“We are simply asking for the concession of keeping our own bloody holdings and homes,” another man spat. “And frankly, this is a beyond a fair concession to request.”
Cassius’s entire demeanor changed when he retorted harshly, “It would have been, if you hadn’t killed Jasmine. If Antonius had not fallen to your men’s swords. If in the night, Rosehana still warmed her lover’s bed. If I did not return Otho’s body to his family for burial after it was desecrated and decayed, and I had to speak to his father to be certain his mother didn’t unbind him to witness what had become of his remains. I could utter many a name of one who was lost, one who was loved, one who is mourned, and this blame, I assign where it is due. On you.”
Well then, this must be why Macrinus and Hera appeared so dour.
Jasmine, Otho and Antonius had fallen.
And if he was not wrong, Hera’s lover’s name was Rosehana.
Grave loss for the Regent.
And shockingly stupid of the gentry.
Truly, with the way Cassius Laird had mourned the loss of his first wife, how could they not know they should not earn this manner of his ire?
“Now,” Cassius continued, “I’ll have your full capitulation, or I’ll not only have your homes and holdings, I’ll have your heads. Speak to your fellow conspirators. Given the flight of a raven and back, you have five days. If you do not offer your surrender then, I…will…take it.”
Jellan then watched as the Regent turned his head to the side and spoke on.
“Get them out of my sight,” he said to a guard. “And as for my father, after the ravens fly, he sees no one, he speaks to no one. Windowless cell. Malcontent’s rations.”
“I will not hesitate to take your head!” Gallienus stormed as a guard came forth to take hold on him and drag him out.
“You are beaten, fool,” Cassius retorted. “And you were before you even began.”
“We shall see!” Gallienus yelled as, wrists and ankles in chains dragging the carpets, chains that Jellan did not see with Gallienus’s back to him, the fallen king was hauled unceremoniously from the room.
Jellan stood where he was and observed, as the others, dressed the same as Gallienus, chained the same, were escorted out as well.
He then saw Macrinus approach Cassius and bend to speak into his ear.
Cassius nodded and called, “G’Jell, you may come forward.”
Instantly, Jellan moved down a center aisle that was kept clear, apparently for comings and goings, and as he walked swiftly toward the dais, he cast his gaze about, and saw no one he knew.
No Go’Doan priests.
No gentry.
Though there were a number of Zees, which was unexpected.
Indeed, it appeared most of them were Zees.
Most unexpected.
He could not wonder about this.
He was hungry. He needed food. A bath. A good sleep.
And then…regroup.
“Your Grace, Prince Cassius,” he greeted as he came to stand between two sofas, both of them vacant, and dipped his chin into his neck. He lifted his head and caught the prince’s eyes. “I am most grateful to be here. I am also most grateful to you for welcoming me into your home so swiftly. For I have just survived a daunting adventure regarding which I needs make haste in reporting to you.”
“Indeed, I am all ears,” Cassius replied.
Excellent.
“It has been some days since I’ve eaten, thus, before I begin, could I trouble you to order up some food?” he requested.
“I thought you needed to make haste in reporting?” Cassius asked.
“Well, I…yes, of course, however…” He gestured to the sofa beside him. “My journey was arduous. May I sit?”
“No.”
Jellan’s spine straightened, and of a sudden, he paid much closer attention to Cassius, and the people who sat amongst him.
They were not friends of Jellan’s, but they were allies, and he had thought he had their regard.
He was a priest of the Go’Doan.
He was called upon to…
Ah.
“I am not of The Rising,” he assured them.
“This is a lie,” Cassius replied.
Jellan blinked.
“Are we to wait long for the story of your adventure?” Cassius prompted when Jellan lost his voice. “For the lot of us have things to do, and if you wish to draw this out, I’m in the position to tell you that you will fail. We’ll just deal with you and carry on.”
“Deal with me?” he asked softly.
Cassius’s head tipped to the side. “Did you or did you not kill Sofia Magos of the Firenz with the intent to kill Farah Magos of the Firenz, now Farah, Queen of Wodell?” Cassius queried, and Jellan’s heart started to beat a quick tattoo as his attention cut to Farah.
She was regarding him with hatred in her eyes.
But worse, when his gaze shifted to King True…
By the gods…
He had never…
Not ever…
Seen the like.
True’s eyes on Jellan were green.
Not the green they normally were.
Overtaken with the color, no white to be seen.
Jellan took a step back, ran into something, and jerked his head about to look over his shoulder.
A wall of men stood behind him consisting, he noted with a sinking stomach, of lieutenants from three separate realms.
That sinking stomach clutched, and his throat closed.
He turned back to Cassius.
“I-I’m sorry,” he forced out. “I do not know what you mean.”
“All right. I’ll ask another question,” Cassius said. “Did you, or did you not, infiltrate a group known as the Society of the Beast, participate in the seizure, rape and murder of countless women over several decades, doing this conspiring to surface the Beast in order to control it for the purposes of The Rising?”
