Page 125 of The War of Wings
A knowing smile pulled at her lips. “Queen Petra, I have spent ample time with hundreds of leaders throughout the years. I have seen the best of us and the worst of us. You, dear, are the best of us. And it is the sheer fact that you do not believe it that proves my point.”
I eyed her, the urgency of Cal pulling me toward the door, but Queen Irli’s energy grounded me for a few more seconds. “You’re so unruffled,” I said. “How?”
“I’ve already suffered the greatest loss a mother can suffer,” she answered, her smile turning sorrowful. “My greatest fear has been realized. Fear has lost its potency.”
I wanted so badly to flip the table on its side, to pull Ludovicus to his feet and watch recognition light Irli’s face, but it wasn’t my place. He kept my secret. I would keep his. “I’m sure he loved you very much,” I managed to whisper.
“I know he did,” she answered with a smile. “I just hope he knew how dearly I loved him. I believe if queens ruled the world instead of kings, there would be no use for blood magic. We wouldn’t send our children off to die on foreign soil. The world would be softer. Kinder.”
I pursed my lips, biting the inside of my cheek to keep the tears from my eyes. “I agree.”
She went silent for a moment, her mind somewhere far away. But then she squeezed my hand, offering another sad smile. “Come back to us here, yes?”
The only thing I could manage was a nod as I backed away, leaving Queen Irli in the kitchens, thinking she was alone.
Chapter 49
Cal
Petra. Petra. Petra.
Her face. Her eyes. Her hands. The way she smelled. The sound of her laugh. The way her lashes fanned across her cheeks when she slept. The quiet tenacity of her love. An incessant humming sound. Which was what?
Petra. Petra. Petra.
Her name rang through my head as I opened my eyes. I peeled my tongue from the roof of my mouth and winced at the taste of blood that coated it. I was afraid to move.
Petra. Petra. Petra.
“Fuck,” I breathed to myself, flopping onto my back. Why had I been afraid to move again? I blinked, realizing I wasn’t in the darkness. The rocky ceiling was illuminated the slightest bit with a dim, gray light. A cave.
The Sanguilite’s Realm.
I shot up, my breath sawing in and out of my lungs as I found Aegrabane beside me, its rubies still glowing in time with my heartbeat. My surroundings blinked into focus, and it became clear this wasn’t the Sanguilite’s Realm. This wasn’t a cave, but a passageway.Thepassageway, the tunnel beneath the Iron Rise that had all but killed me. Slowly, carefully, I pushed to my feet, running my hands up and down my body. I seemed to be, somehow, whole. The memory was the only thing that remained of that merciless, all-consuming pain. I craned my neck over my shoulder, staring into the darkness behind me, and the darkness stared right back. There was nothing to see, nothing to explain the agony that had just wrecked every part of me and had now vanished.
I was okay. Somehow, I was okay.
Cautiously, I took one step toward the light, then another. I had no idea what I was going to find at the end of this tunnel, but I prayed to the fucking Blood Saints it would be them.
That humming sound in my head increased to a dull roar as the light grew brighter and the tunnel gave way to open space. I blinked in surprise when the pathway came to an end, because Hell looked a lot like the way we’d left Heaven. Scorched land that extended as far as the eye could see. But unlike in Heaven, there was no ocean, no quaint town. No cottages with horse pastures. Just a massive, yawning hole I had no desire to go anywhere near.
Perhaps the most awe-inspiring sight of all, though, was the soaring height of the castle. Towers and spires of a glassy black stone sliced an imposing silhouette into a charcoal sky. I’d bet it could cut the clouds in half, spear the sun on the point of one of its spires. It was terrifying. And beautiful. A lot like Petra.
And it was all eerily and hauntingly empty.
A looming presence prickled the back of my neck and I whirled to see a massive mountain jutting into the sky behind me. Gnarled, bare-branched trees jutted from its rocky surface, like jagged fingers reaching out from the ground, ready to snagthe leg of an unsuspecting passerby. Even with the skeletal trees, it looked a hell of a lot like the Iron Rise, with thick clouds of black smoke wafting from its peak. Did that have something to do with the pain I’d felt? Had I encountered some pocket of toxic gas deep within its core and hallucinated the entire journey here? Wasthisa hallucination?
I shook the thought from my head. This was all real until proven otherwise, I decided. I took a step away from the tunnel, my mind set on the castle in the distance, but my eyes snagged on the pit in front of me. It’d be easy enough to walk around — the path looked like nothing but flat, blackened ground. But something about that pit made goose bumps rise over my skin.
That dull roar in my head got louder, and suddenly there was nothing dull about the sound at all. It was a proper roar, a sound that covered octaves from low to high. The rumble of a driva’s growl. The scream of a tea kettle. Everything in between. And it grew louder as I moved closer to the pit.
Everything told me to stay far, far away, but curiosity pulled me closer, beckoning me to the rocky edge. Burnt grass crunched beneath my feet, turning to dust under my weight with each step. Carefully, I neared the edge, peering over and realizing…that wasn’t a roar.
The sound was a symphony of screams. Painful, terrified screams.
I scrambled backwards before my eyes could pick anything out, pickanyoneout. Back, back, back, away from the precipice that separated me from that…horror. I turned slowly in place, a sourness turning my stomach as I took in my surroundings. Maybe the Occulti hadn’t bothered to come here after all.
Why the fuck was I surprised? This was Hell. What had I expected to find? The worst of the worst playing cards and tending to their horses?
