Song of Sorrows and Fate (The Broken Kingdoms, #9)

by L.J. Andrews

There is a well-known myth throughout the four kingdoms that revolves around four gifts of fate and the queens who will claim them: choice, devotion, honor, and cunning.

according to Calista, storytellers have come before her to bring about the tricky agenda of the Norns, and one of these storytellers was the enchantress, Greta, who cursed Valen and his family.

ghosts danced to haunting tunes of a dream that seemed as if it would never be. A dream where she’d want me the same and scour the earth to find me.

That cruel swipe of his sword helped twist me into . . . this creature in the shadows. That was all I was now. A creature. A phantom of darkness. A memory nearly forgotten.

Crimson painted the moon, a sign of fate twisting our world again. A sign we should’ve long ago been prepared to face, side by side. Now, she would fade again. That was how I’d been taught it worked.

Leave a tale unfinished, and it would fade, along with anyone in it. Already, the heat of the song between our two hearts began to flicker, as though a flame struggled in the fury of the wind.

I thought the wait would’ve ended; I thought she’d never resist the consuming draw. The pull to her crushed me day by day. For her? I was nothing, hardly a whisper in the dark. I was wrong about it all. She refused to see through her own fears.

Perhaps she’d resist when I destroyed her false sense of solace. I didn’t care. Not anymore. She wouldn’t have a choice. Waiting. Wanting. Watching. I was finished with it all. I could not take another moment of the darkness flowing like a slow drip through my blood. It was time for freedom.

Let me be your darkness, but let me be yours. Anywhere she went, I now planned to go.

There was no time to wait. Not anymore. The truth was in the sky—we were about to watch our world burn.

Laila was already set to vow with Njord, a young warrior with a talent for flinging knives. The son of an aleman and a princess would be vowed before the frosts. This was the Etta I’d always wanted, one where we were people first, and titles came second.

Once lit, the torches on the tower burned in blue flames. Through Niklas’s elixirs set to trigger at the burn, the flame traveled along our towers, the seas, then would light the towers in the East with red flames, and the South with green. The West would burn black on a single torch nearest Calista’s tenement building.

The Mad King of the West had never responded to our outreach after the battles of the isles. Truth

If the king of the broken West wanted to live apart, we’d see our feral little storyteller was warned separate from him.

Alek was a forest fae abandoned by the Southern clans at his first breaths,

Damn Torsten. We’d spent too many bleeding turns in close proximity; he knew what each flinch of my face meant.

I have impeccable instincts, and I’ll have you take note, those who’ve tried to kill me thus far have utterly failed.”

I never left my wife and four children without a last look. Titles be damned, for a breath, I was his father first.

“Hold steady and think of those tales to tell the girls at the dawn.” His three younger sisters adored the boy, and Aesir always made himself nauseatingly heroic. He gave me a faulty smile. Kari’s smile.

not the normal feckless schemes in which they allowed Jonas and Sander to join. Raum, Isak, and Fiske enjoyed teaching the two princes how to use whalebone picks on locks, or how to read a man’s eyes to tell if they were lying. The rest of the Kryv took it upon themselves to teach my sons to thieve. Thieving princes. Perhaps in other lands it might be a thing of disgrace. In the East, most folk had a touch of thief in their blood.

Jonas and Sander only snatched the purses of the Kryv or Falkyns, mostly to prove they could. They were usually caught and dubbed the failures of the games. Each time they tried harder, grew slier, and attracted more mischief. While they were raised to be crafty, still we kept Jonas and Sander shielded in a way.

Jonas let his eyes shade over, the same as Kase’s could do, although their mesmer was different. Where Kase worked in the fear of others, our boys worked in creating it. They worked in nightmares.

Sander was a thinker. Most took Jonas for the boisterous troublemaker, but if they knew the truth, they’d know most of the schemes were born in this boy’s brain.

“I saw something in the water and she brought . . . a man with her.”

“A monster in the shadows,” he whispered. “Not as frightening as the ones I’ve made in dreams, but the shadow man came with the sea creature. I think it was a girl, but sorta like a fish with needles as teeth.” “What . . . what did they do?” “Laughed at me.”

I didn’t care what the fish creature was. She could be a goddess of the deep, and if she returned to threaten my son, I’d pluck out those bulging eyes and wear them around my damn neck. What I cared about was the sight of Davorin. He’d slipped past the wards, and I didn’t understand how. A spectral? A projection? He hadn’t looked whole.

