A Court of Champions

Chapter 1 : The Queen's Champion

Andra could hear the sounds of revelry from the other side of the door. The merry twinkle of champagne glasses clinking together, the soft clicking of heels on the marble floor, the din of conversation peppered with laughter. It was dark and quiet on the other side of the gilded gold doors where she waited, flanked by guards.

Beneath the quiet of the anteroom and the muffled murmur of the party, she could hear the screaming of the thousands imprisoned along with her Under the Mountain. Even if their cries of agony weren't audible, Andra knew they were there, ringing in her ears like an aftershock. She could hear the frantic heartbeats of the dozens of Prythian nobility gathered together in Amarantha's throne room, plastering fake smiles onto their care-worn faces and laughing too loud to be believable, all in the hopes that they'd blend in enough to avoid Amarantha's attentions and live to see another night. She could hear the dripping of blood from the swords of Amarantha's executioners, where it seeped into the soil, the roots of the mountain, the bedrock and the groundwater below like a permanent stain. A thousand years of peace wouldn't be enough to wash away Amarantha's legacy from this accursed place.

And most of all, Andra could hear her own ragged breathing.

Her ribs hadn't healed properly from last Solstice, and she hadn't been able to take a full breath since, leaving her to take small, shallow inhales and exhales to avoid moving her chest too much. Her left wrist was bandaged and splinted to the best of her ability, but still screamed in pain at the slightest movement, forcing her to carry her blade in her non-dominant hand. Its weight felt foreign in her right palm, and her mind was too cloudy with exhaustion to compensate.

This was Andra's eighty-second fight. She was the longest lived of any of Amarantha's "champions", the High Fae warriors that the twisted queen had selected from all seven courts to battle to the death on each Solstice. Many of them were personal bodyguards to one of Prythian's High Lords, or - as in Andra's case - notable leaders in one of the courts' armies. Andra had served her High Lord, Kallias, faithfully for the last four hundred years as the Winter Court's Chief Commander. Her skill on the battlefield was widely known, and she was among one of Prythian's fiercest warriors.

She had longed for a chance to earn that title against Amarantha, but the dark queen was far too shrewd to risk such a confrontation. Instead, she'd pitted Prythian's biggest military threats against one another, using their loved ones and their allegiances to their High Lords as collateral to force them into bloody, gruesome battles during her Solstice fetes. It was a visceral reminder for everyone under Amarantha's reign that there would be no salvation for any of them. The queen wanted everyone – High Lords, Prythian nobility, lesser Fae, even her own guards – to see the courts' greatest warriors fall one by one to each other's blades and bleed out on her marble floors. What better reminder of their shared subjugation than the slow, deliberate execution of their greatest warriors, the names and faces who would have undoubtedly led a mutiny against her, if ever there was to be one.

What Amarantha hadn't anticipated was Andra. Andra had far outlived her service to the queen, but she'd been protected by the love of the people. Andra could remember the exact moment Amarantha had realized Andra's power. It had been at the close of her thirty-sixth Solstice fight. She'd just buried her sword hilt-deep into her opponent – a bodyguard from the Summer Court – and watched him bleed out quickly on her hands. Little had she known, he had been a favorite diversion of the queen's, and Amarantha's rage was palpable. At the end of the fight, Andra had made the mistake of gloating a bit, sensing how her victory had unnerved the dark queen, and flung her bloodied sword down at Amarantha's feet. The queen had reacted instantly, sending the Attor into the ring to Kill her! Kill that mongrel bitch! Andra could remember the piercing shriek of Amarantha's voice.