Song of Sorrows and Fate: A Dark Fantasy Romance (The Broken Kingdoms Book 9)

I stuffed my ears with clods of mud and took a deep breath when the lure of the sea singers faded.

“We won’t win this if they keep coming,” I shouted. We needed a damn army.

“They await your call,” Silas insisted. “Tell your people what you demand of them. Do not hesitate. You have the words.”

“What are you talking about? The folk here aren’t warriors.”

Silas gripped my arms, urging me to hold his gaze. “What do you need them to do? If you could have the people of this land be anything what would you have them be? We have power here, Little Rose. Accept it, use it.”

If they could be anything, what would I have them be? Hells, I’d have them be an army. I’d have them protect these damn shores so those monsters in the tides couldn’t leave their ghastly ships.

What would I have the folk of the Row do? This was mad. They were drunkards and simple folk, but I whirled around and raised the short blade overhead.

“People of Raven Row! We are under attack, and if you wish to see another grimy sunrise, then fight to protect our shores. Fight for our land and our people.”

Olaf’s leathery face turned up in a wicked kind of grin. “Finally.”

The next moments stopped my heart.

The oddly sturdier buildings groaned and shifted even more. Chipped stains and crooked paneling peeled away, leaving behind gleaming paints and smooth stones. Walls with parapet barriers were erected around a hillfort with stone towers, wood and wattle cottages, and in the center was Hus Rose. Only it was not the same misshapen palace. A sprawling fortress of sharp, angled peaks with lancet windows, walls made of stone and sturdy beams had replaced the wooden shingles and crooked doors.

Hus Rose was large enough to fit countless folk, and wretchedly familiar. This was a palace from my earliest memories. This was the palace of House Ode.

Raven Row tore apart. Stone buildings and sod huts with smoke from indoor fires took the places of broken tenements and shacks. Along heavy stone walls hung blades and bows, axes and seax from thick beams. Shields marked with dark runes or ravens were arranged below the weapons, ready to snatch.

Soil rumbled underfoot. Roads widened. Like a different world had lived beneath our battered kingdom, debauched buildings melted away and Raven Row was transformed into something beautiful, something formidable.

I let out a shriek of surprise as we stumbled. A few blood fae lost their footing. Sea singers retreated, no doubt the most unsteady of us all on land. Some stumbled and found the tip of a blade, most dove into the tides.

“Take one for questioning.” Brilliant Cuyler, a true warrior, had the brains to act in strategy.

Blood fae moved at once. They battled the shudder of the earth, but managed to surround one of the fumbling, horrifying sea fae, smashing his rotting face to the sand before he could dive beneath the waves.

Cuyler looked for me and held tightly to a post. I staggered back and slammed into a firm body.

Silas gripped my arms, keeping me steady. I didn’t think, merely turned into him, clinging to his waist as an anchor in the turmoil. It took half a breath, but soon enough, his arms wrapped around my shoulders, keeping me pressed to his body until the quake ceased.

“Cal.” Cuyler pointed through the dust. “Look.”

More than the buildings, the people of the Row had fallen forward, unmoving in the road.

“No.” Agony ripped through my chest. They were gone. The folk I’d known. The folk I’d mocked with Stefan when they staggered from game halls. The folk who’d irritated me, yet celebrated my return from captivity in the North with honey cakes and mead ale, as though I belonged to them all.

One shoulder moved. Next, a knee. Followed by groans as men, women, the people floundered back to their feet.

Blood fae watchers grouped closer to Cuyler, to me. Most hesitated at the sight of Silas, but still lifted their spears and knives. I wanted to tell them there was no need to protect against the people of Raven Row, but the thought died like ash in the wind.

These were no longer the people of Raven Row.

Dressed in leathers. Belts thick as my arm. Boots with hard soles that struck the knees. Loops and sheaths marked their waists, shoulders, and backs. Their rugged faces and vomit-stained tops were now dark, woolen tunics spun with silver threads on the trims.

No one seemed to pause for a single breath to consider the impossibility of transforming from drunkard to . . . warrior.

A man with a deep blue mantle tossed over his shoulders barked strategic orders. Others followed in a ripple of different commands.

“Wall at the shore.”

“Archers above.”

“Shield formation.”

“Move your asses!”

The final command came from the man in the mantle. When he faced me, beneath the smooth, sun-kissed skin, the tidy beard, and braided hair, I could just make out his true features.

“Olaf?”

