House of Fire and Blood, page 1
House of Fire and Blood
A MIDNIGHT BALL SERIES SEQUEL
A PALACE OF BONES
BOOK ONE
L.L. HUNTER
Copyright © 2023 L.L. Hunter
House of Fire and Blood
By L.L. Hunter
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1005557492
First Edition
Manuscript Services Provided by
Rogena Mitchell-Jones, Literary Editor
www.rogenamitchell.com
Cover Design by KILA Designs
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This book may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. All characters and storylines are the properties of the author, and your support and respect are appreciated.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Both author and editor have taken considerable effort in presenting a manuscript free of errors. However, editing errors are ultimately the responsibility of the author.
This author writes in both American English and Australian English and may include Australian diction.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Acknowledgments
Also by L.L. Hunter
About L.L. Hunter
A Palace of Bones
PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
Pavin – (Pay – vin)
Imogen - (Im – o – gen)
Amelia - (A – me – lee – a)
Aed - (Eed)
Ares - (A – res)
Agnium - (Ag – nee – um)
Aurum (Or – rum)
Sydlandia – (Sid – lan – dee – a)
Venehica (Ven – ee – ka)
Medeis (Med – ace)
Phaos (Ph – ous)
Lamia (Lam – ee – a)
Denzon (Den – zon)
Prologue
Seventeen years ago, two babies were born with the blood of witches.
Two baby girls, one of darkness and one of light, their magic not yet awakened.
Separated at birth, neither knows of the other, but both are just as strong as the other.
Two magical, sacred relics were forged. Their magic is too great for any to wield, for it is said they would create enormous greed.
It is said the artifacts contain a sliver of Aed’s soul. They were created to be his one true weakness.
But during the time of the First War, these magical artifacts were stolen from Aed and hidden from the world.
The two magical relics, a dagger and an amulet, both containing rare red rubies, their power dormant. But it is foretold in a myth that if the Cursed One was to wield both relics, they would bring about the end of Aed forever.
The young man froze, eyes full of fear.
And then he was falling, falling, falling.
Into the darkness, he fell, never to wake again.
Chapter 1
PAVIN
DENZON, AGNIUM.
“Your Highness, watch out!” Pavin ducked just in time for the fireball to fly over his head. Instead, he landed face-first in a puddle of mud and horse dung.
“Ugh! Seriously? This is my new outfit.”
His bodyguard, or his shadow as Pavin liked to refer to his minder, was a bored older gentleman his father had hired to follow him everywhere.
Many times, he had given Giuseppe the slip. He had hoped to today. The winter festival had begun, and he wanted to explore and enjoy the festivities without him. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be.
Giuseppe ran to him.
“Your Highness, let’s get you back to the palace to change.”
“I’m fine. Just get me my cloak and a cloth to clean my face. And while you’re at it, remind the carnival folk that their crown prince is in their midst and to refrain from roasting him.”
He eyed the fire-breathing sideshow worker with suspicion and annoyance as Giuseppe handed him his cloak and a handkerchief. He threw the dark blue cloak over his soiled clothing and wiped the mud and horse dung off his face. He noticed a stall with mirrors of all sizes, so he used it to clean the rest of his face.
Something flickered in the mirror. Movement from behind him. He didn’t know if it was a trick of the eye or his imagination. He spun around but saw nothing, so he returned to cleaning his face.
Then he saw it again. This time, he noticed a woman in a red cloak standing behind him. Her eyes shimmered white. He spun around again just in time to see the woman disappear into the crown of festivalgoers.
As he followed the woman, it began to snow gently, making visibility low.
What made it even harder to follow the mysterious woman in red was that nearly everyone was dressed in red or teal blue, the colours of Denzon. Everyone also wore a silver mask of different designs to represent their continent of Agnium. Pavin took his half mask off his belt and slipped it on.
He loved the attention of his people, but his parents had warned him he had a target on his back and to please wear his mask. He hated the thing.
But he slipped it on now only so that there was no distraction from his goal: find the woman in the red cloak and discover what she wants. If people recognised him as their crown prince, there would be a frenzy, and he would be in further danger.
