by Terah Edun
Sworn To War: Courtlight #9
Terah Edun
Contents
Copyright
Title Page
Sworn To War Summary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
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About the Author
Copyright © 2016 by Terah Edun
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN 978-1-946217-03-5
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Sworn To War Summary
Ciardis Weathervane is facing a war on two fronts. One with the dragons. One with the deities.
She is ready to face the god that they’ve known was coming for months, but the people that she thought would coalesce around her are faltering under the pressure, the lies, and the deceit.
She knows that the very foundation between ruler, nobility, and commoner had fractured down to its core. Now the capital city and its people need to be reforged, bound in fire before they’re consumed by brimstone.
But the citizens of the empire need more than a speech to believe in the rulers that betrayed them just days before. With their empire on the line, Sebastian lays out his first ruling edict which may be more than even he bargained for.
As Sandrin comes together once more before the final struggle, the daemoni prince is struck down and the princess heir-in-waiting has doubts as to whether they can forge a more perfect union without the one that completes their souls.
With Thanar trapped in purgatory while they fight to resurrect the city that gave them life—Ciardis and Sebastian are in a battle to the death against a god bent on living forever.
1
Ciardis didn’t have time to really think out a plan.
She stood on a crumbling balcony, surveying with a calm eye the sheer amount of destruction that reigned around her. The palace was literally disintegrating around them, earth-shattering quakes grinding throughout the structure with increasing force as every minute passed. The sound of glass and ceramics shattering along with the telltale ring of precious gemstones being thrown from settings, all sounded like a cacophony to her ears. The subtle crack of a floor shifting underfoot was enough to push panicked shouts into absolutely terrified screams as servants and nobles alike began running for their lives.
To a man and woman, fear glittered in their gazes as they dodged falling plaster and dived through crumbling holes in walls, looking for any form of security—a piece of the palace structure that wasn’t falling or a slice of floor that felt stable for more than a few seconds.
She couldn’t blame them for looking for safety.
But it was as if they were looking for a clear meadow in the midst of a forest fire, and like deer trapped in terror by the spreading walls of flames, they were making too many mistakes in the all-consuming sense of panic that was jumping from person to person like the fire they so feared. Ciardis sucked in a sharp breath when her eye caught on something even she couldn’t easily ignore as she sought out the one man who had the power to end this chaos.
A child.
Alone. Unafraid. Just sitting on the marble floor and watching the funny adults run this way and that, a delighted expression on his chubby face.
Ciardis grasped the railing in front of her with enough strength that she was certain she bent it.
She wondered at the open delight on the boy’s face, but her brief enjoyment turned to the same terror that inhabited the face of every person there who was old enough to truly understand the danger they were in.
As she watched, a long fissure appeared in the stucco of the wall just above the boy. It weaved and descended down with a stunning speed until it hit the floor; an ominous rumble sounded just then. Ciardis almost vaulted over the railing. But even she would be unable to reach the fascinated child in time, before the falling section of the wall crashed down on him with the weight of a hundred bricks. It was large enough to crush him. But a quick adult was there seconds later to scoop up the now-screaming toddler. Ciardis relaxed as much as she could to refocus her awareness on why she had come here in the first place.
She didn’t really have any interest in doing anything else.
She knew that not all of the people fleeing around her would be fleet of foot enough to escape being hurt or killed by their hazardous environment. She wanted to help, but she also knew that she couldn’t. Because if she helped one, she would have to go help every single person who she came across. Right now, they saw her as distant and aloof. They outright avoided her gaze or ran—not from her, but around her as if she was a stone and they the water parted by her presence.
For now, that was how she needed it to be. So instead of diving in, Ciardis watched silently.
Detached.
She opened up her mage senses and reprioritized her physical senses, so that she wasn’t so overwhelmed by the sensations of the dozens of people around her. Vana had taught her to do that. Put everything on mute and only open her gaze to the one individual, the one incident, the one place that mattered. She could still see and hear them as they scurried around her small group. But when the time came, she also knew that she would be able to close them off in the back of her mind. For now, she watched them as they moved about her peripheral vision like ants. Up and down stairs. Straight through walls. Jumping across chasms in the floor when no other way was possible.
She saw feats of daring. Kindness and strength that knew no measure.
Cowardice that knew no bounds, as grown individuals elected to do the opposite of what she had seen another person do so daringly. People who abandoned comrades who couldn’t walk, children walking around in a dazed stumble, unable to see. Everyone, it seemed, was out to keep themselves alive. It wasn’t that they didn’t care. It was that their first response was to fly, and another human being would only slow them down.