Why were we to watch our shores? Sea fae? It was possible, the sea folk hadn’t shown their faces since the Ever King had been slaughtered and Valen pulled a wall from the seafloor just beyond the Howl Sea. But hadn’t King Thorvald’s brother made some threat about ten turns? We were months into the eleventh turn since our battle of the Black Palace.

In the next breath, billows of dark shadows wrapped around Felstad. I gripped Sander’s hand and reached out my other until the long, callused fingers of the Nightrender grabbed hold and Kase stepped through. Kryv, warriors, and Falkyns followed. Kase had his arms around me in the next breath,

Tonight revealed a truth we’d all known could come to pass. A dreary piece of our tale we’d chosen to keep buried while we lived and loved. It had shattered upon the first sight of that green fire.

“Listen to me, Starlight,” Ari said. Starlight, a name he’d always called her, a name that belonged to the two of them, since Ari always said she was born beneath the stars, and they brightened with delight at her birth.

His voice cracked when he spoke. “I love you. You brighten my heart, so I need you safe,

We knew this would come. We knew it. But we face it together, and his life is ours whenever he shows.” Ari’s eyes were wet. His jaw pulsed in tension. “He won’t touch you again. I swore to you, he will never touch you again.”

The true fear we had to admit—Davorin might have sights for me, our daughter might be at grave risk since he would want to torment us in the deepest ways, but I was not all he wanted. He wanted the entire House Ode in his grasp, or bloodied and dead. He wanted Calista.

Ten turns ago, in one night, a royal family of worriers had been dropped in my lap. I loved them for it. Loved them all, even the stoic glares of my Shadow King. He fretted, but in a different way.

My endless simmer of unease and fear. If my father’s captain was concealed from me, what else was hidden in plain sight? What was the purpose of it? How did I avoid it? There was the truth—I wanted to avoid the pull toward some other dreadful, cruel path of fate.

I wouldn’t let my Sun Prince lose the life he’d suffered for, the life he’d fought to win.

To fail when it came to Sol Ferus wouldn’t be an option for me. The trouble was, I hadn’t been able to write a damn tale in months.

There was something shifting inside me, like my heart—my soul—anticipated something life-altering, something frightfully wondrous and new.

we’d read strange fairy tales of the sea folk in the lands below the surf. Those stopped being enjoyable when I met some of those damn sea folk. Their ships were horrid and they were hardly polite.

If every kingdom were part of a living soul, Etta would be the heart that kept us vibrant, Klockglas in the East would be the brain that kept us scheming, and the fae isles of the South would be the blood that kept us living.

All my life, I’d been a street urchin. A fate worker who merely wanted to survive the snatchers

If the Mad King and whatever eerie defenses he kept behind his overgrown gates had a care that foreign forces had entered his grimy realm, he never said. He never said anything. A few glimpses of candlelight in the windows, an occasional tune from a lyre or fife, were the only signs anyone occupied Hus Rose at all.

Since the battle of the fae isles ten turns ago, it was as though Raven Row began dying a slow death.

“I can’t write a story, Stef. Words dry up, or they don’t come at all. But I . . . I need you to help me find that voice you were so certain I’d find. “Not for me. It’s for Lump. You owe him, you know, since he looked out for me in those cells. Lost as he was, he fought those Raven bastards more than once when they tried to slap me around.” I blinked through the burn of tears. “He’s looking out for me now that you’re gone.”

Dreams of the past, but not my past. Other fate workers.” Since the battle in the Southern Isles, my mind would drift through moments of the past, as though I were looking through the eyes of another; I would dream of moments where storytellers helped bring us to this moment.

I was grateful to those past storytellers, grateful for their words. They spoke to me, helped me strengthen my own tales.

Some whisper in the shadows of those grimy Ravenspire cells told me simple alterations to a handful of fated curses would begin a tale of hope and kind worlds.

Time runs short. Like the wind heard my thoughts, a new whisper carried over the burial grounds, lifting the hair on the back of my neck.

A distant melody hummed through my heart, a sound like satin. But it was like reaching through a block of thick ice; I couldn’t break through to claim it. Take my song. It was always yours. Time runs short.

My father’s power was my inheritance to use until I was ready . . . for my own voice to take hold. It was what Stefan—Annon—had said in the final moments, when he’d told me I was ready to find my own strength. Whatever power I had was failing me,