A Fate So Cold (Cursed Kingdom Book 2), page 1
COPYRIGHT
A Fate So Cold
Cursed Kingdom Duet
Book 2
Published by Ellie Cassidy
Copyright © 2022 by Ellie Cassidy
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or resold in any form or by any means without permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations for non-commercial uses. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author.
All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to people, living or otherwise, is purely coincidental. If real, names, places and characters are used fictitiously.
After ten years of feuding, Rose and Nathanial have united the Kingdom of Cairn. But allegiances are brittle. There’s a hostile armed force camped outside the kingdom and a civil war brewing inside and their marriage bed is as prickly as a thorn.
To save their people, she must sacrifice herself.
The Kingdom of Cairn is the last haven of mankind. But after 150 years of protection, the shield is coming down and it’s not the barren wastelands they have to fear. As she discovers the missing pieces of her ancestral birth right, Rose is thrown into a fight for supremacy, justice and vengeance that began centuries ago.
The Cursed Kingdom is a dark, thrilling and sexy fantasy series perfect for anyone who likes their romance steaming hot and twisted with an anti-hero.
Chapter 1
The valley swept out a bowl of barren, cracked ground and then rose onto a small hill awash with white canvas. In the middle of it all, a striped white and silver tent peaked high above the rest beneath the sweltering midday sun.
I hadn’t brought Nathanial’s binoculars with me this morning, but yesterday’s memory filled in the detail wherever my eyesight blurred.
There were thousands of black uniformed soldiers tramping about in their shined black boots and black tunics with silver buttons up the front.
There were old world vehicles that sat around like iron tombs and old world rifles slung across each soldier’s chest.
There were thousands of soldiers.
There were thousands of rifles, and that wasn’t counting the monstrous guns mounted on their vehicles.
Nathanial feared worse—missile launchers and explosives and Lord knew what else. My own fears had taken flight after I had availed myself of the royal archives last night and learnt something of what kind of arsenal this army might have at their disposal.
We had brought none of that evil into our kingdom. Weapons of mass destruction had destroyed our planet more than a century ago and turned the land into a toxic wasteland.
We would do better.
A bitter laugh escaped my dry lips.
We had still fashioned ways to kill ourselves. Swords and knives and spears and arrows. And maybe they were more honest weapons, weapons that forced you to look a man in the eye as you took his life, but that altruism did us no good now.
My gaze drifted over the sea of tents that spilt over the far hill. Our numbers and weapons were no match for this foreign army. We had no idea who they were or where they had crawled out from, but we knew what they had come for.
War.
They weren’t interested in talking. The bodies of our messengers still lay in the valley. We could not even venture close enough to collect them.
Nathanial had tried to raise a white flag.
This army wasn’t interested.
The only reason they had not already overrun us was the shield—an energy dome that had protected us from the nuclear fallout and poisonous air all these years. This enemy had been camped there for just over ten months, watching and waiting…for what?
Perhaps they thought the shield was some form of natural phenomena that might break down over time or with the passing of seasons. Maybe they had spent every day of the last ten months fighting the shield, testing for ways to get through. The shield disintegrated our arrows, but their high velocity bullets passed through well enough to kill.
A flush of unfettered fear coated my skin in a film of cold sweat. The mettle left my bones and I sagged against the spindly tree at my back.
I was the High Chancellor.
I was supposed to keep my people safe.
But in three short weeks, the wait would be over. The shield would come down. Nothing would stand between us and this army. Nothing would protect us from the complete annihilation they looked capable of unleashing.
And for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a plan. I could not see even the tiniest glimmer of hope on the horizon. All I saw was an undefeatable army of immaculately dressed soldiers.
How had we gotten here?
Loss, betrayal and vengeance.
I was the High Chancellor, descended from Henry Welsh, the nuclear physicist who had invented the shield that had saved our kingdom. My power was equal to that of the Glamorgan Kings. My bloodline was the biometric key that should have—would have reset the shield to stay up for another ten years if my father hadn’t smashed the mechanism.
How had we gotten here?
My stomach hollowed out as events and time rolled backward through my mind like a rolling stone un-gathering the moss of memories.
The truth of my bloodline. Now I finally knew why the High Chancellor shared power with the Glamorgan Kings and why that balance of power was written into the laws of our land.
Last night in the shield chamber. My chest had inflated with hope and expectation when I’d placed my hand on the glass imprint. One prick, one small needle prick that analyzed my blood and unlocked the luminous shield box, and everything inside me had deflated into a hollow shell.
The letter from my father.
Dear Rose,
If you’re reading this, it means I have failed you…
The smashed ruins inside the box and the ancient leather-bound journal of Henry Welsh.
The devastating realization. I couldn’t do the one thing I had been born to do. My father had destroyed the mechanism I’d needed to reset the shield. We were wholly and utterly doomed.
My resolve to nevertheless keep fighting. Most of us would die, but some of us would live.
