Page 73 of The Flame King's Queen

I can feel my life force being sucked out of me. Black spots are dancing before my eyes. I’m going to die in this lonely courtyard, and leave my mate and my baby unprotected. Terror bursts through my veins, but I can’t manage to break free. Distantly, I hear the sound of running feet.

“There he is,” a woman cries, and I recognize Isavelle’s voice.

“Sha’lenla. Stay back,” I rasp.

But Isavelle isn’t listening to me. I can hear her chanting strange words and see her moving her hands out of the corner of my eye. There’s a flash of red hair, and another woman begins casting a spell.

Isavelle shouts, and a gold crack of lightning leaps from her fingers and through my dead mother’s skull. The former queen reels back with a soundless scream as she clutches her head with both hands. The veil she wears is pulled from her head as she thrashes about, and I see decayed flesh, exposed bone, and gray hair clinging to a bony skull. All her flesh has withered away.

Ravenna casts her own spell, and my mother’s skeletal form falls to her knees, but she still doesn’t die. Or un-die. I’ve never gotten my head around what undead means. Ravenna brandishes a long, thin dagger, and she stabs my mother through the heart, finally finishing her off.

I cry out raggedly and in pain. Blood is roaring in my ears as I watch my mother crumple in on herself and slowly turn to ash, flaking away until she’s nothing but a dark smear on the ground.

Ravenna backs away from me, the dagger dropping from her fingers and clattering on the stones. “I’m sorry,Ma’len. She was killing you.”

There must be such horror on my face to make her so afraid of me. Or is her fearforme?

“Up there,” Isavelle shouts, pointing at something above my head.

Standing on a walkway overlooking the courtyard is Corin, Aurissa’s rider, and he’s grinning down at me with a preternatural smile stretching his lips. There’s something wrong about him, like a corpse that’s been animated, or a person who’s wearing a mask that’s almost real but not quite.

“Grab him before he can run,” Isavelle calls to the guards who have followed my mate into the courtyard. They race upstairs to seize him, but before the guards can surround him, Corin’s features melt away, revealing his true face. Emmeric’s face.

Green light flares in his eyes, and he grins at me before a circle of light appears behind him, and he steps through it. The light vanishes, and so does he.

Wind blows through the courtyard, sending my mother’s pale ashes up into the sky. I never knew where my mother’s body lay. There was so much chaos the day they were killed, and I was never able to return to the castle and bury their bodies before I was imprisoned beneath the mountain. Emmeric must have found her, and he resurrected her to torture me.

Isavelle approaches me and takes my hands. Warm, living hands. My own flesh is like ice. “Ravenna, he’s bleeding. Can you cast that spell on Zabriel?”

“Thatspell?” I ask, confused. “Onme?”

“Ravenna cast a healing spell on your mother’s animated body to put her back to rest,” Isavelle explains gently. “They work against the undead, the opposite way that they work on the living. This will help you.”

I can’t feel any pain in my throat, but something is trickling down my chest that I suppose must be blood. Ravenna lifts her hands, and I feel a gentle rush of warmth. For a moment I feel stinging pain, and then the sensation fades.

I blink and realize how close I came to dying within the walls of my own castle. I pull Isavelle into my arms and hold her tight. “Thank you,sha’lenla. You saved my life. And you, Ravenna. But how did you know I was here and in danger?”

Isavelle looks conflicted as she tells me, “Kane sensed there was something wrong. I almost didn’t listen to him.”

“Kane? Kane sensed I was in danger and warned you?”

“We are just as astonished as you,Ma’len,” Ravenna says.

I stare at the ashy smudges on the ground, all that’s left of my mother. Did Kane sense something wrong, or was he part of this? Emmeric was wearing one of his dragonrider’s faces.

“I will speak to Kane,” I say through gritted teeth to whichever of my soldiers are close enough to hear. “Drag that man here on his knees if you must.”

“Why, am I under arrest for saving the king’s life?” sneers a voice I’ve learned to hate.

Kane walks into the courtyard, pushing a man ahead of him, holding him by the scruff of his clothes. The man is unsteady on his feet and his hands are tied before his back. It’s Corin, but he looks drunk or drugged and completely unaware of what’s happening to him.

Kane peers at me closely, examining my face and the blood on my clothes. “It nearly killed you, whatever it was. Some kind of undead, I suppose?”

“It was Zabriel’s mother,” Isavelle says. “Queen Magritte.”

“Hismother?” Kane exclaims with a laugh. “No wonder she was able to get her hands on you. I would have loved to see—”

Isavelle interrupts him. “Shut up, Kane.”

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