by A Lonergan
“Annoyed but making it. I would love to put a knife through Balam’s skull, if you see him.”
“He brought Madam Colver cooked meat early this morning so she could make breakfast for the rest of the camp.”
My stomach growled at the mention of food. “How lovely of him.”
Nico smiled and handed me a green, folded leaf. The leaf was easily bigger than my arm. I unwrapped it and my stomach clenched. Food. “Balam assured me the leaf is edible, as well. Apparently it’s sweet.” I nodded my head and ate the charred meat in the center. “I heard what happened last night.”
“What happened? I fell asleep against a tree.” I blinked at him in mock stupidity.
“With Cal.” Nico’s face went serious.
“We are at war. It’s best to leave the romance back in the normal world, right?” I offered him the leaf out of courtesy but when he turned it down, I quickly scarfed the rest of the food down my throat.
“You’re handling this a lot better than I thought you would be.” Nico took a seat on a log beside the dead fire.
“What do you want me to do? Wail in grief and misery that I will never love again?” I cocked my head and regarded him carefully.
“I suppose not. That would alarm the other men and possibly put a love target on your back.” He rubbed the back of his neck nervously.
“I’ll live. I lived before I knew Cal and I will live after. I have much to learn and I know love will do nothing but get in my way.” I tossed the leaf into the pit that had held a fire all night and packed my bag up.
“You can’t honestly believe that,” Nico said from behind me in shock.
“What do you want me to say? I thought I was going to be heartbroken but I’m not. We went through a lot together, but I still don’t know how I am. How do I love someone else when I don’t even know myself?” I closed my eyes and let it all out. “Do you know what’s scary?”
Nico didn’t say anything.
“It's scary to not know what comes next. Who will I be? Will I have a job or go on to explore the realm? Will I fight in tons of wars or will I want to settle somewhere secluded and take care of myself? The Emperor was all I knew. Taking orders was my reality. I don’t know how to move on now that I get to call the shots.” I sighed. “Maybe I want to be a hired blade?”
“A Queen can’t be a hired blade,” Nico said sadly.
“No, she can’t.”
Balam was with Madam Colver as I had imagined. Except it wasn’t as specific as my thoughts had been. I had imagined her spoon-feeding him some fatty concoction but instead, he was just sitting at her feet like a little schoolboy listening to her rattle on about her good ole days.
I grabbed his large elbow and yanked him up. He frowned at me and something hard connected with the back of my skull. I growled and rubbed the tender spot as Madam Colver snarled at me. “Rude girl, I was telling a story.”
“The rest of the camp is ready to go and you aren’t concerned at all. I had to stop this madness before it got out of control. You can tell stories to Gregory while you prepare meals. We are scouting ahead today.” I pointed north and gave Balam a death stare. I wanted to be gone before Cal came looking for me. If he came looking for me.
“Why are you still calling me that awful name?” Balam asked when we were out of earshot of the rest of the camp.
“Because people can’t know your real name.” I let out an exasperated sound like this was obvious. “You are a demon, with a very demon name. The last thing we want is for the army to revolt against us. They already don’t like me enough as it is.”
“Why is that?” Balam asked as we sliced through thicker branches. I didn’t know why I was staying on the ground. I preferred to be in the trees. It also made me extremely nervous to chop through the thick grass and small trees like we were. The last thing I wanted was the forest creatures to come after me with a vengeance. I winced with every swipe of my blade.
“It could have something to do with the fact that I sprouted poisonous flowers out of thin air and then gifted them to magical creatures.” I chuckled nervously. “Or that my magic looks like black smoke when I want to scare them. There was also that one time that I plucked a blade out of the air faster than their eyes could see. I bested most of them in hand to hand combat.” I shrugged like there wasn’t an incredibly long list to keep going off of.
“You want a target on your back?” Balam grabbed a vine and swung ahead of me.
“No,” I muttered. But there was the underlying yes that he heard because he laughed when he landed on his feet.
“You want them to fear you.”
I grabbed a vine and decided if Balam could do it, so could I. “I want them to fear me because they knew me as the assassin but now all they see is a girl. Most of them underestimate me so it doesn’t matter much anyways.” I kicked off of the ground in hopes that I would fly over all the stuff we had to cut down to walk through the forest but was sadly disappointed. Whatever Balam had done to get across, it wasn’t this. My hands let go of their own will and I slammed into the ground immediately. The breath was forced from my lungs as my vision swam with tears. Pain was a part of my vocabulary but not pain like this. I had been punched in the chest many times but the breath being knocked out of me then, was nothing like this.
Something hard met my back and I coughed before pulling air back into my lungs. Black spotted over my vision as I rolled over and tried to keep my breakfast down.
“Magic takes practice,” Balam said from above me.
“I didn’t use any,” I coughed out.
The demon laughed. “That explains it, you silly human. The magic keeps you in the air.”
“I hate you.” I pressed my palm to my sternum and glared at the stupid man. Demon. Whatever.
Chapter Seventeen
Willow
Balam’s legs swung from the branch he was sitting on across from me. It was almost distracting. I was supposed to be keeping watch and looking for anything unusual. But there had been no movement, no magical creatures, and no animals for lunch.