Oh gods.
Jellan leaned toward the Regent, his mind racing.
“This is…this is what you must know. It was not me. It was a woman named Marian. But the Beast is risen. He is amongst us.”
Jellan would have said more but Cassius’s gaze shifted to the side, and he said, “I know.”
Jellan looked in that direction and stood solid when he saw five men had moved to the front of the crowd at that side.
The highwaymen.
He pointed at them.
“Those men set upon me to steal my purse!” he cried. “They are highwaymen!”
“I must admit, I had my suspicions, but as I have no evidence…” Cassius muttered, sounding amused.
Jellan’s attention whipped back to him.
“You must listen to me,” he begged.
“Do you deny any of this?” he asked.
“Yes!” Jellan shouted. “All of it! I must tell you of Marian.”
“Marian? G’Ry’s acolyte who’s gone missing?”
This question came from Farah.
“Yes, my queen.” He nodded repeatedly, not knowing if this was true, but willing to say anything to sound important to them. “It is vital you listen to what I have to say. The Beast—”
“Has great claws that can sever a man’s head and great strength that he can crush one. He can also transform from looking like simply a man, a fair-haired, blue-eyed one, to his real incarnation.”
It was Mars that spoke this.
How did they know so very much?
The priests and those girls who had gotten away.
They must have discovered them.
“Yes.” Jellan nodded fervently. “He is fearsome and conniving. He can act guileless, but he is not. It is falsity. He…he…also bleeds,” he shared, turning to the highwaymen. “When they set upon us, they used their whips.” He looked back to the podium. “They made him bleed.”
“And now he wanders about the countryside of Airen with a woman,” Aramus remarked.
“Yes.” Jellan continued nodding
. “She is…not to be trusted. And he is, I do not know. I think he searches for something.”
“But you know not what?” Aramus asked.
Jellan did not wish to, but he shook his head.
And then his mind tripped upon an idea.
“But I think he is…he has some affection for her. As well as…as well as…” He swallowed. “Me. They think I am lost. A fright my horse took when we were set upon by the highwaymen. This I maneuvered in order to escape. I took a grave risk in order to come to you and warn you that the quakes were as we suspected. That it is good the prophesied are at full strength. And…p-perhaps, I-I could be used to…to lure him, to…to…bring him to you so that maybe you can use these dragons of which you speak—”
“Rest assured, G’Jell, we will be utilizing everything we have to eradicate this creature from Triton,” Cassius told him.
Jellan nodded again.
“Except you,” Cassius finished.
Jellan stood frozen before them.
He also felt his bladder begin to loosen when Cassius’s eyes became what True’s were.
Except black.
“How many women was it, in the end?” he asked softly. “Do you even know?”
“It was not the Society who roused the Beast!” Jellan exclaimed. “It was Marian! The sacrifices…the terrible things they did to those girls…it was not that. It was her.”
“So, you know of the sacrifices?” Cassius asked.
Gods damn it!
If this did not get better, he might have to expose his magic to get him out of this place.
“I read it in a tome,” he only partly lied, but went on to fully do just that. “When…when we journeyed to Wodell for King True’s wedding, I remembered the reading of them. I had an idea. I went to inspect. Came upon them performing their ghastly ritual—”
“You are aware that lying will not change matters for you, no?” Mars asked.
“I do not lie!” he cried. “And I am here to help. I know what he looks like. I know where they wander.”
“As do they,” Mars pointed out, indicating the highwaymen.
Gods damn it!
He started to call upon his magic, just in case.
“They don’t know where they wander,” he pushed.
“They are good trackers. They will find out,” Cassius said.
His eyes were back to normal, as were True’s.
But even so, Jellan did not get the sense this indicated good things for him.
“I am a priest of the Go’Doan,” he stated.
“You are a priest of The Rising,” Cassius stated in return. “A priest who murdered countless women, one of them the mother of a queen, and conspired to subjugate citizens of four realms to your beliefs.”
“I cared naught about The Rising,” he spat.
After all he’d witnessed, all he’d endured, being repeatedly raped, watching the deaths, experiencing the fear, the maltreatment, something inside him snapped, and he could not control his words or emotion, even if he had tried.
But he no longer had it in him to try.
He drew upon his magic as he asked, “What man needs religion when he controls omnipotence?”
“So, it is solely for you, you sought to rise him,” Queen Ha-Lah spoke for the first time.
“I go about the unpleasant business of bringing him forth, why would I hand him over to others?” he asked snidely. “Especially for them to use it to force people to serve their paltry gods. If you have that power, you are a god.”
“And Marian?” Elena also entered the conversation. “Does she desire to control omnipotence?”
“The bloody fool, a half-trained witch who convinced herself she’s powerful when she doesn’t even know how to read the veil,” he snapped. “She simply wanted the rituals to stop. But he liked her, so he took her and now he’ll use her as he sees fit before he destroys the lot of you.”