Memory after memory unwound through me, loosening my bones, spinning through my head.
Nathanial Glamorgan’s threat to kill every man, woman and child in my care. I’d given into his blackmail. I had married him. I had promised him an heir to combine the royal bloodline with that of the High Chancellor and ensure the Kingdom of Cairn would never again stand divided.
That fatal kiss at the Hunt Ball. The things Nathanial did to me, the feelings he stirred…I had come undone that night, and the unravelling had sent Marcus into a treasonous fury that had landed him in the dungeon to await execution.
The Battle for River Grodden. Nathanial’s war and our defeat. My surrender, which had brought me and my rebels down from our mountain stronghold.
Me with my father in that clearing all those months ago. Me on my knees, pleading with Nathanial, begging for his mercy. I had been so sure, so steadfast in my faith that Nathanial would spare my father. I knew Nathanial. He had once been my best friend, my only friend.
He hadn’t spared my father. He had spurred his horse about and ridden off without a word or backward glance.
General Sunderland delivering the blow that severed my father’s head from his body. I could still feel it whenever I thought of that day, that moment when time stood still with a shockwave expanding inside my heart and threatening to erupt. I had never blamed Nathanial for his father’s sins, but that day he made his own sin and it had shattered my entire world.
I knew now that Nathanial felt remorse, not over what he’d done but over what had to be done. My father would never have agreed to reset the shield. And as Nathanial put it: He killed a King, Rose. He was never going to live.
I could never forget, but I was trying my damnedest to forgive. I no longer hated him with every fiber of my being. My dreams were no longer feverish fantasies of gutting him in his sleep.
My father had raised me in his shadow on our mountain. The past cannot be undone, Rose, we must live in the now. He had taught me everything I needed to know to lead my people into the future, and he had taught me nothing about my past.
But Nathanial had filled in all the missing detail.
The old King Nial, Nathanial’s father, had imprisoned my mother in the tower ten years ago in order to persuade my father to reset the shield. Determined to ensure the shield came down, my mother had removed herself from the equation. She had hanged herself in that tower. The old King’s deplorable plan had worked regardless. My father reset the shield, not knowing my mother was already dead. My mother had made the ultimate sacrifice and all for nothing. Later, my father must have returned to the shield chamber. His heart and mind in shatters from betrayal and grief and trickery, he had destroyed the mechanism to fulfil my mother’s parting legacy and ensure the shield could never again be reset. Then he had killed the old King and we’d fled the castle to our mountain with his loyal followers.
Which brought us full circle to now and how we had gotten here.
The irony struck me hard. My parents could not have known there’d one day be this foreign, hostile army camping on our doorstep. But they had been tragically determined to bring the shield down. They had believed the planet healed, and that it was time for us to leav
Nathanial and the old King acted with cold-hearted treachery in their blind determination to keep the shield up.
Wholly opposing views, yet either option would have saved us.
That balance of power written into the law of our land, that perfect symmetry of Kings and High Chancellors orchestrated to keep our kingdom safe, had brought us here to our inevitable doom.
Chapter 2
I drowned in the stately chair at one end of the ornate oak table. Nathanial sat the full length across from me in a similar throne-like chair intricately decorated with Celtic designs from his ancestral beginnings—the Clan Chiefs of Glamorgan and Earls of Scotland.
He fit the chair far better than I ever could. With his silky hair falling across his chiseled jaw and those distant stone-gray eyes, he looked darkly beautiful and tragically flawed, a boy King carved ruthlessly into a powerful ruler.
The table was laid with a stately dinner, a working supper. The full complement of Nathanial’s advisory council had been hastily summoned from the four corners of the kingdom—the heads of the barony families, all of royal descent dating back to the first King Nial. Now they sat in grim-faced censure while General Sunderland briefed them on the disastrous state of affairs.
There was Nathanial’s uncle, James Glamorgan, Lord of the Hunt. His wife Amelia, a vibrant woman with hair the color of burnt orange and a flair for dramatics. She wasn’t head of the Hunt barony, obviously, but sat here in her role as Steward of Commerce.
There were the Ross and Ferndale baronies, two graybeards with weathered faces and hardened temperaments. They were powerful clans in their own rights with vast estates and indeterminate loyalties.
The loyalties of the Ellis and Byrnestone baronies were even more contentious. They’d once been represented by Jarvis and Lennard, men who had betrayed the old King and followed my father to the mountains. They had served on my rebel advisory council. Nathanial had executed Jarvis and Lennard after the Battle for River Grodden, but he’d never formally denounced them as traitors and the baronies hadn’t reverted to the crown.
General Sunderland finished speaking.
Now he watched for the reaction with that hawkish gaze.
The man set my teeth on eternal edge, had my fingers habitually twitching for my sword. He only had to exist to provoke me. Nathanial had given the order, but it was General Sunderland’s hand that had slain my father before my eyes. If possible, my hate for the man had grown. Perhaps there was no such thing as true forgiveness, only transference. Perhaps this was all my heart was capable of, transferring my hate from Nathanial to the royal executioner.
