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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: FURY
The Lord hath fire and fury at his beck,
but worry not ye on Avalon's path,
the Sacred Twins shall hold the storm in check,
and righteousness enshroud you safe from wrath…
but woe to he who blemishes his soul
and keeps not shaitan down in his dark hole.
-The Northstar Bible, Canto 35:20
Thea enlisted the help of two big men to help her with the barrel, and even so the three of them had trouble loading it onto the cart. As far as she was concerned, the bigger the better - a bigger barrel meant a bigger explosion. Her only concern was that it was too big, that Cano wouldn't be able to toss it into the sinkhole to stymie the advance of Bestel Myrdon's forces.
She needn't have worried. As they rushed the cart to the gap, Thea heard the sounds of combat. You could hardly call it combat, really - it was Cano killing people. After rushing down into the sinkhole and then climbing its debris-strewn slope, the enemy forces were disoriented and winded by the time they arrived at the breach in the fortress wall, where Cano was waiting. As Thea arrived, Myrdon had just decided to send some of his cavalry in, perhaps hoping the horses would have better luck with the slope. Cano tossed the man off the horse for the Soenmen to deal with and then lifted the terrified, whinnying horse, tossing it down the sinkhole slope into the other charging horsemen. Barrels weren't going to be a problem.
"Cano! Barrel!" Thea shouted.
He struck another man down and then turned to them, hefting the barrel as easily as Thea might a parcel of flour. He lifted it overhead to toss it, readied… and stumbled, his shoulders sagging. The barrel slipped from his hands and rolled to the side, its contents leaking out into the soil. What had just happened?
Thea gasped. The men around her were dying, blisters and boils blooming across their skin, coughing up blood, festering before her very eyes. Suddenly, the air was full of buzzing flies, and Thea caught a glimpse of a white-clad woman strolling across the lip of the sinkhole unchallenged: Myrdon's plague-bride, Aiba. She was at once sublimely beautiful, moreso even than Thea, and the most horrible and putrescent being that she'd ever laid eyes upon. Cano coughed up blood.
"Elixir!" Thea shouted to anybody who'd hear her. "Everybody! Take your elixir!"
Cano coughed up blood, sores spreading to his face and chest. Thea pulled his arm across her shoulder and dragged him back from the gap, searching her own pouch for a phial of elixir… somehow, she'd overlooked that.
"Elixir! Who has elixir?"
Nobody volunteered, but a woman dropped dead next to them. She wouldn't need hers. Thea rifled through the woman's skirt pockets, grabbed the little cork-stoppered phial, and forced its contents down Cano's throat. He muttered and, when Thea brought her ear closer, muttered again:
"…tastes awful," he said.
"That's because it's strong, you idiot!" Thea laughed. He was already improving - it was fast-acting stuff. "Stay back until you're well enough to fight, ok?"
"Where's my sword?" he mumbled.
Thea pointed back toward the wall, where shouting and combat were ringing out in earnest. "Back there, I'd wager. Find something else."
Thea rushed back toward the breach, where dozens of Myrdon's soldiers were now muscling through. Most of the archers along the wall had been killed or incapacitated by Aiba, and the Nortsair soldiers granted resistance by Larian's elixir were just now rushing the breach to stem the flow. Thea did her part, too, using her energy to dispatch a dozen of the foremost enemy soldiers in an instant. Little sparkling lines radiated out from her - zip, zip, zap, and the men collapsed. That gave Nortsair's guards a few seconds to form up, but another dozen enemy soldiers swarmed in to replace their fallen comrades and Thea had precious little energy left. Her combat prowess would have to do until she had a chance to recharge.
She pushed past the regrouping soldiers and into the front line, where melee was breaking out. And soon her axe was out and singing. She cut a man down, cut another with a burbling of blood, and then kicked a third one hard enough that he stumbled back into his allies. Thea and a pair of guards fell savage upon the stunned men, and soon found themselves behind enemy lines. She spotted Erodor Westman among the melee, dispatching soldiers with savage slashes. He was wounded in a dozen places, but none of those wounds were particularly grievous.
"Captain! Form up and retreat!" Thea shouted.
The captain noticed her and waded through bodies and wounded men to get to Thea's spot. He raised his sword and, with two blindingly fast slashes, dispatched the guards to either side of her. Thea gasped.
"This battle cannot be won," he said, his eyes calm and calculating. "If I take you to Lord Myrdon, dead or alive… he'll have no choice but to take me back."
