Page 101 of Revealing Fate

King Domitan stood over the bruised body of his prime huntress. Her eyes were closed, and her chest rose and fell in a shuddering rhythm. Bandages bound her torso beneath the thin sheet covering her. They concealed the jagged line of sutures closing off her abdominal wound.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” the mender begged. “She is fevered. She woke, and I notified the general immediately, but it was a brief span of consciousness.”

Indeed, Domitan noted the sheen of sweat beading below Tavene’s hairline, dappling the pallid skin of her forehead with moisture. A flicker of tension wrinkled her brow, and her eyes wandered restlessly behind shuttered lids. “Did she speak?”

“No, Your Majesty.”

“When will she wake again?”

The mender, Edmore, shifted uncomfortably. “It is impossible to say, sire. The unpredictability of her current state⁠—”

Domitan pinned the lesser man with a glare. “I told you to fix her current state.”

The man stammered. “Y-yes, of course, Your Majesty. I am using every skill…”

The king turned away, no longer listening. He addressed Corstow. “I don’t have time to stand here and wait. Have someone you trust keep watch.”

General Corstow nodded. “What would you have them ask her when she wakes again?”

“If she found what I sent her to retrieve. If so, where. If not, what happened. Keep it concise. I expect to be informed immediately.”

Corstow bowed. “Consider it done, sire.”

“Majesty, please, if she might be permitted to shift, her second form would greatly speed her healing and⁠—”

Domitan’s hand shot out and gripped Mender Edmore by his slender throat. The man’s eyes bulged, his mouth gaping. The king held him aloft and pulled him close. “Are you suggesting, dear Mender, that I allow our holy faith to be impugned and our laws transgressed?” A string of saliva leaked from the corner of the mender’s mouth, his face purpling. “For a soldier’s comfort?”

Blue lips formed a silent word. No.

“Do you think our Goddess’s form inferior, Mender? You find it incapable of recovery? Perhaps your tastes align with those of the Cozened? Perhaps you’d prefer to parade around as a beast like the infidels.”

If the mender was afraid before, now he panicked. He shook, tears leaking from bloodshot eyes, thin brows drawn up in futile pleading. Disgusted, Domitan threw him to the floor, where he crumpled, gasping and sobbing.

The king turned on his heel, trodding on the mender’s outstretched fingers. “Find me a new mender, Corstow,” he commanded without a backward glance. “This one is newly resigned.”

It was another three days before Domitan received news that Tavene had reawakened. He’d been overseeing the latest enlistment of recruits, striding down a line of puff-chested youth teeming with the desire to prove their loyalties, when the messenger came. Domitan swung into the saddle of his black charger and made for the militia’s infirmary without delay.

The new mender, a squat man with a bald chin shaped like an infant’s ass, met him at the door. “She is speaking, Your Majesty. Quickly. This way.”

Domitan didn’t need an escort. He charged past the mender to Tavene’s room. He found his ruined huntress in bed, propped up on pillows, skin pale as a freshly exhumed corpse’s. An assistant stood near the bed holding a bowl of steaming broth, spoon poised aloft.

“My king,” Tavene wheezed. She folded forward in bed, ignoring the pinching of her wounded belly, which seeped fresh blood onto the sheet that covered her.

Domitan also ignored it. “Leave us,” he commanded the assistant, the mender, and the guard stationed at the door. When they were alone, he returned his attention to her. “Tell me.”

She did. Her tale was long and laborious in her deconditioned state. Domitan had expected a recount of resistance as evidenced by Tavene’s state of return. He did not expect this. An established trade empire concealed from his knowledge? The king should have been murderous with rage at the mere thought of such treasonous dealings. Instead? He found himself smiling.

“I expect you remember the way?”

Tavene’s slender fingers gripped the edge of her cot to still their trembling. Her grasp on consciousness was tentative. She took a shallow breath and nodded.

“Good.” He would crush them. It had been too long since King Domitan had spilled blood in battle. He didn’t want wailing torture in the dungeons. Nor silent blades in the night. No. He craved the raucous, ruinous clash of steel on steel. The whistling of arrows and the thud of his archers’ barbed bolts finding flesh. The quaking of his cavalry’s hooves on packed earth. The crunch of bones beneath their charge. The collective dying groan of an enemy defeated.

And the thief? He was a phantom, my king. Skill like I’ve never seen. Domitan craved the pounding blood of a hated foe, the spray of it baptizing him in a wash of crimson as his Asterosian blade split gristle and sinew. The King of Asteros would show them skill.

“And the Prima? You are sure it was her?”

Again, Tavene nodded. “I’m sure,” she rasped. She pointed to a folded stack of cloth on a chair. Domitan rifled through the soiled garments and found a creased portrait of the Prima—the same one he’d given Tavene before she left Asteros to find the missing princess. “It was her.” Emotion flickered over the huntress’s features for the first time. “I almost had her.”