The General had delivered the pertinent facts only. The foreign army camped on our border was superior and hostile. When the shield came down in three weeks, we would be flung into war with insurmountable disadvantages.
There was a long moment of shocked silence. I’d expected the room to erupt, but the silence was just as loud—it shouted from the faces around the table as each person slowly registered the situation.
Amelia refilled her wine glass.
I stabbed a sautéed mushroom and put it in my mouth.
Lord Ross’ purple veined nostrils flared as he raised a sharp brow at me, apparently appalled I could eat at a time such as this.
I picked up my knife and cut into the succulent pork steak, returning his look as I chewed. I was ravenous after my hike to the eastern plateau and wasn’t about to apologize for my appetite.
Finally Lord Ferndale murmured, “We are absolutely sure about the shield? It has kept us safe for a hundred and fifty years. Why would it fail us now?”
Thomas, the newly confirmed Lord Ellis, offered timidly, “Is it possible that army somehow sabotaged the shield?”
“What does that matter?” Lord Ross groused. “We have no protection. We’re sitting bloody ducks.”
An undercurrent of tension surged, thickening the air in the room. I was hungry, not immune, and the dark premonition of what was coming for us weighed heavily on my shoulders.
I looked to Nathanial, wondering how much he would reveal about my family legacy.
Much of it was not common knowledge. Nathanial had confided in his uncle, so James knew everything. I imagined so did his wife Amelia—she possessed a knack for knowing far more than she should. Everyone else only had bits and pieces of fact and rumor about the shield and the origins of Cairn and the great betrayal that had split our kingdom apart ten years ago.
“There was no sabotage or failure,” Nathanial answered in a deep, even voice that compelled authority. “The air is safe to breathe. The land has begun to heal. The shield is coming down by design.”
His fingers drummed the table as he surveyed his solemn barons. “Under different circumstances, this would be a joyous celebration, the time to venture from this valley and rediscover our world.”
The shield had always been our reality and a thing a myth, born of magic or based in science depending on how your belief slanted.
Nathanial had just perpetuated that ambiguity, giving the shield an autonomous presence to judge the state of the world and our fate.
I was as ambiguous as our shield.
While I despised the half-truths and secrecy, I could appreciate Nathanial’s efficiency. I was the biometric key and my father had destroyed the lock. Analyzing the sordid details of that history would derail the conversation, enflame tempers and divide loyalties all over again while offering no solution to the way forward.
Lord Ross slammed a beefy palm on the table, hard enough to rattle the cutlery. “You’ve been aware of this threat for ten months and we’re only learning of it now?”
Nathanial’s expression darkened at the baron’s disrespectful tone.
“We’d hoped to circumvent the shutdown and keep the shield up,” he said with warning stamped on each word. “That has proven to be impossible.”
“As you point out, we have ten months of recon,” General Sunderland inserted, redirecting the conversation. “By our estimate, they number around three thousand. We’ve seen no women or children, only soldiers.”
Amelia broke in with stats from last year’s censor. “Our entire population stands at three thousand, seven hundred and twenty-six, of which only about nine hundred are able-bodied men over the age of sixteen. That includes the King’s army,” she added with a rueful glance at Nathanial.
I wondered if that number included Markus, condemned and hunted, quite literally hiding out in Amelia’s back garden. “Don’t automatically discount the women.”
“I won’t send women to their death,” General Sunderland said, his eyes creasing into crow feet as his gaze landed surprisingly soft on me. “Not in this. For us, this war is a last stand, not a fight for victory. Their soldiers are armed with assault rifles.”
His gaze switched to include everyone at the table. “We’ve counted a dozen LAVs—light armored vehicles. These are mechanical vehicles enclosed in steel and impenetrable, and mounted with rapid fire guns. The good news is, these LAVs can’t traverse the mountainous terrain that surrounds our valley so they cannot come to us and we sure as hell aren’t going to them. That’s the only good news. We’ve identified grenade launchers, possibly missile launchers as well, the list goes on. Many of you are not familiar with old world weapons, but I’m sure you get the picture.”
The hopelessness of our cause finally caught up to my stomach and I pushed my plate aside.
Lord Ross muttered a loud, callous curse. “We must surrender. There is no other option.”
“This army has no interest in talking surrender,” General Sunderland informed him.
Nathanial’s gaze bore into Lord Ross, his face a mask of casual indifference and blue-blooded confidence. His eyes were as stone-dead as their color and his mouth was even harder.
Last night in the shield chamber, I had seen the other side of him, the battle-scarred ruins of a man tormented by the choices he’d made. A man bowed and broken from the blood that stained his hands. Last night he had been the boy I remembered, the man I’d once assumed he would grow into.
Tonight he was the ice-veined King again, untouched by emotion or any weakness that plagued mere mortal men.
