Page 10 of Scourged

“Thank you for the offer, but I will be the one to care for my son, as I always have.” She turned her amethyst eyes to Andrian. “As I always will.”

Andrian couldn’t stop the warmth that spread through his chest. He loved the idea of staying here, in this room, with her, forever.

As she set to work on his hands, he made a simple request, one of his favorites.

“Can you tell me a story?”

Something unreadable flickered in his mother’s purple eyes.

“I will tell you something better than a story, my love. I will tell you an old folktale from my people.” Her hands stilled. “Do you know what a folktale is, Andrian?”

He shook his head. He knew what a tale was, but a folktale? That was not something he’d read in his history books.

His mother smiled before resuming her work. “They are stories, passed down from generation to generation, but never written. It is said they tell us certain truths, things that explain the unexplainable, and they are made better by each new generation who tell them. They are meant to bring us closer—both to the world we share and to each other.”

Andrian thought about her words, watching her delicate fingers deftly clean and bind the wounds on his palms before nodding. “Yes. I understand. Can you tell me a folktale, then?”

His mother flashed him a brilliant smile. “Of course, my love. There are many that my people still share, but this one … this one is about the dragons.”

Andrian’s eyes widened. Of all the things he’d read about in his books, it was the dragons that intrigued him the most.

“My people—yourpeople—still whisper that the dragons are not gone, as many in Onita believe,” his mother continued. “They say the dragons simply exist now in a form we cannot see but are still very much alive.

“It is promised that one day, the dragons will return. On the day we need them most, they will crack forth from the earthand the sky and join us again to defeat all evil and set the world back upon the path of light.”

Andrian listened in rapt fascination as his mother continued with her story of dragons and magic and darkness and victory, the pain and exhaustion in his body and hands forgotten.

A quiet,deadly voice snaked out of the void of darkness, a prison crafted by invisible black and gold shackles.

“Your mother was a very smart woman,” the voice whispered. “She knew more than most and was so committed to seeing a world freed from darkness.”

Andrian sank deeper into the abyss, lost to time and memories and pain and sadness.

“It is such a shame she is dead.”

Chapter 4

The sweat-drenched chills wracking Mariah’s frame were the first sign that something was very, very wrong.

She could hardly keep her eyes open as she lay helplessly on her stiff mattress, unsure if it was her sweat or her blood that clung the threadbare blanket to her skin. The wounds from the flogging were deep; her memories, her nightmares, were consumed by the feeling of sharp stone flaying her skin, scourging deep rivets in her flesh as pain scorched and burned.

Without a healer’s touch, and in this disgusting cell, she’d quickly fall prey to infection. The fester of her wounds would spread rapidly in her malnourished body, her weakened state unable to stave off the onslaught.

The rot seeped into her blood, and as death brushed against her back, she didn’t even have the strength to feel afraid. Nausea rolled through her gut, a ship lost at sea, before her eyelids fluttered shut, and she slipped back into unconsciousness.

Was this part of the lords’ plan? They wanted her power; she knew that now. And while they had obviously tried to break it out of her, perhaps they’d now resorted to letting her die.

Ryenne’s lessons flashed through her fever-hazed mind. A queen had never died outside of an ascension ceremony. IfMariah died now, would her magic find a new host? Or would the cycle end, the queen’s magic returning to Qhohena’s waiting hands?

Perhaps the lords had decided they wanted that power vacuum. No more queens meant an empty throne, ripe for their taking.

Mariah didn’t know if days or hours or minutes passed before she opened her eyes again, only to be blinded by a raging, burning silver light.

It hurt her eyes, just for a single fleeting second, before it receded to reveal a familiar female shape, dark skin and silver hair outlined by incandescence.

Mariah tried to speak, to greet the Goddess of Death. She wanted something,anything,to stop the rotting pain wracking her body. Her mouth opened, lips parched and cracking, and she tried to push words from her throat.

She failed.

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