The Emperor of Evening Stars (The Bargainer Book 3)

by Laura Thalassa

  My power begins to ebb, the darkness clearing from my vision. I make out my mother, and she gives me the same sort of pitying look all the townspeople give me.

  “My son, that is not a vow you can keep,” she says softly, her voice breaking. Her terror and her pity are giving way to a more hopeless expression, something that looks a lot like desolation.

  She’s not going to tell me—not today and from her expression, probably not anytime soon. She’d have me endure the taunts and insults for years more! All so that she can shelter me. As though I’m a defenseless babe!

  My anger rises swiftly within me, dragging my power along with it.

  … You are a man now …

  I am. My wings are proof enough of that. My wings and my magic, the latter of which is building on itself, darkening my vision once more. My wings flare out, so large I can’t fully extend them in our cramped quarters.

  Too much magic.

  I sway on my feet. My anger amplifies my power, and my power, in turn, amplifies my anger, building to some elusive crescendo.

  Can’t control it.

  I know a split-second before I lose control that my magic is too big for my body and too strong for my will.

  And then the storm trapped beneath my veins is trapped no more.

  “Tell me.” My voice booms, my power rippling across the room. Our dining table slides across the floor, the chairs tumbling. The kitchen utensils hanging over our cauldron now fly across the room, and our crude stoneware plates shatter against the far wall.

  It’s a testament to my mother’s strength that my power only manages to make her stumble back a few feet. My dark power coils around her. I can actually see it, like tendrils of inky smoke.

  As soon as I release my magic out into the room, it loosens its hold on me. Again I can think clearly.

  Horror replaces anger. Never have I spoken to my mother this way. Never has my power slipped its leash—though never has my power felt so vast.

  I can still see my magic in front of me. It circles my mother’s throat and seeps into her skin.

  I feel sick as I watch her throat work.

  What have I done?

  … Don’t you know? …

  … Can’t you feel it? …

  … You’ve compelled her to answer …

  Gods’ bones. Now I can feel it, like a phantom limb. My magic is clawing its way through my mother’s system, prying the secret from her.

  Something flickers in her eyes, something alarming, something that looks an awful lot like fear.

  Fear of me.

  Her throat works as she fights the words. But eventually she loses.

  “Your father is Galleghar Nyx.”

  Chapter 2

  The Shadow King

  254 years ago

  “They’re coming.” My mother slams our cavern door closed as she storms into our house.

  “Who?” I close the book I’ve been reading and slide my ankles off the edge of the table. I’m not supposed to kick my feet up on our table, and normally I’d get chewed out for it, but today, my mom doesn’t even notice.

  “Your father’s men.”

  I look at my mother with alarm as she grabs my arm, dragging me towards the back recesses of our home where our rooms are. Every room in our house has a door or an artificial wall to seal the caverns we dwell in from those that lie beyond. The entire heart of Arestys is a maze of them, spanning nearly the length of the island. Not even I know all of the caverns by heart, and I’ve lived my whole life inside them.

  “Why are the king’s men coming?” I ask, my voice deepening in alarm.

  Control your emotions, I tell myself, though it’s my mother’s voice I hear in my head. For fairies, power and emotion are all wrapped up together. Lose control of one, and you’ll lose control of the other.

  And if the king’s men are coming, I can’t afford to lose control.

  Since the day three years ago that my mom confessed my father was the Galleghar Nyx, tyrant King of Night, I sealed away all dreams of reuniting with him. Better to be a bastard than his son.

  Galleghar Nyx is a powerful man. A cruel, powerful man. The kind of man you hope never notices you.

  “Someone saw your wings,” she says.

  I swallow. My distinctive, damning wings. Fairies don’t tend to have the talon-tipped wings of dragons and demons. In fact, there’s only one particular line of fairies that share this trait—the royal bloodline.

  I had the misfortune of inheriting my father’s wings.

  “They must’ve reported them,” she continues.

  Fear coils low in my stomach. I did this. Over the last three years, I’ve kept my wings hidden, but sometimes even my practiced control slips.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, running a hand through my white hair. The words sound hollow. You apologize for a mistake, but this is so much bigger than a simple mistake.

  Too many fights that I went looking for and too many pretty women I spent too long gazing after. I baited myself over and over again with the exact things that triggered my wings.

  And there had been that village girl the other week … she’d seen them. She’d seen them and all but ran to tell the village elders. I was only able to stop her by striking a bargain—her silence for a bracelet made out of moonbeams and asteroid hearts.

  I can’t wield magic, but I’ve gotten good at churning out deals.

  So I whispered to the sweet moon stories about the sun until she shared a little of her light, and I let the cosmos taste my essence in return for the hearts, and it took four days, but I got the village girl her heavenly bracelet.

  Apparently it was all for nothing. She must’ve told someone in those four days before I could fulfill my end of the bargain. After all, it’s not every day that you stumble upon the heir to the Night Kingdom.

  “Don’t apologize for who you are,” my mother says now, refusing to allow me to take the fall for something that is surely my fault. She drags me to her room, shutting the door behind her.