The aleman looked thirty turns younger, arms thick and chiseled with divots and strength, but he hadn’t rid himself of that irritating, stern expression.

He pressed a hand to his chest and bowed his chin. “The Rave fight for the first kingdom.”

The Rave?

“Wasn’t the Rave the army of the fate king?” Cuyler limped toward me, a little breathless.

I nodded. “Annon was Rave. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“They’ve awaited the call of their royal, Little Rose,” Silas whispered against my hair. Low and seductive. His arms tightened around my waist. “You are the heir. They bow to you.”

“Silas, I . . . I don’t know how to command anyone.”

Lines of warriors—people I’d known from my earliest memories—trudged forward in uniform steps.

“Silas?” Cuyler tilted his head. “Now that I’m thinking on it . . . I know that name.”

With an irritated grunt, Silas turned us away. He practically recoiled away from anyone but me. “You do not need to be anything you are not. No one needs more than who you already are, Little Rose.”

Over his shoulder, I gaped at the people taking positions, snatching shields, arming their strong, lithe bodies for a damn war.

A woman stepped into view; the corner of her mouth was tilted in a knowing smirk. Silver braids wrapped around her head in a crown. She was dressed in a simple woolen gown with satchels strapped over her shoulders and pig-skin pouches tethered to her belt.

Runes were inked across her long fingers, and bone chips draped around her neck. Old-world seer attire.

Two more women came to her side; one was half a head shorter with a touch of sea blue to her hair, another with stern braids down the center of her skull, but all three had the same eerily pale eyes, like a frost storm.

“F-F-Forbi? Oviss? Danna?”

The taller of the three women stepped forward. She paused at Silas, and nearly caused him to stumble backward when she patted the spot over his heart. He shoved her hand away and shuddered.

Turns of solitude, no doubt touch from others burdened him. Well, touch other than mine.

After a few breaths, she ignored him and cupped my cheeks. “This is the part where she rises.”

Damn the hells. Where were the cracks in their faces? The wiry hairs from their moles? Where were the hunches to their spines? These women were fierce, formidable, and looked mere turns older than me.

Danna beamed and took my face next. “This is the part where captives are free.”

I recoiled against Silas’s side when the women strode past us and set out rune stones, chanting spell casts for protection and strength. Rave warriors spread out like a beautiful pestilence. From alleyways, rooftops, from the stone parapet walls, warriors bloomed and marked positions. As far as I could see, all along the shore, warriors stood at the ready.

Bleeding. Gods. We had an army.

“Blades ready!” Olaf roared, one fist raised near the shore. Every Rave lifted their swords the same as Olaf. At the aleman’s cry, every warrior near the water’s edge shouted a battle cry I’d long forgotten, one of old words. One shouted under loyalty for the father robbed from me.

Berjast enda. Until the end.

In a furious wave across the line of warriors, sword points rammed into the pebbled sand.

A slow burn, like embers catching flame, began in my fingers. The heat of it scorched and ravaged my veins, spreading like molten ore through my gut, my limbs, until it reached my chest. I burned with a new sort of power.

“Shield, Princess.” Olaf looked to me.

Silas dipped his covered face alongside my cheek. “Sing with me, Little Rose.”

I pressed a hand to my heart, the skin warm to the touch. I did not have my quill, nor my ink, but I had the words. I could write them. I dropped to the mud and used my finger to carve a simple lyric, a few words. Each symbol brought music to my head, the sweet, gentle voice in the shadows.

My body trembled with the flow of heated seidr in my veins. Soon enough I’d be spewing magic from my pores if I did not release it soon. I had the words written, and had no way to burn them.

Sing with me.

I closed my eyes when his voice bloomed from my heart to my mind. A thought connected with my own. I leaned over the mud-carved words—a simple command to shield, to ignite the true power of the first kingdom.

What it would unravel, I didn’t know, but the rightness of it burrowed deep in my belly like churning waves.

My palms burned, they ached. I slammed both palms over the muddy symbols. Heat crackled beneath. Brilliant, burning orange ignited along the divots of my symbols, flaring for a few breaths before smoldering and taking the symbols away.

The low, somber voice heightened in my mind, my heart. As though his sound seeped into my skin, there was something about the tune that ignited a strength I’d never truly embraced. My voice joined in, and I felt as though I’d fallen back into a basin of warm water. Sound muffled but for the song in my heart.

It lasted for a mere moment, but when the song ended, something dreadful happened within me.

