Blood and Royalty Read Free Page A

reclaim the New World for its rightful king and queen.
    King Chad, Xawyn Azar’s father, who was only Richard’s puppet now, gave his blessing to it all in formal settings. The rest of the time he cursed and drank over his ill fortune. The poisons the castle wizards were giving him were slow acting. They would soon rot him from the inside, leaving his childless daughter and Richard the queen and king of Vikaria, as well as the actual rulers of several other smaller kingdoms they’d acquired. And soon the New World as well.
    “Here it is.” Baru grinned as he knocked, but entered Richard’s map room without waiting.
    Baru had the teardrop wrapped in thick leather, for the acolytes extracting them were killed instantly, if not from the intensity of the power the drops contained, than by one of Richard’s two cronies, who knew exactly what other men would do to gain such power.
    Richard took the offered bundle and began peeling away the folds covering his prize. When he saw it, he gasped aloud, and then it was clenched in his fist, where it barely fit. His other hand reached into his belt pouch and grabbed a handful of his other, smaller teardrops causing a rush to slide over him like no other he’d ever experienced.
    He laughed maniacally, because now he was beginning to understand why his spies all told him Jenka spent his days in a daze. Did his brother have a teardrop as big as Clover’s, too?
    He didn’t know, and in that moment of raw bliss, he didn’t care.
    Now, even Clover’s power seemed insignificant to him. The time to start taking the islands had come, and he was as ready as he had ever been to bathe the soil of the Mainland with the blood of those who had once called him king.
     
    *
     
    Clover hated the situation. Not the unavoidable war that was coming between Jenka and his brother, but the situation with the mystica. If Princess Amelia proved to be able to impose her will so absolutely that she could create willborn, then she would have to be killed. It was an age-old thing that certain elves were bound to do, and they would pursue her relentlessly, if she was one. Clover needed to know if Jenka’s daughter was just tainted with the same affliction her father was, or if she had inherited the unallowable ability to create some terrible thing from nothing more than her desire.
    She’d left the castle as soon as the children and their mother had arrived. The girl’s ninth birthday had been ruined by her uncle’s wyrms attacking the Three Forks Palace, and Clover had to agree with Marcherion that it had been an intentional slight. Richard probably had spies enough to have known what day it was, and that there was a festival. Prince Jericho told her that Amelia’s conversation with her father and Marcherion was the only reason she hadn’t been outside on the dais, before the people, when the mudged attacked.
    Worse, Clover heard that the mudged were singling out all of the pale-complected young girls with their hair dyed bright red, as if killing Milly was their sole purpose.
    I’m insane, Clover thought to herself. Here she was debating on whether she would have to kill the girl herself, to save her from the wrath of the elven hunters who would eventually come, while siding with the child in her heart for having such an ass of a king for an uncle.
    “Are you leaving?” Aikira asked her.
    Clover was standing on a balcony that overlooked the lush valley below the castle. She and Crimzon had long ago constructed the place with the help of ogres and dwarves, which reminded her that she needed to go see King Granitine, or whoever sat the throne now, before the coming war got too far out of hand.
    “I am.” She smiled at the beautiful ebon-skinned girl her son had raised and then trained. For a second, she wondered if Aikira had learned enough to know of willborn duty, and the last laws of wizardry. She was suddenly sad, because she couldn’t remember if she’d passed them to her son, Vax Noffa.