8. Melisandre

8

MELISANDRE

I drummed my fingers on the arm of my throne and then scowled, stilling the ridiculous display of tension. The throne room was an abyss, not a candle or torch lighting the cavernous space. Humans would even think it silent, considering neither I nor the orcs keeping watch over the doors made a single sound.

They would be wrong.

The Voidborn rattled in my head like a thousand chattering birds. Gone were their soft, sibilant whispers. Their insidiously quiet clicks and hisses. What happened with that boy several hours ago should have been impossible. They knew that like they knew all the realms should fall.

As did I.

I closed my eyes, but the darkness only made their protests louder. They railed at the fact that irritating young man had dared to avoid being possessed. They ranted about the destruction of one of their own and the mere existence of anything that could resist their will.

But that was where they were wrong. It was my will he’d resisted. My power he’d opposed. I ruled them now, and for that boy—that giant —to have stopped what I planned…

My fingernails dug into the scrolled armrests of the throne, making the gold plating bend and chip. The throne was weak, just like the former king. A monstrosity of gold overlaying its common wooden core. It had been the seat of the ruler for generations, and once I secured my hold on this world and banished any memory of Gwyneira’s family from the minds of the populace, I would have it replaced with something that did not reek of human frailty.

A throne of magic, perhaps. Of darkness and despair. Something to remind anyone who set foot in this place that only one being would ever sit upon the throne of Aneira again.

Me.

It was a pleasant enough thought, but the seething Voidborn and their irritating cries overwhelmed it almost instantly, distracting me once more.

“Shut. Up .”

My hissed command carried into the dark throne room. In the shadows, the orcs straightened, their glowing eyes twitching to me.

“I will solve this,” I snarled at them. “Whatever that boy did, he will not slow us down.”

A second slunk past as if unwilling to be noticed, and then the damned Voidborn quieted their protests.

Finally.

I steepled my fingers, thinking. The giants were devious. Everyone knew this. Yes, I’d set them up as scapegoats for my assassination of Queen Eira, but they were still capable of all manner of schemes.

The war had proven that in spades, after all. For years, the Erenlians had tried countless tricks to keep me out of their country, and their scholars had worked day and night to hold my magic back. But it was when the war ended that the true extent of their desperate refusal to bend became clear.

In the last days of the war, a magical barrier rose around Erenelle. An unschooled human might have thought it identical to the Warden Wall I’d crafted around Aneira, and in some ways, maybe that was true. Just as my wall burned alive any giant who dared attempt to cross, the Erenlian Wall killed anyone who touched its surface.

Even the Erenlian prisoners I’d ordered the soldiers to drive against it.

Even the soldiers themselves.

Old irritation rose again at the memory. I would have sent hundreds at that barrier. Thousands, even, if that was what it took to defeat the thing that dared to stand in my path. But after the first dozen or so deaths, I’d been forced to stop testing. The king had gotten squeamish. He didn’t like ordering his soldiers to die against a wall that never changed, and he believed the Erenlian prisoners were better used in the mines, rather than dying “pointlessly.”

Fool. It was his fault that damned wall still stood around Erenelle, sealing away whatever remained inside and taunting me with its refusal to fall.

But until now, I’d never seen that magic around one of the giants themselves, and that …

My fingertips pressed against one another harder.

That shouldn’t have been possible.

A sliver of light pierced the darkened throne room. “Y-your Majesty?”

Harran peered around the doorway, his aging body silhouetted by the chandeliers burning in the hall. At the sight of my orcs standing on either side of the door, he audibly gulped, but propriety demanded he step farther inside now that he knew I was likely here. His watery eyes squinted in the darkness as he walked toward the throne, and his veiny hands wrung themselves like he would strangle his own fingers from fear. “If… If I may, Your Majesty…?”

I contemplated draining him just to be rid of him, but I would only need to find someone else to fill his place. After all, I needed to keep some of the city’s inhabitants around to feed myself and my servants. I couldn’t be bothered to speak to the human cattle at any given moment, and my vampires and orcs couldn’t either—the former because they couldn’t go out in daylight to enforce my commands, and the latter because they could barely speak at all.

Thus the annoying steward lived another day.

“What?” I replied.

“Your subjects are restless once again. Your allies have… Well, they seem to be eating the dead. Several of the living they captured too. Your subjects wish to know if this will continue, and if not, when your allies might be leaving?”

The Voidborn hissed in my mind, wondering the latter as well.

Fools. All of them. Daring to question me…

But sitting here gained me nothing.

“Very well.” I rose to my feet. “I shall answer their concerns.”

Swiftly, I took up the sword from where it rested against the smaller throne at my side. This ridiculous nation had set that silver seat aside for the queen, just as the one opposite it was meant for the first-born heir of whatever male ruler they had at the time. Had I followed their rules, I would have been expected to sit as regent to their precious Gwyneira, leaving the golden throne empty until the day she married some fool who would take her father’s place.

And that idiot child would have gone along with it. She was complacent. Dull. Pathologically trusting, to the point of never questioning any of the countless lies I fed her over the years. In truth, I doubted Gwyneira could even hold an original thought in her head, much less recognize one if someone presented it to her. She would have no sooner rebelled against giving up power to her husband as her people expected than she’d have grown wings and flown to the moon.

