DARKHAVEN | "Three Sisters" Book One

Chapter Sixty-Three

Gia

The days that followed were uneventful at first, then a maelstrom of chaos, chaos, chaos.

The castle had grown louder. More crowded.

Treacherous.

The First was calling its legions back to witness the rites that would take place beneath the Iridial moon.

To witness the breaking of the veil.

They filed in one after another: hooded mages, beastmasters leading their beasts on black chains, footsoldiers, knights. Every day brought more faces, more banners with sigils she did not recognise—nor did Gia care to.

Gia watched them from her spot at the balustrade above. She and Roslin were often forgotten in the chaos. They'd be passed to a thrall who would instruct them to serve and then forget to find them again in the wash of devotees filling the halls closer and closer to capacity day by painful day. An effort was being made to clean the Great Hall, too, seeing as this was where the masses would no doubt be herded when the time came.

Looking down, Gia wondered if any of them had been quartered in the west wing.

Or if the west wing existed at all.

Her gaze dropped from the crowd and its filth to her wrists. Aleksander had been right: no one had noticed that the magical bindings on her manacles were no longer intact. So long as she should keep them on, their breaking seemed to go unnoticed.

They'd still been draining her magic, though, which was quite the problem considering she would need all of her magic and more if they were to stand any chance whatsoever at completing the banishing.

They had failed not once but twice at max potency. Now...after weeks spent manacled...

Daeron is coming. She clung to that thought like a lifeline.

Daeron has no bearing on your own abilities, her own, worst thoughts reminded her. 

Lost in thought, Gia was staring vacantly at the purple banners across the hall when a muffled shout again drew her attention to the hall below.

Roslin. Gia gripped the balustrade at the sight of her sister alone below, trapped between two devotees. One of them was behind her, holding her by the shoulders, while the other was plainly taunting her from the front.

She couldn't make out their voices—not from high above the rest of the chatter.

Roslin snapped her face away from the man as he exposed himself to her, roaring with crass, drunken laughter. He leaned in close, and then—

A slash of black and silver.

The man went sprawling.

It happened so fast, a single, brutal movement that sent the devotee staggering back. Heads turned, hands reached for weapons, but Mercer's glare froze them in place. The fist that had thrown the punch was still closed. No one moved. No one dared.

The man on the floor was howling—which Gia could hear, even from a distance—about the fact the 'Elven fucker' had broken his nose.

Mercer was simply walking away, Roslin at his side.

From her place at the balustrade, Gia exhaled slowly, her grip on the cold stone loosening. For a moment, just a moment, she thought it was a shame. A shame he was on the wrong side of the war, a shame he hadn't made better choices and joined she and her sisters in earnest.

And a shame that tonight would probably be his last night.

x

Gia was waiting in her room when one of the knights, clad in freshly polished black armour and a new purple cloak, arrived to summon her to the Great Hall.