A dozen soldiers appear on the ramp, marching straight onto the ship, two by two. They stop in front of Captain Fane in a formidable formation that flares out like a pyramid.
It’s an imposing sight. Black armor as dark and flat as burnt coals, brown leather pants and straps that crisscross over their chests. Onyx sheaths are belted around their waists, their sword hilts made of gnarled deadwood tree bark contorted wickedly. Heads covered in helmets, postures threatening, my mouth goes dry at the sight of them.
Because there, carved at the center of their midnight chest plates, between the leather straps, is their kingdom’s sigil. That twisted, misshapen tree with thorned roots, stripped of all leaves, four crooked branches reaching out like the devil’s claws.
These are Fourth Kingdom’s soldiers. King Rot’s soldiers.
And they’re an awful long way from their borders.
My hands go still on my ribbons, my eyes go wide. King Ravinger’s army is the most feared in all six kingdoms. I’ve heard plenty of stories telling of their viciousness on the battlefield. I find myself wanting to inch backward, as if I can try to fade into the shadows, though my feet are frozen where I stand.
No one speaks. No one moves. Even with the twelve soldiers standing there, Captain Fane waits, though I don’t know why.
My brows pull together in a questioning frown, until I hear it—a single pair of footsteps.
A thirteenth man stomps up the ramp, passing his soldiers who stand at attention on either side of him like brick walls. He’s tall, his very presence demanding of attention. Yet despite the fact that he’s wearing the same black armor and brown leather as the others, he has a very distinct difference.
“Are those...spikes?”
I hear the hissed whisper from a saddle to my right. I hear the murmurings of cursed and evil. I hear them explain how King Ravinger created him from the rotted wastes, turning his body into something unnatural for one purpose: to command his army.
But they’re wrong.
The commander with spikes jutting from his spine and arms isn’t cursed. The male who stops at the front of the group, so tall that Captain Fane has to tip his head up to look, isn’t some result of King Ravinger’s powers perverting his body.
No, the man st
anding there, whose body basks in menace, is one thing and one thing only.
Fae.
Chapter Thirty-Two
There weren’t always six kingdoms in Orea. At one time, there were seven.
A thousand years ago, Seventh Kingdom ruled at the edge of the world. Past the Pitching Pines, past the frozen mountain of Highbell, far past the Barrens and even the arctic sea.
Way out at the end, so far that even the sun and moon only skimmed its horizon. So distant that the flat earth ended in a precipice with nothing below. Seventh Kingdom lived in perpetual gray, no light, no dark, no beyond. But it was here where the bridge was found.
Lemuria. The bridge that led to nowhere.
The bridge was just a track of gray, empty dirt that stretched over the edge of the world, past what the eye could see. That strip of land kept going, with nothing below or around it, nothing existing at all except for the dark, sightless void.
It was said that if you were to step off the bridge, you would fall forever, and not even the Divine gods and goddesses could find you to give you the reprieve of death.
But Seventh Kingdom’s monarchs were scholars. They didn’t believe in myths or unknowns. So they sent soldiers and explorers onto the bridge of Lemuria to find out what was beyond, to discover where the bridge led.
For years, hundreds of Oreans journeyed on the bridge, only to never be seen again. Most believed it was a fruitless endeavor, one the monarchs should give up. A suicide mission. A task soon given to thieves and debtors instead. A venture that never led to anything.
Until one day, a woman walked back across.
She wasn’t a soldier or an explorer or a scholar or a thief. She wasn’t sent by the monarchs. She was a stowaway. An orphan girl whose father had gone over the bridge and never returned.
At age ten, she slipped past the guards who stood at the start of the bridge and ran silently, determinedly, into that void to search for her father.
No one ever knew. No one ever saw.
She walked through time and space, battling madness and starvation and thirst. Where all others finally caved and tossed themselves off the bridge, giving in, she pressed on. Where every other Orean man had failed, she succeeded.