“You vipers,” he hissed. “Is there ever a true one among you?”
“Let me go!” I roared, and my true voice, much deeper and throatier than my sisters, snuck between my lips in shock.
I covered my mouth, gasping. He grabbed my face with the other hand, bruising my cheeks. “Show your true form, temptress.”
I fought, but the charm fell away under his power and I shivered as I lost my strength with the blade still pressed neatly between my breast.
When I revealed my true self, he let me go. He stepped back away and withdrew his sword. He pointed it at me.
“What other tricks or traps have you set?”
I said nothing.
“Speak, child,” he snapped, and the ground moved beneath my feet.
“I am no child.”
Truly, to a god, I would seem so. To a human, I would look very womanly as the titans mature by age seven. Still, he was right, I was very young for a goddess.
The trees lost leaves, and his power rolled up through my legs, cramping my muscles, stabbing my stomach with needles, and my chest compressed. He found his way past all of my barriers and through all of my defenses to prick at my heart.
I panicked. “Nothing! There is nothing!” I clutched my throat, scraping to try to do away with the power. “I swear it.”
The lie bit my tongue until blood welled up in my mouth.
He had cast an enchantment to speak the truth.
“The more you lie the worse it will be.” He lowered his sword, but I would not tell him of my plan. I would be dead either way. I simply would not speak again.
“Tell me what your family plots. Tell me why your father sent you.” He was growing impatient and I could see that was not common for the god-king. “Speak,” he commanded, coming closer.
I lifted my hands, waiting for him to strike me, but he had no need. His power thrusted itself into my belly once more, and I fell to my knees, spewing forth the contents of my stomach. Blood came with it from my tongue.
“There is no plot,” I whispered, and my tongue burned with more cuts, this time deeper, and blood welled and poured out of my mouth.
I would choke on what was left of my tongue if I spoke once more.
“You would die?” he hissed, crouching low. “For a dog of a father who gave you to his enemy. Who would give you to that giant. A demi-god known for bedding and ruining every woman that he touches. Murdering them as if they were rats.” He was in disbelief. “You would die for them? Those wicked immortals who would use you to your end. Speak the truth or die on the lies, goddess! The choice is yours.’’
He was furious, and his power was tearing me apart from the inside out. More blood came but not from my tongue. It was as if even the lies in my thoughts cut me.
His hand touched my chin and lifted it but still I could see nothing inside the cloak.
“I would see the face of my killer,” I said, though barely speaking above a whisper. “Please,” I pleaded, knowing the life flowed from me and I would wake in the underworld.
He hesitated, and I took that moment to reach inside my robes and pull the blade from its sheath. He put his sword away and reached for his cloak hood. He was so focused on me there, a goddess, bleeding to death on her own lies, that he did not see it coming until it was too late.
He had called me a viper. He spoke a truth into prophecy for I struck with the quickness of an asp. The blade pierced his armor and it struck his heart with ease.
The god-king did not move.
Of course, he’d assume it was a blade made of regular steel. He had to have figured it was the act of a desperate and sad prisoner, that I would think a dagger would kill one such as he.
Haughtily he stood, the dagger still buried there, and he made a noise of disappointment.
His cloak was still in place, the hood remained, and I could not see his features.
“Arman,” he said with grief, pulling the blade from his chest. “Said you were different. He begged me to believe that at least one of your father’s loins would not be wicked.” The god-king sounded so weary. “But I warned him that not one would be free of my wrath. Not one. And that none would be undeserving. And when he brought you here, did he not pay the ultimate price for his faith?”
He held the blade in his hands, and I watched it melt into ash.
From his cloak he brought out another dagger, identical. I had been tricked. “When you fought the giant, you hid this. I switched the blades. I knew all along what you and your wretch of a sister had planned.”
The god-king withdrew his own power from me, and my power filled me and began to heal the damage he had done.
I climbed to my feet. “You knew?”
“I did.”
“But my power, it was diminished!” I coughed up more blood and I could almost sense a cold smile emanating from the figure opposite my place.
“Your power,” he scoffed. “You defeated one giant and think to challenge an ancient god like me? With what? The trickery of a child, still. You have not come into your own power, and perhaps now,” he paused with meaning, “you never will.”
I would not hang my head in shame at my failure. I had done what I thought I must, and I would do it again if given the chance and the god-king knew it. I had no loyalties to him. But he had known I would try to kill him. Yet he had let me live.
“Then, let us finish this.”
“I will not fight you, goddess. And your death will not be so easy as to fall under my power and spend your eternity on the other side. No. Your deathbed will be as far away as I can make it.”
He turned to leave, and I gaped at him. “I will not go with you willingly!”
“You will.”
Without turning to me, he whistled, and his horse bounded through the woods to his side.
“How do you know?” I asked.
His posture was one of defeat, yet it was I who was defeated. “Because you have nowhere else to go.” He mounted his animal and rode onward. “And because I have your sister.”
Chapter 5
I followed Ascalaphus to the castle, and we entered the place that I had begun to relax in as a friend of Arman before, only now, I was an enemy once more. I trailed behind the king and everyone backed away from me as we entered the main room as if to touch me was to drop dead on the spot. Perhaps they were not wrong.
