The Songbird and the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia #3)

Chapter 47

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

“ M ische.”

He only said my name when he was worried about me. Now, it was fractured with almost-tears.

“Mische. Mische.”

My eyes opened.

It was so dark. I was so cold. Asar leaned over me. Gods, he was beautiful—surely a dream. Smoke rolled off him. His left eye burned bright. Something looked different about him in a way I couldn’t place.

Maybe it was because I was dreaming.

Yes. I was dreaming.

But what a nice dream it was.

“You foolish, magnificent woman,” Asar was saying. “What have you done?”

Something cool and wet fell onto my cheek.

Rain.

No.

I tried to touch Asar’s face. I frowned.

“Why are you crying?” I tried to say. But my tongue wouldn’t form words.

Light and darkness swam through the sky like fish through a pond, circling ever tighter. The air was thick with immortality, restless with gods thrown into turmoil.

What a strange dream.

My vision faded.

“Where is he?”

My lashes fluttered. A stunning woman stood over us. Nyaxia was night and shadow and blood. She was a million shades of darkness. Her hair floated around her, a blanket of stormy night. Her eyes were bright with fury, bloody lips twisted in rage and grief.

She stood over the remnants of the ritual.

“This is not the task I gave you,” she snarled.

She whirled to Asar. He cradled me close, as if to protect me. Silly man, I thought, through waning consciousness. You can’t protect me from a god’s rage. It’s already taken me.

“You,” she breathed, exhaling the word like an execution order. “I gave you the order to resurrect him. Instead, you have stolen his power. You think that because you have some pitiful drop of his blood in yours, you are worthy of what he was?” She approached us, darkness deepening with every step. “You are no god. You betrayed me.”

“She killed Atroxus to save your people.” Asar held me so tightly. “She?—”

“What good does that do me?” Nyaxia roared. The dead shrank back. The sky quaked. The charred remains of Atroxus’s body scattered across the icy ground. “I wanted my husband back. Instead, I have you .”

“You have vengeance. You have an endless night for your children. And you have Atroxus’s head, if you want it.”

Asar was trying so hard. I could see that, even as I slipped between layers of consciousness, in and out. But he did not understand Nyaxia the way I did. I fought for breath as I watched her go to what remained of Atroxus’s body. She leaned down and picked up the arrow, still intact.

I sensed her pain as she observed it. Her betrayal. It had been her husband’s weapon, after all, originally intended for her heart.

And it was a dangerous thing to offer a broken heart blood instead of love.

Nyaxia’s tears fell, blood-red, to her enemy’s ashes. She cradled the arrow to her chest. Then she looked up at the blackened sky, endless ink from which endless possibilities could be written.

I tried to reach for her, tried to say, Wait, it doesn’t have to be this way.

But I couldn’t move.

And I saw it, the moment that Nyaxia decided to discard love in favor of power. The moment she decided that if she could not have her husband, she would have an empire.

She turned back to Asar, her gaze cold again.

“I suppose now you shall beg me to save her.” Her voice dripped with bitterness.

Asar’s thumb stroked back and forth, back and forth, on my charred arm. He was careful to keep his voice from wavering. “I failed you. But she didn’t. She gave you this victory.”

Nyaxia’s lip curled. “You deny me my love but ask me to give you yours. It hardens a heart to lose what you love most. And you will need that steel for the war to come.”

“Please—” Asar begged.

But Nyaxia had already turned away. She looked to the sky, churning with the attention of gods.

“The others are coming,” she said. “I have no desire to see them tonight. You can come with me if you wish.”

Asar didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He clutched me, as if he could hold me tight enough to keep death from taking me. Darkness rolled over me, then parted, and when I could see again, Nyaxia was watching us both.

She scoffed. “Very well, then. Let them take you. Perhaps they will let you hold her head as I held my lover’s once.”

Don’t let her go, I wanted to tell Asar. She can be saved.

