The Beauty of Darkness - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,193

but the strength of generations. I felt something reaching back to me, and then what I heard wasn’t my voice alone, but a thousand voices. They wove through me, around me, the world breathing us in, remembering, time circling. Morrighan stood at my side, Venda and Gaudrel on the other. Pauline, Gwyneth, and Berdi stood behind me and a hundred more. Our voices braided together, a steel reaching to the ends of the valley, swirling, sharing. Heads turned, listening, knowing, some swaths cutting deeper than others. The smoke coiled, thinned.

And then the battle stilled.

“Brothers! Sisters! Lay down your arms! I am your queen! Daughter of your blood and sister of your heart! I will stand by you. I will return to Venda.” I told them there was another kind of hope—the one Venda had promised. I begged them to listen to their hearts, to trust a knowing as old as the universe. “The strength is within us. We will settle the Cam Lanteux. Build new lives. With my last dying breath, I promise you, we will make it happen together, but this is not the way. We can prevail against the Dragon who steals our dreams! Lay down your arms, and we will create a hope that lasts.”

A universe stilled. The heavens watched. The breath of the centuries held.

The pause of battle stretched.

And then a sword was thrown down.

And another.

And while the chievdars, governors, and quarterlords still raged, not open to the hearing, the clans laid down their weapons in waves.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better place to find you, my pet. Where they all can watch.”

I whirled. It was the Komizar.

“Now they’ll all know with certainty who the Komizar of Venda really is,” he said.

I drew my sword and stepped back. “They’re listening to me, Komizar. This is what they want. It is too late for you.”

He lifted his heavy sword with both hands. I knew that stance. I knew what would come next.

“They want whatever I want,” he said. “And I want you dead. It’s as simple as that, Princess. That is what real power is.”

He looked at the sword in my hand and smiled, its reach far shorter than his. He stepped closer, his face gleaming with lust for the power at his fingertips. I stepped back and felt the bluff’s rim crumbling beneath my feet, heard the loose stones tumbling to the valley floor. My heart seized in a fist, and I saw the hunger in his eyes. More. The battle and my fear fed him. But then I saw something else, a flash of color. A jeweled blue eye.

“Reginaus!”

The Komizar’s expression went cold, hearing his birth name said aloud, and then rage engulfed him. He spun and faced Calantha.

Grief shimmered in her lone pale eye, and maybe loyalty, love, and a thousand other things I couldn’t name. We have a long history, she had once told me. Maybe that was what I saw in her gaze, the memories of all he had been to her and all that he was now.

“You gave me hope once,” she said. “But I cannot let you do this. It is time for another kind of hope.”

A dismissive huff of air had barely passed his lips when she charged toward him. He lifted his sword in a sharp move, and it impaled her long before she ever reached him, but her momentum had unexpected power, the sword running her through, and her body slammed into his. He stumbled back, one step, then another, then panic flashed across his face as he scrambled for footing, but it was too late. I leapt to the side as both of their bodies flew past me and tumbled over the edge, his scream echoing as they fell to the valley floor, but as I lunged, I felt myself sliding too, the ground giving way beneath me. I frantically grasped for anything, grass, branches, but it was all out of my reach, earth sliding around me and I was falling with them, and then I felt a hand lock onto mine.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

PAULINE

The battle may have ended, but it still raged on in dreams. It took a regiment of soldiers, along with Gwyneth, Berdi, Eben, Natiya, and me, to contain the child soldiers who were ushered out of the valley, and to comfort them in the following days. Even from the camp, we heard the explosions, the terror, the screams reverberating through the valley. Just before it ended, I fell to my knees in desperation,