But then…there she was. Her kind eyes stared back at me from beneath a forehead dripping with blood. There was no life inside those eyes. Her body lay still on the sand, and her chest showed no signs of breathing.
Pain shot an arrow through my heart, punching through me so violently that all I could do, for a very long time, was stare.
“Tessa, love,” Kalen murmured as he smoothed a stray strand of hair out of my eyes. “Please say something.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, not even a whisper. Sorrow rushed over me like a tidal wave, plunging me into the depths of a despair so deep that I thought I might never reach the surface again. My throat burned. My eyes ached. And then something within mecracked.
I fell to my knees and sobbed.
Thirty-Six
Kalen
THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
The sky was full of ash and embers. I stood on the rolling fields beyond Albyria’s crimson gates and gazed at Oberon’s gathered army. There were hundreds, decked in their fighting leathers, holding their wooden shields with a one-eyed dragon painted in the center. Oberon’s sigil, a declaration to anyone who dared cross him. Wrong him and he would unleash the full force of his fire, a power drawn from the sun itself. At the thought of the baking heat, I reached up and ran my hand along the back of my neck. My army and I had spent weeks marching across the boiling landscape of the Kingdom of Light, cutting down anyone who stood in our way. Entire villages had been burned to ashes. My stomach twisted at the memory of flames reaching up to lick the sun-drenched skies, at the sound of dying screams that had filled the smoky air.
I didn’t relish in death. Blood and terror and flames—it all added to the nausea that clogged the back of my throat.
But I had no other choice. At least that was what I told myself each time I thought about turning my army around and returning to my homeland, a realm drenched in the cool brush of night. If I did not destroy Oberon, he would find a way to return the gods to Aesir and the human kingdoms beyond the sea. The King of Light threatened the future existence of every single living thing in this world. I would do whatever it took to stop him.
I’d made a vow.
Toryn stepped up beside me and palmed the hilt of the sword strapped to his waist. As the elite fae son of storms, he didn’t need a weapon to fight, but he didn’t like being unarmed. “What do you think he’s going to do?”
“He’ll throw the full force of his army against us.”
“He should yield,” Toryn said, his voice laced with regret. “No more light fae need to die. This war has already taken too many lives.”
“Oberon is stubborn and cruel,” Niamh said as she joined us, her woolly violet hair twisted into a hundred tiny braids. “But you know that. There’s no reasoning with him.”
Toryn shook his head. “He is all that, but he’s still a king, and he’s always acted like one. Regardless of everything he’s done, I thought he cared about his people.”
“I did too,” I said quietly.
Oberon hadn’t always been like this. Or, if he had been, he’d hidden it well. He had reigned with a kind smile and generosity, always lending an ear to his people—and assistance where he could. That was the Oberon of a hundred years ago, but something had changed in him these recent years. He’d grown hard and cruel. And he’d taken my mother from me.
Some thought her rejection of his proposal had led him down this path of ruin, but I knew it must have started before that. My father had never liked him.He’d warned us of his treachery. It wasn’t until my mother had vanished not long after Oberon’s proposal that I’d truly believed this.
Even so, I did not want to destroy the last of the light fae. Yes, some had survived the assaults we’d made against Itchen and Endir, but this realm had suffered so many losses. Most of these fae were just following their king’s orders. And there were the humans of Teine not far from the fae city, one of the few mortal villages still left in Aesir. They had nothing to do with any of this. They should not have to pay the price of our war.
I sighed. “Perhaps we could try to draw some of the fae from the front lines for a smaller skirmish. If we win decisively, Oberon might see this battle can only end in the death of his kingdom. He might decide to surrender.”
Niamh let out a hollow laugh. “Kal, don’t even pretend you believe that. Oberon will never surrender. He won’t give up, not even if he has a sword sticking out of his chest.”
“The damn gods are more important to him than anything else,” Alastair muttered. “Otherwise, he would have given up a long time ago. He’s backed into a corner now. He has nowhere to go. And his castle is no fortress.”
“We can’t discount his power,” I said, gazing across the field of his warriors. Oberon still had not shown his face. I’d call him a coward, but I knew there must be a reason. He was planning something, and we had to be prepared. As it stood, Oberon was trapped. Albyria and Teine were backed up against towering mountain peaks along the southern and western edges. Those mountains were not part of the Kingdom of Light. Instead, they were part of the free territory of Albyria—the lands that belonged to no one. The towering, jagged cliffs were deadly, even to elite fae. And the only thing that stood on the other side was the sea. My army waited on the rolling fields that led to the rest of his kingdom, a kingdom that I’d now conquered. Oberon had nowhere to go. And he knew it.
A desperate man was a dangerous man. With nothing to lose, he might be willing to rip his army to shreds.
“Did you find out anything?” I asked Toryn. “About whatever he’d need to do to bring back the gods?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been combing through the books I brought with us, but a bunch of pages have been torn out. Most likely burned. The fae and humans who drove the gods from this world didn’t want us to find a way to bring them back. That information is too dangerous. So they got rid of it. And whatever your mother found…”
The news settled in my gut like rotten pooka meat. We’d been hoping to find out how Oberon planned to bring back the gods, thinking it would give us a way to stop him. According to Morgan, Oberon knewsomething, but he’d forbidden her to speak of it to anyone, especially me. The only way for me to learn what he knew was to find the answer somewhere else, but all the records had been destroyed. A good thing, in theory. The fae who had burned those pages had hoped to keep the information out of the wrong hands, but they hadn’t been thorough enough. Now the wrong hands had it and no one else.
“The only way we’re going to stop this is by defeating him,” I said. “More slaughter. More blood. More death.”