Page 92 of Shadow Throne King
“Ifear your death,” I said, unable to deny it.
Tallu leaned forward, kissing me so fiercely that his teeth nearly split my lip, his desire dragging me down with him. He wanted me, but his kiss said he couldn’t live without me. It was a desire, apromiseI couldn’t bear because I knew its mirror image.
Tallu pulled back, his eyes watching me, the russet nearly black in the dim light.
“Animalia can be killed. My great-grandfather taught us so. Together, we will find him, and together, we will kill him.” Tallu leaned forward, and I reached up to catch his hand in mine, feeling his smooth palm, the skin callused by years of war and softened by wealth beyond imagining.
I grinned in relief, feeling it shiver up my skin, leaving goose bumps in its wake. I was an assassin. I worked alone. I needed nothing, and I had been sent to kill the most powerful man on the continent.
And Tallu had offered me a way out. Tallu had offered his love like the gift that it was.
“How do you propose to kill an animalia?” Vostop asked. He huffed a loud breath. “My cousin, the strongest of us, fell to this creature, and you think that in its territory, inourhome, you can manage to kill it?”
“My line has a history of killing animalia,” Tallu said, his gaze sparking cold when he turned to look at Vostop. He stalkedacross the room, and I was behind him, a shadow, his assassin. “Do you doubt me?”
“Tallu,” Koque said quietly. “You told me that you wanted to make sure that Hallu was safe. You cannot abandon us now.”
“If we do not survive, do you think he is any safer? Centipede will ensure he is infected with another of those things,” I said. “If we do not survive the night, go north. My mother in the Northern Kingdom will take you in.”
“She will?” Iradîo muttered under her breath in Northern. Koque’s eyes found her, and Iradîo straightened. In Imperial, she said, “Queen Opûla is a strategist. She will see the benefit in offering you sanctuary.”
“So we trade one foreign ruler for another?” Koque’s chin rose, her gaze cold as she glared at Tallu. “She’ll demand the same thing as Inor—control of the Imperium.”
“Quite the opposite,” Iradîo said, glancing at me.
Koque’s eyes swung to me, and I was reminded again that she was as sharp as Tallu, even if her presence didn’t flare quite as brightly.
“My mother will take you in to keep you off the game board. She has no interest in the Imperium.” Other than to see it burn, I admitted to myself. “But she also does not want to tip the balance in favor of one general over the other. She will keep Hallu in order to not give one side an irreplaceable advantage. She has no interest in murdering children, so he will be safe along with both of your siblings.”
“Seka and Piivu live?” Koque asked, looking between me and Iradîo.
“My mother has given them sanctuary,” I said.
Koque nodded tightly, but her options were limited. Her only family was in the North already; anyone else in the Imperium would only try to use her to their own advantage. She was well-loved as the only woman whom Millu ever cleaved to, but nowthat Tallu was on the throne, I knew many would question her ability to wield the same power.
The cave darkened, the lantern in Vostop’s hand guttering. The air around us seemed thinner, the act of breathing turning painful. I waited, watching Koque, knowing what it was like to have no options.
“If you do not survive killing a legend,” Koque said, her voice as cold as the air around us, “we will go north.”
Tallu nodded.
“How do you plan to get to the creature?” Vostop asked. “I will not lead you. My loyalty is to Empress Koque, and I will not participate in this. I have watched my cousin go mad, kill our own people, take in an imperial general who experiments on them and turns them into monsters. If you plan to throw your lives away fighting a horror that elders sing stories of, that is your own lives you risk. I will not endanger Koque or her son on such a venture.”
The whispers under my skin grew more intense at his words.How dare he question? How dare he challenge? How dare he seek to defend anything other than Tallu?
The whispers pulled me like a compass, shaking my bones, my blood bubbling with rage. I could hear the words in my teeth, a murmur of chaos and destruction. Centipede didn’t want to destroy the world because of what the One Dragon had done to him. The One Dragon had dropped a mountain on himbecausehe wanted to destroy the world.
He saw beauty in the destruction; he saw holiness in it. And when the world was gone, when he had controlled and consumed and destroyed, he would enjoy the fruits of annihilation.
Sharing Centipede’s consciousness was painful, a knife I wore under my skin, and I wondered how Asahi had dealt with it for so long. The first time we had been in the mountains, Ihad been struck by their beauty. This morning, all I saw was the potential for chaos, the potential for the mountain to come crumbling down on top of us.
Now, with only a guttering lantern to fend off the darkness, and shadows twisting every barely glimpsed object into a monstrous weapon or a dangerous horror, I saw them as something else entirely. This was the lair of the animalia.
The first time I had been bitten by a centipede, back at the Mountainside Palace, I hadn’t felt anything. My body had protected me from whatever venom had become a living creature inside Asahi.
This time, I had no such grace. I could feel it under my skin, small feet crawling up my bones, a mind rubbing against my own, whispering, always whispering.
I wanted to scream, to press my hands to my ears and huddle down, because what Centipede whispered of was impossibly terrible.