Crown of Cinders (Imdalind Series Book 7) (10 page)

The mad, blood-soaked king.

“We are still waiting for word, Alojz,” Georg said before leaning back in his chair, the wood creaking beneath him. “Perhaps the fire has devoured him.”

A snicker ran over the three men at the suggestion.

Alojz returned the pipe to his mouth with an elongated sigh, obviously unpleased with the response.

“We must have hope,” Bronislav said with a sigh, the portly Trpaslík looking very elderly beneath the yards of graying beard. “I worked for centuries to develop that attack. This was not what I had wished to use it on.”

The attack, the fire that I could still smell in my nostrils. I needed to get back there before all was lost, yet I couldn’t pull myself from this sight. This was exactly where I needed to be.

This was what I had been waiting to hear.

“Nothing will work unless we can find a guide to know how his sight works,” Alojz said, his voice muffled from the stem of the pipe he had placed firmly between his teeth. “Everything we have done has given us inconclusive results.”

“What was the reaction to yesterday’s assault?” Georg asked, the change of conversation abrasive, especially coming from the usually quiet Trpaslík. His voice had barely risen above a whisper. If it weren’t for the rattle of the long curls of his beard, I might not have even known it had come from him.

My prescience swirled a bit as my head spun, the smell of the smoke that surrounded me in reality smothering me, making it hard to breathe. The anxious excitement over what I was watching did not help much.

They had always spoken of upcoming attacks, of attempts to dethrone me. And while I had always assumed it was something more, I had never had any proof.

Now I knew.

With this dark query, their true plan had been ripped wide open for me to see, revealed by the very sight they were so cleverly attempting to decode. It was a grand plot yet one that reeked of deadly derisiveness. It would never work.

Now that I knew, I would crush them.

“It was a twenty-minute delay, followed by the execution of two innocents. He was grasping at straws. Although, there is a rumor that he burned the victims,” Bronislav’s voice wafted beyond the smoke toward me.

“What do you mean
burned
?” George whispered, his eyes wide in fear.

I couldn’t stop the nefarious laugh. I was glad they couldn’t hear it. They really had no idea what they were up against.

It made me eager for what was to come. I would definitely
burn
Georg first.

“With that water he drinks,” Bronislav began, a fear behind his voice that I hadn’t expected. “He burns to see—”

“So he’s looking for us,” Alojz interjected, his own voice shaking. “How do you hide from a being who can see everything?”

How, indeed?
I asked myself with a smirk, partly disappointed that they had come to such a conclusion before I’d had a chance to
show
them what was to come.

“We have every spell and shield around us right now, Alojz,” Georg interjected, his beard shaking rampantly from his chin. “As far as we know, he won’t be able to see us. No one will willingly break. They all want him gone.”

My laugh boomed so loudly I could have sworn some of them jumped, their jerks so large even the table shifted under the weight.

“Simple shields won’t stop me,” I hissed to myself, partially aware that anyone around me in reality would be able to hear what I was saying. “I can see everything, and none of you will get away.”

“Are you telling me that all of this has been useless?” Alojz’s knuckles were white from where he gripped his pipe, the rest of his body remaining calm. That tiny, little thing made his frustration of the failure as clear as my shock.

“No, not at all. We haven’t been at this long,” Georg pleaded, his calm barely able to appease his companion’s tempers. “I am positive Bronislav’s fire will work. Then we will know what we are up against. We will know how to defeat him. I wouldn’t want to act drastically when we don’t know—”

“I think we know enough.” Bronislav’s brow furrowed in anger as he glowered at the elderly Trpaslík before him.

Georg did not recoil as the younger man had obviously expected. Instead, he stood still, his eyes narrowed in silent defiance. The glare he was known for shone clear within the smoke.

The two men were locked in a staring battle, the dim flickering light of the single lamp between them not even pulling their focus. With each flicker of the light, the darkness that surrounded them became clear. A dark that swallowed the remnants of what had undoubtedly once been a bed chamber surrounded us, the shadows of furniture loomed around them like monsters.

Monsters not unlike the Trpaslíks that were moments away from a well placed fist fight.

