Page 26 of Oathborn
Magic like that… he hadn’t felt in a decade.
The song’s effects had reached someone else, someone who must have kept his own glamour quite closely guarded in the city.
Damn it all,Tivre thought.Couldn’t he have picked any other city to make his home?
Tivre snapped his fingers, summoning enough magic to render Annette unconscious. Silently, she sank to the ground, like a marionette with cut strings. Pointing at her, Tivre commanded Quila. “Get her to safety. He’s approaching.” Panic colored his voice.
“He?” she asked, and then, understanding dawned. Even she knew there was only one who could frighten Tivre. “I will stay. The Traitor’s death is my duty.”
“You will leave!” Tivre shouted. “Before he gets here. Before Annette wakes.” Only now did Tivre realize all that his vision had left out, and what would happen before that fateful deal would be made.
One window shattered, shards raining down like ice. A figure landed on the ground, a hand stabilizing himself, the other holding an already drawn blade, his military uniform and dark hair unmarred by his entrance into the cathedral.
Tivre flung out an arm in a useless attempt to keep Quila away.
It was too late, her eyes had met Javen’s. The magic in her blood ignited. Now, either she would kill Javen, or fall to his blade herself. There was no other option.
None, except for her to break her own Oath, but Tivre doubted she would consider such a thing. Even without the Oath’s magically-induced rage demanding she kill Javen for his betrayal, she’d made her hatred of him clear.
Quila surged forward, sword flashing, the force of her swing slicing the air. Javen slipped past her first strike, then her second, but only just. Her speed was blistering, and the clash of steel rang through the ruined hall. He vaultedover a half-rotted pew as her blade smashed into the wood, splintering it in a spray of jagged shards.
Before she could recover, he moved, as fast, precise, and relentless as he’d ever been. The past decade had not slowed his speed nor decreased his power. His sword blocked hers, twisting it aside, and with a sharp pivot he drove his boot into her midsection, sending her staggering. “Fool!” he snapped. “You should have stayed on the isles.”
“You should be dead!” Quila roared.
She came at him again, fury blazing, but every blow met an effortless parry, every opening she tried to take turned into another trap. Javen’s eyes stayed cold, calculating. It was no contest. He wasn’t fighting to survive, he was deciding when to end it.
Growling, Quila swung her blade at Javen’s neck. He slipped aside with effortless precision. Every movement he made was calm, economical, practiced, as if this were nothing more than a tedious sparring match. Quila, by contrast, fought like her life depended on it. Each fierce strike was driven by raw desperation, and her ragged breaths betrayed how close she was to the edge of exhaustion.
Tivre had no time to summon magic, nor did he know of any spells that would have saved Quila without killing Javen. And idiot that he was, Tivre could not find it in himself to harm Javen.
It would mean Quila’s blood would be on Tivre’s hands, soon enough. What was one more innocent life on his soul, already stained dark enough to be pitch black?
Forcing herself upright, Quila attacked once more. “For the Queen!”
A snarl escaped Javen’s lips, and his next attack smashed through Quila’s defenses, knocking the sword from her hand. Before it could land, he caught it, then with the two swords, lunged forward. The blades cut through her neck in one clean motion. Her head and body landed, separate, on the ground.
Javen flicked the blood off his blade with a practiced twist of his wrist. Then, he turned to face Tivre. “You,” he snarled.
They stood at either end of the destroyed cathedral, their eyes locking onto each other’s for the first time in a decade. On the way to the capital, Tivre had told himself when he finally saw Javen, there would be nothing left of who he’d been before. If their paths would cross, perhaps he’d not recognize him, not in the officer’s clothes he now wore.
His blue eyes, intense like a storm, deep as the sea, those were the same as Tivre had known his whole life. Only now, they held hatred. Worse, Tivre knew he deserved that disdain.
“I’m sorry,” Tivre whispered. As if the words meant anything. As if Javen had not just murdered another fae in front of him. As if any apology could ever fix anything, in the end.
“Sorry?” Javen spat on the ground. “You come here, of all places. You break every glamour in this damned city, toask for forgiveness? After what you did? Have you lost whatever scrap of sense you have left?”
He was speaking Rhydonian, Tivre realized. Not only speaking it, but clinging to fragmented shards of his nowbroken glamour, as if desperate to still be seen as human. To be anything other than what he truly was.
“I didn’t come here for you.” Tivre said. “I’m here to save the Accords.”
“The Accords?” Javen charged forward and grabbed Tivre by his collar, lifting him off the ground. “You will break them with your foolishness!”
Tivre tried to pry Javen’s hand away. Javen had always been so much stronger than him, than anyone, really. Quila never stood a chance. At the very least… Tivre’s eyes flicked to where Annette lay. Still safe, for as long as she slept.
Fighting the pressure of Javen’s tightening fingers, Tivre gasped out. “Please. The girl is a human with an Oathborn mark.” This wasn’t supposed to happen. He’d plotted so carefully to save lives, not kill more innocents. “If she wakes while you’re here—”
“I’ll leave once you’re dead.”
