by Grace Draven
Blood trickled from his nose, and smoke rose from his fingernails. He wiped away the blood and once more slinked through the prison’s web of hallways, guided by the beacon of song. He found Halani in one of the cramped cells notched into a curving arch of wall. She huddled on a bed of filthy straw, curled in on herself, hands tucked close to her chest.
“Halani.”
She jumped, a gasp echoing in the cell as she squinted at him in the half dark. “Malachus!” She reached for him through the gaps between the bars and he caught her hands, wrenching a strangled cry from her. He dropped her hands as if scalded.
“Where are you hurt?” Her agonized expression made him rattle the bars in a vain effort to tear them out of the stone in which they were anchored. Once more she tucked her hands close to her chest, but not before he got a glimpse at them. Her slender fingers looked the same, except for the smallest ones. Swollen and strangely bent, with bruising running their lengths and over the knuckle to her fourth fingers.
Rage exploded through him, and flames burst from his palms to race along the sides of his own fingers. He leapt away from the cell bars, fearful of harming Halani. She gaped at him, wide-eyed. The red haze descended over his vision for a few moments, and he breathed harder than a winded horse with the effort to suppress the draga’s inevitable rise. When he could finally speak, and the fire in his hands was no more than the memory of smoke, he stared at his lover through the unyielding bars. “Who did this to you, Halani?” Two broken little fingers was no accident. Someone had tortured her.
“I did.”
Malachus turned at the sound of a lilting voice addressing him from the opposite end of the corridor. A troop of soldiers blocked the exit to the main hall, every man armed, their weapons trained on him. At the head of their company, a blonde woman of extraordinary beauty stared at him with a raptor’s gaze, blue eyes as brilliant and hard as sapphires. She wore an ornate gown of crimson silk, its bodice embroidered in a complicated design made of small precious stones and beads. The bell-like sleeves did a fine job of almost completely disguising the fact that one of them was empty.
Dalvila, the empress of the Krael Empire.
She strolled toward him, her self-assured demeanor bordering on arrogance. Either she had supreme confidence in her guards’ ability to protect her, or she understood the value of her hostage to her adversary and his unwillingness to put her at greater risk.
The empress halted not far from him, out of his immediate reach but close enough that with a quick leap forward, he could snap her neck before one of her soldiers could lift his blade to defend her. It didn’t matter if she stood close enough to tread on his feet. Two of the guards held drawn bows with nocked arrows trained on Halani. Malachus hardly dared breathe, much less attack.
Dalvila’s gaze raked him, pausing at his shoulders, his midriff, his groin, the slash in his trousers. More bloodstains decorated his garb, enough that the one put there by Gharek’s cut was no longer distinguishable. She ran a small red tongue across her lower lip. “Well. Not quite what I expected. Handsome enough but not very epic. What is your name? I asked your whore, but she refused to tell me, even after I broke fingers.”
He answered promptly in case she took it as an invitation to break more of Halani’s bones. “Malachus. And you are Dalvila, the Spider of Empire.” He didn’t bow, though he would if she demanded it. Whatever it took to keep Halani alive.
The empress’s lush mouth curved into a delighted smile. “Is that what they call me? I like it.”
She would. Even in far Winosia, everyone had heard rumors and tales of the Kraelian empress. A calculating predator of exceptional cunning. “I’ve heard you’ve searched all of the Empire for me,” he told her. “So you know why I’m here.”
One of her elegant eyebrows rose. “Do I? I have two things of value to you. Which one do you want most? The whore?” She nodded toward Halani before retrieving the false mother-bond from the cuff of her empty sleeve. “Or your mother-bond?”
Under his tunic, the real mother-bond pulsed hard, as if sensing that the bits and pieces taken from it were close. Were he here alone, he’d call the false bone to him and embrace the imperative of his heritage. In the throes of a transformation, he would be impervious to any puny human arrow. He’d destroy the empress, her guard, those suffering wrecks in their cells, and half the palace in the act, and good riddance to them all. He’d also kill Halani.
