Page 129 of Master of Storms
The room fell into silence.
Marduk kissed her shoulder. “He took you.”
“Fornax shot Siv out of the sky,” she admitted. “She was twelve, and he used a ballista to shred her wings.”
“And you?” Anger roughened Marduk’s voice. “How old were you?”
Solveig glanced over her shoulder at him. “Old enough to know better.”
“How old?”
“Fourteen.”
He didn’t tell her she was wrong—that fourteen was a child’s age. She’d heard it all before. Thought flickered through those amber eyes, as if he wanted to. But he nodded. “What happened?”
“I had to save my sister. And I was my mother’s protégé. I thought I could kill him. I was such a fool. I landed and shifted into mortal form and drew my knife.” She shuddered. “By then, our parents had discovered that we’d slipped away. The entire warband was in the sky, but it was too late. And Mother…. Mother didn’t bother searching for sign of us. She used the connection between them to findhim. She knew. She knew he would have lain in wait. She knew he would try to hurt her daughters. And I gave him the opportunity to get to her.”
“You couldn’t have known, Solveig.” Marduk rested his chin on her shoulder, his arms around her. “A male like that…. It’s incomprehensible. To hurt akitgoes against everything we believe in. Kits are so rare that every single one of them is a gift.”
“He didn’t care. She was his, and it didn’t matter who stood in the way.”
“What happened?”
Solveig closed her eyes, seeing her mother scrambling over the rocks toward her as she lay gutted and broken on the ground. “He’d cut me open. Badly. And then kicked me off a cliff. I landed on a ledge ten feet below him as my mother landed.”
Her mother’s eyes had dropped to the knife in Solveig’s hand. Knowing she’d never reach it in time. “Please,” she had said, meeting Solveig’s eyes. “Throw me the knife.”
“It hurts,” she’d whimpered.
“I know, sweetheart. I know.” And then her mother’s eyes had hardened. “Throw. Me. The. Knife. You are a queen, Solveig. You can do this.”
And somehow, she’d managed to push herself to her knees and thrown the knife toward her mother.
It hadn’t been enough.
Her sister was up there.
Her mother.
And her mother was right. She was a queen. Broken, and bleeding, and terrified, she’d managed to haul herself up that cliff just in time for Fornax to drag Siv to her knees, where he put his own blade against her throat.
“My mother had cut him to shreds,” she whispered. “She would have killed him and he knew it, so he used my sister’s broken body as a bargaining point. He had a knife at her throat, and he told my mother he would kill her daughter if she didn’t put her own blade down and surrender.” A half-sob caught in her throat. “She looked at me then, as I managed to haul myself over the edge of the cliff. And she told me that she loved me, and I knew…. I knew he was going to take her away from me.
“Because my mother would not surrender. Queens donotsurrender,” she said, repeating the words that had been drilled into them. “They fight until their last breath. They fight when every lastdrekiin their warband has been cut down. And when they are losing, they fight to make their death count.
“But he didn’t know that. She looked him in the eye and she agreed. If he let Siv go, then she would accept the mating bond.” The delight on his face…. Even now, it made her skin crawl. “And so she accepted the bond.”
Marduk’s fingers stroked her arms, though he didn’t dare speak.
“It was everything he’d wanted, except there were three things holding him back. ‘You will never truly belong to me while your heart is with them,’ he said, and then he lifted the knife and drove it down, intending to kill my sister.”
Tears streamed down her face, and she turned in the bath, seeking comfort in Marduk’s arms. “I was closer to him. I lunged forward and somehow threw him off-balance enough for his knife to miss Siv’s heart. My mother was screaming, but he had a fist tangled in my hair and… I saw the look she gave me and Siv. She couldn’t get to us in time. She couldn’t stop him. And there was just this… expression that flashed over her face as if she knew he would not stop until he’d killed the three of us and claimed her for his own. ‘Be brave, Solveig,’ she said, and then she lifted the knife and looked at him. ‘A bond that can only be broken by death,’ she told him as she set my knife to her chest and drove it through her heart.”
“No!” Fornax had bellowed, seeing his treasure slip through his fingers. But the death of one’s true mate was a massive blow. He’d reeled, falling to his knees.
“No!” Solveig had screamed, finding the strength to crawl toward her mother. “No!”
Her mother had been gasping on the ground, staring up at the sky. “Do it…,” she’d whispered. “Twist… the… knife. End this.”
