A Kiss for Queens by Morgan Rice
He held out a hand to his attendants. “A weapon.”
One passed him a musket, finely etched and better crafted. They could have handed him a rock and it would have been enough, here, in this place. The Master of Crows loaded the weapon methodically, not caring that the man below was running now, that he was getting closer to the outer edge of the gibbets.
If he got there, the Master of Crows would probably honor his word, but it never occurred to him that the man might.
At this distance, a musket should not have been accurate enough to make the kill. The wind should have taken the lead ball and buffeted it. The spin of the ball should have been impossible to predict, tumbling at random through the air. The Master of Crows could see it all in that moment, though, the purest path to death laid out as clearly as a missive from a scout.
He lifted the weapon, aimed it, and squeezed the trigger.
The cloud of smoke obscured his vision, but he saw the moment when the lead ball hit through the eyes of a hundred of his creatures. He saw the impact, the twitch as Ackhert tried to keep going, the long, slow collapse as his body realized that it had been torn through. By the time the other man hit the ground, the Master of Crows was already holding out the weapon for his attendant to take from him.
“Come with me,” he said, and they followed.
He walked back down the hill, watching the strands of death. From here, he felt as though he could see everything, from the death of an ant to the long, slow decline of a world. He marched down the hill, watching the beauty of it the way another man might have stared at the flowers.
He reached the side of the fallen seer, one of his crows fluttering to his shoulder, the power of the death adding a drop to the ocean sitting within him. He might not have needed it, but a man who had known starvation would not waste scraps.
“Someone find out who this Ackhert of the most hidden library was,” he said. “He said he knew secrets.”
“I will find out at once, my lord,” an attendant said.
The Master of Crows waved a hand dismissively. “When there is time. He does not matter that much.”
Nothing did right then, except one thing.
“It is time,” he declared. “Tell the men, have the ships readied to sail. Tell them that death will come to the shores of our enemy, and this time it will not stop until they are wiped from this world!”
His men knew better than to cheer an announcement like that, but his crows cawed their own chorus of assent. Perhaps they were just hungry. They were always hungry, but in the strands that led to death, the Master of Crows could see the path that would slay a nation.
Perhaps that, finally, would be enough.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Lucas waited with all the patience he’d learned at the feet of Official Ko for the audience in the Assembly of Nobles to be over. He knew that Sophia needed to do this: to be seen to rule, and to answer the thousand and one concerns that would arise in the wake of her victory.
In truth, he thought she was doing a fine job. He suspected that he would not have been able to quell the concerns of the city so effectively, would not have been able to forgive former enemies and gain people’s support. When the people there cheered for her, Lucas could see nobles among them and commoners, the folk of Stonehome and those of Ishjemme, all joined together as one by his sister. He couldn’t have done that.
Still, it was hard to wait.
Sophia, he sent, when he could stand waiting no longer, Kate, I need to talk to you both. There’s something we still need to do.
The device? Sophia sent back.
The device, Lucas agreed.
We should do this alone, Kate said. Meet you both on the roof?
Lucas caught Sophia’s eye and nodded to a staircase. Sophia nodded back.
I’ll be there, she promised.
Lucas headed up through the Assembly of Nobles, trying to find a door that would lead outside. It took several minutes of searching, the building almost as much of a maze as the actual maze that stood beyond the palace walls. Eventually, he was able to find a route out onto a flat section of roof.
Kate was just clambering over the side of it when he arrived.
“That’s a lot harder to do with just my own strength,” she said. “Where’s Sophia?”
“She will be on her way,” Lucas said. “I suspect it isn’t as easy for a queen to walk out of an audience as it is for me.”
“It isn’t,” Sophia said, stepping out onto the roof behind Lucas, “but for this, it’s worth it.”
Lucas could only agree with that. The prospect of finding their parents had been one of the things that had made finding his sisters such an exciting prospect, and while he’d loved getting to know both Kate and Sophia, it felt as though this moment had been delayed for too long.
He took out the flat disc of the device that he’d kept near him for so long, the letters on it glowing as Lucas touched it, the power within it responding to his blood the way it always had.
“Nervous?” Kate asked.
Lucas shook his head. “Excited. We’re about to find out something I’ve wanted to know for as long as I’ve known that there was anything to know.”
“I hope this works,” Kate said.
“It will work,” Sophia assured her. “You didn’t see what it did last time, with just two of us touching it. With all three… it has to work.”
Even so, Lucas could hear the note of uncertainty there. After all, the three had touched it before, when the witch had been controlling Kate’s body. It should be different now, but what if it wasn’t? What if the device couldn’t show them where their parents were because there was nothing to show? What if they were dead?
No, Lucas wouldn’t believe that. They would find their parents.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
The others nodded, and he held the device out to them, ready for their touch.