+++++
Thea wasn't going to be taken by Captain Westman alive, and she was going to give him a fight if he planned on killing her. But he was nearly as fast as her, highly skilled, and far stronger. To be fair, Thea was no slouch with an axe - a normal and unarmored man would have died several times over from the blows she landed, and even armored would have been thrown off balance and winded. No such luck with the captain. And only her armor saved her when he thrust forward, the tip glancing across her breastplate and instead skewering the man to Thea's left.
That gave her enough time to dodge the next blow and bring her axe around, landing a blow right in the flesh of his leg. To her surprise, though, the captain didn't fall. Instead, he grasped her wrist, pried it away from her own weapon, and shoved her backward hard enough to send Thea tumbling. The captain advanced on her, his dweisteel sword in one hand and Thea's axe in the other.
"Hold her! Hold her down!" the captain bellowed, and grasping hands reached out to hold her… one man, two men… Thea charred their hearts with arcs of power. But she couldn't kill them all. She cried out as her reserve of energy sputtered. Strong arms held her in place, and the captain raised her own axe for the killing blow.
But the killing blow didn't come. Suddenly, all the men about her screamed like stuck pigs. An inferno engulfed Thea, but it didn't burn her - in fact, the warmth was soothing. It didn't take much deduction to guess who was responsible for that.
"Matthias!" Thea searched about for him, and searched about for Erodor, for she doubted a simple fire would do much to stop him.
Sure enough, the captain stormed through the inferno wall, flames licking off his armor and singeing his hair. Matthias leapt in from the side, knocking the captain to the ground and raining blows down with flaming fists. His eyes burned with literal fiery rage and the coals at the end of his dreadlocks glowed white-hot. His blows opened bruises and blisters on the captain's face, but they didn't kill him. The captain bucked once and then once again, throwing Matthias off with a mighty spasm before rolling to a crouch. Thea had to remind herself: in combat this man was probably Cano's equal, and what he lacked in supernaturally perfect technique he made up for in savagery. She circled around to divide his attention, recovering the captain's dweisteel sword for herself. She tested it out against a trio of heavily armored men with the misfortune of stumbling through the flame… the sword was sharp. Their steel bands split like flimsy fabric before its power, the men gravely wounded in that instant. Then Thea brought the point around to attack the captain.
He rushed her before she could, grabbing the sword and using his momentum to swing Thea between Matthias and himself. He struggled against Thea for a moment, far stronger than her but not quite able to reclaim his sword with his attention divided thus. Thea released the sword in an instant and dropped her body down, rolling the captain's body over hers and toward Matthias. One of them cried out. The other started screaming…
Thea leapt to her feet and scrambled to find a weapon - a dropped longsword of decent mace. She turned and gasped - Matthias was on top of the captain, his large frame mounting the captain's torso, with the dweisteel blade lodged deep within his torso. His hands were white with fire, pressing into the captain's eyes as the man kicked and struggled against him. Thea shot in with her sword and speared the man's throat, his screams becoming hisses and gurgling before he made a final spasm and stopped kicking.
"Matthias… oh gods…" Thea dropped her blade and turned her attention to Matthias.
The flames raging all about them were dying… the flames in his hands, his hair, his eyes… all were fading. She went to pull the sword from him - it was lodged deep in his belly, right through the liver. He brought his hand up to stop her.
"No…" he gasped. "It's all that's keeping me together…" he winced. "Thea… I…"
"No," Thea sobbed. "No, no, no! I'll get Larian. She'll be able to help…"
"She won't," Matthias chuckled. "Not even her." In just a minute, his skin had grown ashen, his eyes had lost their shine. He faltered and Thea caught him, cradling his head in her lap.
"You can't die… I love you," she said. She felt weak and helpless in that moment - the powers of a goddess and nothing she could do for her lover. She kissed him on the lips, ran her fingers through his thick locks. "Don't leave me…"
"I'll always be with you… I'll always love you," Matthias gasped. His eyes were closing. "P-" he coughed up blood. "Promise me…"
"Yes… yes, anything." Thea was sobbing. She clenched her jaw and willed the tears to stop. "Anything… please don't die."
"Look after the girls…"
Thea nodded. Of course she'd look after the girls. Both of them would. She wasn't going to let him die… only, now it was too late. He looked into her eyes and smiled one last time before sighing out a final breath and going slack. In that moment, Thea felt the flame of life leave him, and it sparked its own fire within her: fury. Bestel Myrdon had just fucked with the wrong goddess.
