Total pages in book: 161
Estimated words: 162269 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 811(@200wpm)___ 649(@250wpm)___ 541(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 162269 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 811(@200wpm)___ 649(@250wpm)___ 541(@300wpm)
Cassius then turned his head in True’s direction.
“True?” he prompted.
“Is there somewhere he can start digging his own pit?” True asked.
“I’m sure we can figure something out,” Cassius muttered.
“Then let us do that without delay,” True decreed.
Jellan closed his eyes.
There seemed a great rustling and he again opened them to see all about him shifting.
“He can clean up his piss before you take him to the dungeon,” Cassius said to someone behind him. “I won’t have Elena’s carpets sullied.”
“Right,” he heard a man grunt.
Then he was pushed to his hands and knees, the puddle on the rug right in front of his face.
“Don’t move. We’ll get you soap and a brush.”
He heard footfalls on the rugs all around him. Murmurings of conversation.
But in the end, he was left in the room, on his hands and knees, staring at a puddle of his own piss, with a guard standing over him, chatting casually with each other.
This before he was scrubbing up that piss.
And this was before he was tossed, without a bath, or a meal, into a cell without a pillow or pallet, in the dungeon of the Sky Citadel.
And this was before, quite some time later, indeed, late the next day, under a light fall of snow, Jellan stood at the bottom of a deep pit he’d spent hours digging himself.
When they started raining on him, he vaguely noted they were not all emerald oil asps.
But several of them were.
He felt the pain of the bites, the poison searing through his system.
But the last three thoughts he had before he died was that he wished they were not gazing down on him from above.
It was humiliating.
Though at the very least, in the end, he was the manner of a man who endured such under the eyes of four kings.
He further wished they’d only selected venomous ones.
For the serpent squeezing him about his neck was utterly terrifying.
148
The Twist
Marian
Argyll Forest
AIREN
Marian felt the buzzing.
And she knew.
They were getting close.
It had snowed in the night.
Thus, when he woke her and forced her from under their warm rug and made her move her limbs that had frozen stiff while she slept in order to make her climb atop their steed in the pre-dawn morning, the light dusting of snow that had fallen several days before and had not gone away in this cold had become a thick blanket.
She had not appreciated this at all, for after their encounter with the highwaymen, they no longer sought the warmth of inns of an evening. Nor hot meals.
Thus, she had also woken with a chilled-numb nose, fingers and toes.
And gone to bed after eating a rabbit he’d killed for her that she’d roasted over their fire.
She had grown to become glad for the rabbits, for at times it had been but rats.
For his meals, Daemon did not wait for her to go through the painstaking process of roasting the meat.
He ate what he killed raw.
But she knew now, she did not have the luxury to lament her plight.
And she had long since ceased complaining, and not because it fell on deaf ears, but because the creature who was her companion terrified her to her core.
Neither of these mattered any longer, however.
For she felt the buzz.
His quickening.
And she was not prepared.
She had not come up with a plan to stop him.
And if she did not, all would be lost.
Chu of the Trusted
Guest Bedchamber, Sky Citadel, Sky Bay
AIREN
Chu woke her with a kiss on her neck.
He’d lit a lamp low on the other side of the bed so the light would not hurt her eyes, but he could watch them flutter as she gained consciousness.
Mm, those copper eyelashes.
Watching them, his hand went from where it was shaking her hip, down and in.
He toyed with her clit and she arched her neck.
“Chu,” she whispered sleepily.
“They amass,” he shared.
And he felt his lips curl as her head immediately turned, all business.
“My master teases,” she griped.
“My mouse walks, talks, breathes and sleeps a tease,” he returned.
Her eyes did a roll.
He removed his finger from her nub and leant in to touch his lips to hers.
When he pulled away, he ordered, “Up. We must position.”
She nodded.
Chu exited the bed one way.
His princess went the other.
Reginald, Royal Warden
Slán Bailey, Sky Bay
AIREN
His, as well as six other pairs of boots, echoed on the stone steps as they jogged down the stairs.
Reginald made the lower hall, turned right and saw them loitering about outside the open door to a cell.
All the men except one, who was on his arse on the floor, his back to the wall beside the open door, holding a bloodied cloth to his head, rivulets of red that had not been wiped up marring the ink he had chosen to tell his story on the left side of his face.
Reginald walked swiftly toward them and the guards milling about stepped away from the door, and in doing such, none of them met his eyes.