Heir of Ruin: A Hades and Persephone Paranormal Fae Fantasy Romance (Fae of The Saintlands Book 1)

by Leigh Kelsey

  “Wylnarren is positioned in the center of the Sainsa Empire, with links to every other major city. Not a bad place to launch an invasion from.”

  Maia blinked. Choked on a laugh. But one look into his eyes and she saw he believed it.

  She shook her head, her steps scraping the dirty floor as she stalked a few paces away, and didn’t bother to look at the dagger—this was nothing but Kheir’s opinion. “If my aunt wanted to conquer anywhere, why would she choose Sainsa? The Salt King’s Sea separates us; it takes seven days to cross. It would make more sense to cross the Crooked Finger between us and Venhaus to our left, or march straight into Lower Aether.”

  Kheir laughed, a weak puff of sound. “Your aunt doesn’t have a burning grudge against either of those empires. Besides, we all know Lower Aether’s army is too impressive for her to risk, and the wild beastkind of Venhaus makes an invasion complicated. She wants her sister dead, princess. She wants your mother dead. And you know why.”

  Maia wanted to laugh; she knew nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. She was kept so far in the dark, she’d made the Wolven Lord’s chasm her home. But she held that crack of laughter inside, lifted her chin, and kept her cool. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

  Kheir measured her, pity in his eyes. Maia bared her teeth. “Ismene was in love with Kaladeir when she was young. Maybe she still is.”

  Maia straightened abruptly. Kaladeir. Her father. She blinked, blinked again, and laughed in disbelief. “You expect me to believe my aunt tried to assassinate her own sister, the queen of an empire we’re allied with, over a man?”

  “Never been in love, I take it, princess?” Kheir asked, his voice syrupy and slow and his copper wings fluttering slowly. “Love has launched more wars than hate, anger, and jealousy. More than all of them put together.”

  Maia stared, her heartbeat loud in her ears. “The Vassal Empire isn’t at war.”

  “Then why,” he asked, panting, “are armies being built in the mountain camps?”

  “They’re not.” Maia frowned, staring at the dead stones in the dagger at her words. “They’re not,” she repeated, her certainty starting to crumble. “Are they?”

  “Yes,” Kheir breathed, and the dagger glowed.

  “Shit.” Maia let that truth settle into her, cold spiking through her body. And if the prince was right about that, he was likely right about the assassination attempt. Saints, her aunt had levelled a city, and all because a man had married her sister instead. “Who?” she asked Kheir, her heart thumping her ribs. If the Vassal Empire went to war, the city she knew and loved so much would look vastly different. Likely, Vassalaer’s gates would be locked shut to newcomers, the residents holed up inside barricaded homes, the library and museums and galleries converted into sick bays, and the workshops transformed into munitions factories. She’d read enough books on the history of the Saintslands; she knew how war would unfold. “Who are we at war with?”

  “Right now?” Kheir replied weakly, pressing his wan gold face to the bars. “No one. But soon? My guess would be Sainsa.”

  Maia’s ancestral home. Ismene’s own sister’s empire.

  “And what about the Old Year’s Night disaster?” she demanded, stepping closer, locking her body to stave off a shudder. Her fear made her colder than even the chill of these cells. “You said my aunt orchestrated that, too.” She tried to scoff, to sound disbelieving, but her belief was crumbling to ashes. She hated it, and hated the way the loathing that already filled every corner and passage of her heart had spread, had swelled into something that would not stand her to remain in this palace for another day. Another minute.

  But the consequences of running were as bad as those of regicide. Queenkiller. Kinslayer. She shook the words out of her head like batting annoying flies from her hair.

  “She did,” Kheir slurred, and Maia took a good look at him, really scanning him as he slumped fully against the bars. Blood soaked down his right side, from a deep wound beneath his armpit, and Maia spat a vulgar word, breathless with sudden panic. For a reason she couldn’t pinpoint the sight of his blood made a cold sweat break out down her spine, terror taking hold. A flash of deadly rage made her want to hunt down those who’d hurt him, so she could make them pay.

  But she knew whose hand had done this, and there was no making him suffer—there was only enduring the suffering he put her through.

