard as the assembled riders followed her commands. Calix nodded toward the men who held Neven. They let him go, and he crumpled into a heap on the ground, clutching his mangled hand to his chest.

Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw Calix’s men gathering up the riders’ dropped weapons and forcing them to their knees with their hands behind their heads.

One of them kicked a rider in the back, and he tipped forward, hitting his face against the stone ground with a pained grunt and the wet crunch of a breaking nose.

Unarmed and surrendered, the riders were now at the mercy of Calix’s men.

Aderyn rushed up the stairs and scooped Neven up in her arms, a potent mix of anguish and rage written on her face. I took a few large steps forward, but I had still not dropped my broken sword. I would not stop braying for blood until Keera was safe.

“The antidote,” I hissed. “We upheld our end of the bargain. Now heal her.”

“Oh, but the city isn’t all I want. I’ll give you the weaver in exchange for Kelvadan’s surrender, but I’m after something more powerful.”

My heart rose into my throat, and the weight of the broken gemstone tucked into my sash suddenly increased the second before he said it.

“The Heart of the Desert.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but I couldn’t help the way my face spasmed. After a decade of wearing a mask, I did not have the practice schooling my face that an experienced diplomat would. He could read me easily .

“But you’ve talked about it before. In your letters. You said you and Keera would be able to retrieve it together,” he drawled.

My brain skidded to a halt at his words, struggling to piece together the reality that had been violently shattered in a matter of hours, like broken shards of pottery that wouldn’t quite fit.

“You intercepted the letters,” Keera gasped, catching on before me. Her voice was a whispered rasp.

Calix smiled, and despite the blood on his hands and Neven’s continued whimpering in the background, it was not a cold, calculating smile—it was the warm, open smile he had worn during all his manipulations. Its genuineness was even more unsettling than if it had been fabricated.

“When I was out sending my eagle to my father, I noticed one particular falcon that kept fluttering around the castle. Birds tend to like me, so I had no issue persuading it to give me its message,” he said.

“At first, I thought I was simply disrupting Kelvadan’s chances for peace by sending the messages back.

After all, a city at war would be more willing to make a deal that gave me a foothold of power in the desert.

But then I read of the Heart, and I knew I had my answer.

“See, the ocean that connects the islands of Viltov has magic too, but there are few left who believe in it, and our armies rely on machines of war these days. But I have sailed the seas long enough to know there is a power that lurks in her depths—long enough to believe there is a magic in the earth here as well. The power of the ocean is fickle and dangerous, but if I could acquire this Heart—a power I could hold in the palm of my hand? Viltov could conquer Doran once and for all.”

“The Heart of the Desert would not respond to one who didn’t love her—who didn’t have her soul,” Keera snarled, fierceness imbuing her words despite the blood that bubbled on her lips. “You can’t even ride a horse.”

But the truth currently burned a hole in my pocket. We had found the Heart, but its power was gone. The inexorable call of power I had felt behind the doors to Alyx’s tomb was nowhere to be found, the lumps in my pocket nothing more than inert gemstones .

I did not know if I could restore the Heart. I had no idea how to fix it. But I could still save Keera.

Slowly, I reached into my sash, and my fingers closed around the hard planes of the Heart. Calix’s eyebrows rose in interest while Keera’s face fell in despair as I pulled forth the crimson gem.

I opened my fingers to reveal one stone in my open palm. The way the remaining sun, all but disappeared behind the mountains, made it glimmer and glow like fire. It gave me hope that Calix would know nothing was amiss.

The stone was cleaved so neatly in two that it might have been done by a gem smith, and I kept the long, flat side against my palm, to disguise the fact that this was just one half of a whole.

Calix clearly could not feel the power of the desert, and he would not know that this piece of red crystal didn’t spark with the life inherent in every stone and creature of this land.

Keera whimpered. “Don’t give it to him. You have to restore it. There’s still hope.”

I closed my fingers around the gem, but I refused to look at her. She hadn’t given away that this did not hold the power Calix sought, but the pleading in her tone was almost enough to make me break. Keera still had faith that I could somehow set this right—that the stone could be healed.

That endless hope was what had kept her alive for a decade of solitude. But without her by my side, I would have none of that hope.

“I will give you the Heart if you give her the antidote,” I bargained.

Calix’s lips twisted up in satisfaction. Now it was his turn to reach into the pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a small green vial.

“A heart for a heart,” he murmured.

I nodded my agreement.

Using his grip in Keera’s hair, he hauled her to her feet. I gritted my teeth at the way she cried out in pain. Her legs trembled as they struggled to hold her, clearly only staying upright due to Calix’s grip.

The tether at the base of my skull lurched, and I tried to grasp onto it, finding it slippery with pain and fear.

I tried to find any sense of reassurance to push toward her in the tumult of my own magic, to tell her it would soon be over.

Nothing seemed to stick though, as a strange sense of cold resolve pulsed toward me.

Calix used his thumb to pop the small cork from the vial and held it up as if in a toast.

“Here’s to you, former Queen of Kelvadan.”