“Stop brooding, human,” Balam said as he picked his fingernails with a black blade.
“Don’t tell me what to do, Demon.”
He chuckled and flashed me a dark grin. “Are you always so… hostile?”
“Are you always this annoying?” I flashed him a grin of my own.
“You don’t have to try to impress the human king, if that’s what this is about.” Balam leaned his head back against the tree.
“I’m not trying to impress him.”
Balam tsked. “Okay, then you’re trying to avoid him? Because that wasn’t working either.”
I rolled my eyes to his direction again and cocked an eyebrow. “How would you know?”
“He was watching us as we departed camp this morning.” My face went slack and I stopped talking. There was no point in arguing with the being that was hell-bent on getting under my skin. “He likes you.”
“I am aware,” I grunted and wished I could have taken it back. “Why are we talking about Cal?”
“You’re on a first name basis with the boy-king?”
I groaned. I felt like all I was doing was digging myself into a pit with this one. “Yes, and it’s extremely complicated.”
His legs stopped swinging. “Complicated how?”
“We were courting.” I muttered.
“Were? Why do I feel like there is a but coming after that?”
I turned my back to him and hopped from the tree. The rest of the army would be here soon and I didn’t want to be lurking when they got here. The least I could do was get some food for my growling stomach while I waited. There was a berry bush about ten feet away and I had seen the sketches of them in the safe category in my father’s journal. I reach through the thorny vines and plucked as many as I could without breaking my skin and sunk to the mossy floor. I didn’t bother offering any to Balam, knowing him, he could magically conjure the whole bush up to him.
<
br /> He hopped down from the tree and watched me stuff my face. “How would it feel to be royalty here and in another realm? Do you think that would be overwhelming?”
I smiled up at him and hoped the red juice was stuck between my teeth. The look of horror that flashed across his face was enough to keep me satisfied for a very long time. “I think I am going to run away and never come back. I will disappear into the woods and live like an actual heathen.”
“You are truly revolting,” Balam said as he gracefully sat down beside me. Today his armor was nowhere to be found and had been replaced with light-colored leather and there was a strap across his chest that held various weapons. He was intimidating enough by himself, but with the weapons I had never even seen before, he was a monster.
A sexy monster.
But a monster all the same.
“What are you staring at?” His voice wrapped around me sensually and I had to blink my eyes a few times to break the spell.
“Are those all the weapons you have mastered?” I swallowed thickly and hoped he couldn’t hear my heart thundering away.
“Not all of them, no, but some. These are my favorites to work with.” He touched the top ones. They were curved blades with a ring on the end. “These are karambits. These curved blades will rip the skin from your opponent before they can even register what is going on.” He pointed to the second but I already knew those. They matched the knives strapped to my boots. “My throwing knives.” His eyes located my own and he nodded in approval. Then he moved on to the other weapons. The third ones down looked like claws. “Bagh Nakh. These are especially effective. They are great for climbing too. They are mostly worn on my person to intimidate my opponent.” Then, strapped at his waist, was a whip. I swallowed hard. I had personal experience with Emperor Hildaguard’s whip many times as a child. Fear flooded my body. “This weapon was used against me many times while I was held in captivity. I had a similar reaction to it when Hel trained me with it. She explained to me that no weapon should ever make you cower in fear. A weapon is something you master, no matter what someone has done to you with it. I worked hard to train and now a weapon will never make me fear again, and neither will man.”
I didn’t understand how Cal’s army got anything done. We were way behind and they took hours longer than we had to get to our spot. Balam smirked at me before Cal stopped before us.
“Any news?” Cal sheathed his sword and I shook my head.
“The only news is that your girlfriend here is a piece of work and I have no idea how we will ever shape her into a queen.” Balam popped his neck and Cal looked at me nervously.
“We?” Cal narrowed his eyes.
Balam rolled his shoulders and chuckled. “You think you’re going to be able to change her on your own?”
I looked between the two of them. They spoke as if I wasn’t there.
Cal shook his head. “I don’t want to change her.”
Balam blinked at the other man slowly. “Have you met her?”
I pressed my palms into my eyes. “We still have a lot of ground to cover and I am tired of listening to you two talk. Can we continue?”
Nico gave me a rutting grin and raised his eyebrows. I couldn’t handle this any longer. Cal’s awkwardness. Balam’s conniving digging. Nico’s stupid face. It hadn’t even been a week and I wanted to gut them all. How was I going to handle this for another day?
Cal was trying to explain something to the demon and Nico was bent over at the waist chuckling all while I stood there in horror. “RUT THIS. I am over all of this. I hate men and I don’t know how I managed to rope myself with the likes of all of you.”
My hands twitched and my magic flooded the ground around me. It crawled up my skin in black waves and hid my body. All three children stared at me in wonder as I marched around them and left the clearing. I didn’t care if it caused me to be alone for the rest of eternity. If it meant I could escape their stupidity, so be it. I couldn’t handle being around them for another second. Cal started to follow me but I slashed my arm behind me in an arc and a wall of blackness kept him from tailing me. A whistle met my ears and I knew it had to be Balam. He was possibly the only one that wasn’t concerned about my wellbeing. He knew the power that was flooding my veins and if anyone could survive out here alone, it was me.