  Maia stared at Kheir, sick with worry, and opened her lips to let out a deep hum. Stay awake, her song commanded, don’t you dare sleep.

  A plan was forming. Hasty and reckless, but … her conscience wouldn’t accept anything else. And not doing anything … that was worse than any consequences she could think of. She’d rather face him than condone this. The glade of trees in her soul had withered to skeletal branches, her soul full of ashes. Kheir’s words and the Dagger’s truth stripped away any conviction she had holding her together, made her face who she really was—not just Ismene’s weapon. She didn’t know who she was without being the queen’s tool, but she knew who she wanted to be, and that person wouldn’t leave Kheir here to die.

  No, she’d thought when Ismene told her to crush Kheir’s mind, her entire soul wrenching away from the command. The word echoed through her now, as the prince slid down the dirty bars to the floor, letting out a grunt of pain. Shit. Maia could no longer breathe. Was he still alive?

  She shoved past her shaky panic and put more force into her song, holding him this side of consciousness by sheer will. Stay, her song demanded, pleaded. Stay with me.

  Kheir groaned, his mind welcoming her threads of power this time, as if he sensed what she offered. Maia’s song hooked into his consciousness, and he rolled onto his back on the grimy, blood-streaked floor, his eyes staring up at the ceiling of the cell as he panted.

  “I’ll bleed out anyway,” he pointed out.

  Maia shut out the words.

  Not if I have anything to say about it, she decided, and transformed her song into a simpler, louder melody, one that only she could hear. The notes glided through her body and entwined with the vital parts that kept her alive, wrapping around her muscles, around her bones, and settled in her arms—in her hands.

  Not examining the vicious panic that fuelled her, she gripped two of the bars on his cell. She gritted her teeth, refusing to end her song even as she wrenched the two apart an inch, and then another, and another, and another until they were wide enough for a person to fit. She let her song fade, unsteady on her feet now, but she wasted no time in scrambling through the gap and into the cell, kneeling beside Kheir. It was a lot of blood. Too much. Her face burned, her stomach cramping—she was going to be sick. Or cry. Or both.

  Kheir flinched away, but she hushed him, gently batting his hands aside as she pulled his tunic up to expose the wound in his side. It went all the way from front to back, she knew. Maia had a similar one on her thigh. “My healing isn’t the most efficient magic,” she said quietly, apologetically, and began to hum a slow, calming lullaby about star-filled skies and moonlit nights. It was enough to pull the wound together, to seal it, but she could do nothing about the blood loss. And he’d scar, she realised, tracing her finger over the thin white line. She had to clench her jaw against tears at the feel of him whole and healed, and didn’t know why she was so affected. But it had been a rough day; she wasn’t exactly emotionally balanced right now.

  “Now it’s my turn,” Kheir panted, his chocolate eyes glassy but fixed on her as she kept tracing that scar, unable to draw back, “to ask you why?”

  Maia met his hazy eyes, and didn’t know the answer to that question. Not yet. “Because doing anything else is … unacceptable,” she replied finally, and tore her fingers from his feverish skin with more effort than it should have taken. “Can you stand?”

  “I doubt it,” Kheir replied, some of the kindness she remembered re-entering his gaze. “But I’ll try.” He slid her a look, seeing right through to her soul again. Maia held his gaze, and wasn’t afraid of wha
t he saw. She was trying—to do better, to be better. “You don’t happen to have some foolish notion of breaking me out, do you?”

  Maia laughed, her lips curving and relief sagging her shoulders at the humour—the life—in his gleaming brown eyes. “Me? Never.”

  “It won’t work,” he said, his smile forgiving her of what she’d done to land him here. Maia’s throat closed up; she stood in a rush, the leather of her dress creaking, and avoided his gaze as she slipped back through the gap in the bars. She didn’t dare look at the occupants of the other cells around her. She would come back for them, she promised herself.

  “It will,” she disagreed. “And they’ll never know it was me, or be able to track you down. It’ll be fine.”