+++++
Death and carnage surrounded her, guards and civilians alike fighting against Myrdon's forces. Already, hundreds were dead on both sides, but the invaders had far more expendable fighters than the defenders did. Erodor Westman had been right: the battle was unwinnable. Rather, it was unwinnable without some serious scion help. Thea didn't know if she fit the bill, but she was probably angrier than she'd ever been, and she was willing to test it out.
With tears streaming down her face and the late captain's dweisteel blade in hand, she cut her way toward the thickest fighting, the supernaturally-sharp steel slicing through metal, leather, and flesh. And each time she dispatched one of Myrdon's men, she felt a little pulse of power. Whether that was simply something she'd never noticed before, or a new power, or an effect of the magical weapon she wielded, Thea couldn't say. All she knew was that each successive death replenished her reserves a bit more, and soon the sword and her starry crown were glowing and tiny stars winked into the space around her one after another. She strode across the battlefield, some fighters fleeing in terror, some prostrating themselves before her, and others gathering the courage to engage her, ultimately adding to her power.
"Myrdon, you bastard! Fight me!" Thea shouted, and her voice projected with a terrible power, reverberating across the battlefield. "Enough death! Face me, coward, and let's end this!"
Thea looked around for him… she wasn't quite sure who she was looking for. The last time she'd seen him, neither she nor Myrdon had yet completed their transformations. So Thea started following the bodies - the diseased and pox-ravaged dead, some of them from the attacker's side, but most of Nortsair's defenders. The dismembered and disemboweled were numerous, too, some of them fighters on the same side still gripped in combat. It seemed that Myrdon's powers could be a bit indiscriminate at close range… and, Thea suspected, that didn't particularly bother him. He was utterly insane.
She vaulted over a barricade set across the central avenue and killed three of Myrdon's men in rapid succession, one of them an officer in heavy plate mail that tore before her sword like tissue paper. And, suddenly, the air was buzzing - literally buzzing. Thea found herself surrounded by a cloud of flies, zipping around like a maelstrom, their million wings thrumming through the air, but none of them quite touching her. All around Thea, men and women were collapsing, their skin festering and putrefying, their flowing flesh rife with maggots and devoured by biting flies.
"Enough, I said!" Thea shouted. "Fight me now, while there's still something worth winning… or…"
"We can't put an end to the fighting yet," Aiba said. "I rather enjoy the song of men dying… and one day, I think, I'll kill them all."
The cloud of flies coalesced, and there she stood, Bestel Myrdon's bride. Thea saw her twice, as she always did: clad in shimmering white, golden-haired, and pale eyed, the most beautiful woman that Thea had ever beheld… and clad in stinking rags, sagging, hunch-backed, with patchy hair and warts and open boils, one of the most horrible people, too. Thea wondered which vision of the woman was true and considered that they both might be: a goddess of opposites, of beauty and corruption. That made sense - Astrilla was the same sort of goddess, a harbinger of both life and its annihilation.
Thea turned to face Aiba fully, her penumbra of stars intersecting with the halo of flies surrounding the other scion. Whenever a fly collided with a star, it would spiral down in a little flash of flame, but there were so many flies that it might be hours before Astrilla's stars quenched the pestilential cloud.
"Fetch your master, and I may yet show you mercy," Thea said.
Aiba laughed - a golden, melodic titter and a phlegmy cackle. "I have no master. I serve Bestel at my leisure, not his. And I care not whether he wants you as a spoil of war. I'll see your perfect skin blister and peel, see your taut belly bleeding and bloated, your diseased miscarriage shall make you mother of misery, and as your eyes wither into sightless husks, you shall know that Ibbal is the goddess of death and Astrilla is but a daft old sky-gazer."
Aiba opened her mouth and a cloud of pestilence shot out. Thea instinctively dodged it, and she charged at the woman, grappling with her for a moment, her stomach churning from the sickly scent of decay atop a heady and nuanced perfume. She gripped Aiba's throat and lifted her off the ground, the enemy scion's weight insubstantial in her hand. And, as she prepared to skewer her corpulent (and very not-corpulent) belly, Aiba smiled and gripped Thea's wrist.
"All this corruption is yours," she hissed through pearly, pitted teeth.
