Empire of Dust (33 page)

It is too much. She stands back from the wall, stunned. Is she ill? Dreaming? How could one drop of water be all those things?

Oddly, her burning thirst is gone. So is her hunger, along with her exhaustion. She feels as strong as she ever did after a good hot dinner and a long winter night's sleep in the palace, wrapped in blankets of soft Milesian wool lined with fox fur. But how can that be?

There's that sound again. She stops her breathing and strains to hear. Whispers. Or the scuttling of an animal. The rustling of snakes through a nest of leaves. The fluttering of wings. She is not sure. She swings the lantern in a wide arc around her and sees nothing except for a few drawings painted on the opposite cave wall. Drawings of men in horns pointing spears at what looks like the opening of a cave...and within the cave are eyes.

She moves the lantern, and as the light slides over to another section of wall, her heart thumps wildly in her chest. Long gashes—like claw marks—are gouged deeply into the rock.

A scratching sound comes from the back of the cave. Someone—no, more than one—is whispering in a language she cannot understand, a language of clicks and shushes. Claws drag across rock. She hears a crack, a footstep. Someone has stepped on a stick or...a bone. Someone is coming toward her out of the darkness ahead...

An animal scream breaks through the scraping sounds. Zo drops her lamp. It rolls onto the floor, and the flame shudders once, then dies.

Zo turns her face toward the bright light of the entrance and begins to stumble toward it. She lurches out of the cave.

As she scrambles across the rocky ground, ripping her nails and banging her knees, she hears something like whimpering, a small, plaintive cry. She freezes. It sounds like a child, like Roxana the time she tried to climb up the statue of Mithras and fell, hitting her head badly.

She looks right and left, up and down. Where is it coming from? Just then a ray from the rising sun pierces a cloud and falls like a heavenly spear on the ground, illuminating a tiny white horse head with dewy brown eyes, its body engulfed in fallen rocks. Sticking up from the rocks are feathers, veined and golden-pink in the dawn light.

No, it can't be. This, too, must be a dream, a hallucination, just like playing in the palace halls with Roxana and being in the throne room with Cosmas and Ochus. This image will vanish any moment. She has been through so much, this can't be...

But it is. The legend is real. She picks her way over jagged rocks and kneels beside the creature, touching the warm blood seeping out beneath the stones.

She puts a hand on the creature's head. “Hush, now,” she whispers, and the pale eyelashes flutter. “I will help you. All will be well.” Sheathing her knife, she starts pulling rocks off the animal, but some are too heavy to lift. She has to tip them up and wiggle them from side to side. Somehow freeing the colt calms her, gives her a sense of purpose, something to concentrate on other than her wild-eyed fear. She is going to free this little horse if it's the last...

The tiny horse shudders and sighs gently. Zo gasps.
No
. It can't. She can't let it. She can't let another thing die. Horror and sadness threaten to choke her. She is going to die out here, too. Just like Roxana. Her little, helpless sister. Just like this creature, this beautiful mythic creature. Real. She has found a Pegasus. A baby Pegasus. She has found one and it has died, and with it, the very last grains of hope Zo had been clutching, deep inside her heart. The hope keeping her alive—for herself. For her baby.

A huge shadow falls over her and the body of the colt. Zo tenses, feeling as though her bones have been locked together. Some distance behind her, something huge hits the earth with the impact of a catapult missile, and the pebbles and loose stones are thrown into the air like a reverse rainstorm and clatter down on Zo. Even though the colt is already dead, she hunches herself over it, protecting it from the worst of the rocks.

She does not want to turn around. If she's to die, here, now, she'd rather her last sight be the gentle, sweet face of the Pegasus, and not the gnashing of teeth and claws.

No, Zofia.
The voice seems to come from somewhere far off, and it takes Zo a moment to realize it is not a voice at all, but her own mind.

She, Zo, knows what to do for the first time. She is not Attoosheh. She will not meekly accept a revolting fate like her mother did without lifting a finger in protest. She has come all this way. She has lost everything.

She has nothing else to lose.

She turns around.

The sun hits her in the eyes and she's forced to squint. A tall shape stands in relief against the molten light. And then the figure shifts a large, feathered wing, and she can see what it is: a white mare twice the size of any stallion in the Sardis stables, feathered wings sweeping out from her withers.

A Pegasus.

For a long moment, Zo stares at this promise of impossible things. A feeling that could be awe, or hope, or fear—or all three—rises in her chest.