  Kheir gritted his teeth as he shoved off the floor, fingers sliding through his own blood. Maia took a step back towards the cell to help, but he got awkwardly to his feet and staggered out into the aisle with stubborn determination on his face. For someone pushing back against an escape attempt, he looked remarkably like a man escaping. She gave him a wry smile.

  “It’s a shame you work for Queen Ismene,” Kheir said, meeting her eyes with warmth that thawed her icy bones. “You and I could have been friends. Could have been more.”

  Maia glanced away, her chest tightening. Tears stung her eyes for no logical reason. “Yeah, well, let’s not dwell on that, shall we?”

  “You’re not coming with me,” he observed, taking a step after her, steady enough that she didn’t throw her arm around his back no matter how hard an inner voice urged her to. “You’ll stay and do her bidding.”

  Maia sighed, and met his eyes, giving him the only thing she could: the truth. “I don’t see a way out for me. Not today and not ever.” She’d never imagined freedom in her fantasies, only revenge and satisfaction before the Foxes and palace guard closed in around her, before the executioner’s blade drove through the back of her neck. “But I’ll get you out,” she added, assessing his beaten face, his messy bronze hair and blood-stained … well, everything. She opened her mouth and sang, a song she’d never used before but one that came easily, as if the saints themselves had given her it. Beside her, his clothes became clean but dull, homespun, and his features roughened, his hair a dirty blonde. Unrecognisable.

  “I don’t know how long it’ll last,” she said, as he glanced at his hands, no longer long-fingered and calloused, but rough and large. She shuddered hard, imagining how they’d feel against her body, wanting to compare with Kheir’s real hands, wanting—just wanting. She was tired of wanting. It only got her hurt. “You’ll have to be quick. Come on.”

  She kept an eye on him, half expecting his legs to give out again as she stalked up the aisle towards the steps, not daring to look into the cells full of people she was leaving behind in favour of this prince. Not because she valued them less, she promised herself—because she’d put Kheir here herself. Because it was her fault, and she needed to right a wrong. Never mind that the trees at the bottom of her soul leant towards him like he was the sun.

  “I didn’t know you were telling the truth,” she said quietly as they walked, Kheir with difficulty but fast enough to impress her.

  “If you had, what difference would it have made?” he asked, his footsteps scraping, breathing laboured.

  Maia mulled it over, looking hard at the truths she usually avoided. “I suppose we’d both be locked down here.” They reached the staircase, the hardest part of their escape route for Kheir to tackle. She just hoped he wasn’t too dizzy to scale the steps. “If anyone asks, I met you at Silvan’s and brought you home for a fumble.”

  Kheir barked a sudden laugh that made her stomach erupt with butterflies. “Oh, that’s my cover story, is it?”

  She made to lean against the dark stone wall, but thought better of it at the slimy texture of its surface. “It’s either that, or a servant boy.”

  His eyes, now a dull grey, slid to her with amusement. “You’re not my usual type, princess. But I could make an exception for someone so gallant and heroic.”

  “Oh, you flatterer,” Maia replied, keeping up a rapport as they began to climb the stairs. “But I can’t blame you for being swayed by me.” She batted her lashes. “I’m a rare, incredible specimen.”

  “Your ego is as big as the eastern star,” he joked, and scaled four steps before he’d even noticed. Good.

  Maia snorted. They could definitely have been friends—very good friends—under different circumstances. It was a shame that they’d had to meet like this. It burned in her chest, feeding her hate and anger.

  “If you’re ever in the north, come to V’haiv City,” Kheir said, his hand pressed to the wall as he slowly ascended ahead of her. Maia kept a step behind him in case he slipped, every scuff of his feet making her tense in alarm. “Say you’re a friend of mine.”

  The look he slid her way implied a double meaning: if she needed somewhere to hide, he offered his home. Maia just nodded, unable to think of a life outside Vassalaer. It was all she’d ever known, this city that owned her heart.

  “Almost there,” she said, praying her song held his illusion together. “When we reach the top, there’s a gate to your right; go through it, and follow the path to its end. The road at the bottom will lead you straight to the Erythrun Bridge, and from there you’ll see the southern gate out of the city.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Kheir said with a weak laugh, his leg faltering before he made the next step. “I might die before I ever make it to the gate.”

