Page 1 of War Mage (The War Brides of Adrik #4)

Adara

I wait behind a tree, the birds singing sweetly in Undrian Forest. Light dapples through the leaves, the beginning of autumn still warm and welcoming. The day would almost be peaceful if not for the anticipation in my veins and the hate in my heart. The tree that I chopped down with blades of hardened flame lies in the road, blocking the way to the queen’s Garden Manor. The queen’s caravan will have no choice but to stop when they arrive here and, when they do, I will finally have my vengeance.

My eyes close as I hear the past sounds of battle echoing in my ears. The screams as my friends fell under orcish arrows. The gurgling cough of my best friend and occasional lover Cara as I held her dying body in my arms, blood streaming from her mouth, an arrow through her throat. I shake my head violently, attempting to banish the memories, the horrors of war. Scrubbing my trembling hands over my weary face, I grimace. I haven’t been sleeping well since Cara died and the gruesome visions only get worse the longer I go without a proper rest. But I cannot rest. Not yet. Not until someone has paid for her death and the deaths of my colleagues and friends. Only then will I be able to sleep again.

The whinny of a horse breaks into my ghoulish thoughts and I peek around the tree. The caravan is here. At their head is one of the menacing monsters the orcs call warbeasts. It is huge and black, with a giant wolf’s head leading to a scaled body ending in a long spiked lizard’s tail. Atop its gigantic back is an equally intimidating orc with ram's horns on his head and double tusks jutting out his bottom lip. The horns are covered on the bottom with gold and he carries himself with the bearing of a ruler. The orc king. He must be. The thing that clinches his identity for me, however, is the other rider in front of him: a diminutive human woman with a face like a goddess. With a loveliness that is almost painful to witness, she can only be Queen Adalind, the fairy-blessed beauty of Adrik. First married to Yorian, who conscripted me and my brothers and sisters into armed service and now married to the orc king that killed us all.

Whore.

I am not usually so condemning in my language of other women, but this manipulative, self-serving bitch deserves the epithet. To save her own skin, she’s used her fairy blessing to fall into bed, literally, with the orcs. Her pussy must be as magic as her face because the orc king, who was determined to raze the country to the ground, now sits tamed behind her on the beast.

What’s worse, though, is that she has rounded up other innocent human women to push into orcish beds. She couldn’t be satisfied selling herself and Adrik, but these women as well. It’s all anyone is talking about in Adrik. The War Brides they are calling them, the ones whose sacrifice brought an end to the violence with Orik. But I see them for what they truly are: victims of a desperate queen’s ploy to save her own neck.

I hate the queen. And the orc king. I hate them both. I want to watch them char and scream under my flames as I take vengeance for the Mage’s Tower.

The caravan finally comes to a stop at my felled tree.

“Halt!” shouts a blonde female knight. She must be the famed Dame Zera, the sole lady knight in all of Adrik.

“How long until we can clear the road for the caravan?” I hear the queen ask in a voice that sounds like warm crystal. However, the loveliness of her voice only stokes the flames of hate in my heart.

“I do not like this. It seems like a trap,” the orc king grinds out in a gravelly voice, frowning.

That’s my cue. I step out from behind my tree, walking confidently to the center of the road behind my tree. I give a mocking bow.

“Welcome,” I call out sarcastically, “Queen Adalind and King Rognar. To your deaths.”

I have rehearsed the words over and over in my mind for the last several days as I traveled to Undrian Forest and laid in wait. I thought of nothing else but what I would say when I was finally face-to-face with the ones responsible for my anguish. The last words they would ever hear in the Mortal Plane.

My words have the intended effect. Swords and axes ring out as they are unsheathed, the warriors surrounding the monarchs instantly, wary at my threatening words. It doesn’t matter. I have enough mana and rage to fight them all. And all I need is to kill one of them: the most vulnerable of the party. It is my only mission. I raise both my hands, summoning fire from deep in my burning soul to my fingertips, allowing them to grow into huge balls of roaring fire. I hear an uneasy murmur from the warriors. Fire Affinity mages are rare and the most dangerous of all Elemental Magic users. Often short-lived, we can burn ourselves out if we use too much mana at once, our magic taking much of our mana—our souls—as fuel. But I don’t care if I burn out, as long as I take the queen with me. I suppose I’ll be finding the true extent of my mana today.

“Who are you?” demands the queen in a haughty tone, her voice still achingly beautiful. “Why this violence? Can we not resolve this peacefully?”

I scoff, the sound incredulous and angry. Peacefully ? Perhaps she should have thought of that before her last husband caused the deaths of everyone I cared about. “Only those who have not lost everything can speak of peaceful resolution,” I spit out, the fire in my hands growing larger. “ I have lost everything. Your first husband pressed the Mage’s Tower into service in his war, and then your second husband killed us all. And you, Queen Adalind? Did you fight to avenge us? No, your solution was to spread your legs and fuck one of them and then give more women to them to fuck. So I’ll take my own revenge and your death may be just enough to satisfy me!”

On my last word, I send the fireballs spinning out of my hands, hurtling toward the queen.

“Get down!” shouts Dame Zera.