“There is no point in waiting,” Alojz continued in an attempt to cut a pointless battle off. “There is a match scheduled for next week—the first since Edmund’s murder. I am convinced it is all done in show, a foolish attempt for the filthy Drak to prove himself our ruler, to take his place where our master once sat. To defile the thrown!”

They all growled at that, their voices full of the volatile disgust I had become used to.

“What better opportunity to prove his inadequacy than to destroy him in the very pits that are meant to prove his worth?” Alojz continued. “What better place to demonstrate what he really is? We can dethrone the murderer and squash the Chosen back to the slaves they were bred to be. It is the perfect opportunity, one we shouldn’t pass up.”

It was a glorious speech; I would give him that. And it was one the other two conspirators revered. Their eyes were wide with excited bloodlust as they signaled their agreement.

My own greed grew as they began to snicker. Bronislav produced a rolled piece of parchment from the smoke-filled air that surrounded him. Georg shifted uncomfortably as the parchment was unrolled.

My heart rate accelerated as the familiar schematics of Edmund’s war pits were revealed before me, the ancient lines marked with what looked like red crayon, lines of differing depth and motions crisscrossing over one another.

I didn’t have to be privy to their code to know what I was looking at.

Their final attack was laid out step by step in intricate detail.

It was beautiful and brilliant. In fact, if it weren’t for their general underestimation of my ability, it might work.

The new information swelled into a pleasurable warmth in my chest before the vision began to shift and change. A heat moved past me as the room was devoured by the smoke once again, a plume overpowering me, only to be replaced by the red burn of my sight.

Tensing, I expected to open my eyes to Ovailia’s charred body, to the entirety of the tent village in flames. However, it was smoke.

The long, wispy tendrils of graying clouds flew past, leaving me above the red-tinted world of Prague, hovering above the dilapidated buildings and blood-soaked streets.

Everything tightened. A fear I hadn’t expected sprung forth as the worry of returning back to reality left me. Who cared if Ovailia burned to death? Who cared if I lost all the Chosen? What I was seeing wasn’t supposed to be visible to me, not with the Zámek in place.

I could still feel the magic inside of me. I knew it was strong. But the city … Was she strong enough to break past the barrier without me knowing?

Was I strong enough to see her reality, even if she couldn’t see mine?

The latter seemed more probable. Joclyn might be capable, but even she didn’t possess an ability of that caliber.

Pushing the fear of Joclyn’s ability away, I gritted my teeth and let my sight take me down into the middle of the city, into the cathedral that had been home until a few weeks ago.

Tents of every color filled the courtyard, sitting haphazardly, Skȓíteks and Chosen whispering and fighting amongst the temporary housing.

Perfect.

I had hoped the little seeds I had planted would take hold, and it appeared they had done more than that. Weeds were ripping everything apart, ravishing Ilyan’s perfect little garden.

My sight continued to move beyond them right into the heart of Ilyan’s sanctuary, right into the burned and battered cathedral that was ready to come down and the two children who sat in the middle of the rubble.

Jaromir and Míra.

Míra.

She shouldn’t be there with him. She should have never made it inside of Ilyan’s compound. I had seen her die. I had seen her burn with all the others I had hidden her amongst. I had watched Ilyan kill her, unknowing that a child was stowed away within the dozens of corpses.

“No!” I gasped, the single word a shout as the reality of what I was seeing hit me. “I can’t be wrong. I am
never
wrong.”

“And yet, Wyn is alive, as well,” the haunting voice of the woman from the white sight hit me full in the chest as the children talked and laughed amongst the rubble, throwing rocks at each other in some kind of game.

“Not for long. Wyn will die just as this one will,” I growled as the child-like laugh of the voice ripped into me. “Just as you will.”

Gritting my teeth, I pushed the anger from me, banishing the taunts from my mind, knowing how much more of an issue this truly was.

She had been sent to do that which no one else had been able, and by the looks of it, she was still intent on that task. Her resolve was driven by a magic that was still lodged deep inside of her heart, a magic that would not have died, although I had shed the blood of its master. The magic was now a threat to me in more ways than the tiny child could ever have realized.

