Page 164 of Revealing Fate

“Do your captors take me for a fool, Prima? Did they think I wouldn’t discover their trap? That I haven’t had men watching the forest boundary for days?” He leaned forward in his saddle and bellowed at the woodland behind her. At the enemy he knew waited beyond his sight. “Idiots! Cowards! You’re all dead men!” The king hefted a horn to his lips and blew.

The bugle hadn’t yet died when men wearing Asterosian armor burst from camouflaged trapdoors throughout the field. The clamor of battle-hungry shurii disrupted the tranquil landscape as fifty-odd men flooded the plain, evacuating a line of hidden pits where the Meressian explosives and fuel stores had been.

One soldier surfaced not two feet from Felíne’s horse, shouting like a madman. The sorrel gelding reared. Felíne yelped. She grabbed a fistful of mane with one hand and the saddle with the other. The reins fell from her grasp in her desperation to remain seated.

Farther down the field, Felíne spied a flash of bronze as a phantom figure charged from the tree line, but her horse sidestepped violently, and she lost her focus.

A war cry rent the air.

Kal.

Another whistle and a thick-shafted arrow pierced the ground several feet in front of her, missing Cinah Creed by inches.

More arrows joined the first, seeking the king’s men. Grunts and cries created a chorus of pain as several soldiers fell. Not enough. Domitan blew his horn again. The king’s archers hoisted coated boltheads. A cluster of indigo flames rose in the air, the ignited projectiles of a dozen longbows pointing skyward.

Felíne’s stomach plummeted. Something was wrong with those flames. She groped desperately for her reins.

Cinah dropped to his knees and gripped the shaft of the arrow at his feet, yanking it free.

The longbows loosed their flaming arrows toward Stillwater Wood. Domitan followed their trajectory with wicked delight.

Cinah rose, twisted, and plunged the barbed bolt into the king’s warhorse. The animal screamed and lashed out with deadly hooves, striking Cinah in the chest. He fell. Domitan yelled in outrage as he attempted to control his panicked steed.

The flaming arrows of Asteros finally fell, just outside Stillwater Wood’s boundary. The Meressian explosives detonated with a ground-shattering boom. Felíne screamed as a line of violet-blue fire erupted, ripping across the forest border where she and Adder had waited beneath the denser canopy. It blazed in a violent torrent farther up where she’d seen Kal ride into the clearing. Where Beaumont Stonehaugh and the other Meressian militia had been readying to take the field. Penn was there. Santhe, too.

Felíne could only gape in horror as the roar of an unnatural wildfire blazed a hellish path into the wooded sanctuary where she was meant to retreat. She hadn’t regained her reins. She couldn’t give her frightened horse any direction.

It didn’t matter.

The sorrel gelding did exactly what he’d been trained to do—he ran away from the fire. Away from Kal. Away from her friends. Away from Meress and Stillwater Wood.

Her horse galloped for the far plain, carrying her to the ridge on the western horizon and straight toward the remainder of King Domitan’s army.

Epilogue

FELÍNE WAITED INSIDE THE ROYAL villa’s preparation chamber, nursing a shattered spirit. All throughout the city of Asteros, a raucous celebration was underway. Streamers of gold, bronze, and crimson draped from awnings and over alleyways. Ale and mead flowed in an endless torrent from taps in every tavern around the clock. The cheering of jubilant crowds could be heard well into the night. Not for her return—the citizens of Asteros hadn’t even been aware of her absence.

The Autumn Reaping was upon them. The Goddess’s holiday had arrived, along with Felíne’s twenty-fifth birthday, and shurii flocked to the capital in droves, awaiting confirmation of the prophecy’s fulfillment. They brought infants and children. Young men and women came, bearing their lastmarks, gathering on the steps of the Temple of the Rising Dawn, awaiting revival.

Felíne wondered absently if anyone had told them they might be waiting for days.

It had been over a week since General Corstow had halted her fleeing mount and returned her to the capital. Ten days since she stepped through the royal villa’s grand, vine-covered perimeter wall and into the palace where she’d spent most of her life.

This opulent place of comfort and splendor, with its sprawling gardens, tiled fountains, and open breezeways…no longer felt like home.

Home—her true home—had been left to burn on the fringe of an ancient wood.

Felíne lost track of the days spent weeping for the people she abandoned on that black day. She stopped counting the tears that fell for the burning forest, the good plan that had gone so terribly awry, the friends whose fates were never revealed. She couldn’t total the hours spent mourning a dark warrior on a roan stallion whose last words to her had been that she looked like a queen of Ilistaar, admiration and love shining in his black, war-painted eyes. Felíne had given up trying to identify what she could have done differently, how she might have prevented such a tragic outcome.

The King of Asteros may as well have set her aflame, too. Her courage, hope, and purpose were ash. The only thing left was a sorrow so deep, so profound, she’d gone numb out of some subconscious sense of self-preservation. If she allowed herself to feel any more, the emotion would surely kill her.

The door to the chamber opened, and Felíne turned to see a ghost step across the threshold.

Elder Imogen, her mentor and once dear friend, gaped at her with a mixture of anguish and disbelief. Felíne wasn’t sure what her own expression conveyed. She couldn’t remember how to care.

“I lost your cloak,” Felíne said, when the silence became too cumbersome, words scraping through a raw throat.

Imogen’s composure cracked as she rushed forward and wrapped Felíne in a fierce embrace. If Felíne had any tears left within her, they’d have flooded the room. Instead, she moaned, a wordless sob burying itself in the folds of Imogen’s elder vestments. The women crumpled to the rug, clinging to one another in shared solace.