The Armies of Heaven Read Free

sharply beneath his habitual black shirt. “Or he might cut it out of you as he did with his wife.”
    Kae went still as stone. “I never did that. Never .”
    I wanted to strike him. “Don’t you dare lie about it. Don’t you dare dishonor Ola by denying what you did to her! You came here to surrender to me, to take responsibility for what you’d done.”
    “I never did that!” He tried to shout the words and coughed violently, holding his throat. “Don’t you think I remember every horrid, hideous moment of it? My hands and mouth acting as if they weren’t my own? I remember every black drop of blood upon my blade—putting my sword through my Ola.” He expelled her name with a choked gasp as he regarded me fiercely. “And through you, though somehow, mercifully, you lived. I am trapped within a dream from which I cannot wake, a nightmare of such ugliness that I not only wish I were dead, but that I’d never lived. But I never, ever did what you are saying.”
    Clutching the key so hard the iron cut into my flesh, I tried to breathe against the tightness in my chest, misery and hatred threatening to overwhelm me. “You’re a monster. A monster or mad!”
    To my horror, Kae began to laugh, a rough, ugly sound of bitter mockery. “My dear Nenny.” He spoke my childhood nickname with vitriol. “I am both. But I know full well what I’ve done and what I have not. Full well.” He stepped back and slammed the door.
    “Then who did?” I flew at the door and pounded on it in fury before locking it with a jerk and turning to lean against it. Angry tears scored my cheeks. I’d avoided any contact with Kae, avoided saying any of the things that had just erupted from me, knowing it would only make me feel worse. As it had.
    Lively stared at me, holding her stomach as if I were the one who might cut out her baby. “I’m sorry.”
    “Just give me the damned spell.”

    The magical objects were contained in a muslin bag inside a small silk pouch, sewn shut by Lively with a few expert stitches. The red pouch, fragrant and aromatic, went under my pillow while I whispered three times as Lively instructed: “I shall see Ola in the Nightworld and she shall see me. There shall be no barrier between us.”
    When I slept, it seemed I didn’t dream at all, yet I was aware of sleeping and time passing, as if I waited in the wings between dreams, an intermission between acts. I wondered if I’d done something wrong, or if Lively wasn’t the apothecary she claimed to be. And then in the empty space inside my head, I saw her: Ola . But not my child. I gasped and stumbled in the stuff of dreams, falling at her feet and looking up at her in disbelief. With my heart so full of joy and grief at once, I could do nothing but weep. My sister had come to me.
    “Nazkia!” Her eyes were wide with astonishment. Ola took my hands to lift me up, solid, warm, and real.
    I fell into her arms, clinging to her as if I could keep her if only I held tightly enough. Her dark honey curls were just as I remembered them, tumbling over one shoulder from a loose, upswept coiffure. We’d always prided ourselves on how the four of us looked a set. “Four heads of honey hair,” my father would say when we huddled together laughing. She was dressed as I’d last seen her, in a simple gold chiffon with an empire waist to accommodate her belly…only there was no belly now. And no blood. Mercifully, no blood.
    I looked up into my oldest sister’s deep blue eyes, full of tears as mine were. Though Maia and I, the “Little Pair,” had been closest in age and close companions, Ola had always been dearest to me. But I wanted them all. I wanted them with me. “You all left me. How could you leave me alone?”
    “Nazkia, dearest.” She stroked my hair. “I told you to run. And I’m glad you ran. I couldn’t bear it if you’d suffered as the others did. You are our little light in Heaven, the proof we were there once and not forgotten.” Ola