Thea gasped and dropped Aiba, stumbling back a step. Some horrible, dark energy filled her body, shooting through her blood and burning across her skin. Thea could feel it clashing with her own energy, the corruptive forces ebbing her own reserves away, eating her from within like a cancer. Her skin flaked and erupted with sores. Her hair was falling out in clumps… her heartbeat became erratic… and she felt the corruption reach her very core, the nexus of Thea's power deep within her womb. And then it turned. Thea stood tall as the power washed back out of her, reclaiming the corruption, amplifying its power, and blasting Aiba with a cleansing light, blasting the cloud of flies and the pestilential crone at its center away, leaving only a very ordinary-looking woman behind - fifty-ish, a bit chubby, and neither beautiful nor ghastly.
"I… I don’t understand," she said.
"No, I suppose not," Thea said, and with a swift stroke, she relieved Aiba of her head.
+++++
Thea's purifying blast had done quite a bit of good - for many yards around, those who'd been stricken by Aiba were restored to health - soldiers on both sides, true, but mostly fighters of Nortsair… and most of Myrdon's recovered forces switched sides. They didn't care to fight for a lord willing to have them horribly killed by 'friendly' magic. The dead, unfortunately, stayed dead… Thea could do little for them. She swept the field of battle, searching for Bestel Myrdon.
"He's up there," Cano said, fully recovered and bristling with anger.
He gestured up to the ramparts, where some powerful detachment had seized control of the remaining fortress wall, raising the gate for Myrdon's army to enter without crossing the rubble- and body-strewn sinkhole. From there, Thea could see a large, dark-armored man, raven-black hair and icy blue eyes. He bore more than a passing resemblance to Thea - they might have been siblings. But this was no sibling of hers. It was Bestel Myrdon, and he'd just witnessed what had transpired between Thea and Aiba, and he looked none too pleased. Well and good - Thea had her own displeasure to voice.
"Shall we?" Cano asked. He hefted a huge war hammer and started toward the ramparts.
They cleared the foe before them like wheat felled by the scythe. Thea felt a thrumming power within herself, something deep and frightening that spurred her to action. Astrilla's power within her was building to a head, the energy leaping off her unbidden to slay the foes her sword didn't have a chance to dispatch. It was a bit frightening - she felt nothing of their deaths, only the purifying flame of anger and a sense of righteous fury. She cut another man down… three… seven… they were nothing to her. Even their blood couldn't touch her, the little dribs and spatters sliding right off her armor, leaving Thea utterly uncorrupted. And Cano was in fine form, too, swinging his hammer so mightily that it crushed right through armor, putting any man who stood in its path to absolute ruin, and their blades and arrows whizzed past him, each subtle motion of his body doing exactly enough to avoid harm.
They closed the distance to the ramparts, the hundreds of men between Thea and Myrdon utterly incapable of presenting anything beyond a momentary obstacle. Strangely, this, too, angered her: she felt nothing for the death of these men, but the notion that so many lives would be sacrificed simply to slow her progress was offensive. Did the poor fools not know what folly it was to oppose Astrilla? Or Thea, for that matter… the essence of the divine was flooding her, and she felt her own mind unifying with that of her patron goddess, the two of them becoming one being. They reached the gate house and prepared to ascend to the ramparts when a huge and heavily-tattooed man leapt from above, his massive battle axe clanging against Cano's hammer.
"Soenim was already denied your blood once, child. I'll not let it happen again," the man said. His whole body was runed: his skin, his teeth… they even glowed in his eyes. It was the scion of the war god Soenim, huge and powerful.
"I welcome your challenge," Cano said. "I hope you don't require me exhausted and cast in chains like last time… there is no glory in such victory."
"Impudence!" Soenim's scion made another massive swing with his axe, and Cano drew him away from the stairway, giving Thea her window to proceed without him.
There were more enemy soldiers along the tower stairs, at least a dozen of them charging down to intercept her. But the stairwell was dazzling with the light of Thea's aura, stunning the men - and one or two women in Eastern garb - as they charged, and not one of them laid a hand or blade upon her. They barely slowed her as they died. At the top of the tower, she blasted the reinforced door with a jolt of energy, tossing a handful of enemy guards right off the ramparts in the process. And there, at the top of the ramparts, Bestel Myrdon waited for her, a sneering smile upon his face.
"At one time, I'd hoped to make you my bride," Myrdon said. "But now I know that so wild a creature cannot be tamed."
