Page 31 of Lies That Blemish
‘Jump!’I pushed. I could feel her fighting it. Then she just walked off the edge of her dragon and leaped to her death. I watched her fall, the sickening thud of her body reaching me from all the way up here. Her dragon was rooted to the spot, unable to chase after her to save her, and the man with her was now screaming in shock. He looked at me wide-eyed.
“You’re evil!” he spat, backing up as his griffin flew away from me.
“Tell Maxim if he threatens one of my sisters again, I’ll kill him!” I roared.
I’d forgotten what happened when a bonded died outside the Wilds. The red rider’s dragon gasped for air, plummeting to the ground, where her body lay at an odd angle just outside the burning park. Then it began to rain.
Something dark moved inside of me, like a beast asking to be fed, and I knew it was my power, the power to control others.
‘Did I go too far?’I asked Liana, my voice of reason. She threatened my little sister! I had to stop that. But making her jump, forcing her against her will, it made me sick.
You’re evil, that man had said. Was he right?
‘I’m the wrong person to ask,’Liana said.‘My grandmother once made a male firebird drown himself because he tried to force his way on one of my daughters. Seemed perfectly reasonable to me.’
I could feel the smile in her voice as she recounted the memory. I was shocked she spoke of the past. She rarely did, and it took my attention away from my own guilt.
‘You had daughters before the Great Fall?’I asked her. I had assumed all of her children were bred here with her mate and then perished.
‘I do,’she said.
Do?Shock ripped through me.Do. Notdid. If she had daughters, that meant they were immortal. That meant…
Sorrow bloomed to life in my chest as I thought of what it must be like to have been parted from your own children. I didn’t know what the great fall was or much about her family, but I felt bad now that she was stuck here with me and away from them.
‘You don’t think I went too far?’I asked her again.
‘Let me ask you something: if you could have pulled a knife across her throat to kill her that way, would you have?’
‘Yes,’I answered immediately, as the rain fell harder and the fire smoked and sizzled below.
‘You don’t regret killing her, only how you did it.’
‘Yes,’I agreed.
She nodded.‘My grandmother also had these feelings. And when the Fall happened, she was about to step down as Tsarina over it.’
That was surprising.‘Because of her power?’I asked.
‘Sort of,’Liana said vaguely.
‘Well, who would have ruled in her place? What power did they have?’I assumed it was her mother.
‘Me. I think we should get out of this rain now,’she told me, and I recognized that this conversation was over.
For the first time since Liana had told me about this “Great Fall,” I began to wonder more about what had happened, but I kept my mouth shut.
We flew to the ground, where Tetra and over fifty Fleet soldiers had amassed. They watched the burning park with apprehension. I didn’t think anyone saw what I’d done to the red rider as she was on the other side of the blaze, out of view.
“They were just sending a message!” I barked out, scanning the faces of the men and women for people I knew. I spotted Charlene, happy to see her wearing a Fleet uniform. Commander Ledger pulled up in his car along the main road as the soldiers broke into questions.
“What message?”
“Are we going to send a message back?”
I weighed a lot of things in my head then. Being a leader, you had to make quick decisions, and that’s what I was going to do.
“The Talanagi are all on the Luskin side of the wall!” I bellowed, and shocked gasps rang out through the soldiers and crowd present. Some people who lived at the edge of the parkwere walking over now that the fire was being put out by the rain.
