Our Vicious Oaths, page 8
Suffocating grief flayed Kadeesha at the carnage. But now wasn’t the time to let it engulf her. She’d face her crimes after she did what she could to help as many as possible survive the massacre she’d caused. She fought the instinct to target her efforts at the soldiers and spare the Aetherfolk who remained alive from their punishing blades. Even if she killed each Hyperion soldier, their liege was still atop the altar, and Rishaud could wipe out every soul in the room by himself if he desired. He was an Ancient fae king, his power was vast, and the only other individual in the temple whose would have even come close was Sylas. Her father might’ve been only a vassal king, but he was an Elder who possessed the strength to rule over a fae court of brutal immortals. That did count for something. Maybe if they fought Rishaud together, if she lent what power she had to aid her father, they could take Rishaud out. To that end, she attacked the Hyperion king instead of his soldiers. She didn’t foolishly let a furious cry rip free and telegraph her intent. She set her roiling emotions to better use and thrust all her anguish, all her rage, all her hatred into the column of aether flames she sent hurtling at Rishaud.
He was the sort of male who didn’t even register her as a threat, and she used it to her advantage, launching the assault swiftly. He was still focused on burning Sylas slowly—toying with drawing the vassal king’s grisly death out—when her flames crashed into him. He staggered sideways, but then blinding sunfire wove itself through the ribbons of her molten aether flames and Kadeesha’s flames vanished, obliterated by Rishaud’s greater magic.
“You will pay for that,” Rishaud spat, an endless agony promised in his decree. Still, Kadeesha breathed a little lighter because she’d granted her father the lull he’d needed. Desperate hope that the two of them, along with some of their people, would somehow make it out of the temple alive bloomed as Sylas got to his feet, his own aether magic having snuffed out the sunfire that had been riddling his body. Kadeesha fervently thanked the Celestials that Sylas had several centuries in age under his belt, for his scorched skin was already beginning to heal.
Sylas’s growl shook the temple. When he sent aether flames barreling toward Rishaud, Kadeesha added her own to the counterassault. If they both pressed him from different sides, forced him to split his focus, perhaps it’d create an opening Sylas could take advantage of.
Rishaud the Conqueror, however, lived up to his reputation. He kept to only deflecting Kadeesha’s flames—a task that maddeningly took him little effort to achieve—while he and Sylas traded attacks of sunfire and aether flames back and forth. As the two kings fought, Rishaud fully shed any pretense of the refined deportment that power players among faekind liked to mask their true viciousness behind and shifted into a nightmare of pure savagery. For his part, Sylas moved as fast as lightning as he rained aether flames on Rishaud. Sylas sent purple streaks of fire arcing through the air and spewing down all around the Hyperion king. Sunfire ignited around Rishaud, enveloping his body in a protective shield. He chortled as a burst of sunfire, which left Kadeesha’s heart in her throat, barreled toward Sylas with unerring accuracy. The solar fire that burned hot as the sun’s energy, which Rishaud’s brand of magic drew upon, encased Sylas’s entire frame faster than he could counter or dodge it.
Kadeesha stood frozen, paralyzed, as Rishaud forwent delighting in dragging Sylas’s imminent death out this time. Her father screamed at a pitch that shattered the glass of the temple’s windows as his skin re-blackened, melted, and sloughed off him. He collapsed to the ground and writhed, continuing to burn. Soon after, he stopped convulsing. The Hyperion king’s sunfire that had ravished his body vanished, and not even her father’s ashes were left behind. Kadeesha swallowed, fought back the world-tilting grief that was like a hatchet to the gut. If Sylas had fallen, had been wiped off the face of Nimani, there was no hope left for any Aetherfolk who remained alive. And beyond that … like with her mother, she and Sylas had a complex relationship, but he was her father, and she’d wish the gruesome death he’d suffered on nobody.
Well, one person did deserve it. No, actually a few dozen assholes deserved it—along with Rishaud and all his soldiers, each and every one of the Hyperion fae inside the temple who perched primly in their pews while her people were slaughtered.