"I am not a creature," Thea spat. "I am a human woman… and you are a monster."
Thea hated that his face was almost as handsome as hers was beautiful - far too fair a countenance for such an ugly soul. He chuckled. "A human woman? You aren't really either, are you?"
"Gods damn you. Why? Why have you done this?"
Myrdon shrugged. "Because I can. It is the role of the strong to rule the weak - so has it been since the birthing of the world. And the weak are born to serve. And if they will not? I'll make an example of Nortsair… for defying me, I'll put everything that breathes to the sword. I'll pull this damn fortress apart one stone at a time. And then I'll march back to your shithole of a village and defile it until nothing grows for a thousand years. What do you think of that?"
"I'm going to bury you," Thea said. "And nobody will find you, not in a million million years."
With that, she swung her sword at him. At the last instant, he brought his own up to parry, an onyx-black weapon that trembled with power. They traded blows back and forth, lightning-fast strikes far too rapid and precise for any mortal to make. And the impact of their blades rang out across the battlefield, the power of those blows cracking stone and crumbling the precipice of the battlements. Thea struck at Myrdon and he dodged to the side… and one of his men tried to intercede and was neatly cut in half by her blade. Then Myrdon brought his own blade down, and she sidestepped it, letting the thing sink into the stone as if it were semi-soft clay. Thea's aura of stars intermingled with Myrdon's own inky black miasma, forming a nebula of unthinkable power.
Myrdon swung down again, and this time, Thea was ready when his sword sunk into the stone. She cut at his arm, slicing through his nigh-impenetrable armor, but not by much. He cried out and released his grip on his sword, and Thea brought her blade back for another attack. But Myrdon gripped her wrist, and they struggled against one another. And, while Thea was immensely powerful in that moment, Myrdon was larger and proportionally just as strong. He smiled cruelly and pushed Thea back until she balanced precariously over the crumbling edge of the fortress wall. Below, she could see Cano and Soenim trading savage blows, a landscape of mangled bodies about them, the ground palpably shaking with the force of each strike.
"All of your friends will die," Myrdon hissed in her ear. "Watch!"
Something dark flashed in his pale eyes, and a hundred crazed warriors overcame their very sensible fear of the carnage between Cano and Soenim's scion. They rushed Cano, half of them meeting quick and grisly ends, and the other half managing to latch onto Cano or swing with their axes and blades. It would have felled any normal man, but Cano was merely slowed - but that was all Soenim's man needed to take advantage. His axe struck down, first striking Cano's wrist and disarming him (though, however improbably, not cutting the hand clean off). Then he wound back for the killing blow, with Cano too encumbered to reasonably dodge.
"Cano!" Thea shouted.
In that instant, she knew that Myrdon would win, that the city was lost, that everybody she'd ever known or cared about was about to suffer a horrible death. And then she heard the Horn of Sturmgard.
+++++
At first, Thea thought it was some rallying call for Myrdon's forces, that they were about to form ranks and storm on the rest of the cowering city. Dozens of invaders were dashing through the gates, and it took Thea a moment to recognize that they were fleeing in terror from something. Before Soenim's scion could make his killing strike, a brilliant bolt of lightning flashed from the sky and struck him right in the chest, stunning him and instantly killing all the men holding Cano back. And an instant later, a hundred riders streamed through the Lord's Gate, their formation lead by an electric-haired woman in brilliant armor.
The riders cut the fleeing men down and formed a wedge, behind which hundreds of Soenmen warriors streamed into Nortsair and spread out, quickly dispatching Myrdon's nearby forces. Cano and Soenim's scion they let be - that was clearly a vendetta fight, and even if Cano was an ally, it was not their place to intervene. Thea felt Myrdon's grip slacken for a moment and she pulled herself free, readying her sword to strike. But Myrdon only grinned at her.
"Soenmen," he said. "Kill one a-"
He didn't get the chance to finish his command. Thea cut his throat with a flick of her blade, watching on as blood dribbled out and he struggled to make a sound. She then kicked his legs out from under him and stood over his supine and gasping body.
"These lands are under my protection, and you are hereby banished," Thea said.
She raised the dweisteel sword and ran it through Myrdon's heart, piercing right through the obsidian gleam of his supernatural armor and then plunging through the stone of the ramparts, pushing the sword to its very hilt. Myrdon's mouth opened and closed a few times like a fish mindlessly gulping in water. Though he could no longer speak, Thea could read his lips as Bestel Myrdon mouthed: but he promised me.