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Maia huffed, ignoring the way her sickness spiked. Her fault—if he did die, it would all on her head, the blood on her hands. And worse, she wanted him to live. She liked him. She’d hate herself if he died, would turn all the hatred festering in her soul for Ismene inward. “You’ll be fine. It’s hardly a ten minute walk, and then you’re out.”

  “Hardly a ten minute walk,” he repeated dubiously.

  “There’s the archway,” Maia said with relief, humming under her breath, praying to the saints that the illusion around Kheir held out against the power on the dungeon exit.

  “There’s magic—” he began.

  “I know,” she snapped, and kept on humming, turning it into a sharper song, ruthless and forceful. Her hands shook as they neared, the exit seven steps away, then five, then three. She didn’t dare hold her breath as Kheir stepped onto that last step, holding her song in her throat in a defiant note.

  Her melody cut out as the magic barrier shoved Kheir back, the prince nearly toppling onto Maia and sending them both sprawling down the steps with a shriek. She managed to keep her balance, grappling desperately at the gaps between bricks in the walls, her fingernails breaking. The feeling of falling was jarring, but she steadied, breathing fast and gripping Kheir so hard that she’d be adding more bruises to his collection.

  “I knew it,” Kheir said quietly, miserably, shaking where his body pressed against hers. In the midst of panic, a sense of rightness hit, with a desperate urge to grab his face and kiss him senseless. But she fought it; now was so not the time.

  Maia sucked in a breath, steadied Kheir on the step, and ripped a song from her throat to beat the dungeon shield into submission. She’d yet to meet something she couldn’t crush with her power, had yet to find something she couldn’t snare. She’d only failed with Kheir because of her aversion to killing him. If she’d been a hundred percent convicted, like she was now … he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  “Go!” Maia ordered as she felt the invisible wall buckle. Barely long enough for them to both scramble through, but it was long enough. “That way,” she reminded him out in the fresh air, the gardens a snow-covered blur in front of her as she grabbed Kheir’s shoulders and turned him. “Follow the path to its end.”

  “I remember,” he replied, hesitating. He lifted a bloody hand, skimming Maia’s cheek to push a lock of silver hair behind her ear. “Saints watch over you,” he said in farewell.

 
“And you,” she replied, her throat burning as he walked away. She turned in place, scanning the snaking garden path around them for palace guards. The cry of a wood pigeon made her jump, but she didn’t spy any uniforms or swords.

  “Leovan’s hairy cock,” she swore viciously, and hoped the saint of love would forgive her for the curse as she spotted not guards but Naemi hurrying towards her, a look of disapproval and worry on her friend’s face.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Naemi breathed in relief, her amber eyes gentle as they met Maia’s—before her attention snagged on Kheir’s retreating form. He’d hidden his wings, thank fuck. With them on display, he’d never blend into the Vassalians. “Who was that?”

  Maia sighed heavily, amping up the drama even as her heart beat thrice as fast as was healthy. “Remember when I went to Silvan’s without you last week, and I met that guy?”

  “That’s him?” Naemi watched Kheir’s retreating back as he sped up, closing the gate behind him and wasting no time in descending the steep path. Maia’s heart crumpled. Lying to her friend coated her tongue with a sickly taste. She could have told Naemi, but she wouldn’t draw her best friend into this—she’d only get Naemi punished, too. “He’s taller than I imagined. Bigger, too.”

  “Bigger where it counts,” Maia joked, but Naemi didn’t laugh. Her eyes had drawn to the doorway to the dungeons, still cracked open. Maia was going to be sick.

  “Why meet him here?” Naemi asked. Her voice was curious—she didn’t realise what Maia had done, thank the saints.

  “Nobody ever comes out here,” Maia replied with a flippant shrug and a crooked grin. “It’s a bit bleak, but it's the only place I can find privacy with all the guards and staff around. Not to mention the courtiers.”

  Naemi knew she was lying; Maia could see it in the tightening lines around her eyes, the smile that turned from easy to strained. It was the Dagger of Truths that sealed her fate. Maia had forgotten she was holding it.