Page 19 of Blade of the Nightking

He blinked, his face drawn and tight.

“How did you escape him?” Even Sairus sounded winded.

My answer was for Aedric alone. I didn’t look away from him for even a second.

“He was inside our minds. He wanted to kill you. He was... he was searching for something inside you. Someone, I think. I don't know.” I stumbled over the words, struggling to make sense of what I'd seen. “When I healed myself, I... I think the distraction was enough to break the connection.”

The lie settled heavily in my chest. I hated it. But I could tell him later. Tell him the truth when we were alone, when I’d made sense of what had happened myself.

Aedric’s tight response caught me off guard. “Did he find it?”

The intensity in his gaze made something uneasy twist low in my stomach.

“No.”

He closed his eyes for a long moment, breathing deeply. It looked almost like a prayer. When he finally opened them again, he met Sairus’s stare.

“How many?”

Sairus didn’t even blink. “Two thousand.”

Calantha shifted in her seat, though her face remained unreadable.

“Two thousand?” Aedric breathed, disbelief ringing through the words. “That’s all?”

Sairus nodded. “The count keeps changing. Many are dying – especially those struck by dragonfire.”

Dragonfire? I must have misheard.

“Only those who managed to skeld made it out.”

“High Fae, then.”

“Mostly.” Sairus’s lip curled as he went on, his unblinking stare simmering with accusation and disgust. “There may be more survivors, but the leylines in the Court of Flames are… unstable.” A flush crept up Aedric’s neck, and Sairus’s eyes tracked it, before snapping back to his face.

“Many who skelded haven’t been found,” he pressed, the words gaining weight. “At best, they may have stepped into other cities.” His tone sharpened further, the fury he’d been holding banked behind every syllable. “Others could have walked through only to tumble off the cliffs of Malaer. We don’t know.”

Sairus planted his fingertips against the tabletop and pushed himself to his feet, rising slowly. He faced Aedric head-on. Power rolled off him, immense and controlled. I felt it the same way I’d always sensed the terrible force behind Calantha’s eye… before I ever tasted it firsthand. But whatever lived beneath Sairus’s skin was stronger. Angrier. More dangerous. It radiated through the air, thickening it.

Wrath carved hard lines into him as he leaned forward, his presence tightening the air itself. He hissed a single word, dripping with venom: “Kyndralis.”

For a long, strained moment Aedric sat like stone.

It only stoked Sairus’s fury.

“The blood of thirty thousand Solmirans is on your hands, my Lord,” he snarled as he jabbed a finger toward me. “All because you’ve gone cunt-mad for your Eidra whore.”

My pulse hammered, my ears heating.

Aedric didn’t so much as blink. If the insult struck home, nothing in his face betrayed it – only his eyes flashed, lit with a rage his features refused to show.

“I fear, Uncle,” he said at last, a dangerous smile curling his mouth even as every syllable sliced like a blade, “that you forget yourself. You will address me with respect—lest I cut your tongue out and feed it to the drakes in the Vein.”

He gestured toward me, palm up. It took me a heartbeat to realize he meant for me to take his hand. I slid mine into his without hesitation. His grip tightened, as though he were wrestling to hold himself in check.

“And,” he finished, voice thinning to a deadly calm, “you will extend the same courtesy to my bonded mate.”

Sairus’s gaze slid to me, cold and merciless. “She should be bound in iron. Warded.” His fingers tightened against the edge of the table until the wood creaked softly beneath his grip. “There is no such thing as a safe Eidra.”