The mare rears, and her neck curves like a crescent moon as she bares her teeth and screams to the rocky cliff, her large lips trembling with the force of it. The piercing sound echoes all around, and Zo feels the mother's cry reverberate in the chambers of her own heart. The front hooves hit the earth with the sound of thunder, and the ground beneath them trembles.

Then suddenly, the mare charges. The Pegasus is the powerful white roar of a waterfall or the violence unleashed by a snowy avalanche—dangerous and without thought. Zo realizes a second before the mare reaches her that the beast will not stop.

She hurls herself to the side, just missing the enraged mare's gem-hard hooves. The sharp rocks bite into her side as she rolls to a stop, and her arms feel hot where the ground scraped her.

Pushing herself up into a sitting position, Zo looks toward the Pegasus and sees the mother standing protectively over the body of her lifeless colt. The creature's large ribs heave and a sheen of sweat covers its marbled flanks. Her nose brushes over the colt's bristly fur, and a low nicker comes from somewhere deep within the beast—a sound as soft as rainfall and as sad as the closing door of a tomb.

An ache travels through Zo and she instinctively places a hand to her womb. A mother—be she human or horse or myth—is never meant to outlive her child. There's a flutter in her stomach, as if in response to her thought. Zo wonders if she will live long enough to meet her child.

Using a nearby rock to steady herself, she slowly gets to her feet. The movement startles the mare, and the Pegasus pulls back her top lip, baring her teeth again with a little warning grunt.

Zo stops. “I'm sorry,” she murmurs, keeping her voice even. “I'm so sorry, my beauty.” The taste of salt and earth fills her mouth, and she realizes that she is crying—her tears mingling with the dust on her cheeks. Loss is all around her on this eternal journey of the damned. It marked the beginning of her journey with her sister's murder, stalked her through the desert with the loss of Ochus's companions, and stays with her now, waiting to claim her within these mountains.

Zo puts her face in her hands, trying to block the image of her little sister. Roxana had been so proud when her front teeth fell out and two overly large adult teeth started pushing through her gums. A sob slides out of her mouth, and she lets the grief come. Roxana dancing around the room, holding her doll's hand. Roxana fresh from her music lesson sourly twanging the strings of her lyre, her small pointed face lighting up with delight. Roxana snuggling into Zo's bed at night, the sweet baby scent of her neck calming Zo to sleep.

A wind pushes against Zo's ear. Though it's warm, her wet cheeks feel cold. Her hands drop, and she's looking straight into the liquid eyes of the mare. She's so close that she can see the great feathers are not just white, but muted shades of gray and cream and the faintest blush of pink. A reflection of all the shades of the mountain.

Zo doesn't move—she doesn't want to startle the Pegasus and cause her to attack, but she's also mesmerized by the fierce beauty of the beast. She holds her breath, waiting for the creature to make the next move.

The mare slowly drops onto her front knees, the wings unfurled like sails. The feathers rustle together, a sound like a secret whispered between the moon and stars.

Roxana's voice floats to her from her memory.
Pegasus knows the way of fate. Pegasus is never lost
.

With a calm she does not feel, Zo reaches out a tentative hand and places it on the mare's neck. It's soft, like a newly shorn sheep. When the Pegasus stays still, Zo makes up her mind. Grabbing onto the thick woolly mane, she swings herself over the mare's back, just behind the winged shoulder blades.

Keeping one arm around its neck, she entwines the other in its mane. She leans forward to feel its solid body beneath hers, bringing her a sense of comfort and safety for the first time in many weeks. At that moment, sunlight streams through a break in the clouds, warming Zo's face. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees something flicker a bright orange-red. She turns. The cliffs above her look as if they are on fire. The Flaming Cliffs.

The creature lurches to her feet, and Zo leaves her heart and stomach on the ground as the Pegasus gallops across the rocky plain—and takes flight into the red eye of the rising sun.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

OLYMPIAS CLIMBS UP
the ladder into her bedroom naked, dried blood all over her arms and torso. In one hand she clutches an enormous snakeskin, like a crisp, honeycombed netting, its papery mouth yawning wide open.

She crawls onto the floor, gasping and woozy from the venom. The bars of bright light coming through the slats of her shutters hurt her eyes.