Wildly, Kadeesha scanned the room for Leisha and Samira. Relief washed over her when she spotted her sisters alive and fighting. The women fought back-to-back, each cutting down Hyperion soldiers with swords they’d snatched from the enemy to arm themselves. Temples were supposed to be sacred spaces. Bloodshed and weapons inside them were supposed to be sacrilege.
Celestials forgive them, then.
Kadeesha whipped around to the liege lord who was responsible for her father’s murder and the deaths of so many others today. A ball of aether fire formed in her hand. She sent the purple sphere hurtling toward Rishaud. He might be leagues older and stronger and more powerful and more experienced in battle, but she couldn’t stop fighting. She wouldn’t simply step aside and resign the remaining survivors, her sisters included, to their fates. Golden flames surrounded her aether bomb, though, then disintegrated it. She emitted a ragged cry and flung another aether bomb at him. A third, and a fourth, and a fifth. But he was a fae monarch, a king who’d grown in his power over the centuries. She’d only been alive for a mere flicker of time; her magic was no match for his.
Her attacks did nothing. A weapon; she needed a weapon. It was one last, mad, likely impossible hope, but if she managed to get her hands on a blade, she might be able to drive it through Rishaud’s vile heart. It was obvious that he hadn’t leveled any lethal blow at her, no matter the attacks she initiated, and the reason was clear—he couldn’t use her or any prophecy if she were dead. Perhaps she could wield that to her advantage and get within sufficient range for a fatal blow. But she didn’t glimpse any weapons on Rishaud himself and his armed soldiers were far enough away that he’d certainly intercept her before she took one of them out and seized their sword. Still, she had to try.
She ran for the nearest male in a gold-and-white uniform.
Her foot touched down only on the first step before Rishaud’s bruising grip squeezed the back of her neck and yanked her back onto the altar.
“Stop this!” she snarled, twisting out of his grasp. She cast a frenzied glance at the Aetherfolk bodies that kept collapsing to the floor. His soldiers were sparing no soul, not even the striplings among attendees. The little girls who’d carried her train … Her stomach roiled violently when she looked upon two of them that had already been slain. Their small, lifeless bodies had blood staining their purple gowns at spots that covered their hearts. The remaining two girls, who couldn’t have been any older than six, clung to each other against a wall not far from where their peers had been killed. The sight broke her.
“Please! Stop! Call your men off! You’ve already made the point you wanted to!” she begged the Hyperion king for, if nothing else, the little girls’ lives and for Samira’s and Leisha’s lives. Even though her sisters were fighting ferociously, there were only two of them and dozens of Hyperion soldiers. They were locked in a fight they wouldn’t win in the end. They could flee, yes—they clashed with soldiers so near the door at this very moment that they could easily dash toward it and attempt to escape. But she knew, great Celestials, she knew, her sisters would never run and leave her behind. “Please, Your Excellency. Stop! You can’t be this much of a monster.”
The cruel smile he returned in answer assured Kadeesha otherwise. “I’m the monster? I’m not the one who betrayed a promise. I’m not the one who would go against the Celestials’ will. This is your fault. Their deaths stain your hands, Archprincess.” He spoke it all so casually, as if they were somewhere lounging on a terrace and discussing the weather over tea, not standing in the middle of a massacre.
Both little girls screamed. The blood drained to Kadeesha’s feet when she saw the hems of their gowns lit with gold flames.
A violent storm erupted inside Kadeesha. She lashed out with her magic again, sent another aether bomb flying at the king’s head. He laughed, dodging it easily, and her magic exploded against the back wall, taking a chunk out of the temple. The little girls continued screaming, wailing. Samira and Leisha, thank the heavens, were trying to battle their way through the mass of soldiers between them and the girls. But what would happen when they reached the pair? Would her sisters burn too?
Fortunately, Rishaud’s sunfire hadn’t begun inching up the girls’ bodies. It contented itself with only singeing the bottom of their dresses, which meant Rishaud was toying with her now. “You are a sick bastard,” she spat. She was going to gut him for this latest disgusting offense and every other atrocity he’d committed today. She vowed it.
“Instead of continuing with your insolence, you should be profusely thanking me for sparing your life, Your Highness,” Rishaud said icily. He motioned to the carnage before them. “Your penance for unacceptably jeopardizing what the Celestials have ordained for me will be living with what you’ve wrought here this day. I hope this serves as a lesson that’ll make you a more docile wife when we have a do-over for this rubbish ceremony.”