What Myrdon's patron god had promised him, Thea never discovered. His eyes rolled back, his body went slack, and Thea pulled her sword from his dead body. The tide of the battle had turned, but there was fighting yet to do.
Thea leapt from the ramparts, barely feeling the impact of the earth underfoot, and sprinted to mount an unclaimed horse - presumably, its rider had been dismounted. The steed's wild eyes calmed under her guidance, and she galloped forward to join the foremost part of the wedge, where the thickest fighting was happening. She killed a squad of enemy mercenaries attempting to outflank Rorik's cavalry with a few short jolts of energy and then pushed ahead into the front lines, finding herself beside a brilliantly blue-haired amazon of a woman in gleaming silver armor.
"Rorik!" Thea shouted.
"Rori-ga!" she shouted back.
"Ror-i-ga!" The Soenmen all shouted, and they surged forward another ten yards, cutting Myrdon's forces down or trampling them underhoof. Lightning crackled out of the sky, destroying the top of a nearby building where a group of enemy archers had taken post.
Even though she was ecstatic to have the help, Thea didn't care for such destruction. "Surrender or die!" she shouted, jolting a group of rallying enemy soldiers dead to prove her point. "Surrender yourselves and live!"
Roriga nodded. "Each fighter who surrenders loses their weapons, their armor, their coin… but their lives shall be spared!"
The Soenmen, of course, were a bit disappointed by this. From their perspective, it had been a pretty short battle. Some of them hadn't yet bloodied their blades. but victory was victory, and they could always look forward to the feasting. And the gear of a surrendered foe was worth more than that of one who'd just been hacked to pieces. So an end to the massacre had its upsides, too. As the last of the foe surrendered their weapons, the Soenmen raised their axes, blades, and maces, chanting:
"Roriga koenig! Roriga koenig!"
The surviving forces of Nortsair chanted back: "Queen Thea! Queen Thea!"
For a moment, Thea was worried that the two groups might start fighting one another… but she soon realized that their chants were merging until the whole city was jubilantly shouting: "Roriga koenig! Queen Thea! Roriga koenig! Queen Thea!"
Thea leaned over and embraced Roriga. "I'm very glad things worked out for you," she said.
"Me, too." She smiled - and even her teeth were very slightly blue. "Now… it seems to me we have a feast to prepare."
They collected prisoners, tended to the wounded on both sides, and went about the hard work of clearing out the bodies and searching for those with surviving friends and relatives to tend to those bodies and provide proper honorifics. And Thea went about figuring out the finances of the thing - something she'd never really thought about, given Matthias's bottomless golden pockets. For Matthias was no longer with her and she had the body to prove it. It was everything she could do not to break down in front of her people and devolve into a sobbing mess - she needed to be strong, and there would be time for weeping in private.
They took the bodies of the dead scions, too, and recovered their artifacts - Cano had eventually defeated the scion of Soenim, and Thea still held the sword of Erodor Westman. Then there was the brown rider, who'd brought the fortress walls down, Aiba, and Bestel Myrdon… of the latter two, their bodies were nowhere to be found, and nobody could say where they'd gone off to. Thea was incensed, and she offered a substantial reward for the return of their artifacts if nothing else. But she didn't have high hopes - she could only hope that, should anybody else be foolish enough to accept the patronage of those respective gods, they wouldn't be such psychopathic monsters. On the eve of their great victory feast, Thea sought out Elias Wren, who seemed to know where just about everything could be found, but the leader of the Hollow Houses professed ignorance.
"I only wish I knew," Elias shrugged. "I sense that we cannot renounce our divine blessings while we yet live… and I can only imagine what an unclaimed artifact is worth. Enough to buy Nortsair many times over, I'd wager."
Thea sipped her sherry and looked into Elias's strange, violet eyes. "If you hear anything, let me know. I destroyed those dark scions once before and I'll do it again - and woe to she who gets in my way."
"Of that I have no doubt, my queen. As ever, I am at your disposal."
Cano sidled into their sitting room, placing a gentle hand upon Thea's shoulder. "Roriga is about to make her toast."
Thea nodded. "Heavy lies the head," she said, and she wondered whether she'd ever find the happiness as a queen that she'd once enjoyed in a forest glade with a man she hardly knew. "I'll be right out."