He answered Dalvila’s question with one of his own. “What do you want of me?”
She laughed, a sound that made Malachus think of a barn snake swallowing hens’ eggs with an unhinged jaw and throat muscles that flexed and crushed. “I want all of you, Malachus. Your blood, your bones, your meat. I’d take your soul if there was a way to capture it. Every part of you is valuable to me.”
Foolish woman. For all her power, she was no different from most, fearing the one thing she couldn’t control and which came for every living being at some point—death. “Very flattering,” he countered. “But why would I willingly sacrifice myself to you?”
“Because if you don’t, I will decapitate your whore in front of you.” Her smile widened to a grin at the distressed sound Halani made.
This woman deserved the death she so greatly feared, and Malachus hoped when this was done, he’d be the one who dealt it. She played a game with him, her scrutiny sharp as any hawk’s as she waited for his next expression, his next reply. He kept his features carefully blank. “She’s no use to you alive once I’m dead. You’ll kill her just to make space in the cell for the next prisoner.”
The empress shrugged. “True, but what choice do you have?”
“More than you think. Without the mother-bond, I can’t transform, and I must transform. If I don’t, I will burn in a conflagration of my own making. My choice is to refuse the mother-bond and burn.” Dalvila lost her satisfied smirk. “Keep it,” he told her, playing a deadly game of bluff. “I will die as a man and do so in fire, so all that blood and bone and meat you so badly covet will be lost to you, and there will be nothing you can do to stop it.”
And everything near me will burn to ash as well. He didn’t say those words, didn’t want to dwell on them, for Halani would die with him too. It was a fate he desperately wanted to avoid, but he wouldn’t leave Halani to the empress’s savagery.
The smile Dalvila bestowed on him was no longer so triumphant but far more calculating, even admiring. “What a shame you’re worth more in pieces than whole. I think you’d do well as an ambassador for the Empire. You know how to negotiate without giving in, nor are you intimidated. A bargain, then, instead of a sacrifice. My people need a reminder that they live in the greatest empire that ever existed, ruled by the greatest monarch who ever lived. Kraelag’s destruction was an aberration. The Savatar savages won the day; they didn’t win the war they’ve started, nor will the Nunari enjoy their emancipation for long. I will have my revenge and recapture my territories. My armies are ready.
“With your blood, I will regain my arm, and your bones will replace those of Golnar lost in Kraelag’s fires. Instead of hanging them from my ceiling, they will go before my armies, a reminder of the might and power of the Krael Empire. All will know that Empress Dalvila is unbroken, undefeated, the conqueror of men and dragas alike.”
Malachus studied her, certain that this bargain of hers didn’t just spring up in her mind in response to his threat. It reeked of a long game’s manipulation, as if she’d set up this particular chessboard with many outcomes to consider. His threat to burn was just one, and she had a solution ready in case he used it. What else could he do but play it and see where it went?
“You still haven’t said what would inspire me to contribute to your personal glory,” he said.
Her delicate hand, with its manicured nails and unbroken fingers, fluttered in the air in a flirtatious gesture, as if they courted each other. In a way it was a
courtship. Of the deadliest sort. “I want to host a celebration, a spectacle to entertain all of Domora. A replay of ‘The Sun Maiden.’ You will be Golnar trying to steal the Sun Maiden statue for yourself.”
Both his stomach and his heart plummeted at her words, and the floor felt as if it dissolved beneath his feet so that he fell toward an abyss with no bottom and only the wind to follow him down. He would be forced to embrace his mother’s fate, and he knew even before he asked who would embrace Yain’s. “And where will you get your Sun Maiden?”
The sly gaze she sent Halani only verified his certainty. “I will put the Sun Maiden on the battlements. You’ll have the chance to rescue her. If you can get her off the walls without dying beforehand, you can set her down outside them. She can then run away. I won’t waste my soldiers chasing after her, though I can’t guarantee a few enthusiastic townsmen won’t try and capture her for their own purposes.”