Like Ophelia could be saved. Like all the others. I could see it in her still, that rapidly closing wound of vulnerability. I looked at her and saw the young minor deity she had once been in Alarus’s memories of her, full of possibility and love.

As she brushed past us, I tried to reach for her. My muscles, torn and burned, wouldn’t work. I managed only a twitch of my fingers.

But maybe she saw it anyway, because she hesitated. Something indecipherable passed over her face.

She lowered herself to me, fingers of bloody night touching my cheek, as if in curiosity.

“She’s one of yours,” Asar said—still trying, to the end, for me. He’d fight to the very end for me. “She’s the best of us. She?—”

“She is a broken bird,” Nyaxia said. She straightened. And maybe, just for a moment, she looked at Asar with genuine empathy.

“If you wish to be a god, then save her yourself.”

“No—” Asar bit out.

But the sky had opened up, the veil to the world of the gods torn open. And Nyaxia was already gone.

My breath rattled. My chest hurt. The pain was starting to set in now. The gods appeared, and I danced closer to death.

“She killed him. She killed him!”

Vitarus, the god of vitality and plague, was the first to arrive, crashing from the heavens in a cloud of rain and light. One of his arms was covered in green moss, flowers growing from his flesh—the other, blackened with decay. That was the hand he used to grab a fistful of Atroxus’s ashes.

Ix was next, the goddess of fertility and sex—the most stunning being I had ever seen. Her gown wrapped around her body and floated back into the sky, the red of broken virginity and childbirth pains. Copper hair tumbled over her shoulders and pooled among Atroxus’s remains as she fell to her knees.

Then Srana, the goddess of machinery and science, with skin of polished bronze and eyes of ticking clockwork. Zarux, the god of rain and sea, who walked upon a bed of storm clouds and waves. Shiket, the goddess of war and justice, six golden blades fanning from her back like steel wings. They surrounded us, taking in the ritual, the dead, Atroxus’s corpse.

My lashes fluttered. Darkness took my hand. I fought it.

Not yet.

I couldn’t die yet.

“They tried to resurrect a god and murdered another,” Vitarus said. “This cannot go unpunished.”

“Execute him,” Shiket snarled, looming over Asar. “What else can be done?”

Asar shielded me, as if preparing to go down fighting the gods themselves. But another voice rang out above the others, quiet and deafening, ageless, smooth as time itself.

“He cannot be killed.”

Acaeja, goddess of fate and sorcery, lowered from the sky. Her white eyes were wide open, as if taking in the rapid changes of fate set in motion by these events. Her six wings folded behind her, each offering a window into a different potential future. Every one of them now was shrouded in darkness.

“He may not be a god by birth,” she said, “but he now carries the power of Alarus. It would be unwise to execute him yet, when he could still be of use.”

I let out a rattling breath that was almost a laugh. It was just like when Asar had saved me. All of it was a circle, repeating over and over again.

Asar said something, but my consciousness faded.

Not yet, I begged.

“What of her?” someone asked.

I forced my eyes open. Glowing chains had appeared around Asar. He clung to me as they tried to drag him back. But he refused to let me go, even as those chains wrapped themselves around his throat, his wrists. Even as the gods themselves tried to tear him away.

I realized, as my fading vision took in his tear-streaked face, that Asar would never let me go. Not in life, and not in death. He would shatter it all for me.

“Let go,” he rasped. “Let go, Mische, and I will find you. I will find you.”

My lashes fluttered. Some god somewhere uttered a dismissive term. I was no god. The only thing that had ever made me special was the favor of a god who was now dead. I was not useful to anyone. I was not worth saving.

Shiket ripped me from Asar’s grip and tossed me dismissively aside.

My neck snapped. My body broke. My chest tore open beneath her blade, black blood gushing free.

Somewhere very far away, Asar’s voice echoed:

Stop! I need her.

I need her.

I need her.

A smile twitched at my bloody lips. I remembered those words. I remembered how he had used them to save my life, once, an age ago.

But they did not save me now.

There, in a broken heap of flesh, upon the discarded ashes of my god, I died alone.