  “Your powers are still awakening?” she asks, changing the subject.

  I nod. I was powerful before my wings sprouted, and even though I gained a huge portion of my magic that night, it’s been steadily burgeoning within me ever since.

  The look my mother gives me is both proud and full of worry. “My son, you’re already powerful. Not yet powerful enough to escape your father’s clutches, but one day … one day you might become the very thing he fears.”

  I don’t know what to do with her words. At any other time I might preen under the praise, but right now … they sit like spoiled meat in my stomach.

  She releases my hand and moves over to her rickety bed. She pushes it aside, staring at the ground beneath it. I follow her gaze, looking at the uneven, rocky surface. Other than some dust motes, there’s nothing to be seen.

  She holds her hand out and mutters a few words under her breath. My arms prickle as I feel her magic drift out from her. The ground shimmers, like a mirage, then disappears, revealing a huge pit in its place. And inside the pit …

  “Mom …?”

  I stare, transfixed, at the mountain of coins that fill it nearly to the brim. Some are copper, some are silver, but most are gold. Scattered between them are rough cut gemstones, the kind that pulse with heartbeats.

  Lapis viventem. Alchemist stones.

  “What—what is all this?” I ask.

  There’s far more money here than a scribe makes. Whatever my mother has been doing, it’s not just scribbling out the histories of Arestys.

  My mother stares at the treasure. “It’s yours,” she says, her gaze moving to me.

  Her words are like a blow to the chest. She’s been saving all this money … for me?

  I’m shaking my head. Fairies don’t give gifts like this, not without catches. Not even to their brood.

  It feels like cursed magic.

  “I won’t take it.”

  “You will, my son,” she says, “along with the r
est of your inheritance.”

  I furrow my brows as I look at her. There’s more?

  She looks steadily at me. “My secrets.”

  My heart is pounding, and whatever she’s about to say, I don’t want to hear it because secrets are meant for one soul to keep.

  I pinch my eyes shut and shake my head over and over again. I refuse to think of what it means that she’s breaking one of her deepest rules. That she’s giving me her inheritance. That’s an ominous word to use.

  “Desmond,” she says, touching my shoulder and shaking me slightly, “where is the man I raised? I need you to be strong for me right now.”

  My eyes open at her words, and I’m silently begging her to not go down this path, but she ignores my look.

  “The King of Day owes me a favor. Take this money, buy yourself asylum.”

  Asylum? In the Kingdom of Day? Forced to never see the night?

  “If he won’t accept your money, tell him you’re the daughter of Larissa Flynn and Galleghar Nyx. Show him your wings if you need to. He will not refuse you then.”

  “Only if you come with me,” I say. Because that seems to be the catch—acquire safety, but abandon my mother. And that I will not do.

  She cups my cheek. “I can’t, my son. I bought my fate long ago.”

  I squint at her, not understanding.

  “Listen carefully,” she says, “because I only have time to tell you this once. I didn’t love your father—I never did,” she says.

  As soon as the words leave her mouth, I still. So many times I imagined asking her about this—how she came into my father’s clutches. I couldn’t fathom how my clever, principled mother could care for the Shadow King, a man who collected wives and killed his children.

  “My name once was Eurielle D’Asteria. Originally, I was one of the king’s spies,” she admits.

  My mother? A spy? And one who went by a different name?

  Secrets are meant for one soul to keep. It’s an apt slogan for a spy.

  “I didn’t answer directly to him,” she continues, “so for many decades we never came face-to-face. Not until I foiled an assassination attempt on the king did he ever lay eyes on me.”

  My mother saved the king’s life. That revelation leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. There are urchins more worthy of saving than the creature that rules our land.

  “Galleghar invited me to his palace to personally medal me for the deed.” Her eyes grow distant. She shakes her head. “I should have known better than to go, but go I did. That day I entered that meeting a spy, but by the end of it, I’d been stripped of my title and duties and I was deposited into his harem.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Why?” I ask, bewildered. From everything I’ve read, fairies don’t just choose mates over the course of a day. Some circle each other for centuries before settling down.

  My mother lifts a shoulder. “He never really told me.”

  So he ripped her life from her and forced her to be his. The thought makes my skin crawl.

  I’m a product of that union.

  “I was with him for many years, many long, lonesome years. Until, one day, things changed.

  “Galleghar doesn’t let his concubines have much freedom, but on one rare occasion I was outside the palace walls, enjoying a traveling faire, when a diviner told me a piece of my future.

  My mother pauses. “She said, ‘In your hour of desperation, you’ll know what to do, and the world will thank you for it.’

  “I forgot the diviner’s words until the day I found out I was pregnant. It was only then that they came back to me. And she was right, I did know what to do. I sold off centuries of my life for the means to escape, and eventually, I fled the king’s palace right under his nose. I came here, and here I’ve stayed ever since.”

  My mother sold off centuries of her life?

  She clasps the side of my face. “So you see, my son, my fate was decided long before today.”