Torn apart by a mob frenzied with bloodlust. His own death would be more merciful simply because Dalvila would make certain his butchers took care with their cleavers. He’d have to find a way to live long enough for Halani to get free of the city and its citizens.
The empress was a cruel woman, but also an intelligent one. No doubt she had an answer for his next question, but he’d ask anyway. Answers often revealed things not always intended. “And if I decide to just fly away once I transform?” A newly transformed draga didn’t just flutter off like a starling, but Dalvila didn’t yet know that.
“My sorcerers will see to it that you don’t fly away. Leashes woven of magic that won’t let you get too far. It’s said that dragas can breathe fire, though Golnar didn’t use his for some reason when he faced Kansi Yuv. If I see so much as a puff of smoke wisp out of your nostrils in my direction, your own Sun Maiden is dead, and I’ll make sure the dying takes a very long time.”
Malachus saw Halani shudder, though she kept silent as she listened to their negotiating. The empress’s reptilian gaze gleamed in the muddied light of the flickering torches. Golnar didn’t use fire because she didn’t want to immolate her own daughter, you vicious bitch, he thought. “I thought magic was outlawed in the Krael Empire.”
Dalvila stiffened. “I am the Empire. The law bends to my whim, not the other way around.”
It was a demon’s bargain, with almost no chance of getting Halani out of Dalvila’s clutches alive and no chance whatsoever of him surviving. But for now there was no other way. To refuse her offer meant signing Halani’s death warrant. At least by agreeing to the empress’s terms, he’d buy a little time to find a way out of this disaster for both Halani and him. “I want to see her before you put her on the battlements and while you’re putting her there so that I know it’s her, and that she’s alive and unmarked.”
A diabolical triumph glittered in Dalvila’s icy blue eyes, and her expression had lost all of its sardonic humor, leaving behind only a serpent’s cold-blooded scrutiny. “Fair enough. I’ll even bring her to you once it’s time for you to transform. Do I have your agreement?”
He nodded. “You do.” The empress would have her spectacle.
“Malachus.” His name on Halani’s lips might have been a prayer, an entreaty, a last mournful denial of this bargain he’d made.
He glanced at her, shaking his head to signal for her continued silence before turning back to Dalvila. “What do you require of me?”
“Follow me, and I’ll show you.”
Her soldiers made quick work of divesting him of his knives, the crossbow, and its quarrels. They patted him down in search of any other hidden weaponry, never finding the mother-bond, whose magic served to hide its presence from all others now that he was reunited with it. Satisfied he was no longer armed, they clapped his hands and legs in irons.
He didn’t want to leave Halani in the dark, filthy cell, but he had no choice. He paused to stare at her, offering with his gaze what he dared not say out loud. Trust me. I will alter the heavens to save you. She nodded as if she heard him, and in her gaze he saw longing, fear, and unshakable faith.
His bonds forced him to shuffle, and the journey from the prison to the palace’s upper floors was a long, slow one. Impatient with their progress, Dalvila left him behind, warning the soldiers not to injure him. “I want him whole and without a bruise on him. He can’t do what I plan if he has broken bones and wounds.”
A few of the men muttered their disappointment once she was out of earshot, but none defied her, and they reached a grand chamber with a soaring ceiling and polished marble floor with him uninjured.
Dalvila waited in the room’s center, flanked by three men dressed in guild robes he recognized as those worn by sorcerers bound to an order existing in Winosia. The empress had imported her magicians. Obviously, the laws that applied to Kraelian citizens didn’t apply to Dalvila. As she’d told him, she was the empress; therefore, she was the law.
Malachus noted that the chamber’s floors were intricately carved with runes and sigils set in a colossal circle that took up most of the space. He recognized a few—binding runes and wards. The entire place hummed with power.
