Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 131875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
“You helped him conquer all these other worlds? Andine and Cendrea and the like?”
Keres nodded. “I did. Well, not Andine. My reach was farther away than that. At the time, we respected Andine as our neighbors. The kings as their own rulers. Their gods as their own gods.”
“What changed?”
“I was injured,” she said with a laugh. “If you can believe it.”
“Who could injure you?”
“A woman. I still do not know her name. She had magic, the likes of which we had never seen. She took me beyond enemy lines, and I saw for the first time. I saw what I had done, what I had built,” Keres admitted, emotion thick in her throat. “We didn’t speak the same language. I could only understand her through my powers. As you saw me do to you and Fordham, I was able to live in her skin through that experience. I saw myself as the conqueror, my father a slaver, and the destruction we’d caused in my world.” Her hand went to her throat. “I should have seen it earlier, but my father never let me.”
“How did you escape?”
“I didn’t,” Keres said. “She let me go. As terms for my father to leave her people be. A peace treaty.”
“Did it hold?”
Keres nodded. “It was bound with magic that I still do not understand. When I came back, I was not the same. My father realized later than my siblings. It was when he began to speak of marriage.”
“And he chose Vulsan?”
“Yes. Someone he felt could keep me in line. Vulsan is from a distinguished family line. He had … unusual magical abilities that my father thought should be … bred into the line.”
Kerrigan winced at those words. “But you don’t have a child.”
“No,” Keres said. “I saw him for what he was the second we met. I’d heard of him, of course, but that first meeting …” She looked off into the distance, as if caught in the memory. “It was terrible. I tried to tell my father, but he was convinced that Vulsan’s invulnerability would be beneficial for our future children. We married the following week. That night, he forced himself on me and told me he’d only be satisfied when he had a brood of children that could topple my father. That was when I found out the depth of his abilities had not been revealed to me. He was a blood binder, and he used our consummation blood to seal us together.”
Kerrigan thought she might be sick. “Holy gods. So … you can’t escape him?”
Keres turned her head toward the distance. How had her mother had lived so long like this?
“I escape him every chance I can. I cannot speak of what happened to my father. He probably wouldn’t care anyway,” she admitted. “My greatest triumph has been refusing him a child all these many years. He’s put a dozen babes into mistresses, but never me. The binding wasn’t specific enough, and I have found every flaw in the weaving of it as I’ve searched for years to find out if it can be broken.”
“He’s horrible,” Kerrigan snapped. “I’d cut his throat if I could.”
Keres smiled half-heartedly. “Don’t think I haven’t considered it.”
“We can figure this out. I can … surely, there’s a way to fix this.”
She patted Kerrigan’s hand. “I’ve spent decades working on this. We won’t figure it out in the time that you have. Anyway, I don’t tell you all of this to keep you here. Your priority is your world first and foremost. I just want to set the stage of where I was when your father landed in Domara.”
Keres walked them to a stone bench at a lookout across the valley, and together, they sat. She took Kerrigan’s hand in hers.
“Your father came through a portal, just as you did. Though this one happened to be literally into my gardens at my home with Vulsan. Thankfully, Vulsan was out with one of his mistresses, and I reacted by making your father Daijan at once.”
Kerrigan’s mouth popped open. “What?”
“I thought he was a thief or an assassin. At the time, I didn’t know anything about him. When he returned, Vulsan was furious that I had a Daijan to myself and punished me by brutalizing your father. He assumed, due to his own proclivities, that Kivrin was my lover and I was using this as an excuse. I felt for the Fae that I’d enslaved then, but I didn’t know him. It was only over several years that I learned to trust him with the truth of my binding and eventually my heart.”
“Years,” Kerrigan whispered. “But he wasn’t gone years in our world.”
“No, time can be … variable. Our world matches with yours when it suits, and time stretches when it needs to. It’s a fact I accept without question. The magic of the universe is beyond even a Doma.”