  My heart is squeezing and squeezing. I imagine this is how a star feels as it dies, like everything it loves and everything it is, is pressing inwards and crushing the life out of it.

  I shake my head in her hands. My eyes are starting to sting, but I’m still too shocked to fully process all that my mother has said.

  She pulls my face in close. “Hide your wings, control your temper, and learn everything you can about the world, starting with your enemies,” she breathes. “Trust no one, and above all, don’t share your secrets.”

  254 years ago

  My mother is still cradling my face when we hear the thud of footsteps echo down the caverns.

  The two of us share a wild look.

  My father’s men are here.

  “There’s a bag amongst your inheritance that’s spelled to hold it all. Collect what you can while I hold the soldiers off, and then leave.” She nods to the door at the back of her room, the one that leads out to the maze of tunnels behind our house.

  I shake my head. “Only if you come with me,” I insist stubbornly.

  “Desmond,” she says calmly, “you are a king’s son. A legitimate heir to a tyrant’s kingdom. You need to keep yourself alive not just for my sake, or yours, but for our realm’s. Do you understand?”

  “Stop,” I say hoarsely, because I do understand, but I don’t want to.

  She releases me, backing towards the door that leads out of her bedroom and into our living room. “I love you, my son. Till darkness dies, I will.”

  My heart thunders.

  Up until now, this has been my life. These slick, dank cave walls, this humble abode, this enigmatic mother. I’ve resented this life for years, but now, right when I might lose it all, I find I can’t bear the thought. Not my mother’s sacrifice, not my cursed situation, not the possibility that this might all come to a swift end because this life, even as bleak as it is, is somehow too good for the likes of us.

  I stare at the chest of coins. Years’ worth of riches my mother worked for, all so that one day she could save me, and me alone.

  She’s almost to the door when I realize that I suddenly can’t agree to this. To any of it.

  Need to beat her to those soldiers.

  I call on my magic, and it rises within me as though I’d been using it all along. For years I rejected it, but even after all that time it hadn’t forsaken me.

  I have no idea how to handle my power, but it doesn’t seem to matter. All I have to do is will myself to stop my mother, and my magic responds.

  One moment, I’m a man, and in the next, skin, bone, and muscle bleed away. All that’s left of me is conscious thought. In an instant I’m one with the darkness.

  I move across the room, and I don’t even have time to feel wonder or fright that I can do this—that I can become the night—before I reappear between my mother and the door out, my body forming into that of a man once more.

  Her eyes widen as she takes me in.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, my hand going to the doorknob. In the distance I can hear the clomp of soldiers’ boots growing louder, “but you didn’t raise a coward.”

  Before she has a chance to react, I open the door and slip out.

  Bar the door.

  Once again my power rises to accommodate me, and the door slams closed, sealing shut behind me.

  I almost laugh at how easy it is to use my magic. So much easier than containing it like I’ve always had to do.

  “Desmond!” My mom’s muffled voice sounds panicked as she jiggles the doorknob. Her power batters against mine as she throws spells at the door, but even unpracticed as I am at magic, I can tell I’m stronger than her. Much stronger. That door isn’t going to budge anytime soon.

  Now it’s my mother who will be forced to escape out the back of her room and me who will face down my father’s men.

  Good.

  They’re after me anyway.

  254 years ago

  Behind me, the door to my mother’s room rattles.

  “Desmond!” she cries out a
gain.

  I ignore her, crossing our living room and heading for the front door. I can still hear the soldiers’ footfalls, and by the sounds of it, they haven’t yet reached our house.

  I open our front door, and at the other end of the dark tunnel that leads to our house I see a squadron of soldiers heading down the dank passageway. It’s then and only then that I realize I don’t have a plan.

  As soon as they see me, the uniformed men and women begin to run down the tunnel, towards our home, their hands dropping to their swords. This will be no civil visit. In that instant I truly understand that having the king’s blood running through me is a death sentence.

  But it also makes me strong. Very strong.

  I square my shoulders and widen my stance. My mother is not sacrificing herself today. Not on my behalf.

  Stop them.

  My magic snaps out of me, rippling across the cave and bending the light before it slams into the soldiers.

  They’re blasted off their feet and then thrown onto their backs, every last one toppling over like felled trees. No one gets up.

  The silence that follows is deafening.

  Did I … kill them?

  But as I watch, one of them moves his arm and another sighs out a breath.

  My muscles relax. Unconscious, but not dead.

  I back away, moving into my house, using my power rather than my hand to close my front door.

  Time to go.

  I make my way back across the living room towards my mother’s bedroom. It’s only as I lay my hand on the doorknob that I realize it’s quiet. Far too quiet.

  Unease slices through me as I open that door.

  Beyond it, my mother’s room is exactly how I left it, save for three things: my inheritance is hidden again, the back door is open, and my mother is gone.

  She fled, I tell myself. But the hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end, and there’s a taste to the air …

  Hostile magic.

  This time, I become one with the darkness before I can even think the command, disappearing from my mother’s room and reappearing right outside her back door.

  A short ways away I can hear voices, and my mother’s is one of them.