The crowd grew thicker as more people travelled to the township outside the palace walls to enjoy the winter festival.
There was music, dancing, free-flowing mulled wine and ale, and all kinds of food and apothecary stalls, the latter run by witches. There were witch oracles where you could get your fortune told and tarot read. He walked past an apothecary stall where a petite black woman with curly hair stood. She wore an apron over what looked to be homemade clothing. Their eyes met, but the girl shied away and returned to work grinding some ingredients in a mortar and pestle. There was something familiar about the girl at the apothecary stall, which Pavin couldn’t put his finger on.
During the winter festival was the only time witches were allowed to openly practise their craft.
In the past, Pavin enjoyed all the ale and dancing and the different services offered by the festival. But this year, things felt different.
Pavin didn’t know why, but he could feel it in his bones. He could feel it in his soul.
As he pushed through the thick of the crowd at the entry to the festival, he saw her.
Standing beyond the gates, behind the shimmer of the fire sconces, toward the cliffs, stood the woman in the red cloak.
Pavin approached her carefully, hands out as if she were a spooked horse. She turned her head, her obsidian black hair coming loose from its plait and flowing in the wind. Snowflakes fell around her but never landed on her or the ground beneath her.
Pavin gasped.
“How… Who… What?”
Covering half the woman’s face was a black velvet half-mask, and on the other exposed half of her face that he could see, her skin was as rich as molten chocolate.
She was one of the most beautiful women Pavin had ever seen.
And he had been with many beautiful women.
“Foolish prince, be quiet and listen. I don’t have much time. I came to warn you that your life is in grave danger.”
“Who are you?” he had so many questions, but the first to come out was that. He was transfixed by the woman’s beauty.
“It doesn’t matter who I am. I came to warn you that if you continue down the path you are currently on, your life will be a short one.”
“What do you mean? My life is great,” he grinned.
“You’re a fool,” she shook her head. The woman began to walk towards the cliff and stood with her boots partially over the edge.
“Wait! What are you…”
“I only came to warn you. I am breaking a lot of laws by being here.”
“What do you mean? How am I in danger? What laws? Who are you?”
Pavin walked up to her, so close he could reach out and touch her.
“You’re not listening. Be aware.”
“You’re talking in riddles. Please tell me plainly.”
Then the witch, the woman, threw her arms into the air and called the air to carry her away.
“Wait!”
She floated
Pavin closed his eyes to sink into the kiss from the beautiful woman, and when he opened them again a second later, with a whisper, she was gone.
Pavin fell to his knees on the rocky cliff and searched the skies for the woman, but she was gone. It was like she was never there at all.
“Your Highness! Pavin! Pavin? Are you okay?” Giuseppe ran to him and pulled him to his feet.
“I am fine, Giuseppe.”
“What are you doing out here on the edge of the cliff? It’s dangerous.”
“I saw someone… there was this girl…”
Giuseppe rolled his eyes, used to his charge’s behaviour.
“Come on, Your Highness. I think it’s time to retire to the palace.”
This time, Pavin didn’t put up a fight.
Chapter 2
IMOGEN
VENEFICA, THE ISLE OF POISON
Imogen took out her blade. It wasn’t an ordinary blade. It was silver with one red ruby inlaid in the handle. She didn’t know much about her sword, only that she had been gifted it one year earlier on her sixteenth birthday by her parents. It must have been an omen that somehow her parents knew what was to happen because shortly after, they were both killed when their ship wrecked in the Bay of a Million Ships.
Now seventeen, she spent all her time surviving by making potions in her family’s apothecary shop.
She held up her dagger, the blade glinting in the light of the gaslamp above her work table, and sliced her right palm.
She had been experimenting with a special potion in the later hours after she closed the store for the day. She usually sold herbs, tinctures, and poultices to cure common ailments. But Imogen had grown bored of the mundane life of an apothecary.