But then, all of Aneira was like that. Countless sheep merrily trotting along paths that said this was right, this was wrong . Not one would step beyond the lines some long-dead king had put in place for reasons no one living still knew.

Little did they know how vulnerable that made them.

They’d spent years being taught to fear anything outside their precious lines. Anything that wasn’t like them or that didn’t fit into the world as they’d been taught to see it. But fear was a beautiful, vicious tool. Twisted just right, it could be aimed by the person who controlled that fear at any target they wished.

I should know. Years before, I’d manipulated their king into starting a war that should have delivered to me the magic of Erenelle. But now—oh, now —I would turn this nation into a wheel of blood and death that would roll over the world and bring it all under my control.

I had no intention of leaving Aneira.

Not when everything I needed was here.

Harran stumbled out of my way as I strode from my throne room and down the hall toward the castle courtyard.

Dozens of orcs and harpies and other monstrous creatures were waiting outside.

The crowd of beasts parted, clearing my path to the gnarled and aging apple tree that stood inside a large circle of stone and dirt at the center of the courtyard. None of the Voidborn-possessed monsters had come near it, which was just as well. No matter how long other apple trees lived, this particular one was so old, I had never found someone who could tell me its true age. But these creatures would likely kill it.

In all honesty, given what I’d told the Voidborn about apples—along with the fact a few of the dark crimson winter fruits still clung to the tree’s branches—it was somewhat surprising the creatures hadn’t decided to try gnawing on it already.

The Voidborn had a tendency, I’d realized, to be incredibly literal.

Ignoring the way their glowing eyes tracked me, I walked up to the tree. Beneath my feet, I swore the roots shivered, while the leaves quivered in fear when I rested my fingertips on the mottled flesh of a single apple within my reach.

I smiled. Like the damned castle, this tree was right to fear me. Everything should. Between my magic and the power I’d taken in when I killed Alaric?—

A shiver crawled over my skin between my shoulder blades.

Alarmed, I spun, scanning the crowd.

The orcs and harpies and all manner of creatures remained as they had been, their glowing eyes trained on me and the tree alike. Harran was long gone, off to attend to some insufferably domestic task or other.

What had that been? Some traitor lurking in my midst? Any of these creatures would happily kill me given the chance. But that was hardly a threat.

I’d destroyed Alaric. I’d destroy them too.

A chill crept over my skin again, like cold and inhuman fingers tracing down my spine. The slow and steady rhythm of my heart began to speed up.

No. No, that bastard was gone. What I’d done to him was more than death. It was annihilation .

My muscles twitched, as if a bug had landed on my arm and instinct made me flinch to dislodge it. Whirling back to face the tree, I glanced down surreptitiously, but my body was of course the same. No insect was upon me. Nothing in this world would dare touch me.

On the sword in my grip, the gruesome face carved into the hilt writhed.

A short breath of alarm stuttered into my lungs.

I stilled the reaction quickly, not moving. Between one eye blink and the next, the face was still again, as if it had never moved at all.

I ground my teeth. Obviously, this was a trick of the light. Admittedly, there wasn’t much, given that it was night and the moon and stars were shrouded by clouds. But torches still burned by the gate and in the castle. Any one of them could have made the face appear to move in the darkness.

Enough of this foolishness.

Resolutely, I returned my attention to the apple tree. Passing beneath its branches, I lifted my free hand and rested my fingertips on the cold, rough bark of the trunk.

Even though any other tree should have been forced by its nature to remain motionless, I swore this tree still tried to recoil from my touch.

I smiled and sent my power rushing into it, down through it, racing along the corridors and avenues of its being into its roots.

Riding the flow of its energy into the earth.

My smile grew. I’d been right.

This gnarled old tree was so much more than merely a tree. Its roots stretched deep into the earth. Its apples grew even in the depths of winter. And that was because over these many years of growing directly above a powerful nexus, story had been at work, twisting and changing the tree’s nature, both with the power of apples and through its identity as the symbol of the Aneiran queen.

But Alaric hadn’t foreseen this. He’d thought the best way to control the nexus—to control everything—was to go deep into the earth. To descend through the castle and draw as close to the nexus physically as possible in order to strike.

Such linear, literal strategists, all of them.

This was true power.

I closed my eyes, letting my consciousness descend with my magic into the earth. In my mind, the glow of the nexus appeared, a swirling mass of bright light and deep shadow that grew larger the closer I came. Broken ley lines were scattered around it, irrelevant. They bled their light out into the earth like torn veins, their connection to the nexus severed when Alaric had attacked. Those that remained were striated with my darkness.

And that darkness writhed as if recognizing me.

Carefully, delicately, I began to weave my spell, sending my will into the shadow and infusing it with the power of story and belief. Pulses of dark energy surged out from the nexus, pumping like blood from a poisoned heart into the remaining ley lines that traced their sinuous paths out from Lumilia and into the rest of the land.

In the distance, I felt the mountains tremble. Felt the trees and rivers shiver with fear.

And I laughed.

The Voidborn saw only straight lines to their targets. I saw a web that gave a thousand routes to victory. A forest that would carpet the world in my might, crushing my enemies no matter where they might hide.

And it all would start with a simple apple.