***
Sophia could feel how excited the others were in that moment, the emotion spilling out over her, their shared powers seeming to tie them together as they got ready to use the device Lucas had brought. Its interlocking iron and brass rings didn’t look like much, but Sophia had already seen some of what it could do. Now, she hoped to see the one thing that mattered.
Carefully, slowly, she reached out to place her hand on the edge of the metal, next to Lucas’s. She felt the cold of the iron, even under the warm sun, and she felt the flicker of power running through the device too, responding to her and him as they held it together.
The rings of metal started to rotate in response to that power, the seemingly random patterns on the surface starting to resolve themselves even as they glowed with energy. As they had before, the lines of power that glowed in response to Lucas’s touch became the outlines of landmasses and seas in response to hers.
“It’s still hard to get used to this,” Sophia said. “I’ve seen this happen a couple of times now, and it’s still strange.”
“Imagine what it must have taken to create this,” Lucas said. “The mechanics of it are on a par with anything else the Silk Lands can produce, but to imbue it with this much magic too…”
Kate shrugged. “It’s impressive, but so far, it’s not doing anything I can’t get from a book of maps.”
“I’d have thought you’d be the most impressed,” Sophia said, with a faint note of surprise. “You’re the one who has seen the most magic with Siobhan.”
Kate nodded. “And I’ve seen all the ways it can go wrong, or be a trick, or have a price.”
Sophia could feel the fear in her now. Normally, nothing seemed to make Kate scared. She would fight the world if she had to. She had been a soldier, a witch’s apprentice, and more. Yet this one moment had her frightened.
“What is it, Kate?” Sophia asked.
“What if we don’t find them?” Kate asked. “What if we do this, and our last hope of finding our parents doesn’t work?”
“It will work,” Sophia reassur
Sophia thought about her own life in the time since they’d left the orphanage. So much had happened since then. She’d found Sebastian. She’d found out who she was. She’d become the queen of a kingdom almost by accident, trying to save the man she loved. Compared to all of that, was it really so hard to believe that they might finally locate their missing parents?
She tried to picture what that reunion would be like. She had no doubt that they would want their children to find them, or that they would want to be a part of their lives once more. The device in her hand told Sophia that much. But it needed all three of them.
“Come on, Kate, you can do this.”
***
Kate could feel her nerves thrumming with the possibilities of everything that might happen if she touched the device. When she touched it, she reminded herself. Practically all her life, she’d wanted her parents back. She’d wanted them in the House of the Unclaimed, and then after it, when she’d lived on Ashton’s streets. She’d thought she’d found a family with Thomas, Winifred, and Will, but that wasn’t the same thing as having one that was hers alone. Even now that she’d finally met her brother, Kate found herself thinking about the possibility of finding her parents.
It was just that she’d been disappointed by magic so many times now. She’d learned that it had a price. What would be the cost of learning where their parents were? Would it be learning that they were no longer alive at all? Kate wasn’t sure she could stand that. For as long as she didn’t touch the disc before her, she could pretend that her parents were still out there somewhere…
“Or you could know for sure,” Lucas said.
Kate reached around her neck for the locket that sat there, with its picture of her mother inside a golden case. Until now, it had been the closest she’d ever been able to get to their parents, but was a locket really enough? The answer to that was obvious.
Carefully, half afraid that it might still prove to be some dangerous trick that would strike at them all, Kate reached out to touch the device.
She felt the building power within it at once, energy from her, Lucas, and Sophia swirling and joining within it in ways that had nothing to do with simple blood and everything to do with who they were soul deep. Kate saw the surface of the disc glowing like a lamp, then a furnace, although there was no heat to that glow, no sense that the three of them were in danger from it. If anything, it felt right, felt like exactly what they should be doing right then.
The light flared and a beam of it shot up into the sky, like lightning somehow running from the ground to the clouds above. It seemed to punch a hole in those clouds, and a single shaft of sunlight came down in turn, except that Kate could feel there was more power in that than in any mere sunlight.
“What is this?” Kate asked. “What’s going on?”
“I think it’s working!” Sophia said.
“I never thought it would be like this,” Lucas said, as the light poured down onto the device.
Kate saw it coalesce there, tightening down until it was the width of a fist, then a fingertip, then so small it was like a tiny dancing firefly on the surface of the device. It skimmed across the surface of the map in a meandering route that Kate guessed might have been the one their parents had taken in the time since the thing had been created. She watched it moving from the Silk Lands to the continent, from the Near Colonies to the stranger spaces south of them, across Morgassa’s salt plains and into places Kate didn’t even have a name for.
Finally, the tiny point of light came to a halt, so far to the south it seemed impossible that anyone might have traveled there. The single dot stopped moving, and light flared above the device in a brief image.