But she didn’t interfere.
It was as if she was a goddess looking down on the mortal realm and finding it lacking.
Lacking interest. Lacking resolve.
It isn’t that they don’t deserve my help, Ciardis thought with clinical detachment as she tightened her hold on the hands of the males to either side of her.
As if to persuade them, as she had persuaded herself, not to move.
But neither had so much as twitched in an effort to stray.
The thought didn’t please her. Nothing did. Nothing could while her gaze stayed pinned on the subject she had come to see.
He was the epicenter of her focus. How she dealt with him was laid out in her mind like a strategic vision. Her vision for how this would all end, and that vision began and ended two floors below.
Ciardis felt herself smile.
It was a bitter reflection of the swirling thoughts of dark within her.
She didn’t wanted to be here.
Not like this. Not for this reason.
She had wanted to kill Maradian. Now it wasn’t just a want. It was an all-consuming need. The knowledge that she did this in vengeance for her slain brother. Her murdered mentor. Her best friend’s husband’s still corpse. All of those deaths. All of those lives lost assured her of the righteousness of her cause, even as her heart felt frozen and still in her chest.
She couldn’t concentrate on anything else but revenge.
Not the poor souls too pitiful to find their own ways out of the palace warped by power.
Not the citizens of Sandrin who at this very moment were battling to save a city ablaze.
Not the grief that should have been welling up within her but that she pushed down with a firm seal by sheer force of will every time it threatened to do something as outrageous as overwhelm her.
Maradian Athanos Algardis, she recited silently in her head as she looked down on the Emperor who looked serenely back up at her.
Their charged gazes met. Eyes calm. But magic buzzed between them like live fire that arced in the sky, the remnants of a summer storm.
Or the warning of the maelstrom that was approaching, preparing to destroy them both.
Ciardis let the corner of her mouth tip up at the irony.
The last time she had looked at a sky alight with power, a dragon had been felled.
This time it would be a snake who called himself Emperor, and she would be the one who announced his execution.
Tilting her head this way and that as she studied the man who stood several floors below her, Ciardis mused in her head. She began to silently recite the words, almost as if she was speaking aloud to the man himself: I charge you with homicide of the elite and the common. I charge you with malevolent intentions towards your people. You, who should have been the savior of the citizens of this empire, were instead their oppressor.
She didn’t say those words yet to him. She wasn’t even certain he could hear her from all the way up there. But the real reason she didn’t tell him what she was thinking was because she knew that to him, it wouldn’t matter. She knew why, even though it was hard to fathom precisely because she felt so intrinsically tied into the emotional well-being of others. To him, those thoughts were useless concepts of good and evil, protector and oppressor; to him, a man who cared for no one and nothing but himself, the empire was an embodiment of his will rather than the object that shaped it.
To Maradian, Algardis was just a jewel in his crown. Something that he owned, rather than served. Something that he could manipulate and pivot as he so willed. All in the name of the ‘good’ of the empire.
But she knew that the empire was more than that. The empire was its citizens. Its people. The baker and the noble. The child and the adult. The powerless and the powerful.
For a sitting ruler not to recognize that was untenable. It was the reason why Maradian was who he was. A conniving despot who she had to put down. But she wasn’t ready yet.
Not just yet.
2
So as thoughts of his crimes and actions whirled through her mind and he stared up at her as silently as she stared down at him, Ciardis let those actions sink in.
She knew that they were coming to final blows this round. Physical rather than mental. Blows which necessitated blood, sacrifice, and most certainly—death. She wasn’t unready to deal that deadly blow. But it was coming. She just needed to be prepared to tell the people, his people, why she had done what she did. Because no matter what Maradian had done, no matter what notoriety he had gained, he was still their living god. And honestly, it was Ciardis’s sworn duty not only to protect this empire but also to justify her actions to the people. Starting with the reasons why the future wife of the heir to the throne had killed the man who was their Emperor.
She was sure that the nobility at least would understand, or at least suspect, the depths of perversion that Maradian had gone through to secure his throne from its rightful ruler, Bastian Athanos Algardis, and subsequently keep it. But Ciardis Weathervane wasn’t so sure that the people of the empire would understand.
The people, who were affected by Maradian’s every action but did not understand how one ruling could reverberate in their daily lives. The people who lived in small towns and villages all across the empire, who only wanted to live well enough to feed their families with food in warm bellies, and to take pride in the work that this entailed.
It was those people who Ciardis had to convince of the righteousness of her cause.
Those people who she had come from and lived among for the vast majority of her life.
