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I released my princess.
Her fangs went for my throat.
4
MELISANDRE
Iwas surrounded by an army of monsters, but none of them were mine.
And none of them were what they seemed.
Sheltered from the sun by a crude hovel with no door, I sat, watching them. The wind swept across the terrain ahead, making the dry winter grass roll like the sea. The shattered earth lay behind me while the Warden Wall that surrounded Aneira waited several miles beyond the horizon. But all around this insufferably pathetic hovel, monsters milled about in the grass, waiting for the burning light of day to end. Orcs and shifters and creatures with tentacles filled the horde now. Even a dragon lounged off to one side, its body so massive, it could be mistaken for a small hill if not for how its emerald scales gleamed like green metal in the overcast light. Alaric had raised them days ago, resurrecting them from the dirt and stone of the northern forests to serve as his army.
But the creatures themselves were hardly the true threat. No, it was the Voidborn inside them that presented the real danger. Those sinuous, eel-like beings of smoke and nothingness that inhabited the empty realms, desperate to feast on reality and destroy it all, now watched from within the monsters’ bodies, and the only sign of their presence was the unnatural glow in every creature’s eyes. Alaric had cracked the barrier between this world and the empty realm itself, rending the earth with countless fissures to bring them here.
And he’d needed my power to do it.
Not that he would admit that part.
I exhaled slowly, keeping my face calm. The insufferable bastard currently seated beside me wanted me to believe I was merely his pet, as much a slave to his will as these monsters were to the Voidborn within them. He pretended to entertain my continued existence only because I was mildly useful for the moment. To hear him, I could no more break free of him than I could go without blood.
But I knew he was wrong. In the moments when he cracked reality open and allowed the Voidborn into this world, I’d come within seconds of shattering his hold on me. I’d felt the shape of the tether he’d tied to my essence. Had he been distracted for even a few more seconds, I could have broken free.
And he never noticed.
I suppressed a smile. Alaric thought he was so powerful, so unassailable. Sitting there on the boulder beside me like a king on his throne, his hands calmly folded atop his knee like he hadn’t a care in the world, he deceived himself into thinking I presented no threat at all. Never sparing me a glance, he surveyed the plains before us as if he could see all his plans playing out across them, unquestionably destined to come to fruition just as he wished.
He was a fool.
Yes, he’d forced me to sit in the dirt exactly like the pet he proclaimed me to be. And yes, he’d crafted his body into everything I despised, his tall, slender form like that of an arrogant nobleman. Barely even glancing my way, he carried on with such an unrelenting audacity, he would rival the gods themselves, and he put so much faith in the magical tether with which he’d bound me that he believed he had nothing to fear from the vampire queen at his feet.
But the closer we came to Aneira, the closer we came to the seat of power I’d spent the better part of nineteen years building. Alaric schemed to shatter the nexus of ley lines beneath the capital city of Lumilia, but he never considered all the ways I could kill him before we ever reached it. I had my Huntsmen, the most elite of the soldiers and my own personal guard. They waited for me there. And I had the vampires I’d created over the years—everyone from annoying noblemen to servants who vexed me, now waiting for my return.
Most of all, though, I had the wall.
And that alone could destroy him.
I restrained a chuckle. All it would take was one second of distraction, and I would have him. I’d burn the contemptible leash he’d fastened around the innermost parts of my essence and I would scorch him from this realm entirely.
I knew this as certainly as I knew the sun would leave the sky tonight.
“Your emotions are intriguing, pet,” Alaric commented, not turning from his study of the monsters beyond our hovel. “You find your situation amusing now?”
I kept my smile hidden inside. The intolerable fool fancied he could read my mind. And while, yes, the strange abilities he’d shown in that direction were disturbing, that had been before he brought the other Voidborn into this world. Before he drew on my power so strongly, it had let me see the nature of the tether with which he bound me.
And now, just as his leash was no longer as strong as he believed, so too was his window into my mind not as transparent as it had once been.
“Of course not,” I replied.
“And now you lie.”
But he could still pick up some things.
I made myself remain calm, no matter how much I wanted to rip the throat from his body right now. Survival was a matter of patience—and that, I had in spades. “I only find it entertaining to think what will happen when we return to Lumilia,” I demurred.
He smiled, the sharp points of his metal teeth gleaming. No matter how much the rest of his body appeared human, his teeth and eyes had remained like the Voidborn. The sharp points looked like knives in his mouth, and his eyes had no whites around the pupils, only black spheres slit by a line of gold that made it hard to tell where he was looking.
“Destroying the nexus of power at Lumilia will be quite entertaining,” he acknowledged.