Sand spread out, swirling in the wind. The light was so bright that the world might have been on fire with it. There were dunes that seemed small, until Kate spotted a lone tree, and it gave her a sense of their sheer scale. The image passed over them…
…and there was a city like none she’d ever seen.
The city lay at the heart of an incongruously green space, fed by a river that seemed to spring almost from nowhere. The buildings were square things that shone golden, and looked so ancient they made Ashton seem young by comparison. There were monuments there that stood higher than the buildings, spires and statues to gods or heroes Kate didn’t know. Two figures stood at the heart of it all, older than Kate remembered, but utterly unmistakable.
“It’s them! It’s our parents!”
She only had a moment in which to glimpse it, and then it was gone.
“Did you see that?” Kate demanded, joy rising up in her. “It’s our parents. They’re alive.”
“They are,” Lucas said with a smile.
“But alive where?” Sophia asked, looking over at the two of them. “Where is that? Where have they gone that’s so far away?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Official Ko had me learn much of the world, but this place… I have no idea what it is.”
Kate shook her head. She didn’t know either, but right then it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they knew where to look for their parents.
NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!
A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS
(A Throne for Sisters—Book Seven)
“Morgan Rice's imagination is limitless. In another series that promises to be as entertaining as the previous ones, A THRONE OF SISTERS presents us with the tale of two sisters (Sophia and Kate), orphans, fighting to survive in a cruel and demanding world of an orphanage. An instant success. I can hardly wait to put my hands on the second and third books!”
--Books and Movie Reviews (Roberto Mattos)
The new #1 Bestselling epic fantasy series by Morgan Rice!
In A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS (A Throne for Sisters—Book Seven), Sophia, Kate and Lucas finally get the chance to journey in search of their long-lost parents. Will they find them?
Are they alive?
And what message do they hold for them?
Their journey demands a price, though. Ashton is left without a ruler, and the Master of Crows still lies in wait, ready to strike. As the fate of the realm lies in the balance, help may come from the most unlikely place of all: Stonehome.
A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS (A Throne for Sisters—Book Seven) is book #7 in a dazzling new fantasy series rife with love, heartbreak, tragedy, action, adventure, magic, swords, sorcery, dragons, fate and heart-pounding suspense. A page turner, it is filled with characters that will make you fall in love, and a world you will never forget.
Book #8 in the series will be released soon.
“[A Throne for Sisters is a] powerful opener to a series [that] will produce a combination of feisty protagonists and challenging circumstances to thoroughly involve not just young adults, but adult fantasy fans who seek epic stories fueled by powerful friendships and adversaries.”
--Midwest Book Review (Diane Donovan)
A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS
(A Throne for Sisters—Book Seven)
NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!
A new series!
TRANSMISSION
(The Invasion Chronicles—Book One)
From #1 worldwide bestselling fantasy author Morgan Rice comes a long-anticipated science fiction series debut. When SETI finally receives a signal from an alien civilization, what will happen next?
“A great plot, the kind of book you will have trouble putting down at night. The ending was a cliffhanger so spectacular that you will immediately want to buy the next book just to see what happens.”
–The Dallas Examiner (regarding Loved)
“Another brilliant series, immersing us in a fantasy of honor, courage, magic and faith in your destiny..…Recommended for the permanent library of all readers that love a well-written fantasy.”
–Books and Movie Reviews, Roberto Mattos, re Rise of the Dragons
“A quick and easy read…you have to read
–FantasyOnline.net, re A Quest of Heroes
A 13 year old boy, dying of a rare brain disease, is the only one able to hear and decode signals from outer space. SETI confirms it is a real signal.
What is the message? How will the world react?
And most of all: are the aliens coming?
“Action-packed …. Rice’s writing is solid and the premise intriguing.”
–Publishers Weekly, re A Quest of Heroes
“A superior fantasy… A recommended winner for any who enjoy epic fantasy writing fueled by powerful, believable young adult protagonists.”
–Midwest Book Review, re Rise of the Dragons
“An action packed fantasy sure to please fans of Morgan Rice’s previous novels, along with fans of works such as THE INHERITANCE CYCLE by Christopher Paolini…. Fans of Young Adult Fiction will devour this latest work by Rice and beg for more.”
–The Wanderer, A Literary Journal (regarding Rise of the Dragons)
Book #2 in the series—ARRIVAL—is also available for pre-order!
Also available are Morgan Rice’s many series in the fantasy genre, including A QUEST OF HEROES (BOOK #1 IN THE SORCERER’S RING), a free download with over 1,300 five star reviews!
TRANSMISSION
(The Invasion Chronicles—Book One)
Did you know that I've written multiple series? If you haven't read all my series, click the image below to download a series starter!