She wanted excitement. The Denzon Winter Festival had given her that. For one week only, witches were encouraged and welcomed to use their magic in a land where it is forbidden at any other time.
While she worked late at night mixing potions and writing them in her notebook, she often dreamed of faraway places where witches were allies of everyone rather than shunned to one corner of the world.
She had heard the whispers in town as she walked by, the hushed voices, the stares, the rumours that spread through shops and taverns like an infectious disease.
“Did you hear the apothecary is a real witch, Pa?” she had heard a little girl say one day in town.
“Nonsense,” the girl’s father had said. “There are no real witches anymore. Haven’t been for a long time. And there won’t be if the ruling kingdoms continue to have their way.”
That response jarred Imogen ever since. She lay awake at night thinking of her witches running from people with flames and pitchforks, her people burning on stakes, screaming as their flesh melted from their bones…
Imogen knew she was a witch but wasn’t allowed to live openly.
It was probably best because she never had any real magic.
She had tried almost every day growing up. In secret, of course, away from the judgemental gazes of her strict parents.
Her parents had been conservative folk. They had always scolded Imogen for talking about witches, wanting to practise magic, or even reading the forbidden books in her parents’ library…
That was how she found out what she was. As soon as her parents died, she went through those forbidden tomes as she went through their things.
They were diaries from her ancestors, speaking of witches with the ability to read minds, talk to the dead, see the future and cast spells, including everything from a good winter crop to curing someone’s cancer.
Her parents had never read them that she knew of. So they had stayed on the highest shelf in their humble cottage’s meagre library, collecting dust. For someone who had made it loudly known that magic and witchcraft were forbidden, she wondered why her parents had had those books in the first place.
The two tomes now took pride above her workbench in the back of the shop.
Imogen read through them every single day, tracing the sketches and notes about certain spells and potions, dreaming of a better future.
Chapter 3
AMELIA
LAMIA
The scream reverberated through Amelia, grating her very soul. She watched from the doorway as the woman in the throes of childbirth writhed in pain.
“Sister Amelia, do something! Please!” begged one of the other nuns, Sister Abigail.
“But I thought I wasn’t to intervene. That I wasn’t to get in the way.”
“This will be your job one day as the medic in training. Now get over here and check the baby.”
For as long as Amelia could remember, she had always been interested in death and life.
She had been the odd child at school, the one with her nose always in a book when she was supposed to be doing her lessons, and the one whose hand shot up first when they had to dissect an animal corpse in science class. She was always the first to volunteer to do the cutting when the other students screamed and ran away, too sickened by the thought of touching a dead animal. Whereas the idea excited Amelia in a way she knew was not normal.
But one day, when she was ten years old, holding the scalpel, about to cut into a crow's recently diseased body, something changed, and everything changed. The poor thing had flown into the school building window that morning and broken its neck.
She felt the bird move as she placed her left hand over the top of the bird’s neck and breast and held the scalpel in her right hand over the bird’s abdomen.
At first, she thought it was a trick of her mind, but others saw it.
“It’s alive!” the students screamed. The teacher took the scalpel from Amelia, who had been the only one brave enough to do the deed, more so than their teacher had been. The teacher then shoved her aside to check on the bird.
When there were no hands to hold it down, the crow jumped to its feet and cawed loudly, soliciting more screams from the students.
“That’s impossible!” the teacher said after a loud gasp. “The headmaster said this bird was clearly dead this morning. Its neck was broken and hanging at such an angle that he feared the poor thing’s head would fall right off.”
Amelia reached out and stroked the bird’s shiny black feathers. It cawed again, but softer this time, and turned to look her right in the eye.
Amelia knew then that something had happened to connect her and the bird on a deeper level than even she could understand.
“He is fine. See? Perhaps he was only stunned. Poor thing.” She freed the bird outside straight after.
But that wasn’t the first incident.
One day, as she was walking home from school when she was eleven, a dog ran in front of a horse and carriage and was trampled to death and run over by the wheels of the carriage. The people in the carriage didn’t care that they’d killed an innocent little dog, but Amelia screamed and ran to its aid.
