Vengeance Throne (The Callistra Chronicles #2)

EPILOGUE

Epilogue

Queen Evara is dead. Long live King Sesostris and Pasiphae of Eo, the new witch queen of Airesi.

The cry spread like wildfire.

It spread with the speed of a living rumour but carried the weight of immortal truth, pressed between bloodied fingertips on the fields of the Seelie Court and pushed between breaths in the outer circles of the Seelie country.

It became a twisting, sly force of timid zephyrs that dropped a crown atop Pasiphae's head after her return from the coast, that lifted her chin when she tried to drop it, for if she dared the slightest falter, the steel-twined object balanced upon her head, too, would drop and shatter against the hard-tiled floors.

When Seth saw to his subjects for the first time, he refused to let the fae forget themselves. Within the throne room, which had incredibly survived Evara's wave of magic without a single crack to its glass walls, there was an audience of villagers waiting, a collection of surviving representatives who had been at the forefront of the battle. They were waiting to hear how Airesi would go forth from this moment onwards. They were waiting for their king to build his new kingdom.

Yet when Seth swept into the throne room hand in hand with Pasiphae of Eo, en route towards the single throne, he nudged Pasiphae onto it instead, opting to perch on the armrest himself with a casual, upward twist to his lips.

There was no misinterpreting his action. Their wedding ceremony may have been interrupted but in all aspects that mattered, it had gone through. Pasiphae of Eo was the rightful queen of Airesi, and anyone who questioned it would face the wrath of their king.

"Well," he said. "Let's talk, shall we?"

And talk they did. For the world was changed and the people were not safe. The Seelie fae may have been freed from internal oppression, but their enemies were readying for another battle before the villagers could even recover from their injuries, and to act too slowly would be to put their own heads under the guillotine.

Queen Morgana was rallying her unwilling soldiers yet again, but little did the Seelie know, her first target in this new, accessible world was not Airesi.

It was Eo.

Morgana was anything but stupid. She had not lasted this long for no reason, she had not held onto a flourishing country for centuries without knowing exactly what she was doing at all times. She knew that Airesi had joined with one of Medeis' most prominent public figures. She knew that at this point, anything she did against Medeis was a personal attack on the new queen of Airesi anyway.

For Morgana was not only seeking power now, and this invasion was not only a guise that hid her desperate search across Callistra for an object she had long lost somewhere in the depths of the world.

This was personal. This was the payback that the witch deserved after all she had done to Khotadi.

So Morgana ventured forward.

And by the time Circe was stumbling out of her house in the middle of the night, shaken awake by Evara's magic re-shaping the world, she was already too late.

She joined other confused witches on the streets in their nightgowns, blinking at one another under the light of the full moon. They asked what had occurred and no one had the answer—no one except Circe, who went out on a limb, who followed some unknown instinct that she had no explanation for, and wandered through the woods.

Half-dazed, she emerged at the coasts and gasped in with a cry.

The waters of Eo were nothing but a shallow line resembling a pitiful moat. On the other side, the roaring gates of Khotadi stretched into the night void.