Kadeesha vibrated with rage. She was going to do worse than gut him. She was going to carve him ear to groin, filet the skin off his back, and then burn him alive. It was another vow. She didn’t care how long it took to figure out how to achieve it, this was a promise she’d never break:
Rishaud the Conqueror was a dead man.
Rishaud’s mocking laughter boomed, and Kadeesha realized she’d spoken the threat out loud. “No, you won’t. You will henceforth be a good wife and stand beside your high king dutifully and behave as a proper Hyperion queen should, or I’ll have soldiers march through this entire palace and the whole of the Aether lands. And they’ll make the scene before you seem like child’s play when they do it, and then you’ll still be the high queen, but of just Five Kingdoms.”
Bile seared Kadeesha’s throat, but then she refocused on the little girls and her sisters. Leisha and Samira had made their way closer to the striplings, but a wound in Samira’s chest was seeping blood. Samira clutched the spot that looked hazardously close to her heart with one hand and kept swinging her sword with the other. For her to be devoting any energy to the injury at all meant it was severe enough that it couldn’t be ignored.
Rishaud’s hand locked around her bicep when her body moved on its own accord to go to Samira. To help her. “Did you forget my warning already, Archprincess?” he spoke low in her ear.
She drew in a breath through her nose and went rigid. He wasn’t bluffing; he’d made that plain enough. However, she couldn’t not help her sister.
Rishaud’s other hand gripped her jaw, his bruising fingers digging into her skin, and turned her head so she looked at the little girls head-on. “Watch the show, beloved. Feel your fuckup.” The sunfire crept higher over the girls’ dresses. Their screams ricocheted off the ceiling.
There was a stir of movement among the Hyperion fae. It came from the group of six of Rishaud’s kinsfolk that had stuck out from the rest of his court like thorny nettles among a garden of magnolias. The group was on their feet and brandishing weapons. Not ones hidden on them, but ones they’d seemed to conjure out of thin air. Their blades gleamed onyx and hissed with black smoke. Kadeesha blinked. Her mind pieced together what weapons of that hue conjured from the lightless Void meant—the group were not Hyperion fae …
They were Apollyon fae.
Apollyon fae who wielded void magic and had infiltrated the Hyperion king’s wedding. Which meant she’d been right about the reason she’d guessed that those Apollyon soldiers had been watching the palace. Their Apollyon foes had been planning a strike. Likely, they would’ve made their presence at the wedding known sooner if Rishaud hadn’t rained down chaos and blood himself …
She took little joy in the confirmation that she’d sussed out their plan considering the current situation.
She watched as the Apollyon fae moved at once, like the well-trained warriors they clearly were. One of their males hacked through Hyperion soldiers, making his way toward the little girls’ sides. Before he even reached them, the largest soldier among the hulking group—the man with the amber eyes that had looked her way earlier—sent thick black plumes of darkness rushing toward the little girls. The darkness swathed Rishaud’s sunfire and smothered it. The tightness in Kadeesha’s chest eased after it was made clear that the Apollyon soldiers would help the children and not visit harm on the little girls themselves. Kadeesha couldn’t say the same for the rest of Rishaud’s court. Four of the remaining Apollyon fae cut through Rishaud’s courtiers and kinsfolk, many of them never having the chance to flee from the fae who ripped through the pews like monsoons of death. It was a gruesome sight, and yet she found her gaze drawn to one of them: the male among them with the amber eyes who now stalked toward the altar. His features settled into smugness as he raised a long sleeve of his tunic and revealed a bracelet of zalika beads around his left wrist. His pair of void swords—fashioned in the shape of lethal scimitars—disappeared to free up his hands, and he touched a finger to one of the beads. His shorn hair lengthened into luminous brown locs, and the bone structure of his face shifted. His jaw, cheekbones, and nose became more pronounced, revealing the face of a man whose beauty was as hard-edged—and almost painful to look at—as it was beguiling and stunning. And as darkness and shadows swirled in his eyes, brown bled through the amber before overtaking it entirely. Kadeesha’s mouth went dry. She didn’t look upon an unfamiliar face once the glamour disappeared. She knew this male. She’d spent the entire previous night relishing him stroking her into near delirium. She also realized she knew this male, or at least of him, long before Oleander House—the version of his name he’d handed her was short for Malachizrien. She’d been an idiot to ignore the alarm bells and not to slice through the throes of passion and give greater consideration to his name.
