Nightwing, p.1
Nightwing, page 1
Table of Contents
NIGHTWING
COPYRIGHT
CONTENT CAUTION
DEDICATION
VALGARD
THE QUEEN OF ICE AND STONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE PRISONER OF LOVE AND LOYALTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THE CHANCELLOR OF STARS AND STORMS
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
A GUIDE TO OLD VALGARDAN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Read On For a Sneak Peek at
CHAPTER ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY R. DUGAN
NIGHTWING
THE STARCHASER SAGA
BOOK III
R. Dugan
NIGHTWING
Copyright © 2020 by R. Dugan
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For information contact:
R. Dugan
PO Box 1265
Martinsville, IN 46151
reneeduganwriting.com
Cover design by Maja Kopunovic
Map by Jessica Khoury
ISBN: 978-1-7339255-2-5
First Edition: December 2020
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENT CAUTION:
This book contains scenes of verbal badgering, emotional and physical abuse, intense confinement, and sexual harassment and mentions of assault.
Discretion is advised for readers sensitive to these themes.
DEDICATION
To Danny
With my whole heart. For my whole life.
The QUEEN
of
ICE AND
STONE
CHAPTER ONE
SIX NAMES HOVERED like a vapor in the darkness above Princess Cistine Novacek of Talheim, pushed from her mouth in whispers while she rose and fell in steady curls from the floor.
“Thorne. Ashe. Quill. Tatiana. Maleck. Ariadne.”
Her stomach throbbed when she raised herself up with her core and touched her elbows to her bent knees for the thirtieth time. The thirty-fifth. The fortieth. She kept her gaze on the ceiling bathed in freckles of ghostlight, pale like forks of lightning, like—
Cistine slammed down on her back and squeezed her eyes shut, but not quickly enough to dispel the image of Julian Bartos racing toward her, sword upraised, before the augmented lightning pierced straight into his body, pocked and blistered his skin, and melted his midnight eyes from their sockets.
Muscles burning, pulse pounding in the base of her skull, Cistine slowly sat up and peered around the cold chamber’s dark hollows, mineral-licked roof, locked door, and the lonely bed where she’d huddled for the first several days of her captivity, rocked with grief-stricken dreams of Julian and the cabal. Then she’d started to hear them, whispers of their presence reminding her what they would have done if they were captured.
Tatiana would recite names and places to keep her mind focused. Quill would hone his muscles, preparing for a fight. Maleck would internalize the quiet and make it an ally rather than an enemy. Ariadne and Ashe would map the room and choose where to make a stand. Julian would tell her not to let them make a fool of Talheim’s sole heir; to do her crown and parents proud. And Thorne would hold his head high, like a Valgardan High Tribune should, and make his captors feel they were trapped with him.
These thoughts had finally goaded her into core-tightening exercises and push-ups, then to drawing maps of Valgard’s eight territories—Spoek, Nordbran, Kroaken, Lataus, Unsverd, Blaykrone, Eben, and Erdotre—with water from the drinking cup waiting on the steps every morning when she woke. While she did these things, the same gnawing reminder always lingered.
She should not be able to do any of them. She should have died on Eben’s plains when she confronted Chancellor Salvotor of Kanslar Court. But she’d survived the unsurvivable because she was the Key.
She shuddered and shut her eyes, hugging her sore middle. All the excuses she made when augments didn’t destroy her before were worthless that day on the plains; somehow, when the Doors to the Gods were sealed shut at the end of the war between the Middle Kingdom and the North, her destiny was forged—a Key to the lids that sealed the wells of gods-given power. So Salvotor had captured her and locked her away in this small room for weeks, waiting to discover the mystery of her.
Iron clattered as the chain on the other side of her door loosened. Cistine scrambled onto the bed, fighting to slow her breathing as a burly man descended the short flight of steps into the room. He was old enough to be her father, and as well-groomed as a King’s Cadre Warden, silver-fletched hair, beard, and mustache meticulously trimmed, warm brown skin freckled with old scars, and slate-gray eyes solemn in the rosy light of the crushed ghostplants in his lamp.
He’d been here when Cistine first woke in this place, leaving a pair of muslin pajamas on the bed and taking away her shredded nightgown. He hadn’t spoken a single unkind word to her, but there was a shadow on his brow Cistine didn’t recall seeing whenever he left food and water while she watched through her lashes, pretending to be asleep. This time, he carried only a simple wooden box.
Unease curled in her stomach. “You’re…Kristoff, aren’t you? The head of the Vassora here?”
