Kai Drakon's Arc

Chapter 29 of 30

Kai woke in the moss with his wound sealed and his strength back. Seraphina sat against a pine, gray-faced, drained by the magic that had healed him and carried them here. Obsidian kept watch at the tree line. Kai owed his life to Seraphina now, and he meant to pay it. He would not walk away while her sister held the throne and hunted them through these woods. "You saved me," Kai said. "So we finish this. Not by charging the gates again. That already cost me blood." Seraphina lifted her head. "She expects us to run. She has soldiers on every road." Her voice stayed even, but it had gone quiet, the way it did when the subject was her own family. "There is a servants' passage under the west wall. My mother showed it to me before I fled. My sister does not know I remember it." Kai leaned forward. "Then we don't attack. We slip in." Obsidian turned from the trees. "Three of us against a queen with dark magic." "She wields it best in the open," Seraphina said. "Underground, in the dark, she is only my sister. And she never looks behind her." They waited until night. Seraphina teleported them the last stretch, a short jump she could still manage, and it dropped them in a wet ditch below the west wall. Kai found the passage where she said it would be, a low stone arch choked with vines. He pulled them away. The three crawled through cold dark until they reached the palace floor. The queen sat alone in the throne room, the stone relic in her lap, waiting for a report from the roads. She never heard them cross the marble. Kai stepped from the shadow behind her chair. Obsidian took the other side. The queen rose and threw one bolt of dark power, but the walls hemmed it in, and it struck a pillar instead of flesh. Seraphina raised both hands. Green light met the dark and swallowed it. "You revealed my hiding place," Seraphina said. "You paid a thief. You attacked me at my own gates." Her calm cracked for a breath. "You never once looked back at me." The queen struck again. Kai lunged and pinned her arms. Obsidian wrenched the relic from her grip. Without it her power guttered like a snuffed candle. The queen sagged in Kai's hold, small now, and afraid. Guards flooded the room. Seraphina turned to them and lifted her chin, and they saw the blood in her face at last. One by one they knelt. They took the queen to the deep dungeons and shut the iron door. Seraphina held the relic and her mother's crown together, and she did not shake. "The throne is yours," Kai said. "It is," she answered. "Now go home to your son. You have paid me back." Kai turned toward the road east, toward Azure and Ren, and toward the promise he still meant to keep.