Page 81 of Oath of War
My father’s voice awakened memories I wanted to stay buried, and it took me a moment to compose myself.
‘Cahyon needs a virgin healer?’ I asked, Lara’s hand still on my throat.
‘I’m not a virgin, you moron, just a Moroi untouched by the blood craving. How else could I heal you after you attempted to slit your throat?’ she snapped, and I belatedly realised that despite all odds, I was still alive.
I groaned. ‘You should have let me die.’
‘I would have, but just like you, I didn’t have a choice,’ she answered, picking up her tools as I struggled to sit up.
I was in the dungeons, chained to the wall with only enough freedom to shift my position. While it was dark and lit only by a single torch, I could see the steel bars of the cell and the mouldy straw on the floor. I yanked at my rusty chains, but they held. Desperate, I reached for the aether, and as the life-giving force flew through me, Lara’s eyes widened, and she pulled away from me.
‘Don’t—’ she warned, but it was too late. Power slid over my body in a chaotic wave of wild magic, and I started convulsing, thrashing like a fish on a hook.
My father’s laugh echoed long after I regained the ability to breathe again.
‘As long as you’re wearing the manacles, you can’t do anything,’ Lara said, closing her bag. ‘I’m sorry, Alaric’va Shen’ra, I would have let you die if I could. I hope you don’t suffer too long.’
She walked away, leaving me alone with the monster I called father, and I finally turned to face him. I knew Cahyon had ordered his golems to seize him, but after my sister’s deception, I thought that, too, could have been a ruse. Yet my father wasin the cell next to me, chained to the walls with the same rune-engraved manacles as me.
‘So, she dragged you here like she said she would. You always were a fool, Alaric,’ he said with a shrug, ignoring my assessing stare.
‘So I’m told, but at least I’m here for the right reasons. You served a monster and made Ro into one, too. Yet here you are, chained up like a rabid dog. Who’s the bigger fool, father?’
Roan was quiet for a moment, but the tension in his body told me my words hit their mark. ‘At least I chained him to this land, this palace! But you ... you’re going to set him free. The marks on your chest,’ he gestured at me, ‘you thought I did them, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, spare me your lies. What else will you claim? That you didn’t sacrifice your wife?’ I huffed with disdain, wishing my chains were long enough to reach across to his cell and choke the life out of him.
‘Of course I sacrificed her. She was planning to leave me. Me! After I lowered myself to take her for a wife!’ he shouted.
‘I wish she had. I wish she didn’t just leave you, but had gone to the empress to disclose the vile treatment you subjected her, and us, to ... we were just children. Look at what you did to Rowena—’ I cried, choking on my anger.
He burst into crazed laughter. ‘WhatIdid? You were always too blind to see the real Rowena, the one who watched your punishment with a smile,’ he said. ‘I suppose I can’t blame you. She tricked me too, that beautiful, innocent child always defending you. Dark Mother, how she irked me with her mewling and begging, but now I know it was on purpose. How her pleas always revealed more details of your defiance, fanning the flames of my anger.’
I shook my head, unwilling to believe him. Still, the revelation reminded me of those moments when my little Ro had come tomy rescue. Every time she wrapped her arms around me and begged father to stop, she would panic and apologise for some other rule I’d broken. Every time, our father’s face would darken, and the beatings got so much worse.
‘Ha! You see it now, don’t you? All the tears, all the apologies. They had one purpose ... I almost killed you once. Do you remember? Because I do, and gods, how I wish I hadn’t stopped that day.’
‘Why do you hate me so much?’ I asked, almost whispering. Even now, he seemed to revel in the worst day of my youth.
‘Because you are the mage your grandparents always wanted me to be. Because Talena saw in you a strength she never saw in me. She rejectedmebut waited for you to mature to ... Her prime mate asked to be your mentor, for the gods’ sakes, when I’d had to beg my way into the court,’ he said.
‘You were a rising dark star of the empire, the “saviour” of the Shen’ra family, while I was considered a failure,’ he continued. ‘No one even cared that you were whelped from the filth of a human, but gods, did they laugh at me. The dark fae touched by tal maladie, too pathetic to choose another domina.’ Roan was raving by the end, straining against his bonds as he shouted his hatred through the bars.
‘I didn’t ask to be born!’
‘No, I thought taking a human would cure me, but you were just another one of my mistakes. I hated you for that, but the irony is that you’re the perfect heir. You’ve not only surpassed your father, but also all dark fae, the male blood-bonded to the goddess’ chosen—’
He was blessedly interrupted by the creak of a door in the distance, and I sensed a familiar magical signature wash down the corridor.
‘Aren’t family reunions so much fun?’ Rowena asked as she opened my cell. The sigil she’d drawn on my chest flared to life, and I felt as weak as a kitten.
‘Why, Ro? I know I took far too long to get here, but why betray me? We had a chance to escape.’ I needed an explanation that would disprove my father’s words.
I was clutching at straws. After seeing Rowena’s indifferent expression as I fought to escape, I knew the girl I remembered was gone, but I hoped there was a reason, an excuse, for her betrayal.
‘You still want to believe I’m some poor defenceless victim?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you remember me begging you not to fight our father’s decision to come here? Did you not wonder why mother escaped alone? Why she left me here ... or why was she captured?’
Rowena’s laughter reverberated in the cell, and it finally sunk in that under her divine looks was a spirit so rotten it was worse than even the Lich King’s or my monster of a father’s.