“The sigils were put there when sorcerers were far more powerful and served the will of the emperor,” the empress said. “They used this circle to summon entities that made dragas seem fragile. You’ll wait inside it for now while I prepare the city for our little spectacle.”
She nodded, and his escort shoved him hard across the circle’s rune perimeter so that he stumbled and fell to his knees, still fettered by the irons that shackled his wrists to his legs. More power, old and blood tainted, seized him in a suffocating embrace. He shook it off, breaking the invisible weave that sought to bind him as much as his shackles did. He staggered to his feet, unwilling to kneel long in the empress’s presence.
She circumnavigated the circle’s perimeter, reminding Malachus of his trip across the sea, when he’d seen the sharks course around the ship he was on, waiting for some unfortunate sailor to pitch from the deck into the waves. “I forgot to ask,” she said. “Where is Gharek? Did you kill him?”
He didn’t risk a lie. She might believe him, but if she didn’t, Halani would pay for his attempted deception. “Your cat’s-paw hoped to outmaneuver me. He lost.”
Dalvila sniffed. “Ah well, he served his purpose. It doesn’t matter now. You’re here where I want you, and soon you’ll provide Domora’s citizens with the finest entertainment and me with the opportunity to gain back my arm and retain my youth.”
If he wasn’t sure disabusing her of such ridiculous notions would destroy any hope of rescuing Halani, he would have laughed. Instead, he walked to the circle’s center and sat down, wondering how long it might be before she released the false mother-bond with its precious splinters to him so he could transform, and if he’d have the strength to hold down the draga much longer.
She watched him, puzzlement drawing her eyebrows together. “You find me dull, don’t you?”
Malachus sensed she’d be amused by his unadorned answer. “I find you vile.”
Dark laughter danced in her blue eyes. “Another draga, doomed to repeat Golnar’s failure in trying to steal the Sun Maiden.” The laughter vanished, leaving behind only the darkness. “You’re going to die. You know that, don’t you? You will never leave Domora still breathing.”
There was really nothing subtle at all about this woman. “You’re the Spider of Empire. No one believes in mercy from you.”
“True, but mercy never raised empires and conquered kingdoms. To be loved or feared . . .” Dalvila clucked her tongue. “Neither matters to me as long as I’m obeyed.”
He didn’t bother arguing with her. He’d witnessed mercy and its sister compassion, been a recipient of both. They lived within a woman whose soul shone as bright as this creature’s pulsed dark, and if the gods favored him, he’d see to it before he died that the first lived on in the world and the sec
ond did not.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Halani pressed herself to the cell bars as the soldiers pushed Malachus through the corridor and out of sight. She’d wanted to cry out his name, ask why he was bloodied, had he found Asil, a million questions hovering on her lips that she dared not speak in front of the empress. That monstrous woman would lap up Halani’s distress as if it were nectar.
Had she seen the last of her draga lover? She shied away from the bleak thought. She’d never been one to delude herself regarding difficult realities. The fact that she hadn’t been raped yet while imprisoned didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen in the next few moments or the next few days. She’d been groped and leered at by those who’d brought her here before being tossed in this cell, but none had forced themselves on her. Not while her well-being had value as the lure to bring in the elusive, provocative prey that was a draga.
Without a window to see the outside world, she had no idea how much time had passed since Dalvila had taken Malachus, but the hours dragged before a pair of guards appeared, keys in hand. These men didn’t work in the prison itself. They were too finely garbed in the livery of the palace’s more gracious floors. Nor did they leer at her with the same feral lust she’d seen in the other guards.
One unlocked the cell door. “The empress says you’re to attend her,” he announced. He opened the door and ushered her out with an impatient gesture.
Unlike Malachus, who’d been trussed in heavy irons when they led him away, she remained unfettered as they navigated the prison’s confusing maze of hallways, ascending several stairs before finally reaching doors that opened onto a guardroom manned by more of those dressed like her escort. They wrinkled their noses as she passed them.
