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High Priest Dekalon leaned back in his chair and let his hands steeple before his chest. “Or perhaps you won’t leave at all.”
One after another, I gingerly shifted the daggers where they levitated above the ground, aiming them upward in the direction of sixty-one necks and one stomach. “Bring me my father. Let me leave here with him unharmed, and I will convince my husband to spare your soul.”
“Would you listen to this woman?” His chuckle held more arrogance that Enosh’s ever had. “You have a great many demands.”
“My husband said the same.”
A moment of stiff silence passed between us, then his pout took on the gut-roiling sway of a smile. “I am afraid I ca
Suffocated on his own blood.
Left him by the wayside.
My heart shattered.
A sob built at the back of my throat, pressing painfully against my esophagus the harder I tried to contain it. An old man who’d never done anybody any wrong, and they’d just… left him without even a burial, wicked wayward mortals.
Beneath my dress, sixty-two bone daggers shook and trembled out of aim at the rage in my core, the utter disgust I held for these… monsters so sickening that—
No. I had to remain calm before the ground trembled, giving away what I was.
Except… everything remained still aside from the bone I carried on me, and that realization caused cold sweat to break out along my spine. My gaze flicked around the chamber, everything in here encased in polished marble.
Not a single speck of bone.
I took a deep breath, no matter how the sharp bite of pine irritated my airway. All the more reason to find my bearings and end this once and for all. No matter how meticulously they might have kept the bone out, I was about to make more available, anyway.
“My husband was right.” Sixty-one daggers waited patiently for my command. The last one I slowly reshaped in the grip of my closed palm. “You’re a terribly dreadful kind, full of wickedness and depravity.”
The high priest gri
Bone daggers cut through the wool of my dress, whistled through the air, then embedded themselves into the throats of soldiers. A cacophony of thuds and clanks resonated the chamber as they collapsed onto the marble.
I climbed the dais, gripped the high priest by his robe, and pulled him from his chair. “I won’t ever wear a chain again, be it shaped of bone, iron, or the scrutiny of mortals.”
His lips parted and clenched shut several times before he managed another word. “Adelaide, let me—”
“You do not get to call me that, mortal, for I am the Queen of Rot and Pain.” One stab, and I drove my dagger between two ribs and into his lungs, so he may suffocate on his own blood like Pa had. “Kind enough to allow you a quick death, right before I tear down your damn temple and bury your bones beneath the rubble with the rest of you traitors.”
Ransacked by trembles, he stared down at his blood-drenched robes, then lifted his stuttering hand onto the metal ring of the fire basin beside him until his flesh sizzled. “May H-Helfa save… save y-your soul.”
He pulled on the metal.
The basin tipped.
Clank.
Coals rolled from it and skipped down the dais. They scattered across the chamber, over the amber glass—
Whoosh!
A massive flame shot toward the ceiling, so potent I let go of High Priest Dekalon. He rolled down the dais, his body coming to a stop near the emblem as fire broke out all around him. It followed the amber lines, spread out in all directions from there, climbed the walls—
No, no, no…
I stumbled back as panic gripped my heart and squeezed the battering organ. That wasn’t glass; it was pine pitch, dried into the furrows of the marble to set the entire temple aflame.
And me with it.