Page 54 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Letting go of her wrist, as if he could hear every dark thought she’d ever had, he said, “Then get down on your knees and beg for it.”

***

The night was waning. The moonlight danced over his perfect face, his honed, sweat-slicked angelic body when they finally parted. He got up, as always. Never holding her. Never staying through the night. He went to the window, gazing up at the moon.

She swallowed down her pride, her hurt, and just watched him, memorizing every detail of his chiseled body, although she already knew it by heart. Every ridge and pane.

It truly hurt to look at him.

Next to him, even she felt common. Average. It was a kind of beauty that made you ache.

She sat up eventually. Slowly, so slowly, her mind came back to reality. To what her aunt declared before.War.

“So it’s truly going to happen. We are going to war with Palisandre?” Blair asked, still not quite believing it.

“Those lands are drained of their essence. It’s the only logical next step to acquire more magic.”

“She already has enough magic as it is.”

He glanced at her. “Greed and the thirst for power are insatiable.”

Blair frowned. “You make it sound as if you agree with her.”

“I don’t. I just have been wandering the grounds of this world for too long.” There it was again, the fact that Caryan was so old it was hard for even her to grasp.

She didn’t like the change in his tone though. His voice was lush with menace and marvelously unsentimental.

“We don’t even have an army,” she said, feeling foolish already for even trying to talk him out of this.

“Gatilla thinks we don’t need an army with these runes on my body. She finished them the night before.”

Caryan didn’t look at her as he said that. He merely stretched out his right arm where the gold-and-black runes Gatilla gave him writhed over his skin like a beautiful, strange kind of snake. He looked at them as if they weren’t part of his body though.

Blair got up and carefully walked up to him to look at them more closely. It was a language so old it was long forgotten by the world. Symbols, drawn and inked into his flesh with the help of Ciellara, the silver elf— the only one still versed in the dark languages. When Blair asked her once, she said those runes came from the depths of the black hell, the last of the nine hells, itself. That those words had been whispered in the tongues of the devils when the fae had still been as fragile and mortal as humans.

Before magic spread over the lands.

Silver elves themselves were more legend than anything. Books said they had been hunted down to extinction like the angels, too feared for their strange powers and the never-dying knowledge of the worlds that flowed through their blood. Books Blair read as a child. Books that sounded like fairy tales, talking about the other worlds. About the nine hells and the Abyss. Vivid stories that came along with a glossary of hellish beasts.

Ciellara, the last silver elf in existence. She’d spent her life hiding away from everyone when Gatilla found her. A secret daughter of Evander, evil tongues hissed in shadows and dark corners. They said she’d brought shame over her house, over her father Regus, the right hand of the former king of Palisandre, when she refused a mating bond.

Blair didn’t know whether that was true. But Ciellara was hunted, had been hunted, and would be for the rest of her life.

With silver elves, secrets never died. And secrets were dangerous. Deadly.

Her aunt had offered Ciellara shelter in exchange for the runes. Gatilla had her working on Caryan, carving wild, raw magic into his skin with a needle made of monster bone, ink from the hells, and infernal fire from the dwarfen forge deep below, close to the hot and living core of this world.

With those runes, Gatilla and Ciellara turned Caryan into an abomination.

But the tattoo on Caryan’s body—seeing it with her own eyes,Blair couldn’t deny that, apart from the unholy power it was brimming with like a heartbeat, it was also breathtaking.

Horrifying. Mesmerizing.

Blair bit back the need to ask how Caryan had managed to bear the pain. It was said that there was no greater pain than infusing a body with magic. One tattoo took an eternity. And Caryan hada lot.

Blair swallowed.

The endless hours he’d spent in the darkest, hottest core of the amethyst tower, chained to the altar. Only to be taken apart and pierced together anew by that unholy magic. Forged anew. Bit by bit.

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