When I looked back at my Whisper, heat from my blood pooled in my belly, dripping even lower until I clenched my thighs tightly. Gods, no. Absolutely, unequivocally, no. What had I told my Raven Queen? The bleeding instant one of those lust-crazed royals leapt into bed, damn wars began.

I would rather go the rest of my life without risking the necks of everyone I loved simply because my masked phantom all at once looked like a morsel, one I wanted to taste over every surface of my tongue.

The words, the connection, something had awakened a fire in my body, and I could not control it.

If the pulse to his jaw, the rapid rise and fall of his chest, were any clue—he felt the same. I reeled through every reason touching him would be a disastrous decision until the shock of need and desire faded.

“Calista.” Cuyler’s voice broke my delirious pull toward Silas. My friend stepped in front of me, a touch of fear on his face. “Are you all right? You . . . you . . . you glowed.”

“I’m fine.” I peered over his shoulder, searching for Silas, but instead caught sight of the shore. “What the hells? Look!”

Threaded between every Rave blade was a brilliant string of golden light, connecting each blade to the next beside it. Warriors didn’t move, but kept hold on their hilts as the light reached one edge of the small Western shoreline to the next.

A blast of golden light split into beams across the sea and tossed great walls of violent waves against the dark streak of the open Chasm of Seas. Monstrous walls of water shot toward the sky, creating another barrier against the ships.

With the water and the light barrier between the Rave swords, the sea folk wouldn’t be able to reach us.

At least, not for now.

Silas had drifted to the side and loomed in the darkness of an alleyway ten paces away. His tension, his need to flee and cover from the sunlight and countless faces was palpable. Still, he remained. Fists clenched, but he stayed.

For me. He didn’t need to speak it. He’d bid me farewell, allowed me to leave when he didn’t want it, and still followed me into a fight that, doubtless, terrified him to the bone.

I made a move to go to him, all at once empty without his nearness, but paused when Cuyler placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Calista, you did this on the shore in the fae isles. The glow.”

“I think . . . it’s part of my seidr. A deeper part.” It was my song. Our song.

I lifted my gaze to my Whisper when he crossed the space in stiff steps. On instinct, I gripped his arm, pulling him closer.

Silas lowered his voice, so only I could hear. “Accept the truth and you will do all of it without writing. Accept the truth and the words will come from your heart.”

“How can—”

I didn’t finish before Olaf shoved his way through the lines of warriors. “We’ve been given more time. Fight with us.”

I blinked. “I . . . I just bleeding did, you big oaf. Didn’t expect damn Rave to show up, mind you, but—”

“There is a final piece, Princess. The captain believed you were ready to return to the beginning? Are you?”

What he was truly asking was if I stood ready to face my fate after all this time.

“She has no choice.” Silas’s deep, damn-near seductive voice brought the answer.

Somewhere inside, I knew he wasn’t wrong. Whatever I’d done, crossing into Hus Rose, commanding hidden Rave warriors, I’d unlocked something in this place. A power I could not deny.

Cuyler lifted his blade until recognition dawned. “The fate king’s ward, yes? That is where I know the name Silas. From Ari’s fae sleep.”

I didn’t answer, merely tugged on Silas’s tunic, drawing his chest to mine. “What happened here, Whisper? My folk were Rave, hidden all this time?”

“How do you suppose the first ice queen of the North got the idea for her own people?”

My heart stuttered. Queen Lilianna Ferus. She’d, gods, she’d hidden her fae army as phantom guardians of that damn tomb where the Cursed King and my Kind Heart ended his suffering, and their heart song took hold.

“Queen Lilianna had the same idea?”

“She was given the twist of fate in her story by one who’d done the same,” Silas told me. His thumb wasn’t gloved anymore, and the rough scrape of his calluses on my cheek sent a shiver down my spine. “No more running, Little Rose,” he hissed through his teeth. “This is your chance to know everything.”

Instinct urged me to flee. His touch urged me to stay. My mind reeled through thoughts of my royals. The flame that ignited meant they were in distress. I thought of Sol’s missive. “Will my fate save them?”

I didn’t need to explain who. Silas lowered his face, his breath was warm against my ear. “To see your truth will finish the tale. A tale of which they are all a part. From there we take what we know and make our own fate.”

I took hold of his wrist, guiding his palm from my neck to my cheek. “You’ll be with me?”

He blinked, stunned. “Always. Let your dreams descend. I’ll be there.”

The words had barely left his tongue before the world faded into abysmal black.