Page 82 of A Chill in the Flame
“Shall I leave today?” Harland asked.
Eero looked at him with eyes as bright and golden as Ophir’s. “You’re a good man, Harland. You’ve done a good job taking care of Ophir. If anyone has a hope of getting her back, it’s you. I know you’ll do right by this kingdom. Have you spent much time with our spymaster? He’s rather young—still in his first century of life, but he’s a discreet and powerful asset with an impressive skillset. I’m confident he’s picked up more than a few languages as a hobby.”
Harland made a face. “You trust him?”
“As surely as I believe in the heavens, yes. I put my faith in him as I trust you with Ophir’s. You shouldn’t go on this mission alone. It’s important that we keep our efforts contained. Relations with Tarkhany are strained, and sending an army to retrieve her and slay Berinth might start a war, for which Aubade is not prepared. This kingdom will not survive more loss.”
“I’ll leave tomorrow,” Harland promised.
“Make it tonight,” Eero said. “I’ll send word for Samael to meet you by the stables.”
Part IV
The Puppet Master
Thirty-eight
It was hot.
It was so fucking hot.
Goddess, she’d never been this hot in her life.
Ophir sucked in a scalding breath, coughing and choking on the dry air. She squinted at the taunting, yellow ball of light and cursed it from the bottom of her heart. It was meant to be the middle of autumn, not the torment of high summer. The princess had long since shed her extra layers, scattering clothes and coverups and bits of cloth about the meandering southbound paths, then regretted it, wishing she’d kept her shawl to keep the scorching rays off her baking skin.
She was going to die. She knew it. Her skin would be fried before the sun set. She’d be able to eat her fully cooked arm for dinner under the sizzling heat of the sun. The moment Ophir realized she had to cross the desert, she’d been categorically unwilling to remain on the sand. The baking rays reflected off the dunes as if they were glass, intensifying the blistering heat from all angles. How many words were there for hot? It was scalding, blazing, sweltering, feverish, broiling, fiery, goddess fucking miserable.
Sedit whimpered.
“I know, boy,” she said, “I don’t want to be here either.But this stupid compass insists he’s…” She looked from the pocket watch to the rolling dunes beyond. “Honestly, I have no idea. This goddess-damned thing is probably broken. There’s no reason for him to have fled to Tarkhany. Why would he seek asylum in a country where he’d stand out as the only fae paler than the sand?”
Sedit’s bony, lizard-like tail wagged from side to side as if he was just happy to be included.
“Does he have some safe house in the dunes? Could it be a trap? What if he…” She stopped herself from saying it was crazy, as she reminded herself that she was talking to a demon hound she’d created.
He looked at her with his too-many eyes. They glimmered with the suffering pout of any pet who’d been denied a treat. As she stared into her beloved hound’s face, something within her began to shift. She had made this vile, wonderful, utterly unique, terrifying thing. Sedit was born of her whims and raw power. She was not the same woman she’d been the last time she’d encountered the man.
“You’re right, boy,” she said with a nod. “There’s nothing he can throw at me that I can’t handle.”
She would have remained roasting in her self-congratulatory thoughts, had Sedit not begun flinching as each step forced him to place his paws on the blistering sand. She loved her vageth far too much to let him suffer. “I’ll fix this,” she promised.
So, she tried.
It was hard not to feel like her craft grew markedly worse with each and every monster.
“It’s okay, boy,” she said unconvincingly. Ophir reached forward to stroke the mane of her latest creation. She’d attempted to make a horse for her and Sedit alike. They needed to get their feet off the sand and cross the unforgiving wastelands far more quickly than she and her hound could on their own. But the moment she brought the cursed horse into the world, she knew she’d never be able to take it ona main road. Not only did the steed look like the decaying remains of a reanimated stallion, but reptilian scales clung to the knobby bumps of its ribs and spine, ending in a serpent’s tail. Disappointment settled in her stomach like stones, but Sedit didn’t mind the horse.
“You’re not much of a looker, are you?” she asked the undead horse. Her face fell as the creature carried her forward, and she couldn’t help but wonder why all of her creatures were born into the world with goddess-awful needles for teeth.
Sedit was born to be her protector, so the vageth’s mouthful of prickly, venomous thorns was both blessing and marvel. Her first creation, the snake, was also intended to have fangs, so its horrid, pointed teeth hadn’t been a surprise. This was her first attempt to make a gentle, grazing creature, and she’d failed miserably. She winced when the horse pulled back its lips to reveal rows upon rows of glistening, ivory weapons, as though she was looking at the bone-white jaws that sailors hung on their mantles from predators of the deep. She reached a hand for its nose, touching the scales below its sunken eyes, and decided she loved it.
It hadn’t been what she’d intended, but perhaps it was what she needed. A docile steed would not serve her.
“You knew what I needed for you before I did, didn’t you.” She softened, patting her new horse with all the tenderness she could muster. Well, “horse” wasn’t quite right, but it was certainly horse-adjacent. She would prefer to find a way to create things that didn’t smell quite so bad, but maybe that was part of it. The creations birthed from her subconscious created a protective barrier for all the senses. Terrifying to look at, horrible to breathe in, and deadly to touch. She wouldn’t dare try to eat one of them but was confident that they’d be poisonous in one’s belly.
After bringing her mount into the world, Ophir created a saddle, which also didn’t turn out quite like it was supposed to. She wasn’t confident enough in her riding or in the comfortof the steed’s bony spine to want to ride it bareback. She took the horse all the way from her escape beyond Henares to the desert’s edge, where she realized her plan would have to change. She couldn’t stay on the horse, nor did she want Sedit to burn his paws.
She slapped the corpse-like rump and set it free into the wild as she looked at her hound. “What can I possibly make that would get me across the Tarkhany Desert?”