His brow creased. “In practice, if not in title.” His voice was slow, warm, and husky—things she wished she could trust. “You’ve been summoned for supper.”
“I thought I wasn’t allowed to leave this room.”
“You have a…guest.”
She folded her arms. “I’m not feeling well enough for supper tonight.”
Kristoff sighed. “You aren’t being given a choice. Neither of us are.”
“Will you drag me out?”
“No, but I will absolutely throw you over my shoulder. If you behave like a child, that’s how you’ll be treated.”
Cistine almost jutted her tongue at him, almost reminded him she was not a child, but a prisoner.
The thought made her grow still.
A princess imprisoned. Like her own mother, Solene, and Julian’s mother Eboni, abducted by Jad of Mahasar to goad Prince Cyril into starting a war more than twenty years ago. The clever women had plunged Mahasar’s capital into disarray with manipulative words and playacting, turning Prince Jad against his father.
That was the legacy she came from.
The memory lifted Cistine’s head high and drew her shoulders back. “I suppose I can make time for a guest.”
Kristoff’s mouth twitched, then firmed again when he opened the box. The dress inside was artfully-tailored lace and silk, floor-length, with long, sheer sleeves. It was also pale purple—the color inside a stroke of lightning.
Her heart jumped into her throat, and she shook her head.
“I don’t like this any more than you,” Kristoff grunted. “But things will be far worse if you don’t do as you’re told.”
Bristling with more than just indignation, Cistine snatched up the dress and stalked to the small relief alcove at the foot of the bed. She loathed the clash of pale lavender against skin that had begun to lose its sun-kissed tan, as if the hours spent training on the rock top in Hellidom and tend ing her garden behind the Den had never happened. “Where did this come from? Should I assume this place has shops?”
“That gown belonged to my sister.”
Tears pricked Cistine’s eyes at the terrible heaviness in Kristoff’s voice. When Baba Kallah died, she struggled to fathom the cabal’s grief; yet now that she’d lost her and Julian both, she not only fathomed this man’s agony, she felt it like a blow to the ribs.
For the first time, it occurred to her that the Vassora who often thwarted the cabal’s plans might have their own griefs to carry.
She stuffed her feet back into her dirty slippers and stepped out to find that even while she took pains to hide herself, Kristoff had also turned his back, giving her all the privacy he could.
Cistine’s fury softened. He was obeying his orders; that was not something she could fault him for. After all, why would he defy his superiors for her? She was only a tool of his kingdom.
“Should I twirl?” she asked.
Kristoff faced her, a strange emotion guttering across his face. “Come. We’re short of time.”
They stepped out into an arched stone corridor, the ghostlamp in Kristoff’s hand bringing the only light for many paces. Cistine tried to decipher anything about her prison from the dark, heavy rock, which opened into a larger chamber at the corridor’s end, the walls hewn in articulate lines and inlaid statues. Kristoff led her down another hall to the right, shorter than the last one and lit with a string of smaller ghostlit bulbs paving the way into a broad stone dining hall. Her so-called guest sat at the table, and at the sight of his face Cistine’s knees turned to water.
Chancellor Salvotor.
CHAPTER TWO
LIMBS LOCKED, HEAD reeling, heart slamming against her ribs like a caged animal, Cistine didn’t know whether to retreat or catapult across the polished stone table to wrap her hands around Salvotor’s diamond-hard, armored throat.
Kanslar’s leader. Thorne’s father. The man who murdered Julian Bartos in cold blood.
As if he sensed her pain and grossed pleasure from it, the Chancellor smiled up from his meal of pork and asparagus. Cistine’s empty stomach snarled at the smell of food, and Salvotor’s brows leaped. “Kristoff, I didn’t realize you resorted to starving children. That seems so unlike you.”
“She’s been given her meals every morning and evening,” Kristoff replied stiffly.
“Far be it from me to a question a fellow father’s routines, of course, but hasn’t it been some time since you had children to feed?”
Kristoff’s breath audibly hitched.
“She’ll dine with me each night from now on,” Salvotor continued, “so I can ensure she’s being properly looked after. Out you go.”
When Kristoff retreated, hands in fists, Salvotor dabbed his scaled face and gestured down the table. “Sit. I insist.”
Slowly, Cistine lowered herself onto the throne-like chair opposing his.
“Eat.”
She would not.
Salvotor smiled, dark and humorless, folding his napkin and then his hands on the table. “I understand you’ve been quite lonely these last weeks, so I’m prepared to sit with you until you finish your supper.”
