Page 14

CHAPTER XIII

The sun bled, its wounds swathed in the black gauze of smoke-stained skies. Nemed lifted the visor of his helmet, too satisfied to acknowledge the burning of his eyes or the weakness of his body as he trudged up the hill of the main thoroughfare.

Hours before, Tahsman was glittering. A copper chalice settled at the center of the southern wastelands with a singing, laughing, merry heart of a kingdom at its center. Winds ran dry and hot, brushing the branches of skeletal, spindly trees and the cracked earth. They blew from the north, scraping up the sides of Tahsman’s sparkling gates and into the kingdom itself, billowing below the wings of Aos Sí as they darted between the corridors of their home. Bridges, walkways, and towers stretched and pulled like hardened honey or melted sugars—amber and trapping the light of the sun. All of which fell at the knee to the fire hand.

Nemed swallowed wystria daily, curled before the hearth like an incubus atop a body. The fire hand spread the scull draiocht from knight to knight. Their eyes lit like hot coals, the corners of their lips curled with smoke and the heat of the Lady’s wildfire inside. They spat, they screamed, they spoke, and fire bred quickly. It grew and multiplied as if alive. As if the wystria, nestled inside the chasm of mortal man’s heart was as hungry for Aos Sí’s destruction as Nemed himself. This was the nature of shadow magic: it ate from the will of its master.

Nemed sucked in a breath, relishing the taste of the Lady’s dark magic. It growled inside his gut, stuck to his insides like tar, and clawed at his throat to be released. He bit down on its overzealous whims, finding strange satisfaction in harnessing such powers. But none of that was as fulfilling as what the wystria did.

The Aos Sí screamed for their lives like a symphony of birds crushed slowly. Their whimpering dimmed to muffled cries within the first hour and by the fifth, only the crackling of the flames popped and snapped atop piles of Aos Sí bones. This was conquest. This was war. This was power, Nemed realized, as he tickled the wystria’s dark desires between his teeth with his tongue.

The fire hand walked forward, taking in the image of his triumph—ichor crunching beneath the iron soles of his boots. He dragged his left leg, his limp less noticeable with the strength of the wystria inside him. And had it not been for the mortal knight, dead atop the cobbles, Nemed would’ve explored every death-marked alley, every blood-soaked chamber, and every splintered bone to indulge his victory—his fae genocide. Instead, he stopped short and knelt beside his knight.

The man had been dead for some time, a gem-encrusted fae spear impaling his chest. He was young, perhaps not even past his fourth decade with a blade still firmly clutched in his right hand. Nemed knelt beside him, brushing back hair stuck to his face by both blood and sweat.

The fire hand had ventured to Tahsman with only a handful of men. Aisling had destroyed most mortal fleets, but it’d been the w ystria that offered humankind power over the Aos Sí at long last. The ability to venture into the feywilds and their kingdoms one by one and reclaim all that was rightfully theirs despite their small numbers. And so, Nemed had done just that: Tahsman was the third Aos Sí kingdom the mortals had taken, pillaged, ravaged, and destroyed in every violent capacity war allowed.

The wystria thrashed inside Nemed’s mouth, eager for release. He clenched his jaw but thought better of it, his hand hesitating on the knight’s forehead. Slowly, he opened his mouth and let the wystria slip off his tongue. It fell from his mouth like a floating lantern, falling gradually toward the knight. It hesitated briefly, before diving down.

The wystria nestled into the cavity of the knight’s mouth. It burned more brightly, biting chunks from Nemed’s soul to complete its work. The fire hand winced—a combination of pain and pleasure rattling through his body each time the scull draiocht took what it was owed.

The knight’s eyes opened, but they burned not with human life, only with the will of shadowed magic—Nemed’s scull draiocht and the bits of his soul it’d eaten.

The knight rose to his feet, pulling the spear from his chest with a slushy release. He stood dead but tall, waiting on Nemed’s signal to continue the destruction they’d already wrought over Tahsman. Starn’s raven, a letter in its beak, landed on a statue lithely.