Page 44 of Oracle of Ruin

His face is more telling than his words, despite the obvious fear that laces each utterance. Out here, I am not a princess bound to the king, and he is not a duke protected by his title. His family’s name and crops protected him, while my crown failed to protect me from his unwanted advances.

A laugh escapes my throat, dry and humorless. It rattles through the forest, bouncing off the trees. The birds fall silent and the others rise, watching me cautiously. I am slightly aware of a metallic taste in my mouth and something warm dribbling down my chin. My lip has split. And I’m sure I look fucking crazy. Blood coats my mouth and drips from my face as I dive into hysterics. Then I draw my sword, my face hardening to stone as I allow it to prick the soft of his chin.

“Of course it’s you,” I seethe through clenched teeth. “You’ve always been a slimy bastard, only concerned with yourself. Your wants—no,desires.”

He must catch on to where I am heading because his hands begin to tremble as he claws at Neris’s hands to no avail. “Please, princess. You are misremembering. You were a child. It is only natural that—”

“So you admit that I was a child.”

All the colors drains from his face and he scrambles for his words.

I cut him off, pushing my blade further in to draw blood. “I should gut you like the pig you are.”

“Vera.” Mavis’s tone is warning.

“Butyou have something we need. So you have until Mavis is done with you to convince me that you deserve to live.” I sheath my sword at my side. “Start squealing.”

Neris drops the man into the snow, and when he attempts to crawl away, she slams her foot down on his spine. He howls in rage and pain, swearing vehemently. His blood trickles slowly from the thin cut I made, but yellow stains the snow beneath him amidst the red.

Emi cringes. “Gross.”

I would laugh if I weren’t so fixated on trying not to kill the man currently laying in his own blood and piss. The man who haunted me my whole childhood until I broke his wrist in the back of a ballroom for trying to touch me on my sixteenth birthday.

“I’m assuming,” he wheezes between breaths, “that you’re here for the solution.”

“Yes, you cryptic bastard, the solution. Humanity’s last hope. The way to stop this damn slaughter. Whatever you want to call it.” Neris smiles. There’s no hint of a soul behind her eyes. She backs up, daring the man to run.

To his slightest credit, he has enough sense not to, and instead rises to lean against the thick trunk of a pine tree. The trunks of the Krycolian pine grow thicker in the mountains, leaving enough space behind him for his whole body to press against it and offer a minuscule amount of relief to his aching back.

“How do I know you won’t kill me?”

“From where I see it, you have two options. One, you don’t say anything and Vera has her way with you right here and now without even a second to plea your case to us or the gods.” Mavis bares her teeth as she speaks and flips an arrow of dark magic in her hand. “I have ways of getting the information I want from your body just as easily dead as I do alive.”

Gadsden licks his lips nervously. “And the second one?”

“You spare yourself a few more minutes at worst, a miserable remainder of your life at best. Your choice.”

The sick fuck spills everything in a single breath. “I found an Oracle in the mountains, the Oracle of Raonkin. They claim to know the future and can gift their visions to men, too, but you have to pass some sort of trial.”

Mavis brings the power closer to his eye, letting a flame lick his cornea.

His eyes water and he cries out.

“What type of trial?”

“I don’t know! Something about the gods finding you worthy? I just know that if you pass, you see the future, any future you need, but if you fail, you die.”

“And you didn’t want to risk your life for those answers, so you thought you’d sell this information to the king?”

“Yes.”

“So he could wipe out this threat to his reign and you’d walk away with your life and immunity.”

“Yes,” he wails.

“And this is also why you tipped off Tanja as to where Vera was when they tried to kill her. Because you saw her bleed once while trying to spy on the princess and knew she’d sacrifice herself so you could steal Vera away.”

“Yes,” he answers before he realizes what he has admitted to. He slumps against the tree, his eyes widening to the point of near bulging from his face. “Wait, no, I— I didn’t do that. Verosa, please, I didn’t.”

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