Memories of the ritual she performed just hours ago swirl through her mind: the bone of the honey-glazed fingertip. The blood from the handkerchief she'd used to tend to Alexander's wound during the Aesarians' sword fighting demonstration last month. The entire spell made more powerful by the cultic ceremonies she performed in that ancient heart of darkness, the Labyrinth of Knossos.

This wasn't the first time she tried the Blood and Bones ritual. Last time, though, she'd used the bones she thought belonged to the newborn Katerina. When Olympias finally tracked down her handmaiden Helen ten years ago, Helen had handed the queen the tiny bones in a box, swearing she had done the deed.
Liar
. Ten years the queen had kept them, cherished them, stroked them, as she waited for the great lunar eclipse to usher in a new Age when the ritual would finally work.

On that night of bloody sacrifices and orgiastic dancing, of drums and screams and chants as the sky swallowed the moon, Olympias performed the ritual and... Nothing happened. And when her snake bit her, the purple blood against the ivory skin inside her arm had formed the words
She's still alive
. That was how the queen learned that her daughter must still be alive.

But this time it was different. The snake had hungrily devoured her own fresh blood mingled with the blood of her son and the bone of her daughter. Then it raised its head, its eyes dilated, before sinking its fangs into her. She remembers the hidden chamber below her bedroom tilting sideways as she fell to the floor. The last thing she saw before blackness took her was a pair of glowing emerald eyes.

As soon as she came to, she thrust her arm next to the last sputtering lamp and saw a very different message.
I am free.

Free! But what kind of free? Free of her?

Find him
. She must find him. She struggles to her feet and throws on a long-sleeved robe. Staggering a bit, she opens the door and nearly collides with the guard.

“Your majesty,” the man says, surprised, “are you all right? Should I call your ladies?”

“Nooot necesssssary,” she says, her lips not quite working right. The guard tilts his head slightly, as though he is trying to figure out a riddle. She realizes he must think she's drunk, and the thought makes her laugh loudly as she adjusts the snakeskin tightly around her shoulders and makes her way down the hall.

Where has he gone?
Panic grips her heart and begins to squeeze it.

She pauses before a fresco in the long hallway: Zeus, disguised as a huge white swan, beating forceful white wings as he ravishes the beautiful Queen Leda of Sparta. Olympias stops and stares at the painting as if she is seeing it for the first time. The father of all the gods got Leda pregnant with twins—one of them Helen of Troy—and dumped her, the way gods always dump their mortal women, even though Leda was still radiantly beautiful. Which Olympias is not. Not after what Bastian did to her. Not without her heavy cosmetics and wigs. Tears slide down her face, and she wonders if her makeup is running down her cheeks with them.

“What is wrong?” She hears Alexander's voice and feels a hand warm on her shoulder. A silent sob racks Olympias's body. She doesn't want Alexander to see her like this. No matter what, even if she is abandoned and ugly, he is her son, and through him she can remain relevant and powerful—but not if he sees her like this.

Olympias lurches away from the hand. “Leave me, Alexander,” she says carefully, though the words sound thick and slow. “I am not feeling quite myself this morning. I...I didn't sleep well.” Her fingers begin to nervously stroke the snake's skin hanging around her neck. It rustles slightly, like a dead leaf falling.

Suddenly, Alex's hand is on her again, trying to turn her around to face him. “Come with me.”

“What do you want?” Olympias snaps, her eyes still stinging with salty tears, her mind still clouded with snake venom from the ritual.

“You, Myrtale.”

Her heart skips a beat, then, and begins to thud rapidly.
Myrtale.
Her soul name. No one calls her that, except for...

Slowly she turns and looks up into Alexander's face.

The hallway swims around her.

She stares dumbstruck at her son's eyes.

They have
changed.

Alexander no longer has one sky-blue and one dark brown eye. He has two emerald-green eyes. Eyes she knows well.

The prince before Olympias smiles slowly, and she feels an irresistible power drawing her in and a fiery heat that Alex never had.

“Myrtale, my queen,” the young man says. “What has kept you?”

And then Olympias knows
.
She knows with the certainty of rock's hardness, the way water only ever flows toward the sea, that it has finally happened.

The man before her is
not
her son. Not at all.

Riel the Snake, the last of the last gods, has returned.

* * * * *

Don't miss book 3 of
the
BLOOD OF GODS AND ROYALS
series,

REIGN OF SERPENTS.

Only from Eleanor Herman
and Harlequin TEEN.

Keep reading for an excerpt from
VOICE OF GODS
by Eleanor Herman.