Cistine looked down at the meal before her, the same as his. Her mouth watered against her will. “First, tell me where I am.”
Salvotor’s brow cocked. “One of the old temples…the place where you were created.”
Her spine tingled. Over two decades ago, her father had stood somewhere in these same halls with the visnprests of that time—cruel masters of augmentation now called Bloodwights—and forged the lock over the lids. Salvotor had suggested the keying came from her father’s bloodline straight to her…that she could reopen the wells. Yet he’d done nothing about it for weeks.
There was something more to this. Something he wasn’t telling her.
Salvotor delicately sliced his portion of meat. “You know, I’ve considered lately that you and I aren’t so different.” A scoff bubbled up in Cistine’s throat, and he smiled. “Really! My father crafted me into a sword at Valgard’s neck, guiding the Courts back to unity under one King. And you…born or made, however it was done, your father saw you, and he said, Now, here is the perfect vessel to harness augmentation’s potential.” He popped the bite into his mouth, hungry gaze fixed on her while he chewed. “I will give purpose to your suffering, a call higher than your throne. You will be the salvation of Valgard when I spill your blood on the Doors…all of it, I gather.”
Underneath the gray haze of terror, a spark ignited at his questing tone.
“You gather?” Cistine echoed, raising her eyes to him.
Brushing aside his platter, Salvotor studied her. “I understand that when you first came to the Northern Kingdom, my son struck a truce with you. I’m prepared to do the same.”
Cistine curved her fingers over her kneecap until her unpared nails bit into her skin. Make a truce with the man who’d slayed Julian—
“There is information I require from you,” Salvotor said, “which none of the visnprests I’ve brought here possess. They do suspect there are other items which must be gathered to open the Doors. And as much as I would like to think the former Order wasn’t foolish enough to spread the Key’s power among tangible objects…well, nothing was beneath your father’s cunning. So, rather than risk spilling all your blood only to find I sullied everything, I’m prepared to strike a bargain with you. Talheim’s knowledge of the ritual in exchange for one solemn act from me.”
The offer woke no more than a flutter of hope in her. This was Chancellor Salvotor, who beat his wife and son and broke his own mother’s leg out of sheer rage and spite. He would give her nothing, no matter what she gave him. So she told him the truth: “I don’t know about any ritual.”
“I see.” Salvotor studied her a long moment, then rose. “Come. I want to show you something.”
Kristoff awaited them in the hewn antechamber, his gaze latching onto Cistine when Salvotor beckoned to him. They marched her between them across the room, through a row of high stone arches, into the temple’s interior—a broad gulch that dropped away to nothing, its halves laced together by stone bridges.
“This is where the keying took place,” Salvotor said. “Before, it was undivided. But with that ritual…”
Cistine stared into the foul darkness below, her stomach clenching. Her father’s choices had brought about so many wounds she never fathomed, even to the North’s very flesh.
A pair of Vassora guarded a staircase across the gulch, and Salvotor led Cistine and Kristoff up the steep vault to a landing high above that cratered wound, then left into a tunnel hollowed from the temple wall. They walked for what seemed like a full mile in darkness; sweating despite the cold, Cistine almost gasped with relief when hints of light prodded around a pair of half-doors ahead.
For the first time in weeks, she stepped outside—and slid to a halt.
They stood on a crescent balcony jutting from the face of a mountain. A dark sky stretched above, its cloudy face shredded by great gales of wind and blinding snow lifted from the peaks all around. Miles and miles of great heights and deep chasms enclosed this fortress, clearly not one of the four temples on Tatiana’s map. The cabal might not even know this place existed.
So they might never find her here.
Cistine ran to the railing and flung herself against it, peering down. The plunge was straight and far, down into bottomless shadows even deeper than the Wound. No handholds to climb like Quill taught her.
She was truly trapped.
Salvotor slammed his hands against the railing on either side of hers, and Cistine tasted bile at his lewd heat. “This is all that’s left of the world. I am more than glad to take my time with you, so ask yourself just how quickly you would like this to end—Wildheart.”
She stiffened at the sound of that Name, spoken by Thorne in a pain-and-panic-stricken daze on Eben’s plains. It was meant to belong only to them; she’d never even gotten to ask him about it, when he chose it, what it meant for them. And already Salvotor wielded it as a weapon to break her.
“Consider it deeply.” He tucked a thread of Cistine’s hair behind her ear. “This all ends the moment you tell me the truth about that ritual.”
