Page 69
His cousin offered half a rueful smile. “Aye, you arsehole. You’ve never hit with so weak a fist. It was pathetic, really.”
Brand huffed, doing his best to accept the forgiveness in those words. And then he took a gigantic, terrifying leap. “It’s all true, isn’t it? This is all…real.”
“Yes.” Some of the tension bled from Lyriat’s aggressive stance. “Every wretched bit of it.”
The attack on their realm, his kidnapping and rescue… Sisters, when he really looked at his friend and king, the truth was there. The deep lines bracketing his mouth. The bags beneath his eyes. The devastation in every line of his body.
While trying to ignore it, denying it, he’d been letting his people down. His family.
“What’s wrong with me?” Brand whispered.
And why couldn’t he fucking remember anything?
All eyes went to Lunara, his own included. Why he was so certain she had the answer was beyond him.
“I don’t know exactly.” She set the goblet down and sat up a little straighter. “But I’m going to figure it out and fix it, whatever it takes. I promise.”
“Because we’re mates.” The statement left him unbidden, and he was as surprised as she appeared to be that he said it out loud. “We’re…bound.”
The rosy tint that Fern’s blood gift had restored blanched away again. “That’s not, um— No. Well, yes, we are, but… ” She cleared her throat. “Because you’re hurting, and no one deserves that. The rest is unimportant.”
It didn’t feel unimportant. Not with that look on her face or the sudden clarity he was having. Still, it seemed best to leave her be for now.
Lunara stood, running shaking hands down her linen-clad thighs. He couldn’t explain it, but the plain sparring set—drab grey, too long on her arms and legs, and fastened all the way up to her throat—was all wrong. Those eyes and her opal skin cried out for…something else.
“If that’s all, I think I’ll be taking that rest now,” she said. “Thaddeus, if you come with me and Fern, I can patch both of you up.”
“You will report back here this evening.” Lyriat leveled a loaded look at Lunara that Brand couldn’t decipher. “Understood?”
“Why?”
Lyriat brandished Bal’s sword, his markings flaring with the sunstar’s golden glow. “We’ve had news.”
“Oh my stars,” she breathed. “Never mind the rest, I can—”
“No. I require time to settle my own thoughts,” Lyriat interrupted. “Here. This evening.”
She stared at him for a heavy few seconds. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
Brand had the distinct impression that he was not invited to whatever it was, and the fact hurt more than he was prepared for.
Magnus checked the Great Hall doors for the hundredth time, ensuring Lyriat’s seal was intact and no one could get in. As if he was any sort of authority on what the Demon King himself created with the stone.
“I would like to express, once again, that I believe this to be ill-fucking-advised,” he said.
Lyriat rolled the black marble between two fingers, only a few paces from the shimmering portal at the far end of the Hall. “Yes, but what choice do we have?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps something less illegal?”
“We’ve reached a point where nothing is right anymore.” Lyriat snapped the marble into his fist and squeezed. “What is legality when Bordoroth is cracking apart at every seam? What do I care for laws when the fate of my family rests at the center of so many wrongs? Why must I be a shining beacon of obedience, of morality, while others disregard it to walk all over me?”
He pinned Magnus with a burning stare, his markings blazing to life as he underwent the change into his greater form. Over a dozen feet tall, membranous wings sprouting from his back, a crown of ivory horns that multiplied and tangled together to crown him with the majesty of all Straelani.
“I am the Demon King Lyriat,” he boomed. “I am rage and war. The sheer force of the earth beneath our feet made manifest. I will not yield because someone decided ages ago that we must all hold hands for some imaginary greater good.”
He’s right pissed. Wonderful.
—Excellent—