She didn’t have time to untangle the fury and hate and surprise and shame that struck her with the intensity of a battering ram because Malachizrien stood at the foot of the altar with features hardened into a mask of lethal intent as he glowered at Kadeesha and Rishaud.
Rishaud sneered down at the male. “Is this a little declaration of war, pup? If that’s what you seek, it was already headed your way. But you’re a bigger fool than your father to so brazenly deliver your head directly to me. Did you learn nothing from his demise? But of course not—he was weak and pathetic, and sons always follow in the way of their father.”
“My title is king,” Malachizrien growled. “And no, I don’t seek war with you specifically, asshole. I simply want you to die where you stand. I’m going to relish showing you I am a much different beast than my father.”
Rishaud didn’t wait for Malachizrien’s attack; Kadeesha would give him that much. Molten columns of sunfire shot up around the Apollyon fae, surged over his head, and curved downward to douse him in flames.
Malachizrien grinned.
He had to be insane because he actually grinned while being surrounded by fire that burned as hot as the sun. As the sunfire barreled down on his head, a black hole—a pocket of the Void he’d summoned—appeared beside Malachizrien and he stepped into the center of the lightless hole. He reappeared on the altar mere inches away from Kadeesha and Rishaud. The pair of smoky onyx scimitars materialized in his hands. He swung them at Rishaud’s neck.
Rishaud flung himself to the side, but his arm didn’t clear the arc of one of Malachizrien’s scimitars. The black sword sliced through flesh and muscle and bone as easily as if cutting silk, severing Rishaud’s arm at the shoulder. Rishaud staggered backward and Malachizrien advanced, scimitars raised. Rishaud bellowed, a column of golden light appearing beside him. Rishaud flung himself into it and vanished from the temple.
Malachizrien roared, rushed to where Rishaud had been standing before using his solar magic in the same way Malachizrien had used his void magic. He bellowed a string of curses.
“Kadeesha!”
Leisha and Samira shouting her name pried her attention away from the hulking male. Her sisters ran toward her, Kadeesha spying not one person among the Hyperion fae alive in the pews around them. There was nobody left alive from her court either, save for her Nkita sisters and the two little girls that an Apollyon male, who now had red locs, kneeled in front of attempting to soothe. Malachizrien’s other four soldiers—who Kadeesha surmised had used zalika beads to don glamours too since they all now appeared as the familiar bunch he had entered Oleander House with—stood behind the one with red locs, stiffly watching him interact with the young Aether girls. Leisha and Samira rushed up the altar’s steps and planted themselves between Malachizrien and Kadeesha. They leveled swords at the male, who was …
Kadeesha stepped up beside her sisters. “You’re the Apollyon king!” she cried to Malachizrien.
He winked, a lascivious look in place. “I am, Princess.” He flicked a glance to Leisha and Samira. “Do we pretend we don’t know each other as intimately as we do, or …”
An aether bomb flew past his head. It would’ve smashed into his face if he hadn’t reacted with frighteningly quick reflexes. Her mind had already put the pieces together. She was livid and wanted to gut this king where he stood too. “It was you who made sure our affairs last night traveled back to Rishaud. You wanted him infuriated and unfocused enough during the ceremony that he didn’t see past your glamours, or even think to look too closely at the unfamiliar kinsfolk among the attendees.” It was a solid strategy, an exceptional one she might’ve admired if she hadn’t been a part—and victim—of it.
Malachizrien didn’t deny anything. He dipped his head in silent confirmation, a wicked shine in his brown eyes.
“You knew who I was the moment you walked into Oleander House!” Kadeesha fumed. “You used me and concealed who you were, Malachi!” She threw another aether bomb. This time, he didn’t dodge it. He did what he had with Rishaud’s magic and engulfed it in a cloud of blackness, smothering her purple flames with his void magic.
