Page 22 of Queen Takes Sunfires 2
I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t want to face the crazy reality of skeletons and sunfires on my side for once. Let alone the fact that I’d apparently fed on one.
“Is he really dead?” I asked softly. “Aurelian said he was.”
“Yes,” the soldier answered. “A new queen was brought to him. Somehow, she managed to kill him. Heliopolis has fallen, Your Majesty.”
“But what happened before that? How did I get here? I don’t remember anything.”
He didn’t answer right away. Perhaps he feared telling me the truth. Or it might have merely been a tactic to get me to respond to him. If so, it worked, because I opened my eyes so I could try and puzzle out meaning or intent. Impossible, when he had only a skull, without eyes or facial expressions. Only the blaze of sunfire all around him.
The same sunfire that was inside me. I could feel it like a low, steady hum deep in my bones, heating and burning, ready to explode into a raging inferno.
“We were there.” The soldier’s grave voice gave me pause, carrying so much unsaid. Perhaps the sunfire filled in the blanks for him, or maybe his words were enough to spark the memory.
Ra fucking me. Endlessly, it seemed. The god was always insatiable and brutal in his lust. I was far away, not even present in my body. I didn’t care what he did to it. It was a shell, empty and growing cold, while I was far away in a place of safety.
This place, I realized, slowly sitting up straighter to look about. Rows of olive trees trailed over the gentle hills. A white house nestled into the hillside. The sky was a gorgeous powder blue without a single cloud. The sun shone, but in a gentle, brilliant way of joy. Not punishment.
Joy spurted a moment, only to dull to grief. Everyone I’d loved here was dead. They’d died a long time ago. The house had been burned down to the ground in order to reach me. “How is this possible?”
“My sunfire holds the Keys of Heaven. We can open any portal to any dimension, even ones that only exist in your mind. When Ra left you to attend to the new queen, I found your spirit here, hiding under a bed in a tiny dark room. I thought you would be less afraid here until we can explain.”
“You were there,” I repeated his words, each one resounding like a gong in my head. “You were his guards. You stood there. Watching what he did to me.”
The sunfire flowed around him, changing from the horse-like creature to a burning halo around all of his bones, acting as though he had flesh. He bent down and lowered me to one of the decorative stone columns of the front stoop. Once upon a time, a stone lion had sat on this column. I didn’t know why it had been removed or what had happened to it.
The soldier dropped down to one knee before me, arms crossed over his chest, his head bent low. “Yes. Forgive me, Your Majesty. I was unable to free you until the perfect moment arose.”
I wanted to rage at him. Scream and flail with the fiery energy coursing through my body. But what good would that do anyone, especially me? We had all been prisoners in Heliopolis, even the sunfires.
Some of the soldiers and sunfires had definitely hurt me. Aurelian and Sepdet, yes, but there had been others. Likely ordered by one of them, or even Ra, at least when he had multiple queens at his disposal. He’d often tried to play one queen against another. None of us wanted him. We all hated him. But if we could be favored even briefly—that meant less punishment in some ways, though more time spent in his pyramid.
It was a lose-lose battle. For all of us.
“What would you have done if he had ordered you to hurt me?”
The soldier bent his head even lower, touching my knee with his forehead. “I would have surrendered my sunfire and allowed my skeleton to disintegrate, Your Majesty. I lived only to keep you safe, as much as it was within my limited power.”
Staring at the shining white bone of his head, I whispered, “Why?”
“I don’t know why, only that I was meant to use every weapon at my disposal to keep you as safe as possible. I wished every moment of eternity that I could do more. That I could open the portal and send you somewhere he couldn’t find you. But it took time for me to find the allies I needed. For the right moment to get you out of Heliopolis without anyone even realizing you were gone. Then it was too late.”
He was saying the right things, but I sensed a hole in his explanation. Not an untruth—but not the complete picture either. “So the other queen was the diversion you needed.”
“Yes.” He lifted his head. The sunfire burning in the pits of his eye sockets seemed to harden with determination with a golden sheen like Ra’s precious metal. “Her life for yours. Unfortunate but necessary. I never expected her to kill him.”
“But why? Why me? Why then? I don’t understand.”
“How can any mortal man know the workings of the gods? I do believe that your goddess, whoever She may be, drew us to you. To help you as much as possible, and especially, to protect you from Sol Invictus. And ultimately get you out of Heliopolis. In all the battles of my mortal lifetime, getting you out safely is my greatest achievement. Sepdet would have killed you as soon as he realized the truth, Your Majesty. He wouldn’t have allowed any competition to rise against him. I had to get you out immediately.”
The truth.
It finally dawned on me that he knew. He knew that I carried Ra’s unborn heir. If she was a queen…
The god of light would achieve his goal even after his death.
This soldier had come after me for the same reason as Aurelian. Power. A weapon to use to bring the other sunfires under his control.
“No,” he rasped, his voice low but fierce. “Never. I refused to stand by and watch Ra’s spawn drain you to a dry, withered husk, which was then thrown to the rabid sunfires to devour.”