Edmund wasn’t dead yet.

They sat amongst the dirt and ash of the rubble-strewn hall, marble and stone piled around them in heaps of gray, a smile on her face and not a speck of char on her skin.

“I like it here,” Míra whispered.

The smile on Jaromir’s face broadened like she had confessed some dirty little secret.

“Good,” he whispered, his voice a grating squeak that twisted inside of me. “Then you should stay.”

I tensed as Míra did. Her shoulders pulled up to her ears as her eyes hardened. A heavy glance was thrown at the boy with the weight of iron bars. He flinched as my heart rate accelerated, the true meaning of that smile not lost on us.

“You know I can’t, Jaromir.” The calm of her voice was gone. The hard edge was so reminiscent of Edmund’s that my sight pulled away in recoil, ready to show me the ghost of the man standing beside her. Nothing was there except the two children.

However, the two children were quickly fading as my vision did, their voices overlapping each other as the two visions blended together. My sight muddled everything together as it faded into the red ember glow of nothing.

“I have to go, Jaromir. I have a job, and it’s important.”

“I say we act tomorrow. If we do as we have discussed, then even his sight cannot stop us,” Alojz’s voice overran the rubble of the cathedral, burning through me as the imagery of the children shifted and faded into oblivion.

I tensed as I gazed into the nothing, knowing what to expect and hating the fear it had impregnated me with.

“We have to kill him,” the child and Alojz spoke together as I jerked, the movement rooted in reality as my heart rate began to pick up into a gallop.

“All I see is death with you, Sain,” the same woman’s voice boomed in my mind, tainting me as I jerked back to reality, to the smoldering tent, the fire long extinguished, the scent of smoke and death heavy in the air.

“It’s about time you rejoined us.” Ovailia stood before me, her arms folded over her waist, lips pursed, eyebrows disappearing into her hair. It was the same look I had loved so much. But now, instead of feeling my magic pulse and rise to meet hers, I felt anger. The raw white heat ran through me, making it hard to breathe as my vision shifted before me.

“The fire …” I gasped, the simple words drowning in fury.

“Is taken care of … unsurprisingly.” She smiled, the wicked twitch at the corner of her mouth, the pride that shone through her eyes, awakening a demon within me. “You always said Edmund underappreciated me. I guess you were right.”

“Taking care of one poorly placed spell hardly makes you more powerful than the crippled Chosen the flames devoured,” I snapped, trying my best to keep my anger contained. The heavily shifting world before me made it hard as the edges of my vision continually faded to black.

Her eyes hardened, the purse of her lips drifting into a tight line, her jaw locking in place. “It was—”

“If you think that is success, Ovailia,” I interrupted her, letting my words smack across her cheek as I stepped toward her, “then you may not be as powerful as even I assumed. But please, let me know when you have accomplished something worth mentioning.”

The heat of her anger was white hot against my skin as I stripped her bare of any pride she had possessed. My anger of being surpassed in skill was paramount.

“What kind of accomplishments do you want, Sain?” she snapped, her eyes boring into me dangerously. Any other time, I would have smiled; I would have laughed; I would have taunted.

But the anger was too deep, the betrayal too fresh.

She wasn’t supposed to be this powerful. I couldn’t let her think it. I couldn’t let her know.

“Anything that a child could not accomplish.” I struck hard and deep, and her eyes narrowed at me in pain and anger, her jaw taut. “Anything that a pathetic Chosen couldn’t do. Not this … My foolish daughter could do this!”

Ovailia said nothing before turning away, her hair swinging down her bare back, revealing the scar that had been opened and reopened, both at my expense.

“You don’t even wear your battle scars well. All that magic and you are still left wanting.”

She didn’t turn, didn’t reply. Still, I could still feel the heat of her anger, her magic as strong as the intensity of the volatile flames.

It was then that the laugh finally escaped me, my humiliation escaping me in a razor sharp snap that cut across her skin. It cut across the air and put her firmly in place on a pedestal far below mine. She could never be my equal, and it was time she knew it.