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A game to pass the time.
~Lore, God of Wisdom
ONE
Caelan Talos
Bullets pinged off their SUV as they sped along the narrow dirt-and-gravel road. Caelan sat sideways, one hand gripping his seat while the other was braced on the driver’s seat in front of him. He was bent low, his knee knocking against Drayce’s with every bump and jerk of the car. He attempted to lift his head to look out the rear window, but Drayce’s hand immediately clamped on his skull and pushed his head lower.
“Keep your head down, you lunatic!” Drayce snapped.
“Can’t you and the gods do something about them?” Adrian called out from his place behind the wheel.
“What exactly would you like me to do?” Caelan grumbled.
Steal their time, Nyx suggested.
Burn them, Caris said, sounding far too pleased to be participating.
Snap their necks, the Goddess of Life offered up.
Lightning! Lightning! Kaes chanted.
No, none of that. Go back to sleep, Caelan growled mentally. Why the fuck did Adrian have to wake the horde of gods in his head? He wanted to kick the man’s seat, but distracting him in the middle of a high-speed chase would be bad. And why the fuck are you all so bloodthirsty?
Boredom.
Caelan suspected the God of Time might very well be telling the truth about that.
“Well, something would be appreciated, because the road is starting to get a lot worse, and I’m not so sure it won’t suddenly end,” Adrian replied.
Okay, so maybe his new bodyguard had a point. Getting across the border into Ilon had been a bigger disaster than any of them had anticipated. Ilon had officially closed their border to all travelers, giving the flimsy excuse of international tensions. What bothered Caelan was that Ilon hadn’t specifically listed New Rosanthe as the source of that tension.
By the time he’d returned to Stormbreak, Ilon had withdrawn their diplomats and emissaries from all countries. They’d also asked all foreign diplomats to leave Ilon. At least it had been a polite request rather than simply dropping all Erya emissaries on a boat and kicking them out of the country.
As a result, they’d had no choice but to issue an advisement that all Erya citizens leave the country as well. Without representation and a working consulate, they couldn’t offer protection to their people there.
At the suggestion of Rayne and General Morgan, Caelan had waited a week in Stormbreak to see if they could reach the prime minister and get official permission to enter the country. The week was nerve-wracking, but they’d needed time to recover from the events on the Isle of Stone. And just maybe, it had given him a chance to do normal king-type things like make some decisions about treaties, negotiations, and progress that was planned for the new year.
They were in the final month of the year, and the solstice celebrations were just kicking off. Families were gathering close for the long winter nights.
Instead, they were racing along a bumpy rural road in Ilon with New Rosanthe soldiers on their heels.
Thanks to Adrian, they’d sneaked across the border at dawn, but they were discovered about an hour later by a patrol of Empire soldiers, and that was after managing to skirt some Ilon border patrolmen.
The back window shattered, spraying glass across the two rear seats and sending Drayce crashing over Caelan to protect him from the shards.
“Rayne!” Eno shouted from the front passenger seat. Caelan’s advisor had elected to sit in the bench seat closet to the trunk so he could spread out a bit. Not that anyone could blame him. Rayne’s long legs had been stuck in the cramped SUV for close to three full days now.
“I’m fine!” Rayne immediately shouted.
“Drayce?” Caelan asked when his lover refused to allow him to lift up enough to check that Rayne was indeed okay.
“He’s good,” Drayce murmured in his ear. “He was already bent down when the glass broke.”
“Speaking of,” Rayne called out. “How is that even possible? I thought this SUV was taken from the royal motor pool. The windows should be bulletproof.”
“They are. Or were,” Eno answered.