This was met with silence.
Jellan found himself breathing heavily.
And as he did, he realized he’d been calling on his magic, but…
It wasn’t there.
“You might wish to know at this juncture, Hera bound you when she met you downstairs,” Cassius said.
Jellan blinked and tried to pull up his power again.
He could not access it.
Her movement, with her arm.
The chill he felt.
His stomach clutched so violently, he feared he’d be ill.
He then watched as Cassius slouched in his chair, stretched his long legs before him, and crossed them at ankles.
The Regent then linked his fingers over his flat stomach.
“There is a man,” he began, as if he were settling in to tell a story. “Most odd. Here in Sky Bay.”
Jellan glared at him.
“When Mars’s men’s reports started coming in, I remembered talk of him,” Cassius shared.
“If you are to jail me, jail me,” Jellan ordered tersely. “At least if you did that, I’d be closer to a meal.”
“He collects snakes.”
Jellan froze, his mind doing the same, to the point he did not feel the warm trickle running down his leg.
Cassius’s gaze dropped to the floor, and his lip curled before it came back to Jellan’s face.
“True’s men have made inquiries, just in case,” Cassius told him. “Just in case we were to find you, or you were to seek us. This man, he has never seen his pets at work. He was quite keen to be of service, if he were called.”
The room filled with the noises of the air rapidly going in and out of Jellan’s nose.
“It might not be of interest to you, but Mars wishes to keep you alive,” Cassius informed him.
Jellan’s gaze jumped to Mars before returning to Cassius when he spoke again.
“He felt, if we were to lose anyone else who had meaning to us, that you should be breathing so we could share with you the fullness of our ire. True, however, disagrees. And although you committed at least one crime on Firenz soil, you committed incalculable on Dellish. Thus, we’ve decided True gets to do what he wishes to you,” Cassius concluded.
Cassius then turned his head in True’s direction.
“True?” he prompted.
“Is there somewhere he can start digging his own pit?” True asked.
“I’m sure we can figure something out,” Cassius muttered.
“Then let us do that without delay,” True decreed.
Jellan closed his eyes.
There seemed a great rustling and he again opened them to see all about him shifting.
“He can clean up his piss before you take him to the dungeon,” Cassius said to someone behind him. “I won’t have Elena’s carpets sullied.”
“Right,” he heard a man grunt.
Then he was pushed to his hands and knees, the puddle on the rug right in front of his face.
“Don’t move. We’ll get you soap and a brush.”
He heard footfalls on the rugs all around him. Murmurings of conversation.
But in the end, he was left in the room, on his hands and knees, staring at a puddle of his own piss, with a guard standing over him, chatting casually with each other.
This before he was scrubbing up that piss.
And this was before he was tossed, without a bath, or a meal, into a cell without a pillow or pallet, in the dungeon of the Sky Citadel.
And this was before, quite some time later, indeed, late the next day, under a light fall of snow, Jellan stood at the bottom of a deep pit he’d spent hours digging himself.
When they started raining on him, he vaguely noted they were not all emerald oil asps.
But several of them were.
He felt the pain of the bites, the poison searing through his system.
But the last three thoughts he had before he died was that he wished they were not gazing down on him from above.
It was humiliating.
Though at the very least, in the end, he was
the manner of a man who endured such under the eyes of four kings.
He further wished they’d only selected venomous ones.
For the serpent squeezing him about his neck was utterly terrifying.
148
The Twist
Marian
Argyll Forest
AIREN
Marian felt the buzzing.
And she knew.
They were getting close.
It had snowed in the night.
Thus, when he woke her and forced her from under their warm rug and made her move her limbs that had frozen stiff while she slept in order to make her climb atop their steed in the pre-dawn morning, the light dusting of snow that had fallen several days before and had not gone away in this cold had become a thick blanket.
She had not appreciated this at all, for after their encounter with the highwaymen, they no longer sought the warmth of inns of an evening. Nor hot meals.
Thus, she had also woken with a chilled-numb nose, fingers and toes.
And gone to bed after eating a rabbit he’d killed for her that she’d roasted over their fire.
She had grown to become glad for the rabbits, for at times it had been but rats.
For his meals, Daemon did not wait for her to go through the painstaking process of roasting the meat.
He ate what he killed raw.
But she knew now, she did not have the luxury to lament her plight.
And she had long since ceased complaining, and not because it fell on deaf ears, but because the creature who was her companion terrified her to her core.
Neither of these mattered any longer, however.
For she felt the buzz.
His quickening.
And she was not prepared.
She had not come up with a plan to stop him.
And if she did not, all would be lost.
Chu of the Trusted
Guest Bedchamber, Sky Citadel, Sky Bay
AIREN
Chu woke her with a kiss on her neck.
He’d lit a lamp low on the other side of the bed so the light would not hurt her eyes, but he could watch them flutter as she gained consciousness.
The Rising Page 33
