Royal & Piper #3
Spark & Heir
by E. L. Tenenbaum
As winter delays impending war, Evalena works quickly to solidify her power and clear her path to the throne. With shadow men at her call, she turns others into pawns in a plan that will stop at nothing and no one to get a long-desired conduit. Through its power and protection, Evalena will build an empire.
Bringing a queen to King Eryk’s court may have been Quirin’s path to return, but it cannot save him from the haunting memories of the sister he could not save. Worse, after embracing a legend of death, the monarchs may most need him to preserve life.
While Cal may have found relative safety at the palace, there’s but two people she can really count as allies. Moreover, King Eryk’s help is not without significant cost, so as Cal prepares to face her treasonous aunt, she must assert herself as a monarch worthy of the crown she lost.
As news of Evalena’s actions trickle across the sea, it’s clear she must be ended, and soon. But Evalena has always been one step ahead, leaving Quirin and Cal with little time to stop her before she succeeds. For as everyone has known for centuries, a conduit will always protect its guardian.
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GENRE
Fantasy |
EBOOK |
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| Teen | ||
Excerpt
One Year Prior
His hands burned with vicious splendor, a blaze of musical force brilliant and damning. Shadows flickered his expression, hiding a brother’s grief within the eerie emerald glare of the Piper’s eyes.
Three glistening cords of LightForce trailed from his glowing fingertips, three strands woven of the blackened songs of the men frozen before him. Favored. Blessed. Evil.
They should not have been so careless.
Moments ago, he’d burst upon their evening of cards and drink in a storm of reckoning. Prodigious musician. Decorated horseman. Peerless archer. Neither had known it was already too late.
“Finally come to submit to your betters?” they’d sneered instead.
“Best this,” he’d growled, then slashed the air with unmatched fury, igniting a trail of golden sparks.
The prominent scar across the middle knuckle of his left hand gleamed before his bone-chilling expression. Six eyes riveted to the pipe he’d drawn from an invisible fold in the air, a pipe carved from antlers of the noble elk of ValDessa. Though none had seen it and lived to tell, there was not a man in the palace, or kingdom, or the realms beyond, who did not know what the pipe was for.
The Piper hadn’t planned to hold his pipe that night. Rather, he’d dropped by to visit his sister, a ward of the palace as he had once been. Asterre and Quirin, the last two members of a minor noble family. Since stepping out of his life as ward and archer to accept his new role as the king’s shadow assassin, the siblings hadn’t seen each other often. Then something had happened in his time away from the palace, something between one job and the next that no one dared speak of.
But he would learn because Asterre’s glittering green eyes had turned hollow. His sister lost her sparkle and grew quiet. His unmarried sister now with child. He’d had his suspicions, but she hadn’t confirmed. Until today. Until she was fighting to bring her child into the world too early. Until they both lost the fight.
And while such tragedy was enough to bow the mythical Piper, it was her words that broke him.
“Which one’s the father?”
“I—I don’t know.”
Eventually, her gaze, then her fingers, had slipped from his desperate grasp. He’d kissed her forehead, closed her eyes, covered her face with a sheet. He turned from her chamber and vengeance scorched his path to a room he’d never cared to visit.
He had not waited to be announced. He had not asked to be admitted. He’d slammed through the doors and into their night of revelry.
These men, they should not have been so careless. He ignored their jibes as he raised his pipe to his lips and played.
The Piper’s song was simple, almost familiar, yet none could capture it. Notes of music emerged from the world around him, pulsating, shimmering, expanding. He was unsurprised to hear unforgiving twangs singing harshly the perversion of once pure souls, the discordance of these three melodies revealed.
Usually, he took a life quickly, plucking strands of LightForce from fingers, and ears, and toes. Usually, he had no reason to delay swift, yet agonizing, death.
This time, reason had sharpened its claws with his sister’s death. He stared at the blackened LightForce in hand, focused on their jagged beats. He thought of what they’d done to her. He thought of her confession and the blood and the searing gasps and the sister and child they’d stolen from this world. He thought of his power to hold these lives in hand yet could do nothing to restore hers.
Usually, he would pull. This time, he twisted sharply. The men’s screams were lost in the thunder of his retribution. He continued to play as he warped each one’s LightForce, not to take their lives, but the part of their lives they lived for most. Their skill. Their distinction. Their perceived superiority.
A prodigious musician deafened. A peerless archer blinded. A decorated horseman lamed.
He tunneled fear into the caverns of their hearts, an unwelcome dread of just how fathomless the shadows were, and just who might lurk inside. They may have been his better in skill and blood, but they were helpless against who he had become.
He left them in ruin.
His sister’s funeral was in the early hours of the next morning, quiet and sparsely attended. He remained after the others had gone, remained with head bent over the mound of freshly turned earth.
“Asterre.” Her name was his prayer, and it escaped his lips a whisper.
He sensed someone step up behind him. He knew it was his king. He knew as well that His Majesty would not only have heard, but also felt what he had done to the Crown’s favored cousins. His power was tied to his monarch after all. And he did not care in that moment if his king took it back, even if it would end him.
Their voices were deep rumbles in the stillness.
“You should have asked.”
“She should have been protected.”
A deep sigh. “Why didn’t you kill them?”
“They didn’t deserve mercy.”
“For this revenge—”
“Justice.”
“No matter. Understood is not the same as forgiven, and now their families want retribution of their own. You went too far. You have to leave.”
“Where can I go?”
“Wherever the shadows will truly hide you.”
And so, with a cycle of vengeance following close on his heels, the Piper of HameLonn fled the court of the man who’d formed him and disappeared deep into myth and legend.