Without flinching, the orc king’s ax flashes out in front of Queen Adalind, cleaving the fire in two and dispersing it harmlessly. Damn their enchanted orc-make blades. That’ll make things trickier. The second fireball is knocked back by Dame Zera, her blade obviously enchanted as well.

“Protect the queen!” she barks. “For Adrik!”

I sneer, pulling more flames from my mana pool. For Adrik? What a laugh. Like this cursed country deserves any loyalty. Without missing a beat, I fling more fire in rapid succession. They spray out over the company and the warriors, both human and orc, must react quickly to guard themselves, dive away, or be burned.

The orc king barks an order that I can’t quite make out and two younger orcs grab the queen, spiriting her to the back of the caravan. Fools . Like I can’t get to her there.

I pull more fire than I ever have from deep within, casting it up into the sky so that it rains down like a hail of inferno. Then Dame Zera is upon me, having leapt over the fallen tree with her horse. She swings her blade in a deadly arc, but I was ready for this eventuality. I open the void and fall through, reopening another rift a mere ten feet away, well away from the knight’s blade. More fire bleeds out of my hands, and I spray a cone of flame at Dame Zera. With expert horsemanship, she pulls her warhorse to the side and blocks the flames with her magic blade. But my flames are intense and even her enchanted sword begins to grow white hot under the fury of my onslaught. Still, she never falters and her free hand goes to her belt, before flinging out a deadly dagger straight for me. I make another rift into the void and tumble inside, barely avoiding the dagger. I snap the rift shut so the deadly implement cannot follow as I open another tear behind Dame Zera and launch myself out, a whip of hardened fire summoning to my hand, coming down to slice into the knight.

Then the orc king is there, guarding the knight’s unprotected back, his ax tearing apart my whip. Little licks of flame fall uselessly to the ground as I scream in rage. I don’t have time for this! More warriors, emboldened by Dame Zera and their king, are surging forward. I can’t let myself get surrounded. I pull more forcefully from my mana pool, almost expecting to burn out, but the fire answers my call and I send a huge ring of fire shooting out from me. Once again the warriors are put on the defensive and I open the void, stepping through. I catch my breath for a moment, but I cannot stay in the void for long or I could end up lost for eternity. Doing some quick calculations in my head, I take five steps forward in the utter blackness, before feeling another rift and opening it. I step through to find myself looking straight at the queen. Perfect .

She isn’t cowering and crying like I thought she would be. Instead, she is pulling runes written in blood out of a satchel. I instantly recognize them as written in ancient Fae, the language of fairies, though I don't know what they say exactly. It only takes me a second to figure out what she’s doing. She must be using the residual fairy magic in her blood, left from receiving her fairy blessing, to do magic. Blood magic is potent, but forbidden. A path of death and pain. It is a way for non-mages to do magic and usually involves human sacrifice. That she can use it with only her own blood shows just how powerful the enchantment in her veins must be.

But I have no time to be impressed as I pull more fire to my hands and say, “I never knew that you used forbidden magics, Queen Adalind. Perhaps you should have been at the front instead of me.”

The queen whirls around, a paper in her hands. Before she can reply, I use the flames in my palms to build a wall of fire that I push toward her, burning everything in its path.

To her credit, she doesn’t freeze in the face of her death. She holds up the paper and yells, “ Layok !”

A word in Fae. If I remember my studies correctly it means “shield.” Fuck . A sparkling barrier of light appears in front of her, pushing back on my wall of flames, which stops in its tracks. I half-growl, half-yell in frustration, before tearing open the void again to teleport behind her to attempt another attack like I did with Dame Zera, but when I try to step through the shield, I am instead expelled out of the void, the shield pushing me out and blocking my rift.

My eyes flick sideways, searching for another path towards my quarry. I’ll have to go around the shield to her left, where she is weakest. But my failed teleportation has cost me precious time. Before I can even attempt to rip open the void again, a blade kisses my throat.

“Got you, witch,” the guttural voice of the orc king grinds into my ear.

I scream again, in rage and frustration. I can’t teleport through an enchanted ax. It’ll cut through my neck if I try to move, even in the void. I have lost because I didn’t know to plan for the queen’s magic.

“This is not the end!” I cry out, letting hate liberally coat my words. “There are others that will take vengeance on you! I will curse you with tragedy from the Nether!”

I don’t really know what I’m saying. My threats are largely empty. Though there are others that will want to kill the king and queen, I’m sure, but there’s no one in particular that I am thinking of. Maybe those nobles who the Mage’s Tower suspected of using blood magic. I doubt that they would be content to just roll over and be ruled by orcs.

But that’s not my problem now. I just want to leave the queen with fear and uncertainty before I go join Cara in the Nether. I reach into the deepest corners of my soul, past the self-made barriers made over long years of study and practice, where I have been commanded never to touch except in the greatest need. There, I feel the core of my flame, no, my soul; and yank on it. I’ll burn myself out and with luck I might explode, taking the king and queen with me. Grinning at the thought, I feel totally unhinged, my skin glowing from within.

The queen, however, doesn’t look even a little worried. Instead, she reaches into her satchel again. Before I can even wonder what she’s doing, she blows a puff of powder in my face.

“Sleep,” she orders grimly. What? What has she done? No! No !

But none of my panicked, protesting thoughts stop the darkness from claiming me.