Page 15 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Blair glances over at her without turning her head. Somehow she managed to keep standing. Still manages to keep her head high and her shoulders back while she pushes back the nausea and the pain that threaten to overtake her. Only iron will and honed discipline keep her from wiping out.

Perenilla’s even risen from her throne for her pretty little speech. The thin, raven-haired and ashen-skinned witch looks more like a noon wraith in her fringed robe than a queen though.

She looks small amidst the ring of the black coven thatstands gathered around the throne—thirty-three of Perenilla’s closest and most powerful witches. All of them pledged to her. The ones who govern the reservoir’s magic, deciding who can draw from it and how much.

Blair’s coven—the red coven—in their black riding leathers and crimson cloaks, form a semicircle on Blair’s left side, Perenilla’s sentinels in their long, black robes billowing in the wind on her right. The robes are a clear statement of their station. Those witches never get their hands dirty. That’s what Blair’s red coven and the other covens are here for.

That’s what she’s become: Blair Alaric, the Scarlet Death, the former great heir, wing leader of all covens, now barely more than Perenilla’s personal cutthroat. The red coven, whose reputation for mercilessness and cruelty once sent enemies running, now degraded to being servants at Perenilla’s beck and call. And all the witches, merely more than starved scavengers picking through the ashes, looking for bugs because there’s no meat left to feed on.

At least Gatilla let them fly over the border to harvest once she started the war against Palisandre. Perenilla insists they limit their hunts to their dead lands, so as not to provoke any of their numerous enemies.

They can’t afford to lose another member.

Blair meets the gaze of every robed witch.

Every one of them considers her a nuisance at best—a threat to Perenilla’s throne, the root of all evil, at worst. Sometimes Blair wonders whether the sheer loyalty of Sofya and Aurora and the witches of the red coven has prevented her from having been backstabbed with a knife so far. Not that she’s ever done anything to earn it.

No, quite the opposite.

She’s such a fucking failure.

Perenilla’s voice booms again over the platform, amplified by magic. “You were sent to the human world to bring the girl from the prophecy to me.”

Melody. The girl Caryan so desperately wants.Perenilla doesn’t have to say it, everyone here knows Kalleandara’s prophecy by heart.

“Yet you dare to return empty-handed. I should let you rot in the oubliette.”

Blair’s strength falters, blackness wavering in her peripheralvision. For a second, her knees buckle. She digs her claws into the onyx beneath her, leaving deep scratches in the polished stone before she makes it back up to her feet. Cold sweat runs down in rivulets under her torn leathers, mingling with her blood that’s soaked her shredded clothes. The pain is almost too much, but hells would she cower in front of Perenilla. She’d rather bite off her own hand.

“I had to flee. The human realms have been left unchecked for too long, and dark beings have been allowed to thrive. Lyrian has managed to gather an army which ambushed me when I almost caught the girl. I had no choice but to run.”

“You could have fought.” Perenilla’s dark eyes glitter with obvious disgust and hate.

Go ahead, bitch, hate me. But I hate myself harder.

Blair holds her gaze before she grinds out, “They were too many of them.”

“You could have fought nonetheless. Yet you chose to come running back like the coward you are, Blair Alaric. You chose to tuck tail instead of fighting for your kind. The ongoing war has become a threat to our existence. That girl could change the tides of that war. It is your responsibility alone to find the means to win it. Yet you failed me. You failed all of us.”

Blair can’t help it—that hollow laugh that escapes her throat. Yes, she failed. Yes, she fucked up in more ways than possible. No, she can’t explain that this very girl saved her sorry life. Butthisstatement is ridiculous. “Mine? Why in the Abyss’s name would it be my responsibility alone?”

Perenilla’s eyes only darken. “Aren’t you the heir of your great-aunt? And haven’t our ties with Palisandre been broken under her reign? That delicate truce severed before we witches had a chance to recover from our tremendous losses?”

“Those losses came because we killed the angels after we already lost so many witches to the Demon Wars!” Blair’s temper snaps before she can leash it. “Palisandre suffered similar losses.”

“Yet elven children are not as rare as witchlings,” Perenilla snaps back, her silver canines bared. “It was your aunt’s insatiable greedfor power. Because she decided to enslave the last angel and started a war to harvest the magic of high elves with his aid. Because she couldn’t get enough. It was her hubris that made this world fall apart. That tipped the balance of magic once and for all. That made all the portals to the hells burst open and wreaked havoc on this world. Plummeted us into misery.”

Perenilla’s voice is strained, her whole body shaking with anger, her whole being bristling with a challenge Blair more than aches to meet.

Abyss help her, she bares her teeth right back at the queen. “You can’t blame this on me.”

“Caryan is her dark creation, if I am not mistaken. She worked on him with magical ink and turned him into the blood-sucking demon he now is. She bestowed on himthe curseand made him a living weapon. He is the reason we need to keep harvesting magic to prepare for another war. Palisandre never forgave us, and ever since, we’ve been paying the price. We have been banned from their lands. Our trading routes cut off. Our numbers have been depleted to this tiny circle. Another war could wipe us off the face of this world, once and for all.”

Blair wants to bite out a sharp retort—but it gets stuck in her throat, along with a cracking in her heart. It’s true. She did nothing to stop this when she could have back then.

Gatilla enslaved Caryan. She inflicted it on him—thecurse,enabling him to suck up magic from any creature he drank from and adopt their magical gifts and talents. He managed to break free and turn against her. He absorbed all her magic and, merging it with his own, became immortal. The dark irony was—immortality was something Blair’s aunt always tried to achieve. But she ended up dying before she could, felled by his hand.

Blair could have stopped her aunt before Gatilla could elevate herself to such an unfathomable station. Could have prevented that last, devastating war.

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