Page 129 of A Dagger of Ice and Intrigue
In the disbelieving silence that followed, I couldn’t keep the truth hidden any longer.
“Orion tried to kill me,” I said, voice devoid of the ugly emotions I still refused to let bubble to the surface. “And if what you’re saying is true, we’re all in danger.”
Chapter
Twenty-Five
THE COMMANDER
War.
No matter how hard my feet hit the ground at impossible speeds or how fast the world blurred around me, the word rattled in my brain.
Those measly Serpents should have thanked us for ridding them of Fabrian, the most useless, ruthless, and wasteful Clan heir they’d had in generations.
But no.
They wanted revenge.
More Serpent spies and scouts on the Blood Brotherhood border could only mean one thing–an upcoming attack, grander than the skirmish we’d already had with them in the valley separating us from the Defector Lands.
So Zandyr had obliterated Edrion, the Serpents general, in a cloud of blood and sinew. His powers had just manifested, theywere still hard to control. He’d done them a favor, as far as I was concerned. Sylvester had seen more battles than Edrion.
Nobody could deny the situation was dire and growing more dangerous by the day.
“Even if it comes to a Clan war, the Serpents are outnumbered, outmanned, and outarmed,” Calyx had complained from his palaver portal. The rest of us had gathered in the Capital earlier today, but our biggest and brawniest was still recuperating from that heinous wound he’d sustained on Sanctua Sirena. Even sitting in a chair instead of laying down had given his skin a strange green pallor.
“Perhaps,” I said, drumming my fingers on the ceremonial table, carved by generations we’d all forgotten the names of, but which had raised this Clan into the fiercest in all of Malhaven. “But the Serpents have something we lack–huge fucking snakes.”
Elysia scoffed to my right. “They can’t be that big.”
“No. They’re bigger.”
I’d seen them with my own disbelieving eyes.
Massive beasts, with heads as big as carriages, front fangs tall as men, and bodies long enough to coil on top of hills and engulf them whole.
The Clan Council had long forbidden magicked creatures in Clan battles, but the Serpents had defied the rules. The magistrates, so eager to seal our fates with the Protectorate’s in ungodly marriages, had yet to sanction the Serpents.
Or admit they even had those huge fucking snakes to begin with.
“Why isn’t the Clan Council taking a stance?” Zandyr’s voice cut through the dimly-lit room from the head of the table.
He shouldn’t have, but he blamed himself for this entire debacle.
His blade had sliced Fabrian in two.
His pride and conscience had pushed him to claim Evie’s hand.
But the responsibility was not his to bear. We’d followed him to Sanctua Sirena and nobody could have predicted the massacre which had taken Alaric’s life.
Not even I.
“There’s something rotten within the magistrates’ ranks,” Soryn said bitterly, with that same clipped tone he always had when that big brain of his couldn’t solve a puzzle. “And I can’t find the head of the beast to behead it.”
Magistrate corruption or not, this issue went deeper.
I doubted a magistrate had bothered to sick The Mountain on The Huntress.
