Lord of the Abyss & Desert Warrior Read Free Page A

through the dimly lit passageway until he stopped at another narrow door. When he did nothing else, she pushed through and felt her cheeks color. “I’ll be but a moment.”
    Taking care of her private business, she used the mirror of black glass to tidy herself up as much as possible—there wasn’t anything she could do about her beak of a nose, or the eyes of dirty ice so wrong against her mother’s honey-dark skin, or the strawlike consistency of her matted black hair, much less the slashing gape of her mouth, but she was able to sleek that hair back off her face at least and tuck it behind her ears, wash off the blood that still streaked her wrists.
    “Well,” she said to herself, “you’re here now. You must do what you came to do.” Though she had no idea how.
    She’d grown up hearing the people her father had enslaved whispering of the four royal children, the true heirs to the jewel that was once Elden. The hope in their furtive voices had nurtured her own, fostering dreams of a future in which fear, sharp and acrid, wasn’t her constant companion.
    Then, a month ago, driven by a steadily strengthening belief that something was very, very wrong, she’d stolen away into the putrid stench and clawing branches of the Dead Forest to call a vision as her father could not, his blood too tainted—and seen the tomorrow that was to come.
    The heirs of Elden would return.
    All of them…but one.
    The Guardian of the Abyss would not be there on that fateful day. Without him, the four-sided key of power would remain incomplete. His brothers and sister, their mates, would fight with the fiercest hearts to defeat her father, but they would fail, and Elden would fall forever to the Blood Sorcerer’s evil. Horrifying as that was, it wasn’t the worst truth.
    Elden had begun to die a slow death the instant the king and the queen—the blood of Elden—had taken their final breaths. That death would be complete when the clock struck midnight on the twentieth anniversary of her father’s invasion. Not so terrible a thing if it would strip the Blood Sorcerer of power, but Elden’s people were touched by magic, too. Without it, they would simply fall where they stood, never to rise again.
    Her father had spent years seeking to find a solution to what he termed a “disease.” Which is why he would not murder the returned heirs. No, she’d seen the horror in her vision—he’d have them enchained and cut into with extreme care day after day, night after night, their blood dripping to the earth in a continuous flow to fool it intobelieving the blood of Elden had returned. They were a race that lived for centuries, would not easily die. And so her father would continue on in his heinous—
    Thump!
    Jumping at the booming sound, she realized her guard was whacking on the door to hurry her up. “I’m coming,” she said, and turned away from the mirror.
    Bard began to shuffle off in front of her as soon as she stepped out. It was difficult to keep up with him, for even shuffling, he was a far larger creature than her, each of his feet five times as big as her own. “Master Bard,” she called as she all but ran behind him after reaching the top of the stairs.
    He didn’t stop, but she saw one of those large ears twitch.
    “I do not wish to die,” she said to his back. “What must I do to survive?”
    Bard shook his head in a slight negative.
    There was no way to survive?
    Or he didn’t know how she might?
    Surely, she thought, not giving in to panic, surely her father’s evil hadn’t completely destroyed the soul of the boy who had been Prince Micah. She didn’t know much about the youngest child of King Aelfric and Queen Alvina, but she’d heard enough whispers to realize that he had been a beloved prince, the small heart of the royal family, and of Elden.
    “For who could not love a babe with such a light in his eyes?”
    Words her old nursery maid, Mathilde, had said as she told Liliana a night-tale. It had