I had not seen a throne since I’d been to the islands, having been in a separate wing of suites. Ascalaphus marched me inside as if to show me where his friend had sat for so long holding court.
Seeing the empty seat, I felt as though my head were held under frozen water.
Just below the throne, I saw my sister huddled and I ran to her. “Cenia!” I touched her face and hair and shoulders. “Are you unharmed?”
“I am,” she said sadly, prettily, aware that every eye was on her.
“Oh, Cenia,” I said, holding her to me as I did when she was only a baby.
She looked, to human eyes, as a fully-grown woman, deity, but she was merely fourteen in their years. “All of our plans were ruined.”
I pulled back and forced a smile and she returned it. I had to be strong. If not, we would fall apart so far from home.
The king had not taken off his hood and he watched us both with interest before he motioned for guards to return us to my rooms. I glared at him as I left, hoping that he felt my anger.
Anger for my sister. Anger for making me face the loss of Arman so keenly.
Cenia tugged my hand, her eyes cast downward.
My sister. The star. Now he had her.
Once we were in my rooms, and alone, she stopped her pitiful tears and returned to her haughty self. She raised a brow at the books. She poured herself some wine. She oohed and awed at the view from my balcony—as I’d come to think of this room and the balcony…mine.
Cenia leaned over, nearly over the edge, crooning that salty air made her hair float as flower petals.
“Cenia,” I said, knowing wha
t best to say to my sister. “You are like the sun amidst these mortals.”
She preened. “It’s true, isn’t it? They wilt every moment. I can almost smell the death on them. I swear they age before my eyes.”
I laughed, but inside my stomach twisted. Arman did not deserve it. This should have been a night of mourning for him and here I was laughing at their easy ends.
“They look like cows,” she said airily and then she gasped. “Your owl is back! Look at him swooping low, just for me!”
“I….uh. I don’t think the humans look anything like a hooved animal. Some are rather appealing.”
“Meh.” She scowled up at the moon. “Grandmother is just there, and she knows I am trapped here.” Tears rushed down her cheeks prettily once more. “Why don’t you come down here, you old hag, and do something? You could squash this mad king easily.”
Mad king? I had not thought him so.
If I were to lie to myself, I’d say he were evil. Honesty kept me unsure.
“What do you mean mad?” I pulled Cenia’s hand down where she had been reaching for the moon, or the owl, or something just out of reach. Truly, my sister was an actor in a play for an audience of her imagination.
Disrespecting our grandmother wasn’t going to help matters.
“He’s as mad as a dog with rabies.” Her eyes rolled in her head, and she snorted like a horse. “Do you see how he covers himself? He must be ugly and putrid.” She shivered. “Am I to marry a monster? Oh, Freya, tell me you will save me. I am like a ship, wrecked and broken amidst the storm. There is no one any longer to captain me!”
The owl landed on the ledge, and I stroked his chest absentmindedly. “Cenia. Speak plainly. Your similes are rather morbid.” And pitiful, I wouldn’t add.
Cenia shrugged elegantly and reached for the bird, but he shimmied out of reach, landing on my other side. I smiled and cooed to him. He had visited me so often in my solitude, that I’d begun to think him a friend. I already had some of our dinner ready to give him, and he ate it with relish.
It brought me joy. He responded in kind, shaking his feathers out to look larger, making me laugh.
“Father says so,” Cenia said petulantly. “He’s a mad king. He’s been imprisoned before. Lost his sense of things. Why do you think he is alone here on his man-island? I have not seen any nymphs. Demi-gods, even.”
It was true. In our kingdom, though Cenia and I were kept away, it was well known how many blessed with divinity had visited our shores.
Cenia would not think Arman or the other regents, any kind of company so I did not bring them up.
“Imprisoned? What do you mean?”
She went back inside, pretending to be cold.
“Fine,” I said with a sigh, eyes meeting the owl’s. “She can keep her secrets. We have ours, don’t we?”
The owl had seen me happily dining with a mortal, something my family would never understand. Lucky, he couldn’t speak.
“Ma’am,” a servant said from the doorway. She held a change of clothes for Cenia and me.
Cenia laughed at her, only half covering her mouth. “I will dress myself, maid. As if I would want your mortal hooves on me.” The title of maid could have been exchanged for “worm” for all of the thought Cenia placed into it.
“Leave them,” I said. “Thank you. You may go.”
Cenia spun on me, her hand lifting to close the door with a smash before the maid could escape. “She may not leave. I have questions.”
I sighed, because to outright fight with Cenia would not do. It would only frighten the girl worse. She was already crying.
“Tell me,” Cenia said advancing on the girl. “Tell me what your mad king has in store for me,”
I tried to see Cenia through human eyes—with her shining hair and skin so bright it probably hurt their eyes. With her power now unleashed, it would be akin to the maid staring into the sun for too long. Perhaps they were not tears, but painful leaking from looking at Cenia’s fire.
In all of my years, I had craved that power. In every breath since Cenia’s birth, I had longed to be as cherished as she. My father kept Cenia a secret for the fact that “She would someday put Aphrodite to shame.”
