Page 166 of The Stolen Crown

Djur did not speak. What was there to say? He was down, he’d fallen. His screams only came when Mira’s father hooked an arm around the man’s neck and Erik rammed his bloody thumb into the gash along Djur’s ribs.

“That’s for my men,” Erik snarled in Djur’s face.

The mortal king convulsed. He gasped. Foamy spittle spilled over his lips until, at last, he went still.

Mira clung to my arm. “By the gods. What’s happening to him?”

Djur’s skin did not remain what it was, youthful and clear. Slowly, his cheeks tightened like dry leather over the bones of his skull until it was pulled to nothing but sinews and threads of flesh. His teeth withered, and his eyes sank into his skull until they were nothing more than ash.

Little by little his body aged as though centuries passed in a single heartbeat, and eventually his corpse was nothing but brittle broken bone.

Cheers rose when Erik and the glamour fae king stepped away from Djur’s ashy corpse.

“Tait!” Mira’s fingernails dug into my arm. “There’s Lena!”

Halfway down the path leading to the shore, Djur’s wife clutched something in her hand. Her eyes were wide with horror the longer she stared at her dead husband. One breath, two, then the sea witch spun on her heel and sprinted for a back path.

“I don’t leave here unless she greets the gods. I made a vow that my blood would spill here.”

Mira’s eyes darkened with a brutality she rarely revealed. “Then, we better spill hers, Hearttalker.”

My Vicious did not waste a moment and raced forward, shouting Lena’s name.

“Damn the hells.” I sprinted after her, stealing a blade from a dead mortal along the way. “Mira, wait!”

Lena reached the top edge of the stairs the moment Mira reached for the woman’s braid. With a cry, the two women tumbled forward. Lena thrashed and clawed at Mira’s face.

“I’ll kill you!” Mira screamed, ramming her elbow under Lena’s jaw.

The sea witch cried out, blood spluttering from her lips. Whatever the woman gripped in her palms flew out of her hold and landed five paces away.

When Lena jabbed one knee into Mira’s side, causing her to roll over in pain, the sea witch sealed her fate. Before the woman could scramble back, I curled my fist around her throat.

I squeezed, hard. Lena gurgled against my grip, desperate to draw a breath. She gaped at me in horror. When the witch’s eyes turned red and veiny, I released her in a heap at my feet.

The woman drew in a long, desperate gasp. I pressed my stolen blade against her neck instead. “You have such a love for the gods you’d kill your own clan. Care to finally meet them?”

“I know the gods more than you ever could,” Lena said through a gasp.

From the grass, Mira plucked up whatever Lena had lost in the scuffle. “You wore this when we first met. What is it?”

In her hands was the black glass talisman Lena kept around her neck.

The sea witch merely glared at the princess and muttered words I did not know.

“Does this have something to do with Eeva?” Mira shouted, hot frustration rising in her voice.

“You know nothing,” Lena said, lip curled.

I gripped the woman’s hair, a welcome desire for pain heady in my blood. I forced her to look up at me. “A sea witch, so revered where I am from. Yet you follow mortals, and destroy the people who cared for you, all to be nothing more than a pet.”

Lena’s eyes flashed. “My folk brought their fate on their own heads. We could’ve ruled the seas, but they would not see reason.”

“Reason to what? To serve cowards who fear death? You have power, spells, yet you let a man like Djur command you? Why? What could they have done to threaten you?”

“Eilifur is filled with children of the gods,” Lena shrieked. “Mortals who live with the gods’ strength, with their knowledge, their words.” The sea witch’s eyes were glassy with emotion. “To serve him meant he chose me.”

Foolish, wretched woman. After everything, after witnessing the lengths Djur had gone to, all to stay alive, she truly thought he was a god of some kind?