Now, today, she was about to kill the man who retained as much importance in their daily lives as a god did.
For some, the Emperor was even more important than the gods.
The gods didn’t require a village tax, after all.
Nor did a god throw a hale man into debtors’ prison if he couldn’t come up with his share of the quarterly grains.
Gods were immaterial.
Gods were ethereal.
Emperors were men with swords and steel. Men with a very physical presence and representatives who did not hesitate to enforce their rulings.
Sebastian sighed heavily to her right side. “Are you sure this is the right choice? That this is the right time?”
Before she could respond, Thanar interrupted in a caustic voice, “Are you really asking her? She may be the one who could potentially wield the weapon, but it is you who will pick up the pieces of a broken empire. You who will take up the imperial mantle and rule in your fallen father’s stead.”
Sebastian didn’t hesitate to say in a brittle voice, “That man is not my father. He is my uncle in my father’s clothing. And be sure that I will locate the whereabouts of the true Emperor before we separate the false one from his head.”
Ciardis continued thinking her detached, clinical thoughts as the area around them slowly emptied of screaming servants and nobles.
The commotion died down; only eerie echoes whistled through the palace walls as wind found its way in through gigantic holes in the roof and the walls that had fallen inward.
She almost wanted to ask Maradian what he was thinking as he stared up at her, still as a stone.
But she didn’t want to break the reverie. The silence. The waiting.
It was peaceful.
Once they began their descent, it would be anything but. She knew that. So did Sebastian and Thanar. So did the subject of their attentions.
Sebastian shifted beside her, half in impatience, half in nervousness. She could feel his mix of emotions, and she didn’t have to spy into his mind to discern them either.
It was in the tension in his arms.
The sharp intake of his breath as he thought to speak and changed his mind.
It was in the tilt of his head unconsciously toward her, and the messy, tousled hair that fell into his eyes momentarily as he glanced over.
He was uncertain.
Not in how to be a prince heir, or even in how to be a future Emperor. But in what she truly wanted to do.
That was all right.
She was glad he was uncertain. Because she didn’t want to think that he knew her so well that he could predict her actions before she could even decide on them.
Unpredictability was a strength in her eyes, at least for right now.
Unconsciously mirroring Sebastian, Ciardis looked out of the corner of her eye at Thanar.
Just as unreadable as she was to Sebastian at this moment, the daemoni prince was a closed book to Ciardis’s gaze.
It didn’t help that also wasn’t paying her any mind. She wondered what he was thinking, planning, preparing in his devious thoughts. But she wouldn’t intrude unless asked. She couldn’t.
So she tried to see what he saw when he looked around. Left hand lightly grasped in her right, Thanar was staring up at a crack in a portion of the ceiling that otherwise remained firm.
Stars shone through that crack. Ciardis though
t with a shiver that it reminded her of the hole in the imperial dungeons that she had gazed out of.
Unreachable.
Untenable.
But immovable.
Thanar fluttered his wings and looked back down at her, then caught her gaze and said, “Well, Golden Eyes?”
Ciardis lifted an eyebrow and said calmly, “You too are asking me what to do?”
Thanar gave her a devilish grin as he replied. “Oh, I know what to do. My question is—are you ready for what must be done?”
Ciardis broke their linked gaze and turned back down to the man whose gaze, she suspected, had never wavered from her form.
He looked up at her calmly, a dark speck standing still on a ballroom floor.
The same floor where he had danced with her and threatened to kill her mother one memorable evening.
The same ballroom that had been aglitter with gold gilt and rich brocades. Still even now it was decked out in destructed finery. She saw a golden chandelier crumpled in a corner like a discarded necklace and beyond that the velvet curtains that had lined the walls still gamely clinging to their posts with determination.
Finery on top of glamour with glitz and elegance thrown in.
Or at least it had been. Now two-thirds of the walls had fallen inward, marble jutted upward all along the floor at odd angles, and fabric fluttered in a wind that wouldn’t be amiss on a pirate ship making port after a rough season at sea.
Still, it was the imperial palace of Algardis.
And he was the Emperor of Algardis.
It would do just perfectly for a killing ground.
With a smile, she said, “I’ve known what I’ve had to do for a long while. I was just waiting for you two to catch up.”
Ciardis looked down at her hands. They were dusty white with the chalk of the plaster ground to dust that littered every surface she could see. What had once been rich golds and deep blues, veined marble imported from the mountains on high, was now all a uniform white; besmirched here and there by the faint gleam of a painted floor which refused to be completely covered, but consistent in its ruin all the same.