Such a thrill had gone through my young mind at having a sister so beautiful that Olympian goddesses would be dimmed next to her glow. But now...now I wanted none of that. The humans had not been pained to look at me. They had not watched me as the maid did now. With awe, yes, for I was still a goddess and a strange one, but Cenia brought from them a sort of terrible dread. The girl’s bones shook, and she grew frail before me as if her life was draining. And for once, I was happy with my darkness.
In that instant, I knew I would never wish to trade places with Cenia again. I did not want to hurt the mortals. A shift within likened me to them more than my own sister in that moment.
“Cenia,” I warned.
“No. She will tell us all. Speak,” she snapped, not unlike the king had told me in the woods.
The girl cried out in alarm before whispering, “Please. I know nothing.”
“See. Leave her be.”
“Oh, she knows something,” Cenia said, with a pointed look. “I’ll scrape the skin from your bones!” she shouted, and I had never until that night seen such a side of my sister. Then again, I had never been around humans before and to her, they were cattle.
“Go!” I bellowed, and the door flew open with my power.
The girl ran and the door closed again, with Cenia’s.
It was a battle of wills then and the items of the room lifted in flight. I hurled a chair at her, and she hurled a bed at me. She ripped down the curtains and formed them into snakes. I turned them into feathers.
She made to transform my books, but I held a hand, staying her power, forcing her into stillness with her own hair knotted around her slight form.
Cenia was bound and the ground shook with her rage, but I smiled.
My sister was beautiful. But I was far more powerful.
“What is going on in here!” A woman stood in the room, her face red with anger when she looked at our mess. “How dare you!” She pointed at us. “You are guests here, but you shall be prisoners when I tell the king what you have done. You do not threaten my workers. You do not destroy our things!”
She was a full-figured woman with dark hair, eyes, and skin. I had been able to see the people of the island before, the natives, and she was one of them. She drew herself up and spoke a language that I did not know before spitting on the stone floor.
The woman had just cursed us with her words, I knew. Cenia and I were so caught off guard that we blinked at the woman.
“May I ask,” I said evenly, “who we have the benefit of speaking with?”
“I am Kanani, and this is my palace. Yes, Arman may have ruled it, rest his soul, and the king is our king, always, but this palace….” She motioned around herself. “…is mine. What I say goes. And you would be wise to stop threatening my workers and stop having child-like fits in here, destroying furniture!”
Cenia choked on a laugh. “Mortal, surely you are mistaken. I could pluck the head from your body with thought.”
Kanani smiled. “Then do it. Goddess.” She held her hands at her sides waiting.
Cenia’s eyes were round with surprise, but then she narrowed them, her bluster about to undo us all.
I tried to stop the bluff. “Cenia was only asking what the king means to do with us. She is afraid, Kanani, and wants answers.” I lifted my hand righting the room and fixing the furniture in an instant.
The woman gazed towards me with a softer look. “There is to be a betrothal,” she said. “For your sister.”
“With the king?” I asked.
My heart was going so quickly that it was nearly as fast as a mortals.
“No,” she said with a smile, her sly eyes moving towards Cenia. “She is to be married to a man of the king’s choosing. A human man.”
And in the stunned sile
nce, Kanani left us there to ponder.
Haughty she might’ve been, but she was still a child. Cenia cried herself sick after Kanani’s visit, her body shaking violently. “Kill me!” she sobbed. “Strike me dead, Freya. I cannot. I will not. I would rather die!”
At first my heart was crushed to hear it, but after listening to Cenia go on so, and her awful diatribe and prejudice against mortals, I was beginning to think she deserved it. But still, my motherly heart softened, and I brought her to the balcony with more wine. We emptied the decanter until she was her glowing, happy self.
“It won’t be so bad, perhaps. Some men are very good, Cenia. You will see.”
She slapped my hands away. “What do you know? You are fallen. You are banished. I could go home if your stupid king would only let me.”
My king…?
“Perhaps my betrothed will be a king as well,” she said quietly. “Then if I kill him, I will be queen alone.”
I sighed. It was disappointing to see her think so little of humans. I hoped, over time, she would begin to see what I had. That they could be kind, and beautiful.
I had not properly mourned Arman, so I turned away from Cenia and let the tears fall on my balcony. The owl returned, and I let him see the tears but not my sister.
She was too busy plotting the murder of her betrothed and drinking more wine.
While she was in the room, I told the owl, “He was a good man, wasn’t he? I wasn’t dreaming how he and I felt for each other.” More tears flowed. “But he was too close to the flame that is Freya the Fallen.”
The owl shook his feathers, and Cenia had returned, so I dried my eyes.
She had a knife in her hand and a strange look in her golden eyes. “Grab the owl. I have an idea.” She smiled a wicked twist of lips.
I did not, rather, I tried to shoo him gently away unsure.
Cenia reached for him, but he danced on the wind just out of reach.
“Call him to you,” she said. “Please, sister.”
I was caught between wanting to please Cenia and wanting to keep her from my only friend. “Why?”
Beware the Fallen: Young Adult Mythology (Banished Divinity Book 1) Page 4