Chapter Eighteen
Cal
Balam kept a steady pace with me as we continued on. I could feel his eyes on me as we walked but I wasn’t in the right headspace to talk to him again. He was the reason all of this was happening. The fight had started because of him and like an idiot, I had fallen for his trap. I didn’t trust him and his glowing orange eyes. I didn’t trust his easy smile or the way he charmed my men. He was up to something sinister and I was going to find out what it was.
Nico let out a hum and I wanted to punch him into the ground. Ever since the demon had stopped hounding me, Nico had started singing. His singing was awful too. It was off-key and the pitch was all over the place. If he kept it up I was going to put my head through a tree.
“OoooooOOOOOO, there once was a boy-king that,” Nico started.
I stopped. “No.”
Nico cocked his head to the side and smiled. He looked like a damned happy dog. “Shut up.”
Nico pressed his fingers to his chin and fought the smile that was already breaking across his face. I thought for sure he was going to say something snarky, then Balam spoke, “I like this Nico fellow. He has a way with a tune.”
I growled and continued walking. He was certainly up to something. Nico knew nothing about a tune. He knew about swords and tactical information. Nico knew absolutely nothing about the arts. I eyed Balam’s impressive gear and knew I had to bridge the gap between us.
“What are you doing here, George?” I asked after Nico had finally concluded that his singing was going to get him killed.
Balam raised his dark eyebrows and something changed in his eyes. I wondered for a brief moment what his magic was like and if he could read my thoughts like Nico could plant them. “My Queen sent me to train Willow.”
“Are you certain you don’t mean seduce?” My voice came out angry and I knew I had to try better. I couldn’t bridge a friendship with animosity.
Balam let out a sigh. “I was ordered to teach her the ways of a Queen. She must know the art of seduction, weapon mastery, academics, and she must master her dark magic.”
My mind immediately went to our courting. We had hardly been courting -if you could even call it that- when Hel summoned her. Was she preparing Willow for my throne or her own?
“That is a long list of duties,” I replied. “A short trip isn’t going to teach her all of those things.”
Balam smiled and I got a peek at his sharp teeth. He had done an excellent job of keeping them hidden. “This isn’t a short trip, King. This is a long game.”
I cocked an eyebrow and considered his words. I didn’t like how he had said game. This was going to be an interesting trip once Willow calmed down.
If Willow calmed down.
We set up camp and my tent was assembled. As much as I wanted to sleep and sink into my blankets, there was no rest for my mind. Willow still hadn’t returned and Balam was perfectly fine with it. Like he knew she was fine. I tried to keep my anger in check but I was having a hard time as the demon knocked back some wine and jostled the men around him. He had managed to go from intimidating to friendly and approachable. I didn’t know how he did it. It was like something switched inside of him.
Nico leaned against the tree beside me. “He’s a fascinating fellow.”
I groaned. “Not you too.”
“What does that mean?” He ran his hands through his wet hair before he leaned over and shook it out.
“It means he is managing to turn you all to his side and I am the only one that can see he isn’t who he is pretending to be.” I tossed my hands in the air and retreated to my tent.
“Oh, I see it. I simply find him entertain
ing. I would rather get enjoyment out of all of this than a hole in my chest.” Nico rubbed his chest and made a face.
“He wouldn’t touch you,” I said, darkness filling my tone.
“What are you going to do? He would kill us all with the snap of a finger and we wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop him. I would rather be on the winner’s side. He could be a powerful ally. It doesn’t hurt to be formidable.”
“Do you think Willow is okay?” I didn’t like talking about the demon for too long. I had a feeling he would know about it. His powers were a mystery and we weren’t on the best footing already.
“It’s like you don’t know her at all.” Nico shrugged. “She is resourceful and is used to working alone. Now she has magic, I doubt she’s in any kind of danger.”
I wanted to believe him but as the night wore on, the air got colder. My breath was visible in front of my face and Nico’s lips were blue. I rubbed my hands together and wrapped my arms around my body. Nico’s teeth chattered across the room. I pushed the blankets off of me and pulled my clothes on. Thin nightclothes weren’t going to help me in this weather. I yanked my boots on and marched into the camp. Except, the camp was no longer the camp. It was covered in white fluff and not one of my men could be seen. Balam materialized in front of me and gave me a grim look.
“Your men will freeze to death tonight,” he said.
“What can I do?” I didn’t know why I was asking the demon for advice, but it was apparent that he wasn’t cold and he was hardly wearing any clothes.
“You can get all your men together. Body heat will keep them alive. Your tent is the biggest in the camp, it’ll house most of your men but not all of them. The rest of the men will camp in your elite’s tents.”
I nodded my head. “Round them up for me. I need to find Willow.”
“I will not follow your orders, I will be the one to find the girl.” Balam said over his shoulder as he disappeared into the darkness around our camp.
