Page 45 of Fated to the Wicked King

The king’s hands braced firmly on my arms, his prompt urgent, even as his eyes tracked whatever was happening around us. “Are you injured?”

“No.”

Grabbing my hand, he turned to bolt across the courtyard littered with debris, pulling me in his wake.

Castle staff, soldiers, and maids scattered in blind panic around us, scrambling for cover as walls split and buildings crumbled. It was impossible to tell if anyone had been swallowed by falling debris or lost in the choking dust.

The blond prince all but flew out of an edifice across the way, fury burning in his eyes as he charged to meet us halfway down the courtyard. His temple was already bleeding. His clothes ripped. His growl of accusation dripped with pure venom as we stopped short before him. “Just what in the fresh tides do you think you are doing?”

Before anyone could respond, more spheres appeared, blooming across the kingdom above us, overlapping, intersecting, swallowing sections of parapets where archers stumbled back in panicked yells, their forms splitting and doubling where the distortion touched them.

Another cut into the great, glimmering steam elevator that was built into the mountain. Shrieks accompanied the creaking and crumbling of stone and metal. A massive chunk of the ridge cliff had collapsed.

“There’s people up there!” I cried out, but I knew there was nothing I could do. The mountain itself was collapsing.

The king tugged on my hand again. We raced down the courtyard and through alleys, Gregory barking out instructions to soldiers we passed for them to evacuate the affected structures, to coordinate the rescuers, to salvage what they could.

Fists clenched, Gregory whirled back around, his face red with rage. “You assured me that you wouldn’t bring your manner of hell to my kingdom. I guess I should have known better than to trust a tyrant king.”

The king’s indignation was thick. “I didn’t do this.”

“Like hell!” Gregory spat.

The king’s hand gripped mine tighter.

I met his steel-blue gaze.

“I swear to god, Allie. I’m not doing this.”

My heart pounded in my chest.

Another sphere pulsed into existence through the inner wall right above us, cutting clean through a line of iron cannons, and for a heartbeat, they existed in two places at once—solid and distorted, present and elsewhere—stretched, bent, halting mid-motion like glass sculptures before collapsing seconds later.

No.

This wasn’t an attack.

This was something worse.

My heart thumped in recognition.

This phenomenon was similar to the anomaly that contaminated the River of Tears. Similar to the working principles that underlay the fantastic machine we’d used to cross to this side of Wünder.

I narrowed my eyes.

Gregory looked enraged but was obviously as baffled as anyone by what was happening. He didn’t know about the machine. He had nothing to do with the anomaly at the River of Tears. If someone at Lucerne had used the machine to coordinate my capture or kidnapping, it wasn’t his doing.

Furthermore, it likely meant that he was in danger too.

Struck with a fresh wave of motivation, I caught Gregory’s arm. “We need to find shelter, Your Highness, please.”

He forcibly shrugged me off. “Don’t you dare⁠—”

Out of the corner of my eye, a shattered precipice tore free from the tower above us, plummeting in a deadly cascade of stone. My eyes widened as I calculated that its trajectory would bring it straight on top of the prince.

Without thinking, I hurled myself forward, slamming into Gregory’s chest to drive him aside. He choked out a yelp, staggering to the ground as the precipice’s shadow swallowed us—the falling stone coming down an instant from crushing us both.

“ALLIE!” The king’s booming voice was a storm of its own, the torrential force of his magic coming alive with a thunderclap of crackling energy.