AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It’s rare a dinner ever ends without half a dozen fights breaking out here,” Vessorian says.
“You like horses?” the dark-skinned, curvy woman I haven’t been introduced to asks.
“I understand them.” I shrug. “I was raised around them.”
I don’t want to admit that I adore them, much preferring their company to most people’s. The men and women around the table are my enemies. If they want to know about me, it’s to suss out my vulnerabilities.
“Rhea’s father was a horse keeper,” Alrion fills in, setting my teeth on edge.
“Don’t you ever say my name. You don’t have that right.”
He sighs. “Isn’t it entertaining that you judge me for being a spy, when you’re one yourself?”
“Are you going to hurt my companions if I kill your spymaster?” I ask the king.
Doryn smirks, lifting a berry to my lip. I eat it, its sweet tanginess exploding on my tongue. All of a sudden, I am ravenous.
“Murder, unprovoked, is illegal in Nyxar,” the king says, as I attack his plate with my bare hands, eating all of his berries, then some of his slices of meat. “But you two have issues. Work them out as you see fit.”
I take it as measured permission. “Speak to me again and Iwillcastrate you.” That’s short of murder, so it ought to be safe.
Once I’ve emptied the king’s plate, I stare at my dirty hands, not sure what to do with then. Doryn takes it, and brings it to his lips, licking each one of my fingers, slowly, taking his time.
From my place on his lap, I feel what it does to him. He likes my fingers in his mouth. He likes it a lot. His cock grows rigid under me.
“Rhea, you haven’t met our guest, Rath.” Doryn tilts his chin an inch, toward the Vessorian lookalike I’d noticed at the end of the table.
“I haven’t met most of you.” I am petulant and annoyed, and embarrassed too, both by the steely rod under my ass and by the fact that I know it’ll be inside me soon enough.
“True enough. A round of introductions for my lady of pleasure, if you please,” the king orders.
“Daeron,” says the slim redheaded man next to Rath.
“Lark,” the buxom woman who asked me about horses pipes in. “I’m the general of Nyxar’s armies.”
I manage not to gasp. She’s the general?
“Castien,” says the pierced, shaved man right next to the king.
The dainty woman who caught my blade, I know, but she says her name all the same. “Silver.”
Alrion and Vessorian don’t bother to remind me of who they are, the former hopefully heeding my warning.
I have names for all of the circle, and the occupations of most. I still can’t believe Lark commands Nyxar’s armies. It’s not just the fact that she’s a woman. She seems soft, with her dimples and feminine curves. I would have expected her to be a mother, a wife, a caregiver.
Nyxar is so different from Allea. Every assumption I’ve made so far has been erroneous. I ought to observe and keep my thoughts to myself until I understand the workings of this strange court better.
“As she’s not introducing herself, this is Rhea, who was sent to kill me by the self-dubbed Kind King of Allea. She’s still determined to get the job done, too,” Doryn says with a grin.
My stomach drops as the table chuckles.He knows.He knows and he doesn’t care, because he suspects the rest of my assaults will be as ineffective as the first. And he’s likely looking forward to being able to punish me for them, too.
This is a game to him.
He can’t be an eternal. On the immortal shores, most creatures are long lived, and often immortal in the sense that age doesn’t affect us—we stop physically evolving once we reach our strongest physical form sometime in our first few decades. But everyone here can be killed except the old gods, and most of them grew weary of life, choosing to wander or leave this world. Doryn isn’t one of them. He has a mother from this world. There must be something that can hurt him. And I’ll find it. They can mock me all they want. I’ll have the last laugh—over their king